While the prime minister was off meeting with big city mayors before heading off to Ethiopia, Andrew Scheer was indeed present, and he led off and he read a bunch of complete lies about the supposed plan to “license” media, to which Steven Guilbeault, who reminded him that the panel recommendations specifically excluded news media and the government would not regulate news media. Scheer insisted that wasn’t good enough and the report somehow would impact free speech, and Guilbeault repeated his answer in English. Scheer tried again, and Guilbeault said that he would be happy to sit down with the opposition when they tabled a bill. Scheer then moved onto UNDRIP, and claimed it was an effective veto on energy projects, to which David Lametti said that they were moving ahead with legislation that would be co-developed with Indigenous people. Scheer tried to use the scare tactics of veto powers, and Lametti suggested that Scheer look at BC’s UNDRIP legislation and see that it is not a veto. Alain Therrien led off for the Bloc, and he railed about the Court Challenges Programme funding a challenge against Quebec’s “secularism” bill, for which Guilbeault said that the government doesn’t have any control over that funding, and that they Bloc should understand the notion of independence. Therrien asked if the government supported the challenge, to which Pablo Rodriguez said that the legislation is being challenged by Quebeckers and that the government was following with interest. Jagmeet Singh was up next for the NDP, and demanded changes to the federal bankruptcy laws to prioritise workers, to which Navdeep Bains said that they had made some commitments in the last budget. Singh then demanded to know how much had been spent on legal fees for the challenge around the First Nations compensation, to which David Lametti said that reports of legal fees are calculated according to a set formula.
Tag Archives: Procurement
QP: Fictional legislation and crass quips
Wednesday, caucus day, and MPs were riled up in the aftermath. Andrew Scheer led off, and he recited some concern about the state of the Trans Mountain pipeline, to which Justin Trudeau expressed his satisfaction with the Federal Court of Appeal and that the previous government couldn’t get it done without boosterism. Scheer then tried to hand-wave about fictional “emergency legislation” around court challenges and worried about the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a “new threshold” to prevent development, to which Trudeau called out the whole question as a reflection of how the Conservatives don’t understand how things work. Scheer tried again, and Trudeau called out the misinformation. Scheer switched to French to worry about the supposed “plan” to license media, to which Trudeau picked up a script to read that they would not impose licensing on news. Scheer changed to English and lied about what was in the report, as well as the media “bailout” fund, and Trudeau slowly enunciated that they would not impose licenses on news organisations or regulate news content. Yves-François Blanchet was up next for the Bloc, and he rambled about they English School Board of Montreal getting money to challenge the “secularism” bill, to which Trudeau started that the Court Challenges Programme awards aid to groups in an arm’s length way from government. Blanchet tried to make this an issue of provincial jurisdiction, to which Trudeau repeated that programme was independent of government. Jagmeet Singh was then up for the NDP, and complained about the backlogs for women regaining First Nations status after the law changed to broaden the criteria. Trudeau started that they have spent record amounts to Indigenous communities, and it takes longer because the delivery needs to be done in partnership with those communities. Singh then moved onto the Coast Gas Link pipeline dispute, demanding that the prime minister meet with the hereditary chiefs, to which Trudeau stated that the issue was entirely under provincial jurisdiction, which they respect.
https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1225141168683606017
Roundup: Giving credence to nonsense
As the Conservative leadership race starts to heat up, we’re hearing Erin O’Toole reiterate his neo-colonial “CANZUK” nonsense, and aspiring narcissist Rick Peterson has been all over talking about his “flat tax” proposal without giving any concrete numbers or context as to the trade-offs of that plan. And of course, some UK media has picked upon on O’Toole’s proposal in the wake of Brexit, giving it undue credibility – which is a problem in and of itself.
https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1223959683528101889
So economist Kevin Milligan actually crunched the numbers for the aspiring narcissist Peterson, and lo, it’s not pretty.
https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1224011123009249281
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1224103928096182272
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1224144132873961473
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1224146058088865794
The only thing the federal government would do would be to send cheques to individuals and other levels of government. And presumably the people in charge of sending them out would work for free.
— Stephen Gordon (@stephenfgordon) February 2, 2020
In other words, it’s not novel or a “bold idea” – it’s hokum that we’re giving a free pass. Let’s do better than this.
Roundup: Framing for controversy
I try to give my brethren in the media the benefit of the doubt as often as possible, but yesterday there were two egregious examples of places where they framed a quote in a way that gave it a particular perception, and then went and tried to make news about that perception. The first example was to take a quote from Trudeau from the Global News interview from the night before, and tried very hard to make it look like Trudeau was blaming Trump for the deaths on Flight PS752.
