Tag Archives: Public Health

Roundup: A vote devoid of real meaning

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As expected, the Conservative caucus voted for the (garbage) Reform Act proposals that give them the option to demand a leadership review, and as expected, the media fell all over themselves to interpret some kind of significance into this, including the fact that the same thing happened after the last election when Andrew Scheer was still the leader – never mind that the Reform Act had precisely zero to do with Scheer’s demise.

And while everyone was smiling and preaching unity coming out of the meeting, there are still sore MPs, who are concerned about the losses they suffered, and that their promised gains in places like the GTA didn’t materialise. MP Scott Reid is openly decrying that the party is being run like a “petty tyranny” where policy positions like the carbon price was imposed on them without discussion or even notice (as Reid was running to be caucus chair). So clearly they still have some healing to do, but I wouldn’t read any significance into the (garbage) Reform Act vote, because all it will do is insulate Erin O’Toole.

Meanwhile, I am concerned at some of the delusion that seems to have set into the party, as O’Toole went into the meeting telling the assembled reporters that it was the Liberals and People’s Party who spent the campaign misleading people and sowing division. I mean, serial liar Erin O’Toole, who attempted to make the falsehood of a non-existent Liberal plan to tax home equity a campaign issue, says it was the other guys who thrived on misleading people. I’d say it was unbelievable, but it was simply one more lie that O’Toole effortlessly spouts. Later in the day, Michael Chong was on Power & Politics, and when O’Toole’s constantly shifting positions on issues like gun control were raised, he called it a “Liberal trap.” Erm, it’s O’Toole’s shifting position – that’s on him. Chong also declared that it was wrong to make vaccination a wedge issue because anti-vaxxers felt like “hunted prey,” which is…warped. When you have a group of people who are prolonging the pandemic and endangering the lives of others, whether it’s directly with the virus or because they have overwhelmed the healthcare capacity that vaccinated people require, they should be made to feel social stigma. That’s the point. That Chong is going to bat for them demonstrates why his party continues to be tone deaf about the course of this pandemic.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1445387619215552520

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Roundup: Awaiting the (garbage) Reform Act votes

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Today is the Conservatives’ first caucus meeting of the new parliament – in person, no less – and everyone is anxiously awaiting news of whether they plan to vote on the (garbage) Reform Act provisions that would give caucus the ability to call for a leadership review. While I wrote about this for my column, coming out later today, I will make a few additional notes here.

As the column spells out, these provisions don’t actually provide an accountability mechanism, and they will wind up protecting O’Toole more than they will threaten him. So when I see MPs like Tom Kmiec saying that he wants MPs to accept the (garbage) Reform Act powers on a leadership review, citing that it provides a clear process, what he omits is that the 20 percent threshold insulates O’Toole, because those 24 MPs would need to openly sign their names to a letter to the caucus chair, meaning they will be easily identifiable for retribution if O’Toole survives the subsequent vote and/or leadership review, and that retribution can include not signing their nomination papers. That’s not an insignificant threat against them.

Meanwhile, Senator Michael MacDonald, a former Harper-era organizer, is urging a vote on a leadership review, citing O’Toole’s decision to say anything to whoever was in the room as being a threat to the party’s future chances.

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Roundup: Green insiders spill the tea

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This apparently was the weekend for the tea to start being spilled about what was really going on inside the Green Party, and we got a lot of details. The primary one is this lengthy read that details the struggles inside the party, and there is plenty of blame to go around, but what is on offer here really shows that Annamie Paul was a key author in her own misfortune. To add to that, Elizabeth May also writes in her own words an account of why she stayed silent on Paul’s orders, how she tried to support Paul in any way possible including offering to resign and let Paul run in her riding, which is the first time I’ve heard that such an offer had been made. More to the point, it is a fairly detailed accounting of how Paul misunderstood how Greens view their own leadership, and tried to impose a very top-down view of it, including demanding that her MPs didn’t speak to the media, and how even now, Paul announced her intentions to resign but hasn’t formally done so, which is why the party is in a weird state of limbo.

While once again I have no doubt that racism, misogyny and antisemitism all played a role in Paul’s departure, her own actions were certainly part of what happened, from her salary demands (she wanted the party to pay a salary equivalent as though she were a sitting MP), to her control over the party that was unlike the party’s constitution, which the national council largely did accede to. This being said, everything that has come out this weekend really makes me think that the glass cliff narrative is less likely a driving force in what happened, and a more complicated series of events took place. It is too bad, given how Paul did acquit herself on the national debate stage for the most part (until you realised her answer for everything was “we have to work together”) and it’s a shame that it all came to this.

