Tag Archives: Privacy

Roundup: A confirmation on uttered threats

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We got a better read of the charges against the Rideau Hall intruder from last week, including more specifics on the weapons charges – a restricted revolver, a prohibited rifle, and two legal shotguns – as well as confirmation that the uttering threats charge was indeed directed toward the prime minister. This is, of course, in direct contravention to what RCMP sources were leaking to certain journalists last week that he didn’t intend to harm anyone, which never actually was credible at the time, and yet they dutifully reported it anyway.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1278788951885721602

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1278809780392427520

What is especially galling is that the RCMP seems to have zero self-awareness that this sort of thing fuels the calls about systemic racism in their organization – doing proper de-escalation and then floating this “not intending to harm” fiction when it’s a white guy with guns as opposed to a Black, Indigenous or otherwise person of colour where they will beat, taze, or outright kill them when they are unarmed. The contrast had been made to the arrest video of Chief Allan Adam video where he was tackled and pummelled for merely mouthing off after police outright harassed him for expired licence plate tags, whereas the intruder was armed and had intent to threaten the prime minister (if not outright assassinate him – that remains for the investigation to conclude and the courts to decide), and he was apparently unharmed after a ninety-minute conversation. The fact that they would float that “no harm” notion when the guy was armed and rammed through the gates pretty much confirms in everyone’s minds that white perpetrators of violence get treated separately and less lethally than anyone else – but they remain oblivious to it. Incredible.

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Roundup: Trudeau slows to a summer pace

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau was back at Rideau Cottage yesterday morning, for what he promised would be the last “daily” briefing, though they haven’t been daily for a few weeks now. And there really wasn’t anything new to announce – yet another reminder that the Canadian Emergency Business Account and commercial rent subsidies were good things, that there were still hotspots of pandemic around the country, but that we are making progress – but are not out of the woods yet – and oh, yeah, the New NAFTA comes into force on Wednesday. During the Q&A, Trudeau stated that American chest-thumping over tariffs only hurts them because they need Canadian aluminium as they can’t produce enough of their own. When asked about the Human Rights Watch report on Canadian foreign fighters being held prisoner in Syria, Trudeau insisted that they are preoccupied with the safety of diplomatic personnel in the region, and we don’t have any in Syria, which makes the complicated situation even more complex because most of these prisoners are facing charges. (Not everyone buys this argument). And when asked yet again about We Charities being given that contract, Trudeau again insisted that the advice of the public service was that only they could deliver on the scale that was required, and that some 25,000 students hand applied over the past few days, to prove the point.

A short while later, Dr. Theresa Tam gave her last regular update as well, as those pressers also take on a less daily pace, as well as unveiled new federal modelling numbers, which show that the pandemic is largely under control, but with the warning that people need to keep up good habits around distancing and hygiene, lest flare-ups start happening.

Meanwhile, in Alberta, Jason Kenney and his finance minister unveiled their economic recovery plan, and it was complete with mistruths, and tired magical thinking that tax cuts will automatically create jobs (when these rapid cuts will only benefit existing players rather than attract future ones), or that hectoring tech firms for not upping sticks to relocate to the “cheap rents” of Calgary and lower taxes as being “irresponsible.” So yeah, good luck with that. Meanwhile, here’s Andrew Leach with a bit of a fact check.

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Roundup: Damage control and lunatic accusations

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For his Friday presser, prime minister Justin Trudeau was back at Rideau Cottage, and he started off with the news that the Canadian Forces deployments to long-term care facilities in Ontario and Quebec would be extended until June 26th, but that the plan was to start transitioning to more assistance from the Canadian Red Cross. He mentioned the call with the premiers on Thursday night, which by all accounts got pretty testy, but Trudeau stuck to generalities. He raised the arrest video of Chief Allan Adam, saying he was shocked and that there needed to be an independent investigation, and that policing reforms across the country needed to happen soon. Finally, he mentioned that temperature checks would be implemented on flights, which raised all kinds of questions of faux-confusion that we were told that this was ineffective in detecting COVID-19 – which is true, but it was explained about eleventy times that this was simply an added measure of protection to keep people with fevers off of flights. (And lo, the pundits who seem incapable of thinking critically about public health advice have been decrying this as “added confusion,” which it’s not really). During the Q&A, Trudeau was also asked about the blood donation ban for men who have sex with men, given that NDP MP Randall Garrison has been agitating about this recently, and Trudeau reiterated the government’s position that they were funding the science that would ensure it was safe to end the ban, that they reduced it from a permanent ban to a three-month ban, and that he hoped for a positive announcement soon.

