Tag Archives: Public Health

Roundup: Exasperation over provincial inaction

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You can almost see the exasperation creeping into prime minister Justin Trudeau’s weekday press conferences, as yesterday, he implored the premiers to do more to fight the pandemic and to stop trying to keep businesses open, because they will still fail without healthy populations. He also obliquely asked mayors and public health officials to use what powers they can if their premiers won’t. Because this is a matter of provincial jurisdiction, and the federal government has almost no levers. And the numbers are getting very serious in this country.

In Ontario and Manitoba, there are record high numbers, and Manitoba is going into a province-wide lockdown, while in Ontario, Toronto’s chief medical officer of health is imposing more restrictions on that region after Peel Region did the same earlier in the week. In Alberta, doctors are imploring the government to institute a “circuit-breaker” lockdown for at least a couple of weeks so that they can get infections under control before they completely overwhelm the healthcare system, but Jason Kenney says no, because he’s concerned about “civil liberties.” And you can tell just how seriously Alberta is taking this – their chief medical officer of health retweeted advice telling people to only socialise in “structured settings,” which means bars and restaurants. There are no words.

As for Doug Ford, he made his own swipe at Trudeau’s remarks, insisting that if Trudeau is talking about him, that they need more financial support for businesses, which is ridiculous at this point. The federal government has been shovelling money out the door – not always in the most effective manners, mind you, because they have very limited levers, whereas provinces have more direct levers that they refuse to use. And Ford here, playing the victim, is just engaged in buck-passing so that he doesn’t have to look like the bad guy when things go into lockdown, and they’re going to have to sooner than later. He keeps saying he’ll act when things get “out of control,” but by then it’ll be too late. Positive tests are a lagging indicator. Hospitalisations are a lagging indicator. Deaths are a lagging indicator. If you’re waiting for things to get “out of control” rather than stopping the exponential growth when it presents itself, that’s negligence. But then again, Ford’s apologists seem to think that there is greater political cost for him to closing businesses than there is in preventing hundreds, if not thousands of deaths, and if that’s the calculation, I can’t even with these people.

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Roundup: A question of political accountability

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An issue that I am getting tired of writing commenting on over, and over again, is this story about the supposed political vetting of judicial candidates. The reporters on the story fail to mention the crucial constitutional details underpinning the story, Erin O’Toole lies about what the justice minister has said in response to the constant allegations, and now the president of the Canadian Bar Association is writing to the government to express his concerns that this whole thing threatens public faith in the judiciary. And here I go again.

For the eleventieth time, let me reiterate that the prime minister is politically accountable for judicial appointments under our system of Responsible Government. That means that if another bad one gets through the selection process, he has to wear it politically if things come to light – kind of like what happened around now-former Justice Robin Camp (who you may remembered wondered why a sexual assault complainant didn’t keep her knees together). This is one of the reasons why once the candidates have made it through the initial non-partisan vetting process, that they are subjected to a political screen – to ensure that nobody is aware of any particular skeletons in these potential judges’ pasts that could come around to bite them in the future. Some of the confusion here is because one of the ways in which the government has been doing this vetting has been through their voter identification database, which has been interpreted as seeing if they are donors or had lawn signs – which is a false reading of what these databases do, which is to build voter profiles, and they consume vast amounts of data to do so (which is also why there are concerns that they are not subject to federal privacy laws). But this is being deliberately framed as looking for partisan manipulation. (This is not to suggest the motives of these reporters is partisan – only that they are looking to embarrass the government, and it wouldn’t matter which party is in charge).

I am more concerned by the fact that someone is leaking to the press, and the French press especially seems to be targeted about revelations concerning a particular staffer, which suggests to me some internecine fighting within the Liberal ranks that they are willing to do damage to themselves in order to hurt this staffer in particular. But why worry about motive or the fact that you are being played when you have a potentially embarrassing headline?

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Roundup: Hopes and fears for Biden

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And there we have it – it has been declared that Joe Biden has been declared the winner of the presidential election in the United States, and with that declaration, Canadian leaders of all stripes sent their congratulations over the weekend. While our foreign affairs minister hopes for some more stability and predictability in the new administration, the energy sector in this country is nervous that Biden had pledged to rescind the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline (thought it has been held up in American courts).

