Tag Archives: Refugees

Roundup: A caution around more nomination “safeguards”

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There has been some renewed interest in party nominations after the accusations of shenanigans in Liberal MP Han Dong’s nomination, and unsurprisingly, we get a rather tepid piece asking if we need more safeguards. There are a few things that this ignores, part of which is the history. MPs actively wanted to keep Elections Canada out of policing nominations (though they now have a bigger role in policing the funding of said contests). This is one of the reasons why the decision was made to have party leaders sign off on nominations forms—to keep Elections Canada out of the process. (That later turned into a problem of leaders using this power to blackmail members into staying in line, which was not something contemplated at the time, and yes, I did study the Hansards of those debates as part of research for my book).

The other thing that the piece missed is how parties have been monkeying with nomination processes to get their favoured candidates installed. The Samara Centre for Democracy has a great report on this (though they were a little too credulous at the NDP’s claims they always run open nominations when they don’t), and my particular caution is that more “safeguards” for nominations may very well mean a greater ability for the party or the leader’s office to monkey around or put their thumbs on the scale. Already we are in a veritable crisis where open nominations are fast disappearing behind the curtain of protected nominations for incumbents and invoking “electoral urgency” rules unnecessarily that allow the leader to just directly appoint candidates. Parties used to be robust enough to fight this kind of interference, but they are losing that ability, particularly in the Liberals, who rewrote their party constitution to centralize even more power in the leader’s office and disempower the grassroots after Trudeau became prime minister.

Should there be more safeguards? Probably. But that means returning the power to the grassroots riding associations so that they can run proper, open and transparent contests, rather than what has been happening.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces say that in spite of Russian claims, Bakhmut is not surrounded, and the fighting continues. In fact, the head of the Wagner Group mercenaries has said that their position is at risk if they can’t get more ammunition. The Ukrainains are, however, trying to evacuate the remaining civilian population, who are still there for many different reasons.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1632023670087352321

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1632403808016908288

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Roundup: Silence on some un-apologies

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After Friday’s dubious denunciation of visiting far-right extremist MEP Christine Anderson by a proxy of Pierre Poilievre, and notably not Poilievre personally, either in front of a camera or on social media, and Colin Carrie’s completely insincere apology and lies that he didn’t know who Anderson was, well, the other two MPs doubled down. Despite the party-written apology, Leslyn Lewis used whataboutery in order to defend her meeting, while Dean Allison told a known white nationalist that he wasn’t consulted about the apology and didn’t agree with it, and found Anderson to be a “good lady.”

And Poilievre? Well, he was tweeting about a Black History Month event with Lewis, after she defended her meeting with Anderson, and has not distanced himself from Lewis’ meeting or her whataboutery in any way. So, it sounds like there’s a problem here.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives appear to be content to wink and nod to these extremists, and will simply issue more insincere apologies every time they get caught out, because that’s the whole game these days.

Ukraine Dispatch:

While battles continue to wage around Bakhmut, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is calling for yet more sanctions on Russians, in order to keep ratcheting up the pressure on them. But with any sanction regime, compliance is key. Ukraine’s energy minister says half of the country’s energy infrastructure has been damaged by Russian attacks since October. And here is a look at how the war is impacting children in Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1629796414816415746

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Roundup: Some unnamed inaccuracies

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Because this story didn’t have enough drama attached to it, prime minister Justin Trudeau said yesterday that the Globe and Mail’s story on alleged election interference from China included “inaccuracies” in the leaked documents—but then wouldn’t say what those inaccuracies are, leaving them to sully the field and cast doubt on his assurances and are again told to just trust him. Frank communication is a good thing! When will he learn this?

Meanwhile, the report from the panel of senior public servants that monitor for election interference hasn’t been completed and released yet, even though it’s been over a year since the election. Privy Council Office says it’ll be coming “in due course,” but the delay is raising more eyebrows, especially given the CSIS leaks and what has been reported on them.

