Tag Archives: Public Health

Roundup: Ignoring the broader privacy concerns

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The House of Commons Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics committee met yesterday to discuss the Public Health Agency of Canada’s use of anonymised mobile phone data to assess the efficacy of public health orders. As expected, this was little more than a partisan dog and pony show wrapped up in a bow of concern trolling that ignored the actual privacy issues involved in favour of trying to score points. Which is pretty much how we knew this was going to go down.

There could be actual privacy issues that they could discuss, and summon witnesses from telecom companies that sell this data, or the health companies that use it and track it, but no, they’re going to bring in the minister and Chief Public Health Officer to grill them about the programme, because accountability. And yes, the minister would be accountable politically, but that solves none of the actual issues that might be at fault here, but hey, this is about putting on a show rather than doing something useful, so good job with that, guys.

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Roundup: A late start isn’t an extra week off

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I’m not sure whether it’s because it’s a very, very slow news season, or if the basic knowledge of how Parliament works is that lacking, but we got a lot of really bad headlines yesterday about how the Senate plans to take an “extra week off.” Which is not actually true, and distorts the situation. And in some cases, it’s being spun this way by certain media suspects completely out of bad faith, because anytime they can badmouth the Senate they’ll grab the opportunity and run.

To clarify: The Senate does not have a fixed sitting schedule the way the House of Commons does, and in no way are they bound to match the sitting schedule, because they do different work, and the timelines are different. The Senate frequently doesn’t convene at the same time as the House of Commons after the winter or summer break because they simply don’t have enough work on their Order Paper to justify it. They passed all of the bills that the Commons sent to them before they adjourned for the break, so coming back at the same time makes no sense—especially when they are competing for IT resources and interpreters with the Commons in the current hybrid context (which has, frankly, screwed the Senate over, but they’ve also allowed it to happen). More to the point, there are many years where the Senate will sit for weeks after the Commons rises for its break, and they will have break weeks out of sync with the Commons every now and again because their workloads are different. But this isn’t communicated effectively, either by the Senate itself, or by the media reporting on it—and it most especially isn’t communicated or even mentioned by the bad faith actors whose only agenda is to paint the Senate in a bad light. It’s disappointing, but not unexpected.

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Roundup: A plan to tax the unvaxxed

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By all accounts, it sounded like Quebec premier François Legault was spit-balling policy when, at the press conference to announce the province’s new chief public health officer, he proposed that the province impose additional costs on the unvaccinated in the form of some kind of surtax that would be “significant,” meaning more than $100. There were no details, which is kind of a big deal, but you immediately had other political leaders worried about “slippery slopes,” as though we don’t have other sin taxes on things like alcohol and cigarettes which impose their own significant public health burdens, as well as concerns that this will further disenfranchise those who are already marginalised. And fair enough.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1481062196314624000

The concerns about whether this somehow contravenes the Canada Health Act seem to be overblown, as it’s not charging for healthcare services, but other concerns about just how this might be implemented remain, as professors like Jennifer Robson articulate below.

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Roundup: Recalling a committee for a dog and pony show

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The House of Commons’ access to information, privacy and ethics committee will be recalled for emergency meetings after the Conservatives were “alarmed” to hear that the Public Health Agency used anonymised mobile data to see how Canadians were responding to public health measures. The point of the data collection is to get a sense of travel patterns during these kinds of measures, and to see whether people stay at home, or how far they go, and because its anonymised, nobody can see who is doing what individually—they’re looking at patterns.

But this kind of wailing and gnashing of teeth over anonymised data is nothing new for Conservatives, who have sounded this particular alarm before when Statistics Canada was hoping to use anonymised bank data to track Canadians’ purchasing habits in a more robust and accurate way than shopping diary surveys can, and lo, that project got iced. Of course, because irony is dead, the Conservatives’ election platform had their “carbon points” plan, which would require so much itemised consumer data that it puts this kind of anonymised data to shame, but why worry about consistency or logic?

Because this is a House of Commons committee, we are guaranteed that this is going to be nothing more than a dog and pony show. If they agree to hold a study on this—which it’s not yet guaranteed—it’s going to be hauling public health officials before committee and subjecting them to ridiculous questions that have little to do with this particular issue, in the hopes of catching them out on something, and attempts to build some kind of conspiracy theory that the government was trying to play Big Brother during the pandemic, and it will balloon from there until the point where the government has had enough and starts filibustering the increasingly unreasonable demands by opposition members, and the committee will grind to a halt. Because that’s how this kind of thing happens every time, because our MPs are more concerned with being partisan dicks on committees than actually doing their jobs of accountability. But maybe I’m just getting cynical about the current state of affairs in federal politics.

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Roundup: The healthcare debate needs to include strings

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Our healthcare system is the topic du jour across much of the media, with a lot of “told you so,” and handwringing about how provincial governments drove “efficiencies” over the past number of decades that left almost no surge capacity­—Ontario most especially—while not doing anything about its robustness. And through it all, there are a number of opportunists saying “See! We need more private options!” which in turn leads to accusations of “See! You want American-style healthcare!” and the argument goes binary and unhelpful. (And here is some perspective on the American system amid COVID, which had more capacity, but is similarly overburdened now and some hospitals are declaring bankruptcy because they have had to cancel elective surgeries).