But as much as everyone is celebrating and sending out clips from the end of Return of the Jedi over social media (an odd choice considering that the Empire didn’t fall after that battle, but kept on kicking for another year, and its remnants metastasised into the First Order that decimated the New Republic), I feel the urge to be a bit of a wet blanket to point out that some 70 million Americans still voted for Trump and everything that he stands for, including racism and the march toward a fascist state, and he’s still in office for nearly three more months. The American impulse tends to be that politics is to be treated as a spectator sport, where they cast their ballots once every four years and then watch the show in between, rather than actually grappling with the real issues that face their country – particularly given that their Congress is largely unable to as the real likelihood that the Republicans have maintained their hold on the Senate will mean that virtually nothing will get done for the next couple of years. Not to say that civic engagement in Canada is a whole lot better, but at least our Parliament is actually built to move things through rather than for gridlock, as evidenced most recently by the fact that we could get pandemic supports for people and businesses out the door, whereas they are stalled in the US Senate. The lure of Trump and his ethos is not far gone, just because Biden won the White House, and that should remain the cautionary tale rather than people thinking the problem is solved and returning to complacency.

To that end, Susan Delacourt warns about Trumpism and the lure of “ordered populism” in Canada, as it is not a phenomenon contained solely to the United States. Likewise, Aaron Wherry notes that it was not a landslide for Biden, that Trumpism is still around, and that America needs to reckon with itself on this fact. I will note that Chris Selley did try to grapple with what Trumpism is without Trump, but I think that when Delacourt quoted pollster Frank Graves about “ordered populism,” that it may be the more accurate handle once Trump is out of the picture.

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Roundup: Such a serious country

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The country is fixated on the election south of the border, while we’re failing to effectively deal with a global pandemic, but what shiny thing caught everyone’s attention yesterday? The fact that Whole Foods’ uniform policy forbade employees from wearing poppies. The horror! The horror! Politicians from all stripes across the country were outraged – outraged! Doug Ford leapt into action to declare he would pass legislation to make it illegal for businesses to prohibit employees from wearing poppies, which is more than he’s done about dealing with the pandemic in his own gods damned area of jurisdiction, so make of that what you will. Erin O’Toole got worked up and posted a video calling on people to boycott “Woke Foods,” which is not only not clever, but not even close to a reflection of the situation – in fact, Whole Foods came under fire for not allowing their employees to wear masks that said “Black Lives Matter” on them, so that’s hardly being Woke™. (Then again, when you wield a shitpost-shaped hammer, everything is a woke-shaped nail). It was the lead question in QP. Three separate unanimous motions were passed in the House of Commons after Question Period to condemn Whole Foods, to encourage all businesses to let their employees to wear poppies, and to summon the Whole Foods CEO to the Veterans Affairs committee to explain himself. Everyone needed a piece of their outrage pie.

A couple of hours later, the veterans affairs minister, Lawrence MacAulay put out a release saying that he spoke to said CEO and everything was okay – employees would be able to wear poppies after all. Phew! Of course, we got all parties on-side for the most useless and ridiculous of symbolic controversies, because that’s just how serious we are as a country. Well done, everyone.

Meanwhile, there’s still a pandemic where the second wave is spiking in Canada, and none of the premiers seem to want to do anything about it. Doug Ford is set to loosen restrictions on some of the most hardest-hit regions of Ontario, while his promise to hire thousands of more long-term care workers lacks any details, which sounds about right for Ford. Jason Kenney is calling on people to voluntarily stop having house parties, but won’t make any actual restrictions, nor will he sign onto the federal contact tracing app. You’d think that we’d be spending the day raking these premiers over the coals for their unwillingness to do anything (because it’ll hurt small business – when they have the capability of offering supports for them), but no, we can’t even do that either.

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Roundup: Expediting another bill

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If you were to judge by the mainstream political shows in Canada, there wasn’t anything happening here – well, unless you count the budget in Ontario, which got a brief mention, but these are federal politics shows. But hey, it turns out there was something pretty major happening, which was an extended debate on the new pandemic relief bill.

In order to pass it by tomorrow, the parties agreed to skip committee hearings and have a four-hour Committee of the Whole session instead, where Chrystia Freeland got to field questions for the duration, and wouldn’t you know it, Pierre Poilievre was consumed with questions about the state of the deficit and how the government planned to repay it once the pandemic was over. Never mind that the point of this spending is to bridge businesses so that fewer of them fail, which will ensure that when the pandemic ends, we will have a faster and stronger recovery, and that economic growth will help deal with the deficit, but that’s not Poilievre’s schtick.

