Tag Archives: Public Health

Roundup: A level of cynicism you need to reach for

Posted on by

The Conservatives spent their allotted Supply Day yesterday debating a non-binding motion that would demand the government produce a “data-driven” plan to end all lockdowns permanently – something that should more generously be referred to as shenanigans, but is perhaps better described as an act of deep cynicism that is designed to create false expectations, and make it look like the government is guilty of inaction when the demands being placed on them are largely outside of their jurisdiction.

https://twitter.com/kateheartfield/status/1374374821463687186

https://twitter.com/kateheartfield/status/1374375879959187459

Part of this cynicism is trying to blame the federal government for the lockdowns – or perhaps more appropriately mockdowns – that have occurred over the past year, when those are provincial decisions. Every few days in QP, we get a question prefaced with “lockdowns were supposed to be a temporary measure,” which then blames the federal government for something or other when it was the provinces who a) did not lock down properly, b) opened too early, and c) tried to play Goldilocks by thinking they could have a little bit of COVID in the community and everything would be fine, forgetting that it grows exponentially, and by not taking proper measures, things spiralled out of control. And it keeps happening – we never properly exited the second wave and we are already into the third because these premiers did not learn their lessons and were too concerned about letting people eat in restaurants and failing the marshmallow test rather than actually crushing the spread and allowing a more normal pace of business operations – much as Atlantic Canada managed to do.

Of course, it’s the Conservatives’ ideological brethren who are responsible for most of the disasters at the provincial level, meaning that they don’t want to criticize them. Rather, they are more invested in creating some kind of alternate reality where the federal government is making the calls (they’re not), and are dressing up their disregard for lives under the crocodile tears of “mental health,” when their loaded questions about re-opening the economy betray their true concerns. The realities of a pandemic, where people need to be paid to stay home in order to limit spread, have proven to be beyond their capacity to process, and they cannot deal with this reality – so they instead create an alternate one. Having the federal government produce a plan for re-opening at this point not only sets up false hope and unrealistic expectations, but it would simply allow people to feel like they have permission to start “cheating” on the rules the closer they get to any of the dates outlined in these plans, and it would set back progress even more than it’s been set back now by certain incompetent and immoral murderclowns who are running many of the provinces. With the new variants circulating in community spread, demanding a map for re-opening when we still don’t know what the landscape will look like is premature and frankly, foolhardy. But they don’t care – they’re just looking to score points by crying “The US and the UK have reopening plans but we don’t!” It makes it hard to treat them as a government-in-waiting if this is the casual disregard they have for human lives.

Continue reading →

QP: Demanding a “data-driven” plan to re-open

Posted on by

On a beautiful Tuesday in the Nation’s Capital, the prime minister was indeed in the Chamber for QP, along with fourth other Liberals, which was a very pleasant change of pace. Erin O’Toole led off in person, script on mini-lectern, and he raised the fatigue over lockdowns and the spectre of opioid overdoses, and true to his party’s Supply Day motion, demanded a “data-driven” federal plan for re-opening the economy. Justin Trudeau noted that the federal government has always been there for Canadians and would continue to listen to the recommendations of experts on re-opening. O’Toole tried to wedge a mental health angle, and Trudeau insisted that they stuck to the advice of science, and poked that some Conservatives didn’t even believe in masks. O’Toole then falsely accused the federal government of making a political decision around second doses, before accusing the federal government of being late on everything, to which Trudeau pushed back, citing that the provinces make the decision around spacing vaccine doses. O’Toole then repeated his first question in French, got much the same response in French, and for his final question, O’Toole accused the country of trailing behind. Trudeau took the opportunity to say that while O’Toole wanted a plan for the economy, he still doesn’t believe that the environment and the economy go hand in hand.

Yves-François Blanchet rose to for the Bloc, and after raising the announcement on high-speed internet yesterday, demanded higher health transfers. Trudeau reminded him that they have given higher transfers to the provinces in the pandemic and they would discuss future transfers after it was over. Blanchet then raised the panic over a certain obnoxious blow hard professor’s “Quebec-bashing,” but this time, Trudeau didn’t bite and returned to talk about federal supports for provinces. 

Jagmeet Singh then rose for the NDP, and in French, demanded an apology for General Vance getting a raise after allegations were raised against him, and Trudeau spoke about the importance of independent investigations. Singh switched to English to demand the government support their Supply Day motion on taking profit out of long-term care, to which Trudeau reminded him that under the constitution, this is a provincial responsibility. 

