Tag Archives: Public Health

Roundup: Credulously repeating the 20-year line

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The big story that everyone was credulously repeating yesterday was the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report on the Stellantis-LG Energy Solutions electric vehicle battery plant, and what he termed to be the “break-even” for the subsidies provided by the federal government and Ontario. To hear the two governments tell the tale, it would have earned back the subsidies within about five years, provided you factor in all of the indirect benefits from it. The PBO says that break-even would take twenty-years, but that didn’t take into account indirect benefits, just the revenues from the plant’s output. While I don’t trust the government’s five-year figure because it’s based on a lot of optimism and fuzzy math, I also don’t trust the PBO’s figures, because he and his office have a demonstrated history of just pulling methodologies out of their collective asses, and calling it a day, no matter how puzzling the results or the presentation.

Legacy media, however, takes the PBO at face-value, every time. “Oh, but he’s politically neutral so he’s credible!” is usually the cry, even though credible economists will tell you that his numbers don’t make sense much of the time (to say nothing of the fact that many of his reports are well outside of his legislated mandate). And if you look at the reporting, The Canadian Press, The Star, and the National Post all just quote from the report in full credulity, with some quotes from MPs or the minister in reaction. Not one of them appeared to try to get a second opinion. The CBC, however, decided to take things one step further and engage in actual journalistic malpractice by getting a quote from Ian Lee—a business studies professor with no expertise or credibility other than the fact that he answers his phone and provides bullshit answers about every topic under the sun—and the gods damned Canadian Taxpayers Federation, an Astroturf organization that exists solely to provide outraged quotes to the media. That’s what passes for getting a second opinion at the national public broadcaster.

Officers of Parliament are not infallible, and this PBO is especially a problem. In fact, one economist I was chatting with yesterday referred to him as the “Ian Lee of PBOs,” which pretty much says it all. It would be great if legacy media would actually take his utterances with a grain of salt, but they won’t, because nobody dares to challenge Officers of Parliament, and that is a problem that has a corrosive effect on our democratic institutions.

Ukraine Dispatch:

No news on the wires about any Russian strikes or the progress of the counter-offensive, but there was talk of Sweden considering donating some of its Gripen fighters to Ukraine. As well, Ukraine’s Antonov, which primarily has been in the business of building cargo planes, has been shifting their focus to building drones as the war carries on.

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Roundup: A foreign interference inquiry after all

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The announcement finally came down yesterday that the government will be launching a public inquiry into foreign interference, with terms of reference that include China, Russia, and any other state or non-state actors whom they see fit, and that this will be expected to have an interim report by the end of February next year, with a final report at the end of the year. Leading the inquiry will be Quebec Court of Appeal justice Marie-Josée Hogue, who has no national security experience, but says she is “honoured” to lead the exercise (though that is not what I would be feeling). The choice of judge and the terms of reference are apparently all unanimously agreed to by the government as well as the three main opposition parties, which is in part why it took so long, but there are still a few red flags, particularly around the timeline. It doesn’t seem either remotely possible or even plausible that the bulk of the work can be completed in five months (Hogue doesn’t start until the 18th), considering how much time it will take to stand up the inquiry’s infrastructure, and for her and her staff to be properly briefed on how to read top secret information and how to contextualise intelligence. This having been said, Dominic LeBlanc says the government will turn over any Cabinet documents she needs, and Justin Trudeau says he’ll willingly testify before said inquiry when asked to, so they’re certainly making a big show about cooperation.

As expected, the opposition parties fell all over themselves to take credit for this, and chided the government for why this took so long to get to this point, as though they weren’t a big part of the problem, most especially in trying to find someone to lead this process who was willing to do the job and subject themselves to the likelihood of daily character assassination in the process (because as much as they say they’re all in favour of this, the moment they think they can score points off of what is happening, they will have zero hesitation in being ruthless in doing so). Already Twitter was abuzz with her political donation history (Conservative), who appointed her to the bench (Peter MacKay), and her previous law firm (which has Liberal and China connections), so you can bet that there will be those who won’t hesitate to move into character assassination at a moment’s notice.

