Tag Archives: RCMP

Roundup: Backbench lessons

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Backbench Liberal MP Greg Fergus is learning the tough political lessons that just because the prime minister says something, it doesn’t mean that changes are necessarily happening. In this case, it’s the declaration by Justin Trudeau a year ago that the government would start to address the systemic barriers faced by Black Canadians, including anti-Black racism, but there has been negligible progress in the meantime, other than a commitment of funds. Fergus’ lesson – that lobbying can’t be a one-time thing, but an ongoing effort.

It’s certainly true, and he’s learning that the hard way – it’s easy to make a declaration, but you need to hold the government’s feet to the fire in order to ensure that things happen, particularly a sclerotic bureaucracy that doesn’t like to change the way it does things (and to be fair, you can’t just turn the way a bureaucracy does anything on a dime – it takes time, and it takes capacity-building, which can’t be done overnight). If anything, Fergus is getting a lesson in being a backbencher – that it’s his job to hold government to account, especially when it’s his own party in power. They can promise a lot of things, but you need to ensure that they actually do it, which is part of why Parliament exists, and why we need good backbenchers who want to do their jobs, and not just suck up to the prime minister in order to get into Cabinet. Hopefully we’ll see an invigoration in the way Fergus and others agitate to ensure that the government keeps its promises, because seeing the backbenchers doing their jobs is always a good thing in any parliament.

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Roundup: The myth about the tweet

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At a townhall event in Surrey, Andrew Scheer made a very big deal about the border and the “integrity” of our immigration system. At the centre of it is his invention is the mythology that the #WelcomeToCanada tweet two years ago somehow opened the floodgates. It’s ridiculous on its face, and it ignores the context during which that tweet happened – the recent election of Donald Trump, and the talk of the “Muslim ban” that was ramping up tensions and causing a spike of panic among asylum seekers and refugee claimants in the States, as well as a demonstrable rise in hate crimes. And we can’t forget that within days of this tweet, the Quebec City mosque shooting happened, from which there was a direct correlation drawn to the rhetoric of Trump and his surrogates around Muslims. Trudeau was attempting to take a different approach, and to highlight the decision to bring over Syrian refugees when Trump and his surrogates were insisting that it would be bringing in terrorists (recall the “poisoned Skittles” meme), but Scheer is choosing to ignore all of this.

And then there’s the entire mischaracterisation of the immigration and refugee determination systems, and the very deliberate conflation of the two. They’re separate, and are resourced separately, which makes the constant attempt to portray asylum seekers as somehow disadvantaging “legitimate” immigrants a deliberate attempt to turn immigrants against refugees and asylum seekers. Scheer will then insist that he’s not anti-refugee – that he’s met people in refugee camps who don’t understand why other people can cross the border and “jump the queue” – except of course that there isn’t an actual queue, but rather a process. In fact, those in the camps are usually chosen for resettlement by the UNHCR, and often done by private sponsorship – something that Scheer is a big fan of. In fact, during the Harper era, they reformed a lot of the refugee system to try and offload as much responsibility for resettlement onto the UNHCR, and to more heavily weight private sponsorship over government. (Note that Maxime Bernier is making a big deal about taking more responsibility for refugee determination away from the UN, which could create a wedge, or push Scheer to up his tinfoil hattery around the UN’s processes). Again, asylum seekers who cross the border are separate from those processes, and don’t have the same system impact, because it’s not Canadian officials doing most of the work. It’s another artificial dichotomy that ignores the context of the situation of these asylum seekers and seeks to again create divisions between people involved in those separate processes. Nothing about refugee claimants or asylum seekers is actually impacting the “integrity” of the immigration system – it’s a false dichotomy.

