Tag Archives: Procurement

Roundup: Performative consultations by the PM

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It is performative consultation season, and lo, prime minister Justin Trudeau held meetings with Erin O’Toole, Jagmeet Singh and Elizabeth May yesterday, and the versions of the conversation released by readouts from both the PMO, O’Toole and Singh’s officers were…quite something. (Thread here). O’Toole demanded an end to CRB and an end to the “wedge politics” around vaccines, while Singh demanded CRB continue, and for the government to drop future appeals of litigation around First Nations children. Both were play-acting tough in their readouts, even though Singh is but a paper tiger. Trudeau’s readouts, meanwhile, were similar and bland, listing the already circulated “priority” items he wants to address right away (and yet is delaying recalling parliament), with no indication of what the other parties said, or if any kinds of agreements were reached.

Something that did come out of the readout with Singh was that Trudeau is in favour of continuing hybrid sittings, and Pablo Rodriguez’s office confirmed that, which is really, really disappointing and frankly mind-boggling. We are not in the same phase of the pandemic, and we are in a place where, with mandatory vaccination and masking, MPs can all safely attend parliamentary duties in-person, end of story. Carrying on hybrid sittings – which only the Liberals and NDP favour – are frankly unjustifiable, given the human toll that the injuries take on the interpreters, and the incredible amount of human and technical resources that they consume (and which have starved the Senate of necessary resources because the Commons gets priority). And just imagine telling the interpreters that they have to keep being subjected to injury because MPs are too gods damned selfish or lazy to do the jobs they’ve bene elected to do. Parliament is an in-person job – it depends on building relationships, which happens face-to-face. Hybrid sittings were 100 percent responsible for the last session devolving into complete toxicity, and if you don’t think that congeniality matters, remember that things don’t get accomplished without it. Those five months of procedural warfare didn’t happen in a vacuum. Saying they want hybrid sittings to carry on is both irresponsible and corrosive to parliament as a whole. There can be no justification for carrying them on.

Meanwhile, in case you thought it was just opposition parties making demands of the government before parliament is summoned, we have plenty of civil society groups calling for the paid sick leave for federally-regulated employees to happen immediately (erm, not how the legislative process works, guys), decriminalisation of illicit drugs, and for refugees and undocumented healthcare workers to be allowed access to a programme that would grant them permanent residency status.

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Roundup: A surplus thanks to federal funds

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Something jumped out at me yesterday while doomscrolling, which was New Brunswick crowing that they have a bigger-than-expected surplus thanks to all of the additional federal dollars that were sent to the province because of the pandemic. And it stuck in my craw a bit – provinces have been crying poor when it comes to healthcare dollars and around doing things like improving long-term care, and then they turn around and pat themselves on the back for running surpluses as a result of federal dollars. It doesn’t quite add up.

The fact that certain provinces have been using federal pandemic dollars to pad their bottom lines is a problem for Confederation, particularly as these very same provinces are demanding that the federal government turn over even higher healthcare transfers, and justifying it with historically inaccurate talking points about the original share of healthcare spending without also recognizing the other agreements made in the late 1970s. The current federal government is certainly willing to spend the money, but they have also learned that they don’t want to get burned by it like previous governments have. Recall that when the health transfer escalator was at an unsustainable six percent per year, provincial healthcare spending growth was in the low two-percent range, meaning those additional dollars were spent on other things that did not improve the healthcare system. Similarly, when Stephen Harper tried to buy peace with Quebec and sign a huge cheque to correct a fictional “fiscal imbalance,” the provincial government turned around and cut taxes, which wasn’t the intent of said funding, and yet it happened.

It’s with this in mind that Trudeau has promised that there will be strings attached to future health transfers, and he laid out what many of those strings will be in the campaign, whether it’s hiring targets for doctors and nurses, or minimum salaries for long-term care workers. And yes, premiers will bellyache about it, and the opposition parties will take up those cries in the House of Commons, but we have seen repeatedly over this pandemic that the provinces will demand money and then not spend the money they do get. Time for some accountability for dollars – because it’s all coming from the same taxpayer in the end, regardless of which level of government is trying to make their bottom line look better.