Later in the day, we saw a flurry of damage control out of the RCMP, as Commissioner Brenda Lucki clarified that yes, there is systemic racism in the Force and she should have been clearer about that, and that she has to ensure policing free of bias. As well, the Alberta Deputy Commissioner, who previously denied that systemic racism exists in the Force, said that he’s learned a lot in the past few days and he too will now admit that it exists, and promised to help eliminate it – as calls for his resignation have been mounting. Meanwhile, Winnipeg police tried to get ahead of a story with a video that showed four police grappling with, kicking, and Tasering someone during an arrest, which they insisted was someone who was violent and high on meth – but seemed incapable of admitting that it looks like more police brutality.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives have been trying to make an Issue of the fact that foreign affairs minister François-Philippe Champagne *gasp* has a $1.2 million mortgage for two London properties from a Chinese bank, that predated his time in politics. The mortgages were fully disclosed, and neither the Ethics Commissioner, CSIS or the RCMP seemed to think this was a big deal when he was either elevated to Cabinet or shuffled to his current portfolio, but now the Conservatives are accusing him of being compromised, and going easy on China – to the point that they have insinuated that he is letting the two Michaels languish in a Chinese prison – because of these mortgages. It’s a position that is ludicrously insulting because the worst thing that this Chinese Bank could do is demand immediate repayment (unlikely given the rules for financial institutions in the UK), and Champagne could have to sell those properties, which, given that property in the UK has appreciated rapidly, he could make a tidy profit. More to the point, that same Chinese bank has been operating in Canada since 1993 and had $3 billion on the books here, and there was nary a peep about it from the Conservatives in the nine years they were in power. But logic and common sense are not in play, and instead they are demanding that the Canada-China special committee be reconstituted and Champagne be hauled before it to answer about this, which is starting to reek of a McCarthy-era witch hunt, because they can’t help but engage in meathead partisanship.

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Roundup: Bad-faith grievance narratives and faux confusion

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The day started off on something of a petulant tone, as Andrew Scheer complained that people were “upset and confused” by prime minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to attend the Black Lives Matter protest in spite of the pandemic, and furthered the bad faith grievance narrative by pointing to the Ottawa restaurant that was fined $880 for opening its patio. Scheer, and other Conservatives, spent the day obscuring the difference between what the federal government is in charge of and what falls under local public health guidelines, and deliberately playing up this “confusion” where none should actually exist – there were public health guidelines that said that if people were going to protest that they should wear masks and social distance, and then self-isolate afterward, if anyone bothered to pay attention.

Trudeau was up shortly thereafter for his daily presser, and he talked at length about those protesting, and people being afraid of the police, and that he promised to deal with systemic racism and listed actions that his government has taken to thus far to deal with it, including mental health resources for the Black community, an anti-racism secretariat and strategy under the Minister of Diversity, and agreed that it’s not enough. He also said that he has been in discussions with Cabinet, as well as the RCMP commissioner, and that he was also raising the issue of body cameras with premiers this week. Trudeau also mentioned that Bill Blair was following through on their commitment to Indigenous policing, and that this week the government would be undergoing a stock-taking on their reconciliation efforts with Indigenous people. He then pivoted to the wage subsidy and other measures being taken to help people, the $14 billion being offered to help provinces with their economic restarts, and finally announced that they had introduced a number of limited exemptions at the border for immediate family members of Canadians to cross – spouses, children, parents of minor children in Canada – but that they must still self-isolate for 14 days upon arrival. During the Q&A, he defended his attending the protests as balancing competing interests.