Meanwhile, May also stated over the weekend that she won’t take the interim leader position, and says she wants Paul Manly, who lost his seat, to do the job until they can run another leadership contest. Of course, it may be too late for the party by this point, but we’ll see if they can salvage what remains, but it’s not looking promising.

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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: Calling for a return to in-person sittings

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Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet held a press conference yesterday, where he called for Parliament to be recalled as quickly as possible, and for it to resume in-person with vaccinated MPs, ending the “hybrid” sittings that we were saddled with in the previous session. For once, I actually agree with Blanchet – we are at the point with vaccinations and public health measures that there really is not any excuse for MPs not to be attending in person (wearing masks indoors as often as possible), because we cannot continue as we were before dissolution.

For those of you who weren’t following along, the hybrid sittings were direct contributors to the toxicity of the previous session, as MPs didn’t have to look one another in the eye while they behaved in the ways that they did or levelled the accusations at one another that they did, and the limitations of those sittings, particularly at committee, exacerbated the procedural warfare and filibusters that parties engaged in. Additionally, there can be no moral justification for continuing the hybrid sittings given the human toll it takes on the interpreters, who were suffering acoustic injuries at an increased rate because MPs refused to use their equipment properly, or behave reasonably online in ways that wouldn’t disrupt or injure those interpreters. Some parties – particularly the NDP, but you can bet that the Liberals will chine in as well – will want to keep some aspects of hybrid sittings around, but I want to caution that this should be resisted as much as possible – we don’t want to incentivise these to continue, because it will erode parliament the longer it carries on.

Meanwhile, I do fear that there will be Conservative MPs who continue to refuse either vaccination or to disclose their vaccination status (as a craven way of keeping their own anti-vaxx voters on-side) who will complain that they should be allowed to either attend the House of Commons without proof of vaccination, or to be allowed to carry on in a hybrid means without it. Even more to the point, I fear that at least one of them will turn this into a point of personal privilege, that their rights to speak in the Chamber are being infringed upon, and this will become a privilege fight (which would be doomed as the vaccinated majority eventually votes them down). Nevertheless, a return to in-person sittings needs to happen as soon as possible, and if some MPs refuse then so be it – and they can lose their salaries for absenteeism while they’re at it.

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Roundup: Alberta is broken, part eleventy-seven

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Things are increasingly broken in Alberta, and I’m not referring to the province’s horrific case rates, collapsing ICUs, and Jason Kenney’s continued refusal to take appropriate public health measures in the face of this. No, I’m referring to the fact that a group of MLAs including the gods damned Speaker and deputy Speaker came out as quasi-separatists yesterday with a looney-tunes “Free Alberta Strategy” which is 100 percent handwaving and pretending that they can simply opt-out of federally-imposed laws by sheer force of political will, and the mistaken notion that Quebec did it and they can too. (Spoiler: Quebec didn’t actually do it, and what few things it did do pretty much devastated their economy). This thread helps to clarify a lot of what they’re asking for and why it’s eye-rollingly ludicrous.

There are a few things to unpack here. Much of this stems from Kenney’s farcical referendums that will take place next month, the central of which is to demand a renegotiation of equalisation, which is where these quasi-separatist loons are drawing their inspiration from. It encouraged this kind of magical thinking that somehow Alberta could just stamp its feet and hold its breath and the federal government would somehow surrender its jurisdiction over things. That’s not how this works. But it’s also about Kenney’s entire attitude toward governing, and how he was building anger toward Trudeau in particular so that it would distract the population from his own failings. I have tended to liken Kenney to an arsonist who would set fires and get far enough ahead of them to put them out so that he can look like a hero – but he hasn’t put them out. He poured a glass of water on them and demanded a medal, while the very fires he set are spreading. Everything that is happening in this province all started with a match that has his name and fingerprints all over it. It’s not just trying to pretend that there’s a “good parts only” version of populism that he’s cherry-picking, or that he is somehow “tapping a relief well” to keep it from blowing up in his face. It blew up. The province is in a crisis, and he keeps lighting more fires because he can’t help himself. Things are going to get even worse in the coming weeks, and try as he might, Kenney has nobody to blame but himself.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1442925906679320582

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1442932249666621441

And then there’s the whole issue with the Speaker and his deputy. This is the second time now that said Speaker has compromised the avowed neutrality of his position, and he needs to be removed by the Legislature at once, as well as his deputy. It is unacceptable that they remain in their positions any longer, as they cannot be trusted to be neutral presiding officers in the Legislature.