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Roundup: Counting down to Kenney’s referendum

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

Meanwhile, here is Andrew Leach with a few thoughts:

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Roundup: Misleading to the point of misinformation

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As they tend to do after every election concludes, Power & Politics had David Meslin on to talk about electoral reform, because apparently, we are going to re-litigate it once again. (The saving grace is that this time they didn’t have Meslin using his LEGO to show different PR results). The problem? The graphic that the show produced as an example of how the results of this election would be under PR was essentially misinformation.

https://twitter.com/Catelli2Oh/status/1440818668217135110

The assumptions made to produce said chart is that Canada would employ a system of pure proportional representation, and then allocate seats in that regard. But this would be a PR system that nobody is actually asking for, and which would be unconstitutional because seats are allocated on a provincial basis, while such a system would be unable to take that into account under the current 338 seat model. That’s a pretty big deal. Most people advocate for some form of mixed-member proportional, where you vote for a local MP, and then vote a second time for a party, which will then allocate someone from a list into a number of seats designed as “top-ups” to make the seats more closely resemble the “popular vote” (even though such a thing is a logical fallacy under our current vote construction). Furthermore, it would assume that we’d have the same parties, which is unlikely (and Meslin went at great length about how great it would be for the big tent parties to break up), and even more to the point, under a different voting system, voting behaviours would be different. With all of this in mind, the fact that the gods damned CBC produced an infographic with a misleading characterisation of what Monday’s vote might have looked like under PR is not just irresponsible – it’s downright misinformation.

It’s also concerning that Meslin thinks that as many as 21 seats for the People’s Party under such a system is no big deal, and he thinks we should have more radical parties for the sake of “innovation.” The notion of a far-right party getting 21 seats and putting them in the potential position to be kingmakers in a coalition government is frightening to say the least, but we’ve also seen in other countries that use PR, such as Germany and the Netherlands, that when far-right parties breach the threshold to attain seats, they grow in popularity because they are given respectability and a platform to espouse their views. One of the great strengths of big-tent parties, that Meslin completely ignored, is that they moderate extremes, which is actually a good thing in politics. Big tent parties build coalitions of regions and factions within themselves, rather than having smaller parties building the coalitions externally post-election. It’s one reason why radical parties are short-lived, and why disruptive parties tend to “self-correct” within a couple of election cycles, because they can’t maintain the necessary organisation that Canada requires. These are features of our system – not bugs, and it would be great if CBC didn’t turn to the same guy every election to make the same misleading points, time and again.

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Roundup: A promise of extra-illegality

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On a day of more organized protests outside of hospitals around the country, prime minister Justin Trudeau has decided the way to deal with this is…more criminal sanctions. Which is ridiculous, because there are already criminal sanctions around nuisance, harassment, and intimidation, and creating a law specifically for healthcare workers is kind of ridiculous and merely clogs up the criminal code – and I don’t care that they think they’re sending some kind of message. There are existing laws and police should enforce them. Of course, the NDP are saying that this was their idea first, while in more technical terms, Singh says that the victims being healthcare workers should be considered an aggravating factor during sentencing, but the effect is largely the same – this is virtue signalling using the Criminal Code rather than a useful exercise in enforcing existing laws.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1437477651225133056

In Alberta, however, premier Jason Kenney has been warning that he can use the province’s recent law about critical infrastructure – designed to criminalise Indigenous protesters who blockade railways or pipelines – and how they can apply to this situation because the law is so broadly worded. That alone should be concerning about how this law was intended to be applied, but nevertheless, this does appear to be an unforeseen use for this particular piece of legislation.

https://twitter.com/EmmaLGraney/status/1437470976472666116

Meanwhile, Althia Raj worries about Trudeau inflaming “divisions” in the country as the PPC gains more followers among these protesters and the anti-vaxx crowd, but this is a  credulous take if I ever heard one. These are not rational actors we are dealing with. They are part of an embrace of conspiracy theory that is happening across the Western world, for whatever the reason, and this is a very big problem. I’m not sure I see the utility in appealing for Trudeau to be soft-peddling to these conspiracy theorists, but I will note that there has been one party who has been winking and nodding to these conspiracy theories, and even going to far as to promulgating them in the House of Commons, and that party is not the one that Trudeau leads. There are consequences for O’Toole and company for doing so, and we are reaping what they’ve sown. It’s too bad that people in the media are not calling it out.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1437467693934854149

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Roundup: Promising to take credit for work already accomplished

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

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

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

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

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Roundup: A display of arrogance and entitlement from McDonald

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In what is quite possibly an admission of arrogance and entitlement, the ostensible current Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Art McDonald, says that he’s going to return to the job now that he’s been “cleared” by the investigation into previous sexual misconduct – but that’s not his decision to make. The fact that he seemed to publicly indicate that this was a fait-accompli may have in fact been a faux pas, as the Minister of Defence actually showed a modicum of spine and said that no, McDonald is remaining on paid leave until they can decide what they’re going to do.

