Tag Archives: Public Health

Roundup: Liberal caucus boards the BI train

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Ever since the creation of CERB at the beginning of the pandemic, the Basic Income crowd has believed that this is their chance to finally get what they’ve been asking for. Most of it remains in the realm of lollipops and unicorns, with a lot of handwaving away the difficulties associated with a basic income, but here we are. To that end, it seems that the Liberal caucus has made this their top priority for the party’s upcoming policy convention, which means that it has a fairly good chance of getting adopted as party policy. Of course, in the current day and age, a party’s policy book isn’t really worth the paper that it’s printed on because the leader’s office now controls everything, most especially the campaign platform (you know, what the party’s policies are supposed to inform), so I wouldn’t put too much stock in this, but it’s certainly an indication of where their heads are at.

To that end, economist Lindsay Tedds, who has been studying the implementation of Basic Income programmes, is unimpressed with this turn of events. Why? Because there are a lot of things in the federal government’s wheelhouse when it comes to better implementing current social supports programmes that they’re simply not doing, because of the ways in which they rely on the current tax system – which is a problem when a significant portion of marginalized people can’t access those benefits because they don’t file taxes. And if you’re going to implement a Basic Income, you would think you’d want to get these kinds of things sorted first so that it becomes easier to do any kind of BI.

Economist Mike Moffatt also makes the point that there are far more effective things that the federal government could spend money on that would get better outcomes than spending it on basic income, because of the supply side problems that adding more money into the system won’t fix, but will simply drive up things like rental costs.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1304769768961048577

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https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1304784277041709056

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Roundup: O’Toole hears the siren song of cheap outrage

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He’s barely a week into the job as Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, and Erin O’Toole is already starting to beak off about official residences, and my head is on the verge of exploding. When asked about the CBC story that Stornoway – the official residence of the Leader of the Opposition – is due to get $170,000 in needed repairs before O’Toole and family move in, O’Toole started going off about how he only wanted the very minimum of work done and that he doesn’t even want furniture in his kids’ bedrooms because he wants to use the furniture that their grandfather built in Nova Scotia, and I was both outraged and exasperated.

Let me be clear – the National Capital Commission needs to put work into upkeep of these heritage residences or else they will start to degrade. Everyone was so afraid of necessary upkeep at 24 Sussex for so long that it has literally become a crumbling shitpile, and nobody can decide what to do with it now. Stornoway managed to avoid that fate because when Preston Manning refused to move in, the NCC was able to do the heavy-duty renovations that the residence needed to bring it back up to spec, but 24 Sussex has never had that opportunity, and look where it got us. Nevertheless, this persistent politicization of official residences and casting them as “personal benefits” for political leaders is outrageous to the point of being offensive. These are not personal benefits – they are official residences who belong to the Queen in Right of Canada. And you can bet that a lot of journalists and Liberal partisans on Twitter dug up everything O’Toole said about 24 Sussex and the renovations to Harrington Lake to paint him a hypocrite, but dear sweet Rhea, mother of Zeus, this is such self-defeating behaviour. Stop it.

I will also add lay a certain amount of blame for this on the media, because the impulse is always to write these stories as cheap outrage. The CBC headline is quintessential cheap outrage: “Stornoway getting $170K in taxpayer-funded repairs before Erin O’Toole moves in.” This is the kind of thing that gets Canadians’ hairshirt parsimony and tall poppy syndrome riled up, and suddenly it’s a scandal – no matter how reasonable the costs, or necessary the work. And that’s exactly why 24 Sussex is a crumbling shitpile, and why our government aircraft are so old that they have to constantly refuel, and why the avionics on some of them are so old that they are banned from several major airports. It’s embarrassing, but cheap outrage is like crack to so many journalists’ brains that they can’t help themselves, and we collectively set ourselves back another decade on doing what needs to be done. We need to do better, and stop going for the cheap dopamine hits that these stories give because it’s self-destructive.

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Roundup: Trudeau backs Payette

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While making his media rounds, mostly on Vancouver stations yesterday, prime minister Justin Trudeau was asked about the situation in Rideau Hall, and whether there would be any chance he’ll replace Her Excellency Julie Payette anytime soon, especially given that there is currently a workplace investigation after more than twenty current and former employees have come forward with claims of bullying and harassment, not to mention the revelations about how her habits – especially her attempts to evade her own police protection – have cost additional millions of dollars unnecessarily. Trudeau responded that we currently have an “excellent” Governor General, and that the country is currently dealing with a health crisis and didn’t need a constitutional crisis to go with it.

It was a bit of a slow boil, but rest assured, dear reader, my head did explode.