Continue reading →

QP: Bludgeoning about belief in climate change

Posted on by

It was heartening to see a few more bodies in the Chamber, but alas, there remained only a mere two Liberals — Mark Gerretsen and the designated front-bench babysitter, Catherine McKenna. Candice Bergen led off in person, and she spun a very dubious connection between continued lockdowns and federal actions or perceived lack thereof. Jonathan Wilkinson, surprisingly, answered and gave a brief speech about how climate change is real, in the wake of the Conservatives’ policy convention. Bergen then pivoted to the trials of the two Michaels, and demanded the government withdraw their participation in the Asian Infrastructure Bank, which Marc Garneau disputed, citing that these were a top priority, and thanked allies for appearing that the court houses in China in protest. Bergen railed that the government sent $40 million to the Asian Infrastructure Bank, and Garneau gave a stern warning to China about arbitrary detention. Gérard Deltell took over in French, and received pay increases given to General Vance after the allegations against him were raised, for which Harjit Sajjan stated that he doesn’t determine pay raises, but that it was done independently on the advice of the public service. Deltell tried again, and this time Sajjan raised testimony from Harper’s former chief of staff at the defence committee earlier in the day.

Alain Therrien rose for the Bloc, and demanded increased health transfers for the provinces, crocodile tears about the plight of nurses metaphorically streaming down his face, for which Patty Hajdu reminded him they are already giving increased transfers to the provinces. Therrien was not mollified, demanding increases, and in response, Hajdu listed assistance given to the provinces.

Jagmeet Singh then led for the NDP in person, and in French, he also raised Vance’s pay increase and demanded an apology, for which Sajjan repeated that he does not determine pay. Singh then switched to English to demand concrete action to end systemic racism in the RCMP, and Bill Blair gave his condolences to Colton Boushie’s family, and said that the Commissioner of the RCMP agreed to implement the recommendations of the report.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The leader and the grassroots disagree on climate change

Posted on by

After Erin O’Toole’s big speech at the Conservative Party’s “virtual” convention, where he said that the party needed to change if they hoped to win enough seats to form government in the future, the party apparently felt otherwise on a number of policy resolutions. The big one that will be cited for weeks to come is the fact that on a resolution to declare that climate change is real that the party needs to act on it, the grassroots voted this down – predominantly with votes from Alberta and Saskatchewan, but also from the social conservatives. It seems that Campaign Life Coalition distributed a guide to delegates, wherein they equated “climate alarmism” as a tool to justify population control and abortion, so good luck having that rational debate.

But it almost doesn’t matter because O’Toole says climate change is real, and he’s going to do something about it. What exactly is unspecified, and he also intimated that the economy comes first, so that could mean doing as little as possible using the economic recovery as cover – but it won’t be a carbon price (which is ridiculous for a supposed fiscal conservative given that it’s a transparent market-based system that allows consumers to make better choices). But this has become what happens with our political parties now that we have made them solely leader-centric thanks to our presidential primary-style leadership contests. What the leader says goes in terms of policy and election platforms, so these grassroots policy conventions have largely become theatre with little resonance to how said leader operates because his or her word is what goes. The system shouldn’t work like this, but all parties now operate in this mode, but nobody wants to address the cause of it.

To that end, Chantal Hébert weaves together O’Toole’s weakness on promising a climate plan without a carbon price, and the upcoming Supreme Court decision on it, and how those two dynamics play together. Susan Delacourt takes the “virtual” convention to heart and posits that the Conservatives have created a virtual reality for themselves if they believe that denying climate change is what will set the tone for a campaign while their leader tries to shake them out of their complacency.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Agitating for a political document

Posted on by

Unable to score points on the vaccine procurement in a meaningful way, now that sufficient quantities have arrived, Erin O’Toole has recently tried pivoting to the federal budget, or the fact that there hasn’t been one in some 700 days. Given that the party is losing its lustre in public opinion polls as being “good fiscal managers” – a bit of branding that rarely, if ever, actually proved itself to be true, O’Toole is trying to bolster their street cred. The problem, of course, is that many of his arguments are, well, not actually sound ones.