“If there were no tensions, if there was no escalation recently in the region, those Canadians would be right now home with their families,” said Trudeau. “This is something that happens when you have conflict and war. Innocents bear the brunt of it and it is a reminder why all of us need to work so hard on de-escalation, moving forward to reduce tensions and find a pathway that doesn’t involve further conflict and killing.”
If you notice, the focus was – quite rightly – on the fact that civilians get caught in the crossfire of war. But the various outlets in this country (and the US – Fox News in particular) tried to frame this as Trudeau blaming Trump, which he didn’t actually do. And then, CBC had their Washington correspondents getting reaction to the “perception” that Trudeau was blaming Trump, even when he wasn’t, and in interviews, kept aggressively going after the perception of the comments, without actually acknowledging that they were trying to create that very perception with the very frame they put around those comments. The lack of self-awareness and self-reflection was entirely galling.
The second incident in a single day was taking a comment that Stephen Harper made, where he called for “change in the nature of the government” in Iran, and headlined it “calling for regime change” which has a very specific meaning, and got their reaction quotes based on the notion that he called for regime change – again, putting a frame around comments which were so bland as to be not worth reporting. (Note: CBC was not the only offender here, and they had to issue a “clarification,” which was really a correction, as a result; the CTV piece eventually changed their headline and lede, but didn’t note that they had made the correction).
https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1217233046908416000
Two instances of torqueing quotes and placing dubious framing devices around fairly innocuous quotes to spark controversy in a single day. Not good, guys, and like Robert Hiltz said, this is the kidnd of thing that erodes trust. Let’s be better than this.
Roundup: Testing names in the field
Over the weekend, I got a call from a public opinion research company who was doing a survey on the Conservative leadership race. While many of the questions were fairly loaded or leading when it came to things like carbon pricing, and there were a lot of questions relating to just how progressive one thinks a future Conservative leader should be, I was most fascinated by the testing about potential candidates. There was an open-ended opportunity to provide a name that one might think could entice voters to switch to the Conservative party, followed by a list of names where one was invited to rank how much it would make you switch your vote for the Conservatives. That list: Gerard Deltell, former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, Doug Ford, Jason Kenney, Jean Charest, Peter MacKay, Rona Ambrose, Lisa Raitt, Pierre Poilievre, Erin O’Toole, and Christy Clark. The inclusion of Carney is a head-scratcher considering that there was a Big Deal a few years ago about his apparently sniffing around the Liberals about a possible future leadership bid, while the fact that Michael Chong was left out despite his previous leadership run and the fact that he has stated he is seriously considering another go of it. So anyway, make of the list what you will, but those are the names that someone is testing.
Meanwhile, the first “official” declared candidate is Bryan Brulotte, a one-time Progressive Conservative staffer and failed candidate, who is pitching a negative income tax and “luxury tax” in lieu of a carbon price. Pierre Poilievre is also planning to announce his candidacy today, with John Baird chairing his campaign – though one wonders if that will conflict with his post-mortem report on how the party botched the election.
On that note, here’s Jess Morgan’s argument why he would be the absolute worst thing, while Paul Wells sizes up what we know of the race to date, and what kinds of choices the party faces in the process.
Roundup: Building the Teck narrative
While some of Jason Kenney’s usual mouthpieces and apologists start agitating for the Teck Frontier oilsands mine, it seems we need yet more reality checks about the project – particularly the economics. Because we have seen on more than one occasion where a project that wasn’t economically viable still achieves mythology status because certain people who think the idea of it is great will lie about its fate in order to suit their narratives *cough*Energy East*cough*. Anyway, here’s Andrew Leach with more.
Frontier is a big project: a $20 billion potential investment. It's also an expensive project. That capital investment is $76k per barrel per day of capacity: an option that gets you ~ 40 years of production 4 which you still have to pay op + maint costs, royalties, and taxes.
— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) December 18, 2019
Taking those estimates, and assuming a 10% return on investment, which would be a fairly standard hurdle rate for taking this kind of commodity price risk over this kind of time horizon, you can calculate what oil price you'd need to see to make the project work.
— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) December 18, 2019
If you were to cut initial capital costs or operating costs by 25%, you could get your break-even down closer to $65 WTI. Those are real prices, so you'd need to see WTI at $65 plus inflation on average over the life of the project just to meet a minimum hurdle rate of return.
— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) December 18, 2019
So, what about the other part. Is this the project that is most likely to be adopted? No. There are plenty of other potential investments with lower costs than Frontier. Cenovus has several great SAGD assets, Imperial has Aspen, Carmon Creek is available in the Peace, etc.
— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) December 18, 2019
Let's also remember why CERI doesn't even evaluate oil sands mines anymore. They are too expensive. In 2014, with oil at its post-2008 peak, Total shelved its investment in Joslyn. That project has an approval in hand, is closer to McMurray, etc.https://t.co/Rx9miZ3EUv
— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) December 18, 2019
A fair point to make is that many world oil price forecasts show prices that would make Frontier work, in a vacuum. For example, here are EIA's real dollar WTI price forecasts from their Annual Energy Outlook. https://t.co/T7BPYwOcjK The reference case average is ~$100/bbl. pic.twitter.com/1079U2l0mY
— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) December 18, 2019
If you're going to frame Frontier as the last, best hope for AB, and frame Trudeau as the lone barrier, one has to wonder what you've done with all the other, cheaper projects out there and why you expect this project to be more likely to be built than earlier-approved mines.
— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) December 18, 2019
Roundup: SNC-Lavalin gets a plea bargain
In an unexpected development yesterday, we learned that SNC-Lavalin took a plea deal from the courts – that one of their divisions would plead guilty for fraud over $5000 in connection to their dubious activities in Libya, pay a fairly hefty $280 million fine over five years, and all of the rest of the charges they were facing were withdrawn, and they wouldn’t face debarment from future contract work for governments. In other words, they largely got what they wanted with the Deferred Prosecution Agreement/Remediation Agreement that they had been agitating and lobbying for, and which spun off the whole Double-Hyphen Affair in the first place.
Could of things – first of all, DPAs are not “get out of jail free” cards like they have often been described as. Had SNC-Lavalin been granted the DPA, they would have had to agreed that they committed wrongdoing, paid a fine which would have included remediation for the wronged parties, and would have a structured monitoring regime put into place to ensure better governance going forward, and it wouldn’t have protected any of their executives from future prosecution. One particular law professor, Jennifer Quaid, noted that even though they weren’t a good candidate for a DPA, it would have actually been more transparent than the plea bargain that they wound up with, there is no guarantee of remediation to wronged parties, and it’s unlikely there will be the same structure imposed, so maybe, just maybe, the DPA was the better plan in the first place.
Jody Wilson-Raybould tweeted out in response that the system worked, while Justin Trudeau said in an interview that he may have acted differently had he known this would have been the outcome, but he was trying to do the best he could at the time. And there are certain people screaming about prosecutorial independence, but I keep going back to the conversation that Wilson-Raybould taped with Michael Wernick, and so much of it was them talking past one another – him looking for an explanation and her not providing one until the end of the conversation when she said that she gave a report to PMO months prior, to which Wernick said “That’s news to me.” This key exchange was completely glossed over in most of the reporting because they fell instead for the juicy quotes that Wilson-Raybould had set up in conducting the conversation the way she did. So much of the communications and relationship breakdown is on full display in that call. (That being said, I remain deeply troubled with how much SNC-Lavalin was stage-managing the legislative process around the DPAs, even if lawyers in the field had been demanding that legislation for a decade because we were behind our comparable Western allies in making these kinds of arrangements available).
Meanwhile, certain journalists want to insist that this doesn’t mean that the story is over because parliamentary committees. Erm, except they would need the support of the Bloc to push forward with them, and they have explicitly stated that they have no interest in doing so. (Also, I am a bit concerned that Elizabeth May was conspiracy theorizing over Twitter regarding who this plea deal is “protecting.”)
On a related note, Wilson-Raybould was chosen by The Canadian Press as their Newsmaker of the Year, and make news she certainly did (and still does).
Roundup: Mandate letters and the minister for everything
Yesterday was the day that Justin Trudeau released the mandate letters for his ministers, giving us a glimpse as to what their marching orders will be (which is still a fairly novel transparency and accountability measure in this country, it needs to be said). The National Post counted up some 288 projects listed in those mandates, some of them holdovers from the previous parliament (which isn’t surprising considering that many of them were fairly ambitious and transformational and were not achievable within four years). But there were also a number of things missing from several of those letters that should have been dealt with – particularly on the justice file.