Payette has not been an “excellent” GG. Far from it. She is a brilliant and accomplished woman, but is wholly unsuited for the role that is largely ceremonial, and where the exercise of her powers is 99.95% automatic. A big part of her job is to act as patron to a number of Canadian organizations – something she balked at (and for which I have argued we should start getting actual members of the royal family involved instead), in some cases causing problems for those organizations. She has tried to take an active hand in things like Order of Canada nominations, where she is supposed to act, again, in a ceremonial capacity. Her insertion of her own talk about the “space-time continuum” in the last Speech from the Throne was a problem. And this is on top of the problems having the dubious honour of overseeing the most toxic workplace in official Ottawa.

The notion that there would be a “constitutional crisis” is also completely insane. It is literally a matter of advising the Queen to name a new GG to replace Payette – that’s it. Trudeau is not in the midst of a confidence crisis in his government. There is no question as to the legitimacy of his advice to the Queen for such a replacement. There would be no crisis. Trying to pretend otherwise is disingenuous, plain and simple.

But Trudeau can’t acknowledge any of this, because that would mean owning the fact that he once again screwed up in not doing the actual work of due diligence required with the appointment – having disbanded the vice-regal appointments committee – and that it was a bad appointment. Beyond that, there is some speculation in certain circles here that Trudeau is not put out by the fact that Payette won’t do her job, because it allows him to step in and do more of the ceremonial stuff, which he’s not supposed to do as head of government, but something he has nevertheless tried to do more of. That’s a problem, and one that I suspect we can’t solve so long as Trudeau remains in office. (Chrystia Freeland, on the other hand, seems far less taken with Payette, and has moved to distance herself, so there’s that).

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Roundup: Warning signs ignored by the RCMP

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Monday morning was kicked off by a very good story over on Global about a lawsuit launched by former employees in the RCMP’s intelligence unit regarding the bullying of alleged spy Cameron Ortis, who awaits trial for allegedly stealing state secrets with the intent to sell them. The suit alleges that Ortis was bullying out anyone from his office that he didn’t like in order to install friends and people who would be pliant. While the government says they are going “look into” the matter – the fact that this was raised long before Ortis’ arrest and apparently ignored by the RCMP’s management is concerning.

Meanwhile, here’s former CSIS analyst Jessica Davis putting these allegations into perspective – and painting a worrying picture of our national security institutions in the process.

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1300398113430085636

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https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1300399739284881408

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Roundup: Trading in NWO conspiracies

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On Saturday, Conservative MP and former minister Kerry-Lynne Findlay retweeted a shitpost put up by a QAnon follower that contained a video of a pre-politics Chrystia Freeland interviewing George Soros, and worried that Soros was trying to get China on board with the New World Order – a particularly pervasive conspiracy theory which goes back to the anti-Semitic tropes of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Findlay’s quote-tweet – since deleted – had her proclaiming that Freeland was “listening carefully to him like a student to teacher. The closeness of these two should alarm every Canadian.” When called out, Findlay insisted that it was “about economics,” before she finally deleted her tweet, apparently after Liberal MP Anthony Housefather (who is Jewish) reached out to her to explain why the Soros/NWO conspiracy theories are inherently anti-Semitic. Findlay then made a qualified apology, claiming she “thoughtlessly shared content” and that she doesn’t endorse hateful rhetoric, but didn’t explain her won statement about why Freeland interviewing Soros should be “alarming.”

Why does this matter? Because other Conservatives including Pierre Poilievre were retweeting Findlay uncritically, which means that this kind of conspiracy theorism and anti-Semitism is getting more normalized. And then there’s the fact that Andrew Scheer spent his farewell speech promoting sites like True North and The Post Millennial which also trade in these kinds of narratives, and was touting them as credible and “objective,” when they are not. What this is saying about where the Conservative party is at in terms of what kind of narratives they trade in should be alarming, especially when you think of the fact that fourteen percent of the party voted for Derek Sloan’s outright parroting of Trump talking points, which includes the racism, misogyny and homophobia.

Over the rest of the weekend, Erin O’Toole was silent on the tweet, as were the other Conservatives who retweeted Findlay. That should also be concerning, especially because it means they are either ignorant of the anti-Semitic tropes they were trading in, or they were complicit in them. That’s not a direction that we want Canadian politics to be heading down, and Findlay owed an explanation of why it was “alarming” that Freeland interviewed Soros as a journalist, and O’Toole owes an explanation for his silence in not shutting this down when it happened.

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Roundup: The inertia around solitary

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The story of what happened with the panel the government assembled to oversee its supposed elimination of solitary confinement in federal penitentiaries has been a slow-burning story this week, but indicative of some of the incomprehensible ways in which this government operates. The practice of solitary confinement has been declared inhumane and contrary to the Charter by courts across the country, and the government promised to reform it with these “structured intervention units,” but that was already dubious, and unlikely to satisfy the courts – and they knew that, but went ahead with it anyway. A year later, the panel that was supposed to oversee it quit in frustration because they couldn’t get any information they needed to do their work (and the Correctional Investigator gave Correctional Services a pass on this because apparently, they’ve been implementing new software and this has been a problem). But it was only when this story leaked thanks to Senator Kim Pate that Bill Blair sprang into action, promising to reappoint the panel and implement a “work plan” to get them the information.