While this is going on the National Post spoke to former Clerks of the Privy Council and members of the panel about the determination of what they say about these allegations of interference, and the answer was basically that it’s complicated—there is no bright line for when you disclose, and disclosing could raise even more issues and that public alarm could sway the vote, which is why they were trying to avoid. It’s an interesting read about what factors they are trying to balance, and good on the Post for actually reaching out, which other outlets have not done.

Ukraine Dispatch:

It’s the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a “special military operation” which was supposed to last three days, let them engineer regime change, and cross back over the border. Somehow things didn’t turn out that way. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowed that they will “defeat everyone.” Russians have stepped up their attacks in the hopes of depleting Ukrainian resources (but they seem to have no qualms about how many of their own are dying in the process). Here’s a look at how Canada successfully delivered grain sleeves to Ukrainian farmers to help protect their harvests until they could get to market rather than risk them going to waste. Back in Canada, this armoured vehicle manufacturer is hiring Ukrainians displaced in Canada to build the vehicles destined for the war.

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Roundup: Still not finding the right tone

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Justin Trudeau continues to struggle to find the right tone to respond to the allegations of Chinese interference in the previous couple of elections, and still hasn’t managed to find it. Yesterday he made the point that this is serious, and that’s why it shouldn’t be made a partisan issue of, and that doing so is doing the work of these autocratic countries for them because it weakens trust in democratic institutions…but he’s not exactly doing much to engender that trust either, because the response is once again some feel-good bromides that don’t worry, they didn’t actually affect the election outcome. Okay, but you’re asking people to take your word for it, and doing so with the same pabulum that they shovel in everyone’s direction for absolutely everything, so it’s hard to take these assurances seriously. It’s time to drop the feel-good talking points and be utterly frank, as much as can be allowed given the nature of the situation, and that’s what they’re not doing.

And because they’re not being frank, the Conservatives are shrieking “collusion,” and “you turned a blind eye because you benefitted” (as though a hung parliament is the real benefit here). But part of the problem is that the Liberals never think that they’re partisan, even when they are, and while Jennifer O’Connell may not have been wrong in saying that the Conservatives sure sound like they want to build this up as a “big lie”/illegitimate election campaign, it wasn’t the right tone to strike. At all. I did find it interesting that a former Conservative candidate did talk to the Star, and said that he didn’t think that this alleged interference did much with the Chinese-Canadian population because Conservatives themselves were doing their best to alienate that community.

I would also like to note that poll analyst Éric Grenier was on Power & Politics yesterday to provide a bit of a reality check to these ongoing allegations, and how the ridings that the Chinese diplomats allegedly targeted had no bearing on the election. For the Liberals, they didn’t get a majority because of Quebec, thanks to debate moderator Shachi Kurl playing into Yves-François Blanchet’s hands and phrasing her “tough question” to sound like Quebeckers are racists, and it gave Blanchet the ammunition he was looking for. For the Conservatives, the GTA remains elusive to them, and that’s why they couldn’t win. None of the alleged Chinese interference did anything to change that, and the Globe and Mail should have included this kind of analysis in their original story, but they didn’t, because they wanted this to be as sensational as possible. This continued narrative that the Chinese government attempted to engineer a minority parliament remains frustratingly moronic because you can’t do that. It’s as dumb as when the Globe endorsed the Conservatives but not Stephen Harper in 2015. It doesn’t work like that, but hey, why should the so-called newspaper of record understand how our gods damned political system works?

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 365:

Russian shelling of Kherson in the southern part of the country has killed two civilians, with two civilians injured by missile strikes in Kharkiv. Meanwhile, the CBC talks to front-line Ukrainian soldiers about the training they got from Canadians, and the praise is coming particularly for battlefield medicine, as well as leadership for junior officers learning to take the initiative (unlike the old Soviet system).