In related news, LeBlanc says he’ll be meeting with MP Han Dong in the near future to discuss his future and whether he’ll be able to re-join the party given the allegations against him, which David Johnston found to lack credibility in his report. It sounds like LeBlanc hasn’t had the time to deal with this with everything else going on over the summer, so we’ll see where that leads.

Programming note: It’s my birthday this weekend, so I’m going to make it a long-ish weekend on the blog. See you next week!

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians attacked the Danube port of Izmail for the fourth time in five days, damaging more grain silos and critical infrastructure. Ukrainian forces are gearing up air defences in preparation for another winter of attacks on their energy systems and power grid. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has tasked his new defence minister with rebuilding trust after a series of corruption allegations in the defence forces, particularly around procurement. Ukraine is also calling for more international pressure on Russia to return the children they have taken from Ukraine over the course of the invasion.

https://twitter.com/billblair/status/1699740567435915664

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Roundup: A resignation that won’t solve the problem

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A couple of days after everyone declared ministerial responsibility dead for Ontario housing minister Steve Clark’s refusal to resign over the Integrity Commissioner’s report and his own gross negligence and dereliction of his duties, Clark did resign, at 9 AM on Labour Day, pointing to an attempt to take the sting out of the messaging. Ford later announced changes to his Cabinet which would put Paul Calandra in the housing file, in addition to Calandra’s existing role as House Leader.

Ford, however, insists that the tainted process for those Greenbelt lands will carry on, and while he is promising a “review” of the process, he won’t do the one thing the Auditor General and Integrity Commissioner have said, which was to cancel this process and start over. In fact, yesterday morning, Ford left open the possibility of reviewing all Greenbelt land and opening it up for development, which is unnecessary for housing needs—he hasn’t even implemented the recommendations of his government’s own housing task force, which explicitly stated they don’t need to develop those lands because there are fifty other things they should be doing instead.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1699015630316360078

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1699103206893056279

And that hasn’t been all. As this sordid affair continues to drip out, the identity “Mr. X” from the reports has been identified as a former mayor and developer who Ford has ties with, and his operation is practically stuffed with Batman villains. The jokes write themselves, but just make the corruption all the more hard to take.

My latest:

  • My weekend column looks at how ministerial responsibility changed in the age of message discipline, but how Doug Ford and Steve Clark can’t do the bare minimum.
  • At National Magazine, I look at the number of “secret trials” that we have seen come to light recently, and what could be behind them.
  • Also at National Magazine, I get some reaction to the Competition Tribunal’s cost award to the Bureau and the signals that they are sending by it.
  • My column points out just how inappropriate it is for premiers to write open letters to Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem, and how it corrodes our system.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian strikes damaged more grain warehouses at the Danube port of Izmail. Ukrainian forces say that they have taken more ground in both the eastern and southern fronts, as president Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited two front-line areas. Ukraine’s defence minister is being replaced by Rustem Umerov, a Crimean Tatar, who headed a privatization fund. Ukraine’s parliament passed an anti-graft law that contains a loophole, and many are urging Zelenskyy to veto it as a result. A parts shortage and a dispute over intellectual property rights is hobbling the ability to repair the Leopard 2 tanks we sent to Ukraine. And Ukrainian intercepts show Russian soldiers complaining about poor equipment and heavy losses.

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Roundup: The torqued six attendees

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The National Post’s series on judicial appointments continued apace yesterday, with the torqued and misleading headline that “High-level judges may have paid to meet Trudeau before their appointments,” and members of the pundit class and commentariat swooned with disbelief, and social media was blanketed with caterwauling about “corruption” and “bribery” and so on. Some of the excitable far-right fanboys started ranting about the whole judiciary being corrupted and needing to be bulldozed (because how better to enable fascism?)