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Roundup: Did Paul hit a glass cliff?

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Not unexpectedly, Green Party leader Annamie Paul announced her resignation yesterday morning, citing that she didn’t have the heart to go through the restarted leadership review process, and saying that she didn’t expect when she smashed the glass ceiling, that the shards would rain down on her and that she’d have to walk over them. Without denying that some of her problems related to racism, misogyny and antisemitism, I find myself somewhat conflicted about the notion that she is a case of a glass cliff.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1442538999579561984

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1442541082126913547

Why I’m unsure this is necessarily applicable is because the party wasn’t in a great deal of a mess when Elizabeth May decided she no longer wanted to be leader, and it was certainly doing well electorally (they had just won two additional seats for the first time ever federally), and they had some provincial successes that they were counting on. Unlike most “glass cliff” scenarios, it wasn’t like a woman or minority was brought in to clean up a mess or was outright set up to fail. But part of what happened is a problem that is getting more common in Canadian politics, which is that we have so utterly bastardised our party leadership selection processes and fetishised “outsiders” coming into parties to lead them that we have set up the expectation for someone like Paul, who had no political experience, to come in and lead a party as though it were an entry-level job. When Mike Moffatt talks about the pipeline of talent to replace a leader, that’s not unique to the Greens either – the federal Conservatives also suffer from that problem, in part because Stephen Harper actively killed the ambitions of anyone else in the party and surrounded himself with yes-men, so it’s no wonder that his successors have largely proven themselves to be duds (and Rona Ambrose was never intended to be a permanent leader, so any course-corrections she made to the party were largely undone by Scheer and O’Toole). Did Paul get mentorship and training to succeed? Erm, was there anyone in the party that could give it to her? Aside from Elizabeth May – which may be the problem. This is also a problem when you choose leaders who don’t have seats, and who lack the political judgment about how to go about seeking one as soon as possible (and when your sitting MPs refuse to give up their seat to the leader). There are a lot of points of failure here, including structural ones in how leadership contests are conducted – but I fear that simply calling this a glass cliff may be absolving Paul a little too much of her own culpability in her political demise.

Where the party goes from here we’ll have to see. May said she had no interest in being interim leader, though I suppose she will be back to being “parliamentary leader” for the party, though I suspect she may also want to make a run for Speaker as she has previously expressed a desire to do (which she will lose). But the party is going to find itself dealing with fairly existential questions pretty shortly.

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Roundup: Knives out for O’Toole?

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Erin O’Toole’s future is under discussion, as a number of vocal MPs are coming out to support his continued leadership, and former Ontario premier Mike Harris is adding his voice to the call. But this is as other MPs are phoning up journalists, on a not-for-attribution basis, absolutely savaging O’Toole and the fact that he is a lying liar and an opportunist of the highest order, and that ultimately undermined their case during the election. (Threads here and here).

This is going to start resolving itself at the first caucus meeting, whenever that takes place, because it’s when the party is going to have to vote on which provisions of the (garbage) Reform Act they are going to adopt for the 44th parliament, including the provision about having the caucus hold a vote to start a leadership review process. Why this is important is one of the reasons that makes the Act garbage in the first place – it actually makes it harder for caucus to push out a leader because it establishes a threshold of 20 percent of the caucus needing to demand a vote before it can be held. That exposes his critics at a time when he is deciding on critic portfolios and things like committee chairs for opposition-chaired committees, and he can use that fear-or-favour system to punish his critics if they fail to meet that 20 percent threshold. If they didn’t have this threshold or this framework, we’ve seen leaders read the writing on the wall with far fewer MPs/MLAs going public, and resigning as a result. The (garbage) Reform Act provides protection for those leaders where it’s supposed to be putting the fear of caucus into them, and it’s just such a dark irony that once again, attempts to improve the system only make it worse.