On body cameras, it looks like the RCMP has agreed to outfit some members with them, but it remains a controversial move, that may be seen as a band-aid solution to deeper problems. (Here’s a good thread by lawyer Michael Spratt to that effect). It’s also pointed out that if we want to shift resources away from the current model of policing, this is a big expense that makes it even harder to do so.

As the talk of the defunding/abolishing police gains momentum, here is a look at how Camden, New Jersey, has been doing an experiment in scrapping their police force and starting over, and some of the more important things to realize in his are that the incentives changed – not judging performance by the number of arrests or tickets issued, and a focus on making connections in communities. Of course, it also says that they haven’t made enough investments in the other community supports that are supposed to underpin this model, so that’s something to think about.

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Roundup: Eliminating the staffer excuse

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The day got off to a slightly different start – the prime minster didn’t have a daily presser because he was off to CFB Trenton for the repatriation ceremony for the crew of the downed Canadian Forces Cyclone helicopter (which is a whole issue I plan to write more on in another place), and there were no announcements in the ministerial presser before the special COVID-19 committee met in the House of Commons chamber for more ministerial questions, followed by a take-note debate.

While the “virtual” special committee reconvenes today, I wanted to draw attention to this piece in the Hill Timesthat shows the impact these meetings are having on the support staff, and in particular the interpreters, who are burning out and suffering cognitive injuries as a result because these meetings are harder on them, when they’re already at a reduced capacity because many are stuck at home without childcare. Why this is particularly important is because leading up to these meetings, we were inundated with a bunch of chuckleheads and tech bros with a superiority complex who were going around shouting “Teach MPs how to Zoom!” and “Okay, Boomer,” and so on. Turns out that it’s more complex than that, and the people we can’t see are paying the price for it.

It’s also a sign of just how disingenuous the government was when they kept insisting that in-person sittings were going to expose all of these staffers in the West Block to potential exposure to COVID-19. But the problem is that even when the MPs aren’t there to meet, these staffers still need to be there to run the daily press conferences, and to run the virtual meetings, and no, they can’t do it from home. And if the workload is more difficult for some of them, like the interpreters, if the MPs are doing this “virtually” instead of having a smaller number of MPs sitting on a regular basis, then their justification is completely blown out of the water. There is no reason why they shouldn’t have proper skeletal sittings three days a week, and we now see that it would be better for these staffers than these “virtual” meetings are.

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Roundup: Supply councils and stalled approvals

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After a very welcome day off from daily pressers, prime minister Justin Trudeau was back at it on Sunday, in his weekend uniform – jeans, white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and a blazer – but no sweater because it was actually nice out in Ottawa for a change. And while some weekend pressers are merely greatest hits packages, this one had a few substantive announcements – $240 million for online health and mental health tools that people can access, $175 million for a Canadian company doing promising research using COVID-19 antibodies; and launching a “national supply council” for dealing with personal protective equipment – more of which was elaborated upon in the ministerial presser that followed – and a reminder that enhanced Canada Child Benefit payments were on the way. During the Q&A, Trudeau also reiterated that the promised legislation that would allow municipalities to further restrict handguns in their jurisdictions would be coming once Parliament returned to normal.

Something that Trudeau and Dr. Theresa Tam were asked about in their respective pressers were the news that Health Canada had ordered a pause on those Spartan Bioscience portable testing kits because while the tests themselves worked, it turns out that the swabs didn’t go deep enough into the nasal cavity to get good samples, so they risked giving false negatives. That becomes a setback that some provinces – and remote communities in particular – will definitely feel because they had already ordered thousands of those kits as part of their plans.

Meanwhile, I see that Jason Kenney is back making noises that the federal government isn’t doing enough for the oil and gas sector, and brings up the auto sector bailout of 2008-09 as a comparison of “unfair treatment.” He should be careful what he wishes for – I’m not sure he’s advocating for the same thing at all.