Remember, CDS is a Governor-in-Council appointment, meaning that the prime minister and Cabinet can appoint who they want to the position, and remove the current occupant at any point for any reason, and the fact that McDonald has both lost the moral authority to hold the job, coupled with this stunning bit of entitlement, may in fact prove that is should no longer be considered to be qualified to hold the position.

Meanwhile, here is former national security lawyer (and former armored officer) Leah West to put this into perspective:

https://twitter.com/leahwest_nsl/status/1425547465051279361

https://twitter.com/leahwest_nsl/status/1425547467471429634

https://twitter.com/leahwest_nsl/status/1425549147118125069

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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: Ford’s eagerness to please

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The Star had a very interesting, if very infuriating, longread out yesterday, which charted the ways in which Conservative-affiliated lobbyists impacted on the decisions that Doug Ford made over the course of the pandemic – the laundry list of exemptions that kept growing by the day, the fact that the long-term care industry has insulated itself from any and all accountability and is getting their licenses renewed as if the deaths of thousands of seniors aren’t on their hands, the illogical restrictions for small retail but not box store, right up to the illogical closure of playgrounds.

The piece was illuminating not because of the look at lobbying – all of which is legal, above-board, and not the same as we’d understand from an American context of the cartoonish Hollywood portrayals – but rather because of what it shows us about Ford himself. He’s someone out of his depth – his sole experience was a single term as a junior city councillor while he brother was mayor – who was not only struggling to understand his job, but who also has a pathological need to be liked, and to be seen to be doing favours for people he knows. People like these former Conservative staffers and operatives who are now in lobbying firms. It less that these lobbyists are cozy with the provincial Progressive Conservatives – it’s that Ford wants to please them and do them favours because he knows them. That’s why the pandemic in this province turned into such a clusterfuck – because Ford needed to please the people he felt close to.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1415672572574715909

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Roundup: The “failure of negotiations” is nonsense

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It appears that the lack of seriousness around getting Bill C-6, which would ostensibly ban conversion therapy in Canada, through the Senate has reached its peak, as the Government Leader in the Senate, Senator Marc Gold, claims that negotiations have collapsed and he can’t bring the Senate back to deal with it. Which is nonsense. He has the power to petition the Speaker to recall the Chamber, and that request would almost certainly be granted. They can sit as long as necessary to pass the bill, and if they can’t get unanimous consent for hybrid sittings, well, by now most if not all Senators should be double-vaxxed and can attend in person. There are no actual impediments to them actually doing this.

Part of the problem is Gold himself – he doesn’t seem to grasp how the Senate works procedurally, and that he has a lot more power than he claims to. He also, for no good reason, proposed a date for the Senate to rise at the end of June when he could have kept it sitting into July with no actual problem. He also seems to be enamoured with the idea of agreeing on a timeline to pass the bill, which he doesn’t need, but ever since the Senate agreed to timelines around some major pieces of legislation in the previous parliament, there is a romance with doing this all the time in the Senate, which is unnecessary and in some cases counter-productive.

The other part of the problem is Justin Trudeau. And while it has been suggested that he has ordered Gold to let the bill die so that he can use it as a wedge in the election – frankly, the dynamics in the Senate don’t really support this line of reasoning – it’s more that Trudeau has a case of not-so-benign neglect when it comes to the Senate. By cutting it loose, so to speak, he gives it no mind rather than making it part of his strategy. There’s no reason why Gold is not a Cabinet minister who can answer for the government in the Chamber, rather than his current half-pregnant quasi-governmental role while still claiming independence, which doesn’t work in theory or practice. He clearly needs the support of PCO because he’s not able to do a reasonable enough job as it stands with what support he does get, and there frankly needs to be an actual government (meaning Cabinet) voice in the Chamber. But in insisting on “Senate independence,” Trudeau simply expects things to go through the Chamber and he can forget about it, which is a mistake.

Gold needs to fix this situation, and fast. If that means recalling the Senate in person, so be it. But claiming negotiations “collapsed” and he can’t do it is both untrue and against procedure. This is on him.

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