But if you read the piece, and put it into context with the previous work, it says that as many as six out of 1308 lawyers who later got judicial appointments may have attended Liberal fundraisers that the prime minister or other Cabinet ministers attended. Which is…nothing. And yet, the framing and the headline suggests that they paid for access and that said meeting resulted in their appointment to the bench, in absence of any evidence to the contrary—just innuendo and correlation that has no relation to causation. This kind of journalism tends to be bullshit.

I have made this case before, and I’ll re-up it again—we absolutely do not want or need purity tests to be applied to applicants to the bench, and we should not bar anyone who has ever donated to a party from receiving an appointment. Donation is a necessary form of civic engagement, and lawyers tend to be more engaged in their communities, and often have the means to donate. This is important—we need people engaged in the system, and if we bar them from promotion because they have donated at one point in time or another, we are losing talent from the judiciary. The process as it stands is working (albeit slow for other reasons), and we don’t need concern trolls dismantling it for the sake of purity tests.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Three Ukrainians were killed in an overnight Russian attack on Poltava, and two others were killed in shelling later in the day in the Kherson region. Ukrainian officials have confirmed that they have liberated the strategic settlement of Robotyne in the country’s south, as they are pushing further in the area as part of the counteroffensive. Russians are claiming that they scrambled jets in response to two US drones flying near occupied Crimea.

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Roundup: A stupid fight over housing jurisdiction

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There is a really, really stupid fight brewing around whose jurisdiction housing is, and I am very nearly at the end of my patience for this. On Monday while in Hamilton, the prime minister said—correctly—that housing is primarily not a federal jurisdiction, but that they are trying to do what they can to support municipalities. And so yesterday, Pierre Poilievre held a press conference to insist that it must be a federal responsibility because immigration, infrastructure and taxes affect housing, and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is federal (erm, except it’s an arm’s-length Crown corporation). But while there are federal policies that can affect housing, that’s not actually a federal responsibility. He knows this, but is trying to muddy the waters in order to blame Trudeau for the problems that provinces and municipalities have created for themselves.

And to put a cherry on this particular sundae, the gods damned CBC comes along and simply both-sides this stupid fight without actually pointing out that under the constitution, housing is a gods damned provincial responsibility. And there is a certain other outlet that shall not be named running a piece about how Trudeau says that housing’s not a federal responsibility while standing behind a lectern with a sign about building houses faster as though that’s some kind of smoking gun and not simply the federal government patting itself on the back for dispersing money—which is not actually an indication of constitutional responsibility. This shouldn’t be rocket science, and yet they also do this with healthcare. Nor is this new—provinces have been shrugging off this responsibility since at least the 1950s, because they know they can get away with it because credulous media outlets in particular let them.

This being said, I am also rapidly losing patience with the whole thing about people angry that Trudeau has correctly pointed out that he is not primarily responsible, and that he should somehow “show leadership” through handwavey means. This makes as much difference as people getting angry that Trudeau hasn’t fixed healthcare. Yes, there are things the federal government can do around the margins to affecting housing, but again, they cannot force municipalities to zone for density. There are stories about how hundreds of millions of federal dollars for affordable housing are languishing in cities like Vancouver because the municipalities can’t get their permitting through. Trudeau doesn’t have the constitutional levers to change that, or a Green Lantern ring to willpower more housing construction. Meanwhile, the premiers sit back and let Trudeau take that blame while they continue to do nothing about the problems, and the media won’t hold them to account. Isn’t federalism just grand?

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1686292418344239104

Ukraine Dispatch:

In the early morning hours, drone debris has hit Kyiv as attacks were thwarted. There were also more attacks on the port city of Odessa and the grain storage there. Russians also shelled a hospital in Kherson, which killed one doctor. Meanwhile, that same office tower in Moscow’s financial centre got hit by another drone attack (and again, Ukraine is not claiming responsibility).