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1628470688725053440

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1628484262994362370

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Roundup: Showboating at PROC over allegations of Chinese interference

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The Procedure and House Affairs committee met yesterday to vote on a motion around expanding their study on election interference to include the recent revelations from the Globe and Mail about alleged Chinese interference in the past two elections. Despite some arguing, particularly with Conservatives demanding both the appearance of Katie Telford (once again, for those of you at the back, you do not summon staff to committee because ministers are responsible!), and they were going to demand classified documents, which is becoming just part of the show these days, but they were eventually talked out of both of those demands and have instead summoned a few ministers, plus CSIS, the RCMP, and Elections Canada to discuss these particular allegations.

But of course, there was showboating. And the Liberals, who usually try to pretend that they’re the grown-ups in the room, were all-in on it as Jennifer O’Connell responded to the allegation that the Liberals were covering up what happened because it benefitted them (allegedly), saying “This is the same Trump-type tactics to question election results moving forward,” and that created a giant stir. She’s not entirely wrong, and the Conservatives have dealt in enough bad faith that they could start going down that particular road (and still might), but she wasn’t helping.

Amidst all of this, the Star obtained documents from the Conservatives showing that they were considering going public about the alleged interference over Chinese-language social media they were seeing during the last campaign but decided not to for fear of political backlash. Instead, they sent it to the committee overseeing the integrity of the election, but didn’t get much response from them at the time, who are now complaining that their concerns weren’t taken seriously.

Throughout this, I keep going back to my misgivings about the way in which the original Globe and Mail story was framed, particularly in giving the impression that the Chinese were trying to engineer a minority parliament, which is impossible to do. The piece should have simply stated that the Chinese preferred it because of chaos, but there is no interference they could do, short of stuffing ballot boxes in certain regions, to hope to achieve it, and that’s not going to happen in our system. Likewise, with the allegations around campaign financing, which don’t make any sense as written. Of course, the Globe has a well-known tendency of producing a lot of smoke for very little fire, but all of that smoke is just fuelling the MPs’ showboating, and it’s making it difficult to demonstrate that we have a serious parliament as a result.

https://twitter.com/mrmubinshaikh/status/1628216781901905922

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 364:

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that Ukrainian forces are holding positions on the front lines in the east, while Russia claims that they are advancing in the Donbas region toward Bakhmut. Here is a look at five significant battles over the past year. Meanwhile, Ukraine is asking Canada to lend rail expertise and parts to help keep its crucial system running (but seriously? We’ve not been good to rail in this country).

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1628044033321848833

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1628137356556439585

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Roundup: Empathy for the deeply selfish?

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Update: Sorry for the delay. I had issues with the website but everything should be running smoothly now.

In spite of the Emergencies Act public inquiry report being released on Friday, there seem to be some awfully short memories as to what was happening at the time—or a bunch of people are acting disingenuously or in bad faith. Take, for example, Pierre Poilievre, who took to claiming that the assembled mass of far-right extremists, conspiracy theorists, grifters and grievance tourists were concerned about their costs of living and not being able to live. Which is funny, because inflation hadn’t spiked then, and interest rates were still at rock bottom. He is taking his current talking points and casting them back in time to a situation that didn’t exist, and has consigned the talking points of the era (“Freedom!”) to the memory hole. Funny that.

https://twitter.com/maxfawcett/status/1627033913188290560

And then there’s the Globe and Mail, whose editorial board decided that what the occupiers need is empathy. After all, they had hurt feelings, and this narrative of the prime minister’s “divisive” comments keep circulating, even though he was telling the truth. The fact that certain people kept telling on themselves by openly identify as racists and misogynists to somehow “own Trudeau” was quite something.