But it’s a wedge, and one built on lies, which is what Scheer is hoping for. Is there a cost to asylum seekers? Yes, absolutely. But we also need to remember that Canada is getting off extremely lightly by sheer virtue of our geography, surrounded by ocean on three sides and the US border on the other, which filters out the vast majority. Scheer shouldn’t expect sympathy from anyone about the influx we’ve seen (which, I remind you, is not out of step with historic norms). In a world facing a migrant crisis, with more displaced people since the Second World War, there are far more who would argue that Canada isn’t doing enough, and telling lies to make it look like we’re under siege because of a single tweet is more dangerous than he realizes.

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QP: Lavish lifestyles or austerity

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Thursday in the new Chamber, and neither the PM nor Andrew Scheer were present. Plus ça change… That left Candice Bergen to lead off with slams against the prime minister’s alleged lavish lifestyle before demanding to know whey they planned to raise taxes. Bill Morneau got up and noted that the first things they did was lower taxes on the Middle Class™. Bergen retorted that the Conservatives delivered a balanced budget (not really), and that today’s deficits were tomorrow’s higher taxes (not with a declining debt-to-GDP ratio), but Morneau noted that the facts didn’t match her rhetoric and that Canadians didn’t want to return to the “bad old days” of Conservative austerity. Bergen read more vitriol about Trudeau, to which Morneau listed off their tax cuts and Canada Child Benefit plans, and decried the Conservative legacy of debt. Gérard Deltell took over in French, and gave his usual demand to know when the budget would  be balanced. Morneau state that their plan was clear to invest, and that the approach was working as witnessed by lowest unemployment in 40 years and people with more money in their pockets. Deltell asked a second time, and Morneau repeated his pabulum. Guy Caron was up next for the NDP, and said that the PBO reported that the government paid too much for the Trans Mountain pipeline. Morneau replied that he had it wrong — that they bought the pipeline because it was good for the economy. Caron wondered why they didn’t invest instead in transitioning to a clean economy, to which Morneau reminded him of the need to get access to international markets, which was why it was necessary to buy the pipeline. Nathan Cullen took over in English to repeat the question with added sanctimony, to which Morneau said that their purchase price of the pipeline was in the middle of the commercial range, which meant it was a good one. Cullen tried again, and got much the same response.

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Roundup: Playing into Ford’s framing

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While Ontario Premier Doug Ford doubles down on his assertion that a carbon tax will drive the economy into recession, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. And it’s not just Ford’s doubling down on this assertion – the Saskatchewan government is also insisting that the report it commissioned on the effect of carbon taxes is correct, despite the fact that the other experts who’ve looked it over say that the report vastly overestimates the effect by orders of magnitude. But as with Ford (and Andrew Scheer), it’s not about truth – it’s about taking any crumb of data that they think will fit with their narrative and blowing it so far out of proportion that it becomes an outright lie.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1087768772436463617

But beyond that, the way in which this issue is being framed in the media should be questioned – something economist Mike Moffatt did over the Twitter Machine yesterday.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1087670357757227009

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And he’s got a point – the CBC’s own story to debunk Ford’s claims is headlined “Economists cool to Doug Ford’s warning of ‘carbon tax recession’,” which again frames this as Ford versus economists – something that plays directly into Ford’s hands because he can turn around and claim that this is just the out-of-touch elites in their ivory towers and not “real folks,” a populist construction that is again built on a foundation of lies. And yet we in the media can’t seem to help ourselves because we don’t want to be seen as being biased, even when we are subjected to bald-faced lies, and again, we need to look like we’re being fair to the liars who are lying to our faces, which they take full advantage of. We’re hurting ourselves, but we can’t seem to help ourselves.

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Roundup: Recession fear-mongering

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At an event at the Economic Club of Canada yesterday, Ontario premier Doug Ford asserted that the federal carbon price backstop – which will affect Ontario – will plunge the country into recession. That Ford wasn’t laughed out of the room is a bit more than curious, because that kind of assertion is beyond ridiculous. BC has had a carbon tax for ten years, and not only is not in recession, but is leading the country in economic growth. Quebec has a carbon price using cap-and-trade, and is also doing quite well in terms of its own economic growth. Alberta’s carbon tax didn’t cripple its economy either, and what fiscal troubles it has are related largely to the low world price of oil that stems from a global supply glut, the temporary price differential issue having pretty much been resolved before the production cut even went into effect, now that the American refineries are back in operation. “Oh, but there’s a report that says it’ll slow the economy!” Ford says – except that report says it’ll be about by 0.02 percent at a time when the economy is growing by two percent.

