Tag Archives: Public Health

Roundup: Stop hitting yourself!

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Yesterday, the Conservatives had the gall and the cheek to put out a press release blaming the Liberals for the fact that none of their legislation is going through in a timely manner, never mind that it’s the opposition using procedural delay tactics to hold bills up. In particular, Conservative House Leader Gérard Deltell accuses the Liberals of not calling bills “in a logical order,” scheduling “insufficient time” (never mind that some bills recently have had more debate than budget bills), and then sounding wounded when the Conservatives are the ones being accused of playing games.

While most of this statement really reads like Detell holding the government’s arm while telling them to stop hitting themselves, while trying to craft the narrative that the Liberals are deliberately causing problems in order to engineer an election – err, except that it’s not the Liberals who are calling for concurrence motions and debates on committee reports rather than proceeding to government orders every day.

But hold up, you may say – surely the government could cut a deal with the Bloc or the NDP! What do you think those terms would be? The Bloc demand unconditional transfers to the provinces, which the federal government would be foolish to agree to, while the NDP want an intrusion in provincial areas of jurisdiction on things like rent, sick leave, pharmacare, dental care, and long-term care – things that the federal government cannot make unilateral change on, and are already negotiating with provinces on in most cases, and that is a time-consuming process. Nobody wants to play ball, even though nobody says they want an election (and really, the only people who do are bored pundits), but nobody wants to look like they are helping out the Liberals too much because they think it’ll cost them at the ballot box. Accusing one another of wanting an election while essentially engineering excuses to have one is making for a very irritating sitting, and I don’t imagine it will get any better the longer it lasts.

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QP: Weaponizing International Women’s Day

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For International Women’s Day, it was mostly women in the Chamber, except for the Liberals, though Catherine McKenna was present as a designated front-bench babysitter. Candice Bergen led off for the Conservatives by video, and she accused the government of covering up when they knew about the General Vance allegations, to which Harjit Sajjan stated that he disagreed with the statement, and he looks forward to setting the record straight when he has the right opportunity. Bergen stated that if Sajjan wasn’t part of the investigation, he was part of the cover-up, to which Sajjan repeated that he directed the allegations to the Privy Council Office, and they followed up. Bergen tried to make this an International Women’s Day issue, to which Sajjan started that no politician should be part of the investigation process but that they should be done independently. Gérard Deltell took over in French and asked the same thing, and Sajjan repeated that politicians should not be part of investigations and he looked forward to setting the record straight at committee. Deltell accused the government of lacking courage, for which Sajjan hit back by saying he wouldn’t take lessons from the Conservatives on gender rights.

Christine Normdin led off for the Bloc, and demanded increased health transfers for the provinces, to which Patty Hajdu reminded her of all the money that the government already transferred to the provinces for the pandemic. Normandin the claimed the government was abandoning the women in the healthcare system by not increasing transfers — another ham-fisted way of trying to wedge into International Women’s Day — and Hajdu countered with actions the government took including topping up the wages of essential workers, most of whom are women.

For the NDP, Jagmeet Singh led off by video, and in French, he demanded a plan to protect women in the Canadian Forces, for which Sajjan reminded him of the actions they have taken to reform the military justice system and victims rights. Singh repeated the question in English, and Sajjan reiterated that there should be an independent investigation process to ensure it has credibility.

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Roundup: A nuanced conversation post-interview? Hardly.

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I’ll say right off that I did not watch That Interview last night because I was trying to have what little life I have available to me in these pandemic times, but judging from the reaction over the Twitter Machine, I have a feeling that we’re in for a week full of boneheaded op-eds and “tough questions” about being a constitutional monarchy, or whether we should abandon the monarchy. Well, good luck with that, because we’d need to rewrite the constitution from top to bottom, because the Crown is the central organising principle, and good luck deciding on just what we would replace the monarchy with. No, seriously – good luck, because that exercise went so poorly in Australia that not only did their republican referendum failed, but support for the monarchy has been on the rise since.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1368770788128620544

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1368771249464348677

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1368771778047262727

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1368772293552267270

And lo, some of our country’s Serious Journalists are already Asking Questions™. And it’s going about as well as you can expect.