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Roundup: On Scheer’s silence over Sloan

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For his daily presser, prime minister Justin Trudeau was all about science – specifically, a $1.1 billion package for research on vaccines and clinical trials, plus the launch of an immunity task force that will help to determine the spread of the virus within the population (as many may have been exposed and only ever experienced mild symptoms or had none at all), which will be necessary as we talk about re-opening the economy and how that will proceed. Trudeau also reiterated that the situation with long-term care facilities is untenable, that using soldiers to help the residents of those homes is merely a short-term solution that demands a long-term re-think. During the Q&A, Trudeau was not promising the billions of dollars that municipalities were demanding, but made some fairly vague commitments about working with provinces, given that cities are creatures of provincial legislation. He also said that provinces were going to take their own leads on re-opening their economies given that there are different epidemics playing out across the country and not just one nationally, though there is talk of federal guidelines.

The thing that had everyone talking throughout the day, however, was Conservative leadership candidate Derek Sloan making a fairly blatantly racist call for Dr. Theresa Tam to be fired while questioning her loyalty to Canada as he accuses her of following Chinese propaganda. And more to the point, that Andrew Scheer refuses to comment on what Sloan says insofar as the racism – he did say that as the opposition, they should be criticizing ministers who make decisions and not officials who give advice. Of course, this shouldn’t be too surprising as the party has already been pursuing this notion of vilifying the WHO because they were too credulous about the information coming out of China and Canada followed WHO advice, and Sloan simply took it one step further. And more to the point, under Scheer, the party has offered succour to racists on more than one occasion (most notably after the incident when Trudeau called out the racist statements of an avowedly racist woman in Quebec at an event, after which the Conservatives insisted that she was merely concerned about the economic impact of “illegal” asylum seekers and that anyone who questioned the government would be called a racist – because being labelled a racist is apparently a worse crime than actual racism). A few other Conservative MPs did denounce Sloan’s comments, and local officials within Sloan’s riding called on him to be denounced by Scheer and expelled from the party.

Ah, but that’s part of the issue. The Conservatives, if you recall, voted to adopt certain provisions of Michael Chong’s (garbage) Reform Act which ensures that the full caucus must vote to expel a member, that the leader alone can’t do it. It would be mighty awkward for Scheer to pull that trigger regardless, considering that he’s in an interim, outgoing position and not really the leader any longer, and that Sloan is vying to replace him (and it will be a doomed effort), but I will say that regardless of the circumstances, I have long been uncomfortable with both leaders expelling members, and with the more recent notion that MPs (and senators, where applicable) should be expelled at the first sign of trouble, rather than managing them better from within the fold, or leaving it up to their riding association to decide whether or not to keep them in the party, being as they are really the ones who should be deciding.

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Roundup: Sorrow and motions

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As the various party leaders lined up, one after another, to give their positions before the microphones on yesterday’s return of the House of Commons, prime minister Justin Trudeau devoted his presser to the mass-shooting in Nova Scotia and the loss of an RCMP constable, including a direct address to children as part of his speech. More controversially, Trudeau made a plea to media not to name the killer and give him the “gift of infamy,” which became the subject of many a column the rest of the day. During the Q&A, he insisted he didn’t want to fight about the return of the Commons, while also saying that the government was not backing away from its plans to enact further gun control measures.

Not far away, the Commons resumed its sitting with a skeleton complement, kicking off with Green MP Paul Manly immediately launching a point of privilege to complain that their health and safety was being jeopardized by the sitting, and it impacted on the ability of MPs who faced travel restrictions to participate. (Manly’s point was later rejected by the Speaker). After a very surreal QP, and more speeches on the Nova Scotia shooting, the vote was held and it was decided that there would be in-person sittings on Wednesdays starting next week, with planned 90-minute “virtual” sittings on Tuesdays and Thursdays – you know, assuming that they can actually get them up and running. Also, those sessions would not be regular sittings of the Commons, but would qualify as “special committee” sessions that would be devoted to two-and-a-quarter-hour-long sessions to ask questions of the government.