Ford’s environment minister later took to TV to try and falsely insist that the federal Parliamentary Budget Officer projected a hit to the economy from a carbon tax (he actually said that it would only have an impact if revenues weren’t recycled in an efficient manner), and that BC’s carbon tax didn’t stop its emissions from growing (also false, because the emissions are far lower than they would have been without the price, while their economy continued to grow). So Ford is relying on lies to feed his false narrative that is trying to get the population angry so that they’ll vote out Trudeau. And what was Catherine McKenna’s response? Her same line about Conservatives wanting to make pollution free, and that they have no plan for the environment. So, the lies stand on the official record. Slow clap, everyone.

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Roundup: A few notes on the state of the Brexit drama

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Given the state of the drama in Westminster right now, I thought I’d make a couple of points about why we’re here now. It’s pretty unprecedented for a government to lose a vote – badly – on a major foreign policy plank without automatically losing confidence, and yet, thanks to the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, that’s exactly the case. And because Theresa May squeaked out a confidence vote, that leaves her in something of a precarious situation about not really having a mandate to continue on the path she was on, while not being able to take anything to the people in a general election, as might ordinarily be the case under our share Westminster system. The FTPA has made Parliament untenable, and enables bad actors to game the system, which would ordinarily have been avoided by the sheer fact that they would have been keen to avoid shenanigans that the Queen would need to be involved in.

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It seems to me that if the Westminster parliament were functioning normally, then May could have taken the question of proceeding with Brexit to the people in an election, given that she lost the vote of confidence. Of course that would necessitate Labour to come up with a coherent position (and perhaps a more coherent leader, which their current bastardised leadership selection process also gave them). That would have given the winning government a popular mandate to overtake the referendum if need be, but again, that’s now off the table because of the way the FTPA has distorted the Westminster system. With the practice of Responsible Government being blunted by this statute, it’s clear that it must go.

Meanwhile, Chantal Hébert looks at the Brexit omnishambles and compares it to the plans for Quebec sovereignty back in the day, and how this seems to be dampening any sovereigntist sentiment in the province even further (while getting in a few jabs about Andrew Scheer’s Brexit boosterism along the way). Andrew Coyne likewise looks to the Brexit drama as an object lesson in how seccession from any union is far from painless.

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Roundup: A subdued oil price shock

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The Bank of Canada decided to hold on raising interest rates yesterday, but there were some very interesting things in the accompanying Monetary Policy Report that haven’t been widely reported on, and much of that was the whole section in the report on the state of the oil industry in Canada. (It’s pages 9 and 10 of the report – PDF here). Essentially, for all of the talk about economic doom for the current state of oil prices and the price differential, this current price shock is affecting the Canadian economy at a quarter of what it did in the 2014-2016 price shock, and there are a couple of reasons for that. One of them is that the oil sector is no longer as big of a part of the Canadian economy as it was then – it’s currently worth 3.5 percent of our GDP, while it was six percent just a few years ago. That’s fairly significant. As well, after the previous price shock, most energy firms are better equipped to handle the low-price environment thanks to innovation, improved efficiency and the fact that they already cut overhead costs. Add to that, our low dollar is providing a buffer effect because it supports non-energy exports and employment. In other words, while it’s softened the economy a little over the past quarter and the current one, this is projected to be shrugged off as the rest of the economy continues to pick up steam, and we’re likely to continue growing at a greater pace, because the rest of the economy continues to be running close to capacity. Even some of the areas of potential slack that have been identified, such as lower-than-expected wage growth, are mostly because the situation in Alberta is dragging down the national average. So perhaps it’s not all doom after all.