So, yeah. That’s what we can look forward to this week. I can’t wait, because I’m sure it’ll be even dumber than we expect.

https://twitter.com/tomhawthorn/status/1368818526564229121

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Roundup: Keeping the minister away

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The drip-drip-drip of revelations around the allegations surrounding former General Jonathan Vance continues to be felt, with emails showing that defence minister Harjit Sajjan’s former chief of staff emailing about the attempted investigation, but with the former ombudsman not providing any information that could be deemed actionable, we know it went nowhere until after Vance retired. The Conservatives are trying to use this to “prove” that PMO knew that something was up with Vance and are now engaged in a cover-up, but I am not entirely sure about that. A Liberal MP appearing on Power & Politics last night made the salient points that as soon as Sajjan was alerted to the allegations, he steered clear of them and turned PCO onto the case, because he needed to ensure that this did not become politicised, and if this is the case – and it sounds very plausible that it is – then it’s also quite plausible that these staff were trying to create that ringfence around the minister and prime minister to keep them from getting involved so as to avoid politicising any aspect of the investigation or its fallout.

This of course raises questions about what Sajjan should have done in leaving Vance in place knowing this allegation was out there, and whether or not he had an obligation to pursue the claim against his chief of defence staff. If he was trying to stay out and let the arm’s-length PCO process carry out, and it didn’t proceed because of a lack of actionable information, is that on Sajjan? Or should he have been more proactive in possibly accelerating Vance’s departure, given that he was already reaching what would have been the usual end of his term as CDS (and the fact that he stayed on for three more years meant that Vance became the longest-serving CDS in Canadian history)? Again, it’s a hard call to make because he was trying to keep that separation in place to avoid this being politicized.

Trudeau, meanwhile, says he still has confidence in Sajjan, which had everyone joking on Twitter that this essentially put a countdown clock over Sajjan’s head. But this is a mess that makes it very difficult to sort out because of the considerations at play, and the fact that a parliamentary committee is now digging into this will make it all the more partisan as the days go on. I will not be too surprised if Sajjan is made to fall on his sword about this in a few weeks’ time, but not before the Liberals put up a fight to say that he did all the right things, and that the real problem is that the accuser didn’t feel comfortable enough to want to make the allegations official or actionable – but that gets us back into something of a Catch-22. None of this will end well.

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Roundup: A $28 billion demand

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It was with a certain amount of chutzpah that the premiers assembled virtually yesterday, and demanded that the federal government turn over an additional $28 billion a year to them in Canada Health Transfers – or else they’ll ask the opposition to demand it for them. And yes, all three opposition parties are happy to demand that unconditional transfers be increased for the provinces (the NDP, at the same time, also saying that they can offer more federal money with strings attached for things like pharmacare, under the false assumption that the premiers wouldn’t dare turn it down).

Of course, this is a completely laughable proposition, because without strings, there is no guarantee that premiers will actually spend this money on healthcare, or that they won’t reduce their own spending. It’s almost like we’ve seen variations of this roadshow before – under the older health transfer escalator, health transfers were rising at a much higher rate than healthcare spending growth was, meaning that the additional dollars were not being spent on healthcare by the provinces (in spite of all protests to the contrary – math is math). When the current federal government boosted infrastructure spending with the hopes that it would help boost productivity, the provinces retreated in their spending and lo, those productivity gains didn’t happen. When Stephen Harper agreed to Jean Charest that the fictional “fiscal imbalance” with Quebec existed and decided to placate him with those billions of dollars, what did Charest do? Turn it into a tax cut. Justin Trudeau isn’t an idiot – not to mention, he’s got pharmacare on his agenda to implement, and he wants national standards for long-term care if he’s going to turn over more money for it. Of course, he’s going to put all kinds of strings on this money, and the provinces are going to have to either take it to get the money they claim they are so desperately in need of, or they can throw a tantrum and hope that they can get votes by claiming Ottawa is being mean to them (which, to be fair, will work in some provinces). Either way, their request is laughable, and Trudeau would be a fool to give in to it as is.

Oh, and as a reminder, every time you read a premier saying that healthcare spending used to be 50-50 and now it’s not, that would be true except that Ottawa and the provinces long ago agreed to change the formula in exchange for giving the provinces tax points instead, which they happily accepted at the time, and trying to make the 50-50 claim without mentioning the tax points is revisionist history that should be called out for what it is. You have been warned.

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Roundup: Misinformation in service of the Narrative

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Every now and again, coverage of a story gets me so riled up that I absolutely cannot even, and this happened last night on Power & Politics where once again, former Conservative interim leader Rona Ambrose was trotted out to complain that her bill on training judges in sexual assault law hasn’t passed. This is the fourth or fifth time that the show has had her on to complain, and every single time, they mischaracterise the legislative process, and absolutely ignore that her original bill was blatantly unconstitutional and was completely unworkable in a real-world scenario, and it needed to be rewritten entirely.

Every. Single. Time.