And while there are a bunch of voices (especially over on the CBC) who seem to think that Andrew Scheer was pushed out for his loss, they have all apparently forgotten that he resigned, particularly after his use of party funds came to light. Whether that was an excuse is not really the point – it wasn’t simply because he lost the election.

Programming note: I am taking the weekend off of blogging entirely because I am exhausted from the election and need to catch up on some sleep. See you next week.

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Roundup: The stakes on Monday may be bigger than we think

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There were a couple of columns on The Line yesterday that are food for thought as we head into the final days of the election. The first was from Matt Gurney, who states in no uncertain terms that if the Conservatives can’t pull out a strong enough showing, that they will start a death spiral as a party to the forces of right-wing populism that have consumed the Republican Party south of the border. Gurney’s thesis is essentially that if O’Toole can manage to get enough results to hold onto power, he might have enough time to get the party’s shit together to save it, but it’s going to mean hard choices and dumping the shitposters in his office and the loonies in his caucus like Cheryl Gallant, and have a firm enough hand to be the necessary bulwark. But I have my doubts that O’Toole is strong enough to do this – he’s spent his leadership winking and nodding to this crowd, given a free pass to Gallant and to Pierre Poilievre, and has basically lied his way through his entire leadership, while utterly debasing himself and his party in order to secure the favour of François Legault. I’m not confident that O’Toole is the person capable of doing the hard work of steering the ship away from Charybdis that lies ahead of it. I think Gurney is right that we need a coherent right-of-centre party for the sake of the country (and hell, we need a capable opposition party regardless of stripe to do the work of accountability), but I have less faith in O’Toole than Gurney does, and I think the party needs a complete generation change if it’s going to be truly successful in pushing back against the very populists that they’ve nurtured and coddled this whole time.

With all of this in mind, Jen Gerson lambastes the entire election as a collection of shiny talking points, with the Liberals basically a shell of a personality cult versus O’Toole amorphousness that is certainly not ready for power – and that there may be a problem with conservatism as an ideology when it comes to dealing with issues like a pandemic, as Alberta is demonstrating. Most of her points are legitimate, but I also think that if anyone thinks this election is about nothing then they’re not paying attention. I don’t disagree that the Liberals are largely a personality cult around Trudeau, but at the same time, they are the only party that has put in the homework, whether it’s on their plans for early learning and child care, inclusive growth, the environment, housing, LGBT issues – they have actual feasible plans behind them and aren’t just handwavey platitudes, or fig leaves that are designed to look like they have a plan but they really don’t. That counts for something, and Trudeau won’t be there for much longer. The cult of personality will reform as it always does, but there will be still be the actual work they’ve put in, and it has been a lot of work, even if it doesn’t look like it from the outside (and that’s partially the Liberals’ fault for not properly communicating their own successes).

And with that in mind, I am baffled by the fact that O’Toole is making his final pitch to voters that Trudeau called an “unnecessary” election – omitting the months of procedural warfare that O’Toole’s side was orchestrating, and that Trudeau needed to break that logjam one way or another. There is a lot at stake in this election, and it would be great if we could keep our eyes on some of what that actually is.

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Roundup: Bracing for election night

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With voting day just days away, we’re starting to see a few “reminder” stories about how our system works, so that we can have some reasonable expectations about what the outcomes might look like on Monday, and why it will mean things like the current government staying in place and having the first chance to test the confidence of the new Chamber once it’s been summoned. There is an interview with Emmett Macfarlane here about how any decision will unfold on Monday night and why Trudeau will remain prime minister until he chooses to resign, which is good. There is also a piece from the Canadian Press which maps out different scenarios about how the evening may play out and what these scenarios might mean.

The problem, of course, is that television news in this country is abysmal, and we’ll spend the night listening to inane banter that pretends that there is no sitting government (exacerbated by the fact that they are currently observing a convention that refers to the prime minister as the “Liberal leader” in order to have an exaggerated sense of “fairness” around his incumbent status), and they will throw around terms like “prime minister-elect” even though we don’t elect prime minister (it’s an appointed position) and the fact that if it is the incumbent – which it’s likely to be – he’s already the prime minister and won’t require an “-elect” or “-designate” title to go along with it. We’ll also no doubt hear talk about him getting a “mandate” even though that kind of thing is utterly incompatible with our system of government. And no matter how much people like me will call it out over social media, nobody will care, and they will continue to completely misinform people about our basic civics without any care in the world, because that’s the state of media in this country right now.

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