Throughout this whole debate, I keep shaking my head at the fact that they insist that they don’t want MPs to keep travelling, or how MPs from regions with travel restrictions can’t participate, but nobody can apparently fathom that MPs could travel to Ottawa, and then *gasp* stay there! You know, like they have housing allowances and per diems that facilitate it. This insistence on once-per-week sittings means that there will be all kinds of unnecessary travel, travel that MPs from those regions can’t participate in (or at least not easily), and it needlessly complicates this whole affair when we could have more easily kept a skeleton parliament with these MPs who stay in Ottawa present, and just ensured that you had a representative sampling that includes MPs from those otherwise hard-to-travel-to-and-from regions so they don’t have to travel back-and-forth. It’s revolutionary, I know. None of this is rocket science, and yes, it involves some sacrifice on the part of these MPs, but no worse than some of our essential healthcare workers who also can’t see their families during this crisis.

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Roundup: Trying to blame the WHO

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Andrew Scheer was again out first yesterday morning to repeat his call for in-person sittings in the House of Commons (which Elizabeth May somehow claims is mere partisanship, which I don not grasp), before Scheer went off on tangents about the WHO, because apparently he thinks that following Trumpian logic is a winning plan. (The Conservatives on the Commons health committee have also been aggressively trying to “get answers” on misinformation from China laundered through the WHO).

Prime minister Justin Trudeau was up next for his daily presser, wherein he laid out plans to expand the CERB to those who make less than $1000 and seasonal workers, as well as those whose EI has run out, and promised wage top-ups for those essential workers who make less than $2500/month, but still no news on help for students and commercial rent (which one assumes is in partnership with the provinces). He also noted the assistance that the Canadian Forces as providing in Nunavut and in Northern Quebec. During the Q&A, Trudeau refused to get involved in the WHO debate, for what it’s worth.

Meanwhile, the issue of long-term care in Ontario was getting much more scrutiny, and it turns out that out of 626 facilities in the province, a mere nine got an inspection last year. Nine. Because the province moved to a “risk-based” system, which apparently means that there is only an investigation after a complaint is filed. So that’s totally fine, and one more sign about the complete mismanagement of the Ford government (that people seem to be forgetting when they praise Ford “stepping up” to the current pandemic challenge).

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Roundup: Back-end accountability and second guessing

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Even though Good Friday is normally a day where the whole of Ontario shuts down as owing to its strong Protestant roots, prime minister Justin Trudeau nevertheless carried on with his daily presser, talking about how the CERB and the Canada Emergency Business Accounts were now online, and that the wage subsidy was on the way. He also said that his Saturday address would be in the House of Commons instead of at Rideau Cottage, and then he would be spending Sunday and Monday with family, so there will be a brief respite from daily pressers (which have been solid for nearly a month now). He also spoke about his teleconference with the premiers, and upon questions about it, stated that no, they were not looking to invoke the Emergencies Act, and it was the very last thing they wanted to do (so maybe stop asking about it). During the Q&A, he was asked about the G20 energy ministers’ meeting and noted that there had been a decision around production cuts, and with regards to the next Bank of Canada governor, the process was ongoing and they had made no decision on next steps.

During the ministerial briefing shortly thereafter, employment minister Carla Qualtrough said that CRA would deal with the issue from there end where some people got double payments (apparently because they may have applied twice out of confusion) rather than relying on people to call in, and that the accountability measures in this programme were built in on the back-end, in order to speed through the processing of these benefits to those who need them. As well, Indigenous Services minister Marc Miller said that the additional funds to Indigenous communities for the pandemic were flowing, and that they will work together with individual communities and First Nations about what they need.

I’m also concerned with the burgeoning proliferation of stories questioning how quickly the government moved early on – particularly around things like travel bans and quarantine measures. One of there reasons, illustrated by the video here, is that this novel virus has proven to work faster and much deadlier than other epidemics we’ve seen in our lifetime. We’re still in the early phases of this pandemic, so it may be a bit early to second-guess things, given that we were following best practices, and travel bans are generally ineffective because people skirt them and don’t report when they are symptomatic because they don’t want to get in trouble for skirting the ban. This pandemic is unlike any we’ve had before, so it’s hard to start demanding why we weren’t better prepared, given that we were prepared for what we were used to expecting, and that should be something we should keep in mind.

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