Part of the framing last night was that the bill is “stalled” in the Senate – except that isn’t true at all. It was sent to the Senate at the beginning of December, at a time when they were preoccupied with the assisted dying bill (which is under a court deadline), and it just got sent to committee now that the Senate is back from the winter break (which was longer than the Commons’ because they have so few bills on their Order Paper). In no way is the bill “stalled,” but this is the narrative that the show chose to run with, and facts be damned, that was how they were going to play it. The CBC’s flagship politics show was actively misinforming its viewers as to what was going on with this bill, which makes me really question its ethics, and those of the producers.

Aside from the misinformation about the process, over subsequent appearances, Ambrose has repeatedly maligned the Senate as holding up the bill because of the “old boys club,” which is patently absurd because the Senate is at essentially gender parity (unlike the Commons), she has also dismissed the concerns of judges as “arrogance.” But that’s in contrast to the concerns that judges themselves actually raised (and lo, I actually spoke to them in this piece I wrote about the original version of her bill). And yet there was zero pushback to these assertions, nor was there any mention of the first bill – or even mention that this version of the bill is basically just for show because it’s now useless (because that was the only way to actually make it constitutional).

There has been so much journalistic malpractice on this particular bill over the past several years, and it very much seems that there is a consensus Narrative about this bill that every media outlet has decided to service rather than actually challenge, and that’s a problem. The way this has been handled has been a complete disservice to Canadians, and I wish there was far more critical thinking among the media about this, rather than simply blindly servicing the Narrative.

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Roundup: Too-generous benefits?

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I find myself a bit troubled by this notion that pandemic benefits have been “too generous,” even when people trot out statistics that show that some households got as much as $3000 more in supports like CERB over reported lost income in a three-month period, and some $2500 more in lower-income households. Partially why this rankles is because this is a gods damned global pandemic and we needed people to stay home rather than try to recklessly go to potentially unsafe workplaces where they could spread the virus. This notion that people needed to get back to work is one of the reasons why COVID infections and deaths were at much higher rates in other countries who had less generous supports, and I don’t think we should necessarily be apologising for this.

The other aspect of this that is unsettling is this notion that if these benefits continue that there will be a disincentive to work as the economy recovers, but again, if the economy is recovering and we are reaching a point of mass vaccination sufficient to actually have a re-opened economy, then these pandemic-specific programmes would be wound down, so it shouldn’t be a long-term consideration. More to the point, however, is that these pandemic supports were not really all that generous, and if people think it’s a disincentive to work, then maybe they should re-examine the wages that people are being paid – if they’re so low that CERB-level payments are a disincentive, then perhaps the job is the wage rate and not the benefits themselves. Businesses have continually lobbied to keep minimum wages artificially low, in spite of an increasing volume of evidence that higher minimum wage don’t actually cause businesses to close (and in fact, have the opposite effect). Perhaps governments should take that into account as we look to “build back better,” with more inclusive growth that should include higher wages for these workers, rather than returning to the failed “old normal” of grinding poverty.

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Roundup: Procedural shenanigans in a pandemic

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The state of the government’s legislative agenda remains mired in procedural shenanigans, and the Conservatives are largely to blame. Of course, this is being framed as giving the Liberals ammunition for calling an election to try and win a majority so that they can regain control over their agenda, despite the fact that nobody aside from a few bored pundits actually wants to go to an election in the middle of a global pandemic, especially because we won’t be getting enough people vaccinated until at least summer before this could even be a remotely plausible scenario.

The government has been trying to pass two bills in short order – the latest pandemic support bill, and the assisted dying bill, for which they needed to get yet another extension to the court-imposed deadline because the Conservatives keep denying consent to extend debate on it. The procedural tactics tend to be forcing concurrence debates on committee reports, and because the opposition has enough votes to force them through, the actual orders of the day – mostly government bills – don’t wind up being debated after all. Of course, what has been especially precious is the way that the NDP have been using Question Period to complain that the government isn’t bringing bills up for debate (including the conversion therapy ban bill and the UNDRIP bill), even though they are actively participating in these concurrence debates, and voting with the Conservatives to have the debates. (The NDP also wasted an hour of the Commons’ time the other day when Don Davies complained he couldn’t re-ask his question from QP after his video cut out, never mind that the audio was fine, he was heard, and the question got a response. But he wanted the video so that it could be clipped for his social media, which is what QP had degenerated to).

I find myself particularly bemused by the Conservative House Leader – backed up by the Bloc’s – to claim that the government hasn’t set “clear priorities” and is failing to manage the legislative agenda. This is pretty ridiculous, because they know full well why those two bills are being prioritised, and in the case of the assisted dying bill, the Liberals have several times offered to move a motion that would allow the Commons to sit until midnight and debate the bill uninterrupted, but the Conservatives keep refusing consent for such a motion. And for as much as both the Conservatives and NDP keep saying that it’s the Liberals that want an election and that they don’t want to give it to them, it’s curious how they keep trying to engineer the opportunities for such a call. The fact that this level of gamesmanship is going on while we’re still in the midst of a pandemic just breeds cynicism, but seems tactically stupid if the government can demonstrate that their ability to get help to people (as with the pandemic support bill) keeps getting stymied by these kinds of shenanigans. But most of our parties these days are all tactics and no strategy, so that’s not a surprise in the end.