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1686410208338464768

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Roundup: Plans to half-ass maternity leave

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A piece that caught my eye over the weekend was an interview with new Government House Leader Karina Gould about how she plans to deal with her maternity leave on the second time around, and how it’ll be different from the first time (when she was the first Cabinet minister to give birth while in office). Significantly, she doesn’t want to come back as quickly as she did the last time, where she only took ten weeks off, and then returned with her husband in tow to help with child care duties while she did her job.

What Gould says she wants to do differently this time is to not travel to Ottawa, but attend virtually from her constituency office, while the government whip assumers her duties during her absence. But this gets back to what I have been repeatedly warning about when it comes to remote and hybrid sittings, which is that this is going to create an expectation of presenteeism that is unrealistic, particularly for new parents. And while they absolutely should take the time they need off, it should actually be time off in a proper leave of absence, rather than constantly hovering by their computers to follow proceedings along over Zoom, and being ready to vote using their remote app at a moment’s notice. That, frankly, not only doesn’t help anyone, but creates even more stress on the MP or minister while they’re on leave.

More to the point, it will be exceedingly difficult to do House Leader duties remotely, because part of the job is stage-managing answers in Question Period, and directing who should be responding (though not always effectively as we have seen). That can’t be done remotely, and indeed, Mark Holland got into trouble a couple of times for trying to do it over hybrid format at the height of the pandemic, because he was trying to do so with a phone, and that was forbidden. The best thing is for her to simply take the time she needs, and resume her duties from Ottawa when she’s ready, because she won’t be doing anyone any favours trying to half-ass it from her constituency office when she should be spending time with her newborn.

In case you missed them:

  • My column on the Conservatives preparing a “stolen election” narrative by deliberately confusing basic Westminster parliamentary dynamics
  • My Xtra column on why conservatives posing with “Straight Pride” and “Leave Our Kids Alone” t-shirts are no accident—and a sign of their moral cowardice.
  • My column on the signal that Chrystia Freeland has sent to premiers and mayors when it comes to their plans to beg Ottawa to bail them out.
  • My piece for National Magazine about how competition law has failed the media sector in Canada, and why Bill C-18 was a flawed attempt to deal with it.
  • My column on why a public inquiry into Canada’s COVID response may actually prove impossible, because federalism.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian missiles slammed into an apartment complex and a university building in the central city of Kryvyi Rih, killing six and wounding 75. Russian drones also hit Kharkiv, partially destroying a college dormitory. Ukrainian forces say they have reclaimed 15 square kilometres of occupied territory in the past week, while describing that the fight has been tougher than expected because the Russians have fortified themselves. Meanwhile, a drone struck an office building in Moscow’s financial centre, which Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for, and Russians claim that they destroyed three Ukrainian drones headed for their ships in the Black Sea.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1685580157254307840

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Roundup: The usual NATO meeting tropes

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In advance of the NATO summit happening today in Latvia, Justin Trudeau was in Latvia to announce that Canada would be doubling our military presence in that country by 2026, which is actually easier said than done with the current state of our Forces. This was, of course, superseded by news that Turkey has agreed to drop their objections to Sweden joining NATO (leaving Hungary as the last to sign off, though they insisted they won’t be the last). Here’s Stephen Saideman to parse what this means.

Of course, as with any NATO meeting, we get the usual lazy tropes about Canada supposedly being a “freeloader,” because we don’t spend the minimum two percent of our GDP on defence. But that analogy doesn’t actually work because NATO isn’t a club where members pay dues and then it does stuff with them—it’s a military alliance that depends on the participation of member countries, and Canada participates. We participate more than a lot of other countries who have a higher percentage of defence spending than we do. And it bears reminding yet again that the two percent target is a stupid metric, because the fastest way to meet the target is to tank your economy and have a recession, and it’s easier for countries with a smaller GDP denominator to meet. But hey, the two percent target is easy fodder for media because they can make hay about it with little regard for the nuance, which is why it has been a fixation for years now.