One other particular note from the morning was that Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz made a couple of remarks around his hometown of Oshawa, and how it’s managed to weather previous plant closures and how its resilience means it will likely weather the pending closure of the GM plant as well as it did previously.

Meanwhile, Kevin Carmichael walks us through the morning’s decision, and some of the reaction to it.

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Roundup: Bernier goes full tinfoil hat

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Maxime Bernier appears to be going full tinfoil hat, with a Twitter thread about a supposed move to create some kind of UN parliament that will erase borders, and that Canada will be absorbed into, and I can’t even. I literally cannot.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1082829073922093057

As Carvin points out, this is a campaign that is orchestrated by Neo-Nazi sympathizers in Europe, and it’s the very same thing that Andrew Scheer was also have been touting this very same conspiracy theory as part of their attempt to push back against the UN global compact on migration. But then again, Scheer and company also gave succour to racists in order to try and paint Trudeau as some kind of bully, so it shouldn’t be a surprise, and they’re being wilfully blind and deaf to the white nationalists and xenophobes that are infiltrating the “yellow vest” protests that they like to promote, so there’s that.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1082252207234473985

Meanwhile, Bernier has tapped an anti-abortion, anti-trans “Christian pundit” as his party’s candidate in Burnaby South. And he’s being accused of running a campaign in that riding that is trying to depict Jagmeet Singh’s efforts as being one that is running only for the Indo-Canadian community, so, you know, the xenophobia tuba instead of the dogwhistle.

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Roundup: On those marginal tax rates

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Given the debate that his happening south of the border when it comes to agitation for a 70 percent marginal tax rate on high earners, it’s only a matter of time before the left-leaning contingent of Twitter starts agitating for the same here. The problem, of course, is that you can’t simply import the same concepts between the US and Canada and expect it to be analogous, or at the very least analogous at one tenth the figures in the US. To demonstrate, economist Kevin Milligan took the Canadian data and mapped out what that would mean here. And lo, it’s not an analogous situation (though I suspect it won’t stop left-leaning Twitter from repeating these American talking points one bit).

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1082383660857225217

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Roundup: Foreign policy complacency

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There has been some musing of late about Canada’s place in the world, and a couple of things jumped out at me. First is Paul Wells’ most recent column, which responds to a Globe and Mailop-ed from a former trade negotiator that wrings its hands at the way the current government is handling China. As Wells points out, said former negotiator is all over the map in terms of contradictory advice, but most gallingly, suggests that we break our extradition treaty with our largest and closest ally in order to appease China. And Wells quite properly boggles at this suggestion we break our treaty, while at the same time taking a moment to reflect on how there is a different way in which Ottawa seems to operate when it comes to these matters, particularly in an era where major corporations with investments in China are no longer calling the shots by way of political financing.

At the same time, Stephanie Carvin makes some particularly poignant observations about Canada’s foreign policy complacency in this era of the Americans retreating from their obligations on the world stage (never mind the Brexit-mired UK). We talk a good game, but have no follow-through, and in the past, she has quite rightly pointed to the fact that we won’t invest in the kinds of things we talk about the importance of globally (most especially “feminist” foreign aid). The government’s actions in Mali are another decent example – putting on a big song and dance about how important it is we go there, spend a few months there doing low-risk medevac, and then refuse to extend the mission for a few extra months so that our replacements can get properly established, meaning there will be a gap in services there.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1080853935328497665

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1080854398052564992

I do have to wonder about some of the crossover between what Wells and Carvin are talking about – that Wells points to the rise of crowd-pleasing populism freeing governments from the go-along-to-get-along complacency, but Carvin points to the fact that we are not actually free of that complacency, though perhaps there are different sorts of complacency that we are grappling with when it comes to our place on the world stage. Something to think about in any case.

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