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Roundup: Taking a culture change seriously?

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So much of the discourse yesterday – aside from the AstraZeneca vaccine – was around Admiral Art McDonald stepping aside while he is the subject of an investigation into sexual misconduct dating back to 2010. In particular, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and defence minister Harjit Sajjan were asked repeatedly whether they knew anything about this investigation or the allegations behind it before they appointed McDonald to the post of Chief of Defence Staff. (For the record, both Trudeau and Sajjan say they weren’t aware until it was reported in the media).

Trudeau says that it’s a good sign that McDonald stepped aside because it shows how serious this is being taken, and wants those who have experienced said misconduct to know that they will be heard and listened to. Erin O’Toole says that there should be a freeze on all promotions and salary increases for senior leadership in the military until an independent investigation can look into how the Forces have handled the problem of sexual misconduct.

Of course, the bigger problem is likely military culture and the structure of leadership, and there are concerns that Operation Honour is failing because it hasn’t tried to understand why sexual misconduct happens in the first place, and that it’s the broader military culture that needs to be changed. There are also particular calls for a fully independent oversight body to deal with the culture – and one that has actual teeth to it – but even though this was a recommendation in the Deschamps Report, the government didn’t go ahead with it. It remains a question whether the government will get over itself and finally create that independent oversight to finally deal with the problem, but they’ve been dragging their heels on other long-overdue independent oversight, especially over bodies like the CBSA, which has no oversight at all. But the fact that two Chiefs of Defence Staff in a row are under investigation should be a wake-up call as to the broader problems with the Forces, and maybe this government should finally take it more seriously than the half-measures they have taken to date.

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Roundup: Pandora’s Box is open

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With the agreement of all House Leaders in the Commons, MPs have finally done it and wrenched open the lid of Pandora’s Box (which is actually a jar) and have let loose evil into the world. That evil is their remote voting app, and Parliament will forever suffer for it.

Am I being a drama queen about this? Hardly. Because we’re already seeing the demands to make these hybrid sittings permanent. The Parliamentary Budget Officer was asked to report on “savings” of this set-up, and in spite of the increased IT and staff costs (and almost no mention of the human costs of the interpreters burning out and suffering cognitive injuries at a horrific rate), he figured that it would save about $6.2 million a year, mostly in travel costs, as well as some 2,972 metric tonnes of CO2 emissions. And the senator who commissioned the PBO report was so enthralled with the result that she wants to make hybrid sittings permanent, with the “bonus” that parliamentarians can spend more time in their “ridings” (erm, except senators don’t have ridings because they represent the whole province, Quebec’s senatorial districts notwithstanding).

What I have been warning about this whole time is that MPs would use the pandemic to normalise hybrid sittings and remote voting, because some of them – the Liberals especially – have been pushing for this for years with little success, and with the pandemic, they are not letting a good crisis go to waste. They know that once it’s over, they will contrive excuses to keep these “temporary” measures permanent, starting with the excuse that it’ll be beneficial for MPs on parental leave, and then it’ll be for those with work-life balance issues, and finally it will because they just have so many things going on in their ridings that they couldn’t possibly be in Ottawa – and now they have the added justification of cost savings and reduced GHG from flights. Parliament is facing de-population, and it will become like a homeroom that everyone attends once or twice a year, and that’s it.

The problem is that Parliament is a face-to-face institution. Some of the most important work that happens is actually on the margins of committee rooms, in the lobbies behind the Chambers, or in the corridors. Ministers can be button-holed by MPs in the Chamber waiting for votes, which is incredibly valuable. Relationships are built with stakeholders and witnesses who appear at committee, and that happens face-to-face. And more importantly, MPs need to actually be in the same room for collegiality to happen. When MPs stopped having dinner together in the Parliamentary Restaurant three nights a week after they ended evening sittings, collegiality plummeted and has never recovered. If MPs aren’t even in Ottawa with one another, they will be fully ensconced in partisan bubbles that make it easy to treat one another as the enemy rather than as fellow MPs who can play outraged in the Chamber and go for a drink together afterward (which is becoming rare enough as it is). This is antithetical to what Parliament is. And not enough of them are getting it, so they’re allowing this to go ahead full-steam ahead, and boasting about “modernisation,” and so on. It will kill Parliament, and not enough people will actually care, which is the worst part.

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