And yes, one of our biggest issues when it comes to our military spending and capacity to spend is our ability to recruit, which we have had a hard time doing—it’s a very tight labour market, and it can take a long time for applications to be processed, by which time potential recruits are likely to have found new jobs. It also seems to me that the military has never adapted to the changes that happened about two decades ago, when they could no longer rely on economically-depressed regions (such as the Atlantic provinces) because of the rise of the oil sands and the ability for people to fly out to Fort McMurray on two-weeks-in-two-weeks-out shifts, that changed their fortunes. We’ll see if they can fix their recruiting now that they are allowing permanent residents to apply, but that is one of the major challenges they need to address.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russia launched 28 drones over Kyiv and Odessa in the early morning hours, 26 of which were downed. Ukrainian forces also say that they have trapped Russian occupation forces in Bakhmut and that they are pushing them out. A statistical analysis shows that as many as 50,000 Russian men have been killed in the fighting to date.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1678651881185243137

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1678332390052098048

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Roundup: Whitewashing Orbán

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The thing that had Twitter all abuzz yesterday (aside from the launch of Threads) was a meeting between former prime minister Stephen Harper and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Harper was tweeting about “centre right parties strengthening their collaboration” through his IDU club, and lo, people were losing their minds. Harper also mentioned “the IDU’s strong support for Ukraine,” so one could be extremely charitable in suggesting that perhaps Harper was trying to get Orbán on-side with supporting Ukraine where he has not been so far, but one doubts that it had any particular effect.

First of all, the IDU is not some fascist plot. Stephen Harper is not a Bond villain, pulling the strings of these strongman leaders. He’s a political has-been, a middling economist whose only lasting legacy in Canadian politics was the GST cut. Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi are not looking to Harper for advice, and they most certainly are not taking orders from him. The IDU is a social club for awful people, but that’s as much as it is. And no, because they share tactics, it doesn’t mean it’s a plot. Parties across the globe do that regardless of where they are on the political spectrum. The Americans have made a whole cottage industry of their “political strategists” making coin by speaking to political parties around the world. There is no plot.

This being said, Orbán is a really, really awful person, running a racist, homophobic and Islamophobic government that is cracking down on civil liberties and democracy in his country. That Harper is trying to whitewash this as “centre right” politics is gross, and gives permission to people like Pierre Poilievre to engage in more authoritarian tactics in the name of the kind of legitimising that Harper has been doing around Orbán as well as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni (again, who has been particularly homophobic). But again, he’s not pulling strings. He’s trying to pretend he has power and influence that he never actually had, and too many people are willing to give him that credit because they have an image of Harper as being something he never was.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Lviv continues to dig out from the overnight missile attack, as Russia continues to insist it “doesn’t target civilians.” (Sure, Jan). It sounds like the US is preparing to give cluster munitions to Ukraine, despite the protests of human rights groups. Ukraine’s military intelligence chief says the threat of an attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant is receding, but the threat remains so long as the plant is occupied by Russians. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the capitals of Bulgaria and the Czech Republic to drum up support for Ukraine’s entry into NATO at the end of the war. Zelenskyy will head to Turkey today for grain talks relating to the Black Sea deal. Ukraine’s prime minister says that once the war is over, they will abandon conscription and maintain a professional army, akin to NATO standards.

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Roundup: Google joins the bully tactics

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Following Facebook’s particular tantrum over the online news bill, and their announcement that they will remove Canadian news links from their site, and end some of their media fellowship programmes, Google has stated that they will do the same, and lo, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s absolutely a bully tactic, but so far the government is holding firm. It has been pointed out that when these web giants tried this in Australia, they lasted four days before they returned to the table, so we’ll see how long this lasts.