What I find particularly curious, however, is that in none of the pieces I read over the weekend was it ever acknowledged that over the decade that the health transfer escalator was at six percent annually, that provincial health spending didn’t match that growth, and that the money was being spent elsewhere. Provincial governments should be held to account for the fact that they were given money to fix their healthcare systems, and they didn’t, which has led us to this situation, and while my reply column on Twitter likes to insist that this is just conservative governments, no, it was common to governments of all stripes for decades now. This is why we need all future federal transfer agreements to come with hard strings, and compliance measures to ensure that we actually use those federal dollars to fix the system, not paper over cracks while they use the money to lower taxes elsewhere.

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Roundup: The limits of federal capacity to help

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As the omicron variant continues to surge and stress hospital systems around the country, the federal health minister has started issuing a warning to provinces—the federal government’s resources to help provinces are finite, and that provinces are going to need to do more to bend their curves and reduce caseloads, because the federal government is about tapped out. That could include stricter vaccine mandates within provinces, because they may not have a choice as the unvaccinated continue to swamp the healthcare system. (This is where Jason Kenney and his mini-me, Scott Moe, immediately declared that it wasn’t going to happen in their provinces).

The Canadian Forces’ own medical abilities are very finite, and even before the pandemic, they were already short thousands of bodies necessary to do all of the work they’re supposed to be doing. The pandemic has very much not helped this situation, and between pandemic needs and natural disasters (wildfires and floods), the military is having a hard time doing its own job and preparing soldiers for possible combat deployments when provinces keep demanding more military help—and there is talk that Ontario should bring in more military personnel to deal with the crisis that is yet again brewing in its long-term care homes. This is not only not sustainable, but I suspect there is also a troubling willingness on the part of provinces to simply turn to the federal government (and federal dollars) because it’s easier than doing the hard work on their own, in their own backyards.

Yes, the federal government is doing what it can, but at this point in the pandemic, a lot of bad decisions by provinces are catching up with them, but we already know that the blame is going to fall on the federal government because they couldn’t do enough to fix the premiers’ mistakes (and really, they have neither the jurisdiction, the capacity, or the necessary competence to do so). But too many bad actors are willing to blame the federal government because it suits there purposes to do so, and I will bet you that virtually nobody in the media will bother to correct them because too many of them believe the maxim that “nobody cares about jurisdiction in a pandemic,” even though real life doesn’t work that way, and no amount of political willpower (or Green Lantern rings) can change that fact. And premiers whose bad judgment cost thousands of lives will get away with it, because we have an allergy to holding the right people to account in this country.

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Roundup: Fuzzy logic, rank innumeracy, and outright lies

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Erin O’Toole has apparently decided he’s going all-in for the unvaccinated, and wants “reasonable accommodations” made for them while they continue to flood the healthcare system and push it to the point of collapse, and lo, he wants the federal government to halt their vaccine mandate for truck drivers citing the fragility of the supply chain. (Erm, so when the virus rips through the unvaccinated drivers, that won’t further disrupt the supply chain?)

Logic doesn’t seem to be penetrating O’Toole’s rhetoric—nor the simple fact that premiers are responsible for the management of the pandemic, not the federal government. There are no “reasonable accommodations” because rapid tests are not actually passports that allow the unvaccinated free licence to go out in public (unlikely to be masked either, because the Venn diagram of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers is nearly a perfect circle). All it does is prolong the pandemic and the strain on the healthcare system which is leading to the mockdowns across the country—which again, O’Toole is trying to pin on Trudeau because the federal government continues to offer pandemic supports, and he claims that this is “normalizing” them. (He also calls them lockdowns when they are nothing of the sort). He’s tried to claim that the federal government should have been able to increase bed capacity in hospitals (physical beds are not the problem—the problem is trained staff to tend to the patients in those beds). It’s just a bunch of fuzzy logic, rank innumeracy, and outright lies, and O’Toole knows it, but he’s decided that this is the path that he can exploit politically, and there frankly aren’t enough people, particularly in the media, calling him on his bullshit (because both sides! *jazz hands*).

Meanwhile, O’Toole is also calling for emergency meetings of the health committee to examine the “critical gaps” in the federal government’s ability to manage the pandemic in the omicron wave. Which is…not the federal government’s fault. They provided the vaccines, and the rapid tests when asked, and are deploying military help across the country when provinces ask (never mind that the military is stretched beyond capacity and they can’t do their actual jobs right now). No, what O’Toole has decided we all need is a dog and pony show to deflect from the failures of the premiers so that he can try and pin this all on Trudeau. It would be risible if we hadn’t already seen the Conservatives abuse that very same committee in the previous parliament, for the sake of a few headlines.