Oh, and the Globe and Mail’s editorial board, comfortable in their downtown Toronto offices, should take a look at their own life choices as they demand empathy for a group of deeply selfish people who refused to take public health measures for the good of everyone around them, and who traded in conspiracy theories instead of behaving like grown-ups, and who held a city hostage in an extended three-week temper tantrum, instead of empathy for the citizens of Ottawa as their city police and provincial government abandoned them.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 363:

US president Joe Biden made a “surprise” visit to Kyiv yesterday, and stayed for some five hours, meeting with president Volodymyr Zelenzkyy and pledging more support for the country. (Here’s a look at how that trip came together). Ukrainian troops training on Leopard 2 tanks compare them to a Mercedes. Ukrainian forces say they are inflicting “extraordinarily significant” losses on Russian forces in the Donbas as Russia continues to move toward Bakhmut. Meanwhile, midwives in Ukraine are looking to Canada for training on how to better deliver babies outside of hospitals (as they are not licensed for home deliveries).

https://twitter.com/re_dailymail/status/1627639235665702913

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Roundup: The frustrated Commissioner was part of the problem

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The outgoing Ethics Commissioner is starting to do exit interviews, and he’s expressing frustration that these kinds of ethics violations keep happening, despite the law being in place for 17 years now. To that I say two things:

1) No matter how many rules you put in place, it won’t matter because the Liberals under Trudeau fundamentally believe that so long as they mean well, the ends will justify the means, and that it’s better to simply apologise after having broken rules than it is to scrupulously and slavishly adhere to them in the first place. You can’t just put new rules to stop them from that particular belief, and no amount of training from the Commissioner’s office is likely to shake them from such beliefs.

2) Our ethics regime sucks, in large part because so much of it is predicated on the whims of the Commissioner, and this Commissioner had a lot of whims. His predecessor had a habit of reading her mandate so narrowly that nothing ever applied, except for a small handful of cases, one of which was Trudeau’s vacation with the Aga Khan, in which she made up rules around what a family friendship entails. The current Commissioner has been the opposite, reading his mandate very, very expansively so that things it should not encompass, it does (like the SNC-Lavalin issue). He has made up statutory interpretation from whole cloth, such as the definition of what constitutes “family” under the Act, and capturing relatives through marriage that no other statute in the country captures in its definitions (the issue with Dominic LeBlanc). There is no consistency, and even when they believe they are within the law, he will make up a rule that says they’re not.

I’m not suggesting the Liberals are blameless, because they’re not (see the part about them not caring about rules), but the statue itself is a problem, as are the perceptions around it, and the apocalyptic language being used to describe minor transgressions. They keep talking about the transgressions making it hard to have trust in politicians, but when the system itself fails them because it’s poorly designed and poorly administered, it’s just one vicious circle that nobody wants to show a way out of.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 359:

Russia launched 36 missiles early in the day and struck the country’s oil refinery, while also shelling two dozen settlements in the east and south of the country.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1626479351045804032

https://twitter.com/denys_shmyhal/status/1626151901686337538

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Roundup: Opposing amendments at committee

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I find myself amused by the ongoing stories that some Liberal MPs may vote against the official languages bill when it comes out of committee as amended, and the constant oh noes! Trudeau is losing control of his caucus! narrative that accompanies it. This said, there are egregious amendments that I have a hard time believing that they’re in order, because they reference provincial legislation in Quebec. For example, the change to the preamble of the bill to acknowledge Quebec’s Law 96 should have no place in federal legislation. There is also an amendment that says that if federal and provincial language laws come into conflict, the provincial law (especially Quebec’s Law 96) takes precedence, which is against every single constitutional practice and statutory interpretation principle in this country, and beyond that, it sets an absolutely terrible precedent for other areas of the law where one level of government tries to impose something on another jurisdiction, and because this one went unchallenged its okay. Yeah, we don’t want that to happen.