As with the previous parliament, each of the letters has an identical preamble, advising the ministers to “govern in a positive, open and collaborative way,” because it’s a hung parliament and all of that. In terms of specific points in the letters, there are issues like discussions with province over pharmacare, shortening wait times for airport screenings, tax cuts for green tech companies, reforming the medical assistance in dying laws, advancing international efforts to ban “killer robots,” procuring new fighter jets and modernizing NORAD. One of the more alarming mentions was in Bill Morneau’s letter, advising him to review and possibly modify the financial stress test applied to mortgages, which is a Very Bad Thing, and means that the real estate lobby is winning its air war over the good common sense of the Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. (Seriously – there is no excuse for encouraging bad debt).
And then there is Chrystia Freeland’s letter, which is expansive and makes her in essence a “minister of everything” who is assigned to basically work with a number of other ministers to advance their priorities, whether it’s carbon pricing, getting resources to market, breaking down internal trade barriers, facilitating pharmacare talks, working on pan-Canadian childcare, gun control, regional economic development agencies, and advancing reconciliation. This leaves questions as to what exactly Trudeau will be doing while Freeland does all the work – leaving her to either take the fall while Trudeau gets to take the credit. This having been said, it’s just as likely that she wanted a full plate of projects rather than simply spending her weeks heading to provincial capitals to meet with premiers once the New NAFTA is ratified, but she certainly has her work cut out for her, ensuring that enough of these promises are fulfilled before the inevitable early election call that comes in a hung parliament.
Roundup: A promise weaselled out on
A very important bill has been introduced in the Senate, that has been attempted on more than a few occasions now, and it’s a sign of a promise that the Liberals weaselled out on in the past. The bill? To restore Parliament’s ability to control government borrowing by way of votes – you know, like Parliament is supposed to do as part of their job of holding government to account by means of controlling the public purse. You see, back in the Harper era, they hid the change in one of their massive omnibus budget bills that stripped Parliament of the ability to vote on new borrowing, and instead turned it over to Cabinet. Senators caught it too late, and the bill passed, and whoops, no more ability for Parliament to hold government to account for it any longer. Senator Wilfred Moore introduced a bill to revert this practice on a couple of occasions, and Senator Joseph Day carried on with it in the previous Parliament, and has just reintroduced it in this one.
https://twitter.com/SenDayNB/status/1204502292076154880
Thanks to @SenDayNB for holding our fed govts to account when borrowing on behalf of Canadians. Parliament's powers need to be restored and respected as promised. #BillS201 @SenateCA @OurCommons
— Hon. Wilfred Moore (@SenWillyMoore) December 10, 2019
The Liberals were all in favour of this back when they were in opposition, and made a big show about promising to restore this to Parliament – and then they weaselled out on it. What they did instead was introduced a debt ceiling of $1.168 trillion, after which Parliament would need to vote to extend it, and said that Cabinet only needed to report to Parliament every three years about the money it has borrowed, starting in 2020. Let me reiterate – they weaselled out of this promise, and at least there are senators who are alive to why this is important for Parliament.
These are principles that go back to Runnymede, and the Magna Carta in 1215, and made more explicit in 1688 when the king wasn’t able to borrow money without Parliament’s consent. The Conservatives broke this important principle of Parliament for their convenience. That the Liberals have refused to act on their promise to restore it is a black mark against them.
Roundup: It’s Cabinet Shuffle Day!
We are now well into Cabinet leak territory, and right now the news is that Chrystia Freeland will indeed be moving – but we don’t know where. We do know that François-Philippe Champagne will replace her at Foreign Affairs, that Pablo Rodriguez will be the new Government House Leader (after we already heard that Steven Guilbeault will take over Canadian Heritage), plus Seamus O’Regan moving to Natural Resources, that Jonathan Wilkinson is taking over Environment and Catherine McKenna will take over Infrastructure. We’re also hearing from Quebec media that Jean-Yves Duclos will take over Treasury Board, and that Mélanie Joly is due for a promotion – but no hint as to what it means otherwise. Still no word on Public Safety, which is a huge portfolio that will need a very skilled hand to deal with in the absence of Ralph Goodale.
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1196922355181924352
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1196922357073489920
https://twitter.com/JenniferRobson8/status/1196959319994056705
Meanwhile, some of the other roles that Trudeau needs to decide who are not in Cabinet will include the whip, parliamentary secretaries, and considerations for committee chairs (though he won’t have the final say on those as they are ostensibly elected by the committees themselves, and it’s the whips who largely determine who will sit on which committee). Committees are especially important in a hung parliament, so this could mean big roles for those who didn’t make it into Cabinet.