For starters, no federal budget is like a household – not even close. It’s a bogus populist argument that just refuses to die, but everyone keeps repeating it and buying into it. More to the point, O’Toole is trying to claim that nobody knows how government money is being spent, which is a falsehood. Any money that the government spends has to come through the Estimates process, which gets voted on in Parliament after going through committee study. Afterward, how that those appropriations wound up being allocated get reported in the Public Accounts, which are released every year. All of this spending is being accounted for.

What O’Toole is looking for is a political document that lays out spending plans in broad strokes. It does not on its own showcase how that money gets allocated and spent. In fact, there has been a disconnect between the budget and the Estimates going back a few decades now, because governments and civil servants preferred it that way, and when the Liberals tried to better re-align those processes in the last parliament, it did not go very well thanks in part to institutional inertia pushing back. Suffice to say, it is not true that money is being spent blindly. MPs have ostensibly been in control of the process the whole time – but whether they have paid attention to what they were voting on is another matter entirely.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The importance of our distinctions

Posted on by

There has been no shortage of columns on the future of the Canadian monarchy over the past few days – I’ve even contributed my own – and they are all over the map between “Our current system works” and “Barbados is going republican so why can’t we?” But one of the fundamental problems with many of these pieces is a fundamental lack of basic civics. Like, the most basic, which then gets even more compounded with wrong-headed expectations about what our other political actors should be doing. A huge example is the importance of keeping the ceremonial head of state functions away from the head of government functions, but this is failing to find as much traction these days, and that’s a problem.

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1372200793546366976

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1372202091712819200

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1372203588466978820

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1372205703843225607

I would dispute with Philippe a bit here in that people would get fussed about honours being handed out by prime ministers or ministers, particularly if it’s a PM that they disagree with. That’s one of the primary reasons why honours should be with the Queen via the Governor Genera/Lieutenant Governors, because it keeps it out of the hands of politicians and the whims of the government of the day. When you start turning honours over to politicians, bad things happen – recall the gong show that was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medals, where MPs and senators were given a number to hand out apiece, and some of them went to certain individuals that would never have been eligible for any other honours in this country.

But of course, as Dan Gardner points out, so much of this stems not only from our poor civics education, but the fact that we are so saturated with American pop culture and politics that so many in this country believe that we are analogous in so many ways. Hell, we have political parties in this country who simply swallow the positions of American politicos and just divide by 10, thinking that’s all it takes, like we’re not separate countries or anything. It’s a huge problem and not enough of us are pushing back against it. The Crown is a big part of what keeps us distinct, and we need to better appreciate that. I can say from personal experience that one of the comments I’ve received most about my book is that people read the chapter on the Crown and say that it finally makes sense to them because they’ve never learned it properly before. We have a problem and we need to solve it before more people think that the solution is to become Americans.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1372205403782676486

Continue reading →

Roundup: Chalk up a couple of own-goals

Posted on by

Political own-goals can be painful but also hilarious, and we saw two of them happen yesterday. The first was courtesy of the federal Conservatives, whose intended shitpost went awry when they wound up praising the Liberal government. It was obviously deleted within an hour or so, but the damage was done, and the day was spent with Liberals tweeting that the Conservatives told the truth for once. Oops.

The other was in Alberta, where a committee was examining the Energy Department’s budget, and questions arose about the spending on the province’s “war room,” whose job is supposed to be pushing back against the supposed “falsehoods” about their energy sector. You may have heard that last week, said war room decided to do battle against an obscure Netflix film called Bigfoot Family that shows a battle against an oil magnate seeking to blow up an Alaskan wildlife preserve. As a result of the war room’s ham-fisted campaign, the movie made the top ten streamed films, and had pretty much the opposite effect of what was intended. Nevertheless, the province’s energy minister, Sonya Savage, defended the attack against the film, and some UCP MLAs were praising the war room’s ability to make a film reach the top ten to be “pretty awesome.” Erm, they achieved the opposite and had more people watch the film they wanted to censor, guys. It’s so mind-numbingly dumb, and I just cannot even.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Final debate on the amendments

Posted on by

While the Commons is not sitting this week, the Senate is, with several bills now on their Order Paper for consideration, most especially the assisted dying bill, which is under a court-imposed deadline (that has already been extended thrice). At issue are the amendments that the government accepted, rejected, and otherwise modified from what the Senate sent back to the Commons a few weeks ago (where the Conservatives then held it up).