Well, turns out members of that panel aren’t exactly keen to be reappointed because they’ve been jerked around for a year, and were doing this on a volunteer basis, which cost them a lot of time and money for nothing but headaches. But this all feels like another case of this government meaning well, and talking a good game without doing the actual work involved and then hoping that everything will be forgiven because they have good intentions. That’s not good enough, and yet they keep behaving like that’s all well and good. It’s not.

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Roundup: $2 billion unbidden

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There was a lot of reaction to the announcement that prime minister Justin Trudeau was giving an additional $2 billion to the provinces to help schools restart safely – unbidden – and those reactions were interesting. Trudeau himself made a point of saying that this was as a result of listening to his backbench Liberal MPs and parents who continued to express concerns, and that it wasn’t requested by premiers, so that’s a political marker right there. It’s also a transfer that is largely without strings – it comes in two tranches, one now, one at the end of the year, and all the provinces need to do between them is to tell Ottawa how they spent the money, so again, it’s a bit of a political test for those premiers – and it’s also giving rise to speculation that this is a sign that Trudeau is in election mode.

Reaction was mixed. Doug Ford expressed gratitude (but also falsely claimed that Ontario’s restart plans were the safest in the country, which is patently absurd), but his education minister – and his opposition critic in the NDP – derided the funds as “late to the game.” Manitoba premier Brian Pallister, for example, was somewhat non-committal, and said he’d take the money, but praised his own government’s efforts. And, hilariously, Jagmeet Singh took credit for it, saying that he had called a press conference to “make an announcement” (read: demand) about more money for schools and lo and behold, the prime minister delivered before that press conference happened. Yeah, okay then.

The complicating factor in all of this is that this is an area of sole provincial jurisdiction and there should be zero expectation for federal dollars, which is why I find myself mystified by all of the people on Twitter (and the Ontario NDP education critic) bemoaning that these funds didn’t flow in June. But if you recall, in June, Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland were negotiating with the provinces for their “Safe Restart Plan,” with $14 billion on the table which included money for schools, so it’s not like it wasn’t being discussed – the provinces were recalcitrant because they didn’t want the strings attached that come with billions of dollars. Eventually, they came to an agreement and it turned into $19 billion, and this $2 billion is on top of that, so it’s not like the federal government has been completely silent. I would also suspect that there is a bit of an implicit rebuke in this new envelope of money because provinces have been dithering on their restart plans, giving confusing options to parents with no time to evaluate them, and more critically, have been unwilling to do the important work of reducing class sizes. One could easily interpret this money as Ottawa telling them – not in so many words – to get their acts together, and they’ll look fairly magnanimous while they’re at it.

https://twitter.com/StandingHannah/status/1298685195579723776

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Roundup: First attempts to define O’Toole

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It was not quite ten o’clock Eastern when the Liberals fired their first salvo across Erin O’Toole’s bow. Liberal MP Pam Damoff put out a press release highlighting three of Derek Sloan’s most egregious comments – questioning Dr. Theresa Tam’s loyalties, comparing women’s bodily autonomy to slavery, and calling banning conversion therapy “child abuse” – and said that if O’Toole didn’t repudiate those claims that he was condoning them. It seems the Liberals took a cue from the Conservatives before them and are trying to define the party’s new leader before he can define himself – payback for Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff (tough Justin Trudeau proved resilient to those attempts).

A short while later, O’Toole had his first press conference as leader, where he told people to ignore the Liberal spin, and reiterated parts of his victory speech where he welcomed all kinds of Canadians into the Conservative fold, before he took questions for a whole 15 minutes. To wit, when pressed about how concretely he wants the prime minister to address “Western alienation,” he blustered about support for getting resources to market, as though Trudeau controls the world price of oil. Asked about the social conservatives and Sloan’s comments, O’Toole shrugged them off as an attempt to highlight differences in the context of a leadership but said that he would “have a talk” with Sloan, but gave no indication that Sloan was on thin ice. O’Toole also called himself pro-choice – but in the same breath defended voting for a bill that would give rights to foetuses by claiming it was a “public safety” bill about sentencing, which was the weaselliest thing I have seen in ages. He also said that he supported trans rights more than Trudeau did because he was one of 18 Conservatives that voted for one of the private members’ bills and Trudeau had missed that vote – ignoring of course that said bill died and that Trudeau revived it and passed it in government. He also intimated that it was Trudeau who was trying to force an election, not him, for what that’s worth.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1298277863297298434

Meanwhile, here’s a look at some of the raw feelings inside the Peter MacKay camp as the “co-founder” of the party has been repudiated, while O’Toole is rushing to try and unify the party behind his leadership in spite of the things that were said during the campaign.