The Bloc, for their part, haven’t been without their own shenanigans, as they are proposing an amendment to the bill that would ban political parties from using the wage subsidy. (The Conservatives have pledged to repay what they used, for what it’s worth). I doubt it’ll pass, because the Liberals, NDP and Greens have also availed themselves of the subsidy, but the Bloc will make their point – and it likely means additional votes which will probably keep the Commons later than usual tomorrow as a result (as the agreement was to have it passed before end of day). Even though the point of this was for swift passage, neither Chamber is sitting next week because of Remembrance Day, but the Senate’s national finance committee has agreed to meet over the week to do what amounts to pre-study of the bill (even though pre-study is technically before the Commons passes it so that they can pass along amendments before it is agreed to), but that will expedite it somewhat so that it will almost certainly get royal assent before the 19th, and then we’ll see how long it takes to actually implement so businesses can get their rent subsidy in place.

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QP: Reminder that it’s a novel virus

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It was Thursday, and neither the prime minister nor his deputy were present, which generally means a less exciting day. Erin O’Toole led off, script on mini-lectern, and poked out inconsistencies in the story around the Global Public Health Information Network, to which Patty Hajdu related early actions by the government and Dr. Theresa Tam, as well as citing that she would say more about the GPHIN soon. O’Toole tried to call out inconsistencies in early pandemic advice, to which Hajdu reminded him that it’s a novel virus that we are still learning about. O’Toole called the decision around GPHIN politically motivated, to which Hajdu said that when she was alerted to the changes, she ordered and external investigation, and she would have more to say about that soon. In French, O’Toole accused the government of losing control of the pandemic, and Hajdu listed federal actions. O’Toole then concern trolled about testing, to which Hajdu listed the rollout of new rapid tests. For the Bloc, Stéphane Bergeron trolled the prime minister about his call with the president of France, to which François-Philippe Champagne pointed out what was wrong about the premise of the question, and reminded him that Canada defends freedom of expression around the world. Bergeron asked when there was going to hold a debate on acceptable limits to freedom of expression, to which Champagne rebutted his assertions. Jagmeet Singh was up next to lead off for the NDP, and in French, he worried about the record profits of web giants, to which Steven Guilbeault reminded him at they are now treating web giants the same as traditional players in the creative market. Singh switched to English to rail about the Westons making profits in the pandemic, for which Sean Fraser said that they were supporting front-line workers, and that they raised taxes on the top one percent, which the NDP voted against. 

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Roundup: Heading down the same road to destruction

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As the American election results continue to grind along, there are a couple of things that have emerged that we should take to heart – one is that “Trumpism” wasn’t a fluke in 2016, and that it’s a real force that America needs to contend with honestly. The other is that the polarisation in the country has become so acute that adherents to each tribe party are now living in alternate realities, where facts don’t penetrate. This was punctuated by something that Gerald Butts has been saying over the past couple of days, that there are also two “information ecosystems” in the US, that perpetuate these alternate realities, in that each side’s news media is fairly disassociated from one another (and in some cases, facts and reality).

Why do I think this matters in particular? Because I see elements of this culture war bubbling up in this country, in somewhat inchoate and fledgling forms, but it’s there. We may not have the alternate forms of media in this country, but parties – Conservatives in particular – are building it over social media instead of traditional broadcasting (though they did make an honest effort with SunTV). The complete disregard for facts has well and truly wormed its way into the party’s discourse, and we’re now on their second party leader for whom bald-faced lying is now a daily occurrence, and this gets built into shitposts for those social media channels that they are promulgating, in some cases presenting their own alternate reality versions of situations. The NDP aren’t much better, importing wholesale the rhetoric of a segment of the American democratic party, and their own adherents refuse to believe the facts of situations (such as the existence of federalism in this country), as their leader deliberately misleads or omits facts to present the image of a government that simply doesn’t care to do things rather than the truth of their not having the jurisdiction to do them.

This is a problem that we have been complacent about addressing in this country, because we insist that it’s not as bad as in the US – and sure, we don’t have the same level of tribalism and political duality as they do, but just because we’re not as far down the road as they are doesn’t mean we’re not on the road here. There was an attempt to create that duality here – it wasn’t that long ago that the Liberals were considered to be a spent force, politically, and the Conservatives and NDP spent early Question Periods of the 41st Parliament patting themselves on the back that there was finally a real contrast in parties in the House of Commons (while the whole of the pundit class demanded that the remains of the Liberals merge with the NDP, as though the parties didn’t have fundamental ideological differences). We keep adopting Americanisms in our political systems and structures, and way too many political staffers (and more than a few reporters) spend their days LARPing episodes of the West Wing. Too many Canadians are keen to import all of the same problems that are turning America into a failed state because we think they’re more “exciting,” or somehow enviable in other ways. We should be repudiating this and shedding these American affectations from our politics, but nobody wants to do that, and this is going to cause an increasing number of problems the longer we go down this road. America is a giant flashing warning sign to turn back – can we do so in time?