The Government Leader in the Senate, Senator Marc Gold, is taking the line that this is a “historic example” of collaboration between the two Chambers that has resulted in better legislation, but I’m not sure just how historic that is, and by “better legislation,” it’s a fairly marginal case because the government reduced the attempt to render this legislation fully compliant with the constitution with one of its famous half-measures that means that people’s suffering will be prolonged as a result, and yet more others will need to embark on yet more court challenges in order to fully access what should be guaranteed rights.

Ultimately it does look like this will pass without sending it back to the Commons again, as most senators are taking the line that the House has had their say, and because they’re democratically elected, it can go ahead now (though there have been instances where the Senate made a second insistence on certain bills in order to make a point – though I’m not sure that will be the case here), and that it could pass and get royal assent before the court deadline. Nevertheless, the amount of time this has taken for something that had court-imposed timelines is a sense of just how vulnerable the parliamentary calendar really is when you had determined opposition to bills, and it’s not over yet because the proposed changes in this legislation will impose a two-year timeline for more consultations on aspects of the law that currently remain prohibited (where that prohibition remains unconstitutional), but that the government is dragging its feet for the sake of politics. Ultimately, nobody comes out of this exercise looking particularly good.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Pointing to the civilian culture too

Posted on by

The reckoning over the culture in the Canadian Forces that permits sexual misconduct continues to get an airing, and over the weekend, we saw another dimension to this reckoning be raised, which is that the culture of the civilian branch – the Department of National Defence – has many of these same cultural problems in part because a good portion of its staff are former military and came up in the same toxic culture in the Forces. One example of ways in which the Forces were trying to show women that they weren’t welcome was forcing them into co-ed showers in 1997, and how the people involved in those decisions are still in positions of authority today.

Also over the weekend, there was an interview with retired Lt-Gen. Christine Whitecross, who discussed her experiences with misconduct that she did not always pursue complaints about, but also her sense of optimism that more people reporting sexual misconduct in the ranks. Whitecross also let it be known that she did apply for the chief of defence staff position, but obviously did not get it (to the surprise of many). As well, the accused in one of the most high-profile cases of sexual assault in the military – the story of which wound up in Maclean’s and touched off the Deschamps report and Operation Honour – is going to plead guilty to the charges after all.

Amidst all of this, the current military ombudsman is now echoing previous calls to make his office fully independent and reporting to Parliament, rather than to the department and the minister, and I just can’t. The very last thing we need is one more unaccountable Independent Officer of Parliament, and yet they are proliferating like mad, and this is yet one more demand. Surely we can figure out some sort of mechanism to help them retain greater independence within the current structure, but we need to stop the proliferation of Officers of Parliament, before they completely overrun our system, reducing our MPs to battle droids who recite canned speeches and vote according to their whip’s instructions. And it’s not like we’re not seeing other Officers of Parliament going well beyond their job descriptions and turning themselves into media darlings, right? Oh, wait…

Continue reading →

Roundup: Announcing the process to find the next GG

Posted on by

Yesterday afternoon, the government finally announced the process by which they will be selecting the next governor general, and it is the return of an advisory panel – but not really the old vice-regal appointment committee process that Stephen Harper initiated. For one, minister Dominic LeBlanc co-chairs the committee along with the interim Clerk of the Privy Council, which is a big change because LeBlanc’s inclusion means it is no longer arm’s length and won’t be able to claim that it can avoid the appearance of considerations being made through a political lens. As well, the Canadian Secretary to the Queen is nowhere to be seen in this process, whereas the previous CSQ chaired the previous committee process. (There has been some disagreement with this over Twitter, which is their prerogative but I would not consider the creation of a short list to be “political advice” any more than any other options presented to a government as compiled by the civil service).

What concerns me is the timeline of this process, which the government claims to want to be “expeditious” because they don’t want to keep the Chief Justice in the Administrator position for long, particularly if we are in a hung parliament that could theoretically fall at any time (if you discount that the only people who actually want an election right now are bored pundits). Nevertheless, it took them a month-and-a-half after Payette’s resignation to just announce the committee. The old committee process took an average of six months to conduct a search and compile a short-list for a vice-regal position, which is really not tenable in the current situation.

If anyone wants to read more about the old process and the role of the Canadian Secretary of the Queen in it, it was part of the focus of my chapter in Royal Progress: Canada’s Monarchy in the Age of Disruption, which was the product of presentations made at the last conference by the Institute for the Study of the Crown in Canada.

Continue reading →