This having been established, a couple of things: Despite the media narrative, the bill is not a “link tax.” Links are nowhere in the spirit or the text of the bill. These companies were not supposed to be paying for hosting links on their sites, but rather, this was supposed to be an exercise in trying to rebalance the marketplace. Facebook and Google have so distorted the advertising market and destroyed it for media companies that this was supposed to be a way of essentially trying to compensate the public good of journalism for how they distorted the ad market. What the law is supposed to do, once it’s in force, is create transparent conditions for those negotiations to take place, with the oversight of the CRTC as an arm’s-length regulator. Again, this is not paying for links. There is no prescribed tariff rate for these links, but it was about addressing a market failure in a way that is as arm’s-length from government as possible. But web giants don’t like transparency (the deals they signed with media companies previously were all secret), and they don’t like to be held accountable. And the distance from government is also why the government didn’t just tax them and redistribute those revenues—never mind that web giants are expert at evading taxes, and the howls of government funding journalism from those revenues would be worse than the existing funds that the government already provides print journalism (which, again, they tried to keep as arm’s-length as possible through advisory boards making the qualification determinations).

I’m less inclined to be angry at the government, because they were largely being responsive to what the news industry was asking of them, even though that is tainted by the self-interest of certain zombie media giants. We should, however, absolutely be angry that these web giants are throwing their weight around and bullying sovereign governments like this, and it makes the case even more that these companies have become too big and need to be broken up. The fact that they are beating up on Canada won’t endear them to other jurisdictions, like the EU, but that’s in part why they’re doing it—they don’t want other countries to do what Canada is attempting here. But this may very well be a case that they are overplaying their hands, and those other countries or jurisdictions they are trying to scare off won’t be deterred.

Meanwhile, the opposition parties are having another normal one about this. Cripes.

Ukraine Dispatch:

No news from the front-lines of the counter-offensive, but emergency workers in the four districts surrounding the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant are conducting drills in preparation for the event of a nuclear incident or leak involving the plant, as they are convinced Russia will stage. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with Greta Thunberg to discuss the ecological impacts of war, including of the burst dam. Zelenskyy also met with former US vice president Mike Pence, for that matter. Human Rights Watch says that they have evidence that Ukraine has also been using illegal landmines as part of their operations.

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Roundup: Johnston’s classified last word

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In what appears to be a growing habit of waiting until the prime minister is out of the country, His Excellency David Johnston turned in the final version of his report last night, stating that this was all classified material added to the confidential annex to his previous report, and that the public title page was updated, and with that, he’s not answering any more questions as he is no longer Special Rapporteur. You can pretty much imagine him giving the finger as he did so, considering what he was subjected to for stepping up (though I will reiterate the point that Philippe Lagassé correctly makes in saying that former Governors General should not be seen or heard). The Privy Council Office responded publicly that they received it, and thanked him for his service.

https://twitter.com/SusanDelacourt/status/1673445165191643137

As this was happening, NSIRA put out a public statement saying that they’re going through Johnston’s findings in the confidential version of his report, but said that certain Cabinet confidences were not being disclosed to them, and that only a limited number of documents were handed over, and if they are to examine things, they and NSICOP need to see everything, which is fair enough. Given that Trudeau had waived Cabinet confidences for Johnston, I suspect this is more the work of the civil servants and their obsessive desire for secrecy, but it is a bit curious that NSIRA did call the government out so publicly like that, and once again, Trudeau pretty much needs to be shamed into doing something that should have been a matter of course.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Despite reclaiming another village in the southeast, Ukraine admits that not a lot has changed along the southern front just yet. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did visit with troops along the eastern front, and presented medals to those on the front lines. Meanwhile, the Russia/Wagner Group infighting has improved Ukrainian morale along the front lines.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1673301190753550341

As for the aborted mutiny/attempted coup, here are four things we do know about the outcome, and four things we don’t. In the meantime, the memes are just getting started, and there are some pretty good ones.

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