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Roundup: O’Toole on the third ballot

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On a third ballot result, Erin O’Toole won the Conservative leadership race. The big event turned into a very big disaster. It was delayed by over six hours because the machine they were using to open the envelopes with ballots started destroying thousands of ballots, and it was well past midnight by the time the first ballot was even announced – far beyond the day’s news cycle and past the deadlines for newspapers’ first editions, which had long since gone to print. While we were waiting, Andrew Scheer gave his farewell speech, which was bitter, and full of jejune understandings of conservatism or the political landscape – he railed against imaginary left-wing straw men, scared up a Bolshevik threat, lied about the media – to the point where he called The Post Millennial and True North (aka Rebel Lite™) as “objective” that more people should pay attention to, which is incredible.

https://twitter.com/btaplatt/status/1297768475939819521

As for the result, this was very much about the social conservatives flexing their muscles within the party. Both Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan got over 35% of the votes combined on the first ballot, and there were places where either of the front-runners came in third to Lewis, and she swept Saskatchewan, where MacKay came in last. And true to form, it was those social conservatives’ down-ballot support that played kingmaker to O’Toole over MacKay, who was inexplicably considered the “last Progressive Conservative standing” (which doesn’t make sense because he was in no way a PC MP, especially if you look at his voting record). O’Toole at least has a seat, so that means he can get to work immediately, but we’ll see how many bruised feelings are in the caucus and party ranks given how the campaign played out, especially given that O’Toole hired a professional shitposter to run his campaign.

For his victory speech, O’Toole graciously thanked his competitors, and thanked the “patriotic Canadians” who made the victory happen. He paid special mention to Quebec, where he won the most votes, and made it clear that he was going to keep Sloan in the fold, in spite of some of his odious statements. O’Toole insisted that he was going to unite the party, before he took pot shots at Trudeau. He said they would be proposing a new “positive Conservative vision,” and that they would be ready for the next election, which could be as early as this fall. And then it was onto the doomsaying about the direction of the country under the Liberals, complete with the economic illiteracy that has marked the modern Conservative party. “The world still needs more Canada – it just needs less Justin Trudeau,” O’Toole said, before insisting that everyone has a home in the Conservative party.

We’ll delve into the entrails of the regional breakdowns of the race, and the particular mechanics of it and how that affected the results, but I will tell you right now that I have little patience for these takes about how this result means that the party’s power is shifting eastward – that’s hard to believe given the concentration of their votes, even though none of the leadership candidates came from there. And frankly, the notion that the party requires someone from Alberta to helm it keeps it blinkered, and insular. That’s not how you build the kind of national party that the country needs.

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Roundup: Outlining the transition steps

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The government unveiled their planned next steps in income supports for the economic recovery yesterday, starting with an additional month of CERB, after which they will start transitioning people to EI (with relaxed criteria) as well as a new system of support benefits for those who don’t normally qualify for EI, as well as sick benefits. I’m given to understand that part of why they are being transitioned away from CERB has to do with flexibility – the EI computers are more able to handle the ability to allow benefits to flow while a person is still getting incomes than the CRA’s system does, and that is one of the things that are being rolled out here, so that people don’t lose benefits the moment they reach an arbitrary threshold. (More from economist Jennifer Robson in this thread).

Something that came up repeatedly over the day (particularly on certain politics shows), however, was the notion that while the legislative portions of these changes would need to happen fast when Parliament is recalled, that nothing could happen until after a confidence vote on the Speech from the Throne. This is false. Once the Speech has been read by the Governor General, the government can start introducing and debating other bills. They don’t have to simply debate the Reply to the Speech, and they don’t have to have an immediate confidence vote. In fact, they don’t need to have one at all, given that there are other confidence votes coming up in the Supply Cycle. Yes, Trudeau did promise a confidence vote, in what appears to be a dare to the opposition, but that’s not the point here – the point is that they can introduce these measures in Bill C-2, and swiftly pass them before Trudeau has that confidence vote. All of the pearl-clutching that I’m seeing is completely for naught, because people don’t pay attention to process or procedure (and I’m sure a few of them are trying to create an artificial sense of drama).

https://twitter.com/SkinnerLyle/status/1296556887761129476

Meanwhile, a certain senator is grousing that transitioning people to EI is going to be too complicated, so he wants the provinces to start basic income pilots, and I can’t even. Economist Lindsay Tedds has been working on this issue for a long time and has stated that we don’t need more pilots – governments need to simply design programmes that meet their objectives, but it seems that said Senator hasn’t been listening when she’s told him that directly.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1296646779639746560

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