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Roundup: The inevitable comparisons will be flawed

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It’s the anniversary of the Capitol Hill insurrection, so you can expect the media on both sides of the border to be full of thinkpieces about What It All Means™, particularly as America continues down the path of being a failed state. So while there is some good stuff out there, such as this good analysis piece, we’ll see some inevitable “what about Canada?” pieces out there as well. Case in point:

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1478858665423745026

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1478861864541036544

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1478865054699294726

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1478868398192930817

To answer Wherry’s question, there aren’t the same structural weak points in Canada, because our system is far more robust than the Americans’ system. For example, the insurrection happened on the date that Congress had to ratify election results, which doesn’t happen here, because Parliament is dissolved for an election. Elections Canada, which answers to the Crown, does the work of verifying election results, and they have uniform rules around the country, unlike the US, where every state and county runs their own federal polls, and there is no uniformity and voting rights are a mess across the board. We don’t have their gerrymandering because we gave that to arm’s-length judge-run panels decades ago. Nothing could prevent a transfer of power, short of a recalcitrant Governor General, and in that case, there would be the recourse of going to the Queen, but even in those cases, things tend to work behind the scenes to prevent that eventuality from ever happening (because the first rule of constitutional monarchy is that you keep the Queen out of it).

Our structure is sound, but we do have a problem with bad actors because much of our system depends on people having a sense of honour or decency to do the right thing, and when they don’t, things get sticky. They tend to work out in the long run because it’s resilient—but if we go about codifying a bunch of things that operate by convention, we would likely find things being perverted even more so, because then the impetus to find ways around those written rules becomes apparent, rather than there being a broader spirit of the convention to be upheld. It also tends to lead to all kinds of unexpected consequences—Erin O’Toole weaponizing the (garbage) Reform Act is proof of that. And it’s hard to build systems to be bad actor-proof, because bad actors will find a way to exploit the system to their ends. We do need to fix some things in our system, such as the way we’ve bastardised leadership contests and turned them into quasi-presidential primaries, the broader point is that we don’t have the same structural vulnerabilities that the Americans have, which is a good thing, but we do need to be on guard to ensure that bad actors don’t get the chance to wreak havoc.

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Roundup: Unauthorized travel and absurd punishment

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In spite of instructions not to travel outside of the country, Liberal MP Yves Robillard did anyway, and now is facing censure for it. Liberal Whip Steve MacKinnon issued a statement saying that as a result of this non-essential travel, Robillard is being removed from his committee duty (he was a backbencher on the national defence committee, meaning there is no financial penalty for this loss), and that MacKinnon will give him a talking-to later.

This having been said, I find the removal from committees to be an odd sort of punishment, because you’re assigning them less work to do. Maybe the assumption is that they are somehow vain enough to want face time in committees, but that seems like a perverse incentive. You could reassign them to the less glamorous committees, like Scrutiny of Regulations, I suppose, where they are unlikely to get media attention or to any travel, or the like. If I had my druthers, I would not only keep them on their assigned committee, but ensure that every hour not on committee was spent being assigned to House duty in perpetuity (with some additional prohibitions against device use so that they can’t be spending the time playing solitaire on their tablets, or the like), but that may cross the threshold into cruel and unusual punishment.

I will also note that taking away someone’s committee duties is counterproductive because there aren’t enough bodies to go around on committees as it is, so removing someone just means more work for everyone else. It’s especially perverse that this has also been handed down on Senator Denise Batters, who was kicked out of the Conservatives’ national caucus, but she still sits with their senate caucus, but has been denied committee work—which, again, makes more work for everyone because the diminished Conservative ranks in the Senate means not enough of them to go around to fill committee seats (and this gets to be a big problem, much as it was pre-2008 when Stephen Harper was refusing to fill Senate seats and his senators were doing double and triple duty on committees to just try and have enough bodies on them). More to the point, this just gives Batters more time to be on Twitter, picking away at O’Toole. Taking away someone’s committee duties as punishment simply makes no sense at all.

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Roundup: Boycotting NSICOP for theatre

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Because we cannot trust our current political parties to do their jobs of accountability, Erin O’Toole has announced that he won’t name any MPs to the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, citing the Winnipeg Lab documents and completely false insinuations that the committee is a tool of the prime minister’s office to obscure information. It’s bullshit, but it’s bullshit that the party has committed itself to for the sake of political theatre over serious work.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1473261482624397319

To throw a strop over these documents when a) the committee that ordered them no longer exists and won’t be reconstituted; b) the order the committee gave to produce those documents does not exist; and c) the government has offered other compromises to release those documents, both in releasing the unredacted documents to NSICOP, and in proposing an ad hoc committee duplicating the process from the Harper-era Afghan detainee documents, which the Conservatives also rejected for handwavey reasons. Do you see how none of this is adding up to anything coherent, and why the government’s many attempts to release the documents in an unredacted form that will still satisfy national security requirements keep getting rejected for performative reasons?

If NSICOP were really a tool of the PMO to hide information, then its members from both the opposition parties in the Commons and in the Senate would have resigned in protest long ago, and lo, that has never happened, because it’s not a tool of the PMO. O’Toole’s objections are theatre, and nothing more. It would be great if more people would call this theatre out for what it is, rather than just tut-tutting about secrecy. Our MPs have proven time and again that they’re not serious about accountability over national security and intelligence matters, and that they can’t be trusted with the information, and they have proven that the concerns of our national security and intelligence agencies are right, time and again.

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