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QP: Imagining a diplomatic snub

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It being Wednesday, the prime minister was present and ready to respond to all of the questions being posed. Erin O’Toole led off, and lied about what David Lametti said about judicial appointments, and Trudeau said he would answer in a moment, but wanted to first assure Canadians that they were monitoring what is happening in the United States. O’Toole accused him of a cover-up and of politicising appointments, to which Trudeau read a script about major reforms to the process to make it independent after Conservative mismanagement. O’Toole tried in French, and got the same answer. O’Toole then worried that federal guidance on masks was stricter than in Quebec, and wondered who Quebeckers should listen to, and Trudeau said that they respect the advice of local public health authorities but they are trying to provide guidance. O’Toole tried again in English, and got much the same response. Yves-François Legault got up for the Bloc and accused the prime minister of preferring Biden and weakening the relationship with Americans, then wondered if he had spoke to the president of France. Trudeau reminded him that regardless of the outcome of the election, they would stand up for Canadian interests and those of allies including France. Blanchet tried to pivot this to freedom of expression, and Trudeau listed things that Canada stands with France on, and that he would be speaking with Macron in the near future. Jagmeet Singh was up for the NDP, and in French, demanded to know when the federal standards on long-term care was coming — because you can wrangle the provinces overnight. Trudeau reminded him that they are working with the provinces. Singh then lied about federal ownership over certain long-term care homes and demanded an end to for-profit care, to which Trudeau reminded him that they respect provincial jurisdiction on long-term care but are there to support provinces.

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Roundup: Some key differences

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There wasn’t a winner in the US election declared before this blog post was put to bed, but I will make a couple of points about why elections in this country are not such a gong show. Number one is that we have an arm’s length federal elections agency that administers elections, whereas the Americans let each state run their federal elections, resulting in an inconsistency in rules and even methods – some states using only electronic voting machines, others using paper ballots, and there being a confusion around mail-in ballots, not to mention that the fact that we have more than enough polling stations so that lines are rarely more than ten minutes, if that. In Canada, we have arm’s length quasi-judicial processes to draw riding boundaries that have virtually eliminated gerrymandering, whereas political considerations have created such skewed, gerrymandered districts in the US, and their Supreme Court refuses to do anything about them. Attempts to disqualify voters in Canada have been struck down or punished electorally, whereas it’s a voter suppression tactic in the US with hugely racial overtones. And more than anything, we have a monarch and a governor general who act as a constitutional fire extinguisher if everything goes awry in the results. We’re pretty damn lucky to live here, in a functional democracy.

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QP: An unequivocal clarification

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While everyone’s attention was on the election south of the border, things got underway in the House of Commons for our own (superior) system of democracy. Erin O’Toole led off, script on mini-lectern and quoted Pierre Elliott Trudeau about the importance of free speech, to which Justin Trudeau rebutted that Canada always stands up for freedom of expression. O’Toole demanded to know if the PM stands up for freedom of speech, and Trudeau responded that nothing justifies violence or terrorism. O’Toole tried again, and Trudeau was even more forceful in his defence of free speech than the previous two times, without any of the equivocation that was being called out after this comments last week. O’Toole switched to French and recounted how the French president called the Quebec premier, and chided Trudeau on not getting a similar call, to which Trudeau repeated that they always stand up for free speech and will stand against terrorism and violence. O’Toole again brought up Trudeau’s father, and Trudeau reiterated for the fifth time that they unequivocally defend free expression and denounce terrorism. Yves-François Blanchet led off for the Bloc and he carried on with the same question, accusing Trudeau of twisting himself into knots over it, to which Trudeau again reiterated that they will always defend freedom of expression.  Blanchet was not mollified, and they went for another round of the same. Jagmeet Singh was up next and in French, asked about flu vaccine supplies — orders for which is once again a provincial responsibility. Trudeau responded that they ordered more than usual, and it was good that more people were getting it. Singh tried again in English, to which Trudeau reiterated that they preordered more than usual, and that they would work with the provinces to get more.

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