As mentioned, these are a result of Conservative and Bloc amendments, and the Conservatives are back to pandering to Quebec voters (and François Legault) by being as shameless as possible in trying to out-bloc the Bloc, and in some cases, they are being supported by the NDP’s Niki Ashton. It stands to reason that if the government objects to a number of these amendments, they can vote them down during report stage debate, and that would mean the whole chamber is voting, not just the Bloc and the Conservatives, so it could be enough votes to ensure that these amendments are left out of the final bill, which would mean this “rebellion” by a few Liberal MPs has done its job. There are still a couple of meetings left for this bill in committee, so we’ll see what the final shape of the bill looks like.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 358:

Russian troops are mounting constant attacks, and are claiming to have broken through two fortified lines in the Luhansk region (but they make lots of claims that aren’t true), while the regional governor denies that Ukrainian troops are in retreat. The Russians have been changing their tactics at Bakhmut, moving in smaller groups, without the support of tanks or armoured personnel carriers, and the Ukrainians are adapting to the new tactics. Reuters has a photo essay of one family’s evacuation from the area near Bakhmut, during which their grandmother died in the van.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1625861957549948929

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QP: The kings of misinformation

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The prime minister was absent, somewhat unusually for a Wednesday, jetting off to the Bahamas for a CARICOM meeting to discuss the situation in Haiti. His deputy was also absent though in town, and even Pierre Poilievre was away, spending the day in Calgary. Melissa Lantsman led off with a script in front of her, and she went on a disappointed tirade about the government constantly breaking the law, and raised the Ethics Commissioner’s report on Greg Fergus, and wondered why nobody gets fired. Mark Holland said that Fergus apologised and was trying to promote a Black business in his riding, but realised his error. Lantsman listed other past ethics violations and wondered why nobody got fired. Holland said it was important that everyone show up and do their best, and then praised their economic record and poverty reduction. Lantsman tried a third time, and Holland said that the government is trying to shepherd the country though some of the most difficult economic times since the Second World War. Luc Berthold took over in French and worried about people not meeting their financial needs and blamed the prime minister for it. Pascale St-Onge noted that while times are difficult, they are ensuring supports for people who need it. Berthold tried again, and this time Randy Boissonnault gave the usual talking points about the Conservatives voting against supports for people.

Yves-François Blanchet led for the Bloc, and he blamed the government for underfunding healthcare, and Adam van  Koeverden read a script about the deal the government has imposed on the provinces and what it entails. Blanchet railed that the money was not enough, and this time Pablo Rodriguez enthused about how great the deal was, and how it only bad news for the Bloc.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the Bloc and railed about private clinics that are operating in the country, to which van Koeverden recited by rote the talking points about upholding the public system. Singh repeated the question in French, and van Koeverden read the French version of the same talking points.

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QP: Re-litigating the hotel room

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While the PM and his deputy were on their way back from Hazel McCallion’s funeral in Mississauga, most of the other leaders were also absent from the Chamber for QP. Andrew Scheer led off, like a flashback, and after a preamble of nonsense about inflation, he demanded to know why the prime minister billed taxpayers for a “$7000” hotel room (that number has been inflated) which he neglected to mention was for the funeral of the Queen. Ahmed Hussen got up and listed housing measures that the government put in place that the Conservatives voted against. Scheer tried again, this time comparing the cost of that hotel room to mortgage payments. Hussen repeated his same response. Scheer then raised the National Post story about trying to stifle disclosure of that information, and this time Rob Oliphant raised that this was for the Queen’s funeral, and that the delegation was appropriate for that occasion. Dominique Vien took over in French, and the cost of the hotel room was back to $6000 and demanded the government cap spending. Pascale St-Onge got up to say that the spending was targeted to those who need it most, while the Conservatives seek to cut that help. Vien and St-Onge went another round of the same with little difference.

Alain Therrien led for Bloc, and he thundered about health transfers, saying that provinces don’t really agree and accused the federal government of chronic underfunding, which is not exactly true. Adam van Koeverden read a statement about how pleased they are with the “agreement.” Therrien demanded over and over about “35 percent!” This time Pablo Rodriguez wondered where Therrien was with all of the newspaper headlines talking about an “agreement.”

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, and cited a StatsCan figure about people struggling, and turned this into a demand that the government stop the Rogers-Shaw merger. François-Philippe Champagne said that he wanted more competition in the sector. Singh wondered if that meant that he would oppose the merger today, then switched to French to repeat his question. Champagne repeated his enthusiasm for competition.

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