Tag Archives: Refugees

QP: Unhappy with the new emissions plan

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With Justin Trudeau off in Vancouver to give a speech on the government’s new emissions plan for 2030, we did have his deputy present, which was something. Most of the other leaders weren’t present either, and some have become rare sights of late. Luc Berthold led off in French and complained that the emissions reductions plan would cripple the oil sector and that this meant we couldn’t help our friends in Europe get off Russian oil and gas. Terry Duguid stood up to recite some bromides about the plan as announced. Berthold then launched into a rant about how the government doesn’t answer simple questions, and demanded to know if inflation was costing Canadians more. Chrystia Freeland responded that they were sensitive to costs which is why they indexed benefits and introduced $10/day child care. Berthold then railed about the increasing price on carbon, demanding it be suspended, to which Freeland recited the good news about economic growth. Kyle Seeback took over in English, and he misleadingly cited the PBO report on carbon pricing in order to complain that the emissions reduction plan wasn’t going to work. Duguid got back up to recite that the PBO indeed stated that most families would be better off with rebates, and he cited the rebate levels in several provinces. Seeback then railed that the government spent $60 billion on fighting emissions and they still went up—again, somewhat misleadingly because the curve of growth has flattened—and Duguid responded that if the Conservatives were still in charge the emissions would be even higher.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and he demanded that the government start chartering planes to get more Ukrainian refugees over here. Sean Fraser insisted people were arriving all the time and they were rolling out programmes to support them. Therrien said that Air Transat was just waiting for the government to charter flights and repeated his demand, and Fraser said that they are discussing with airlines.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP in person, and he called the emissions reduction plan “disappointing,” saying it gives a free pass to the fossil fuel sector. Duguid got back up to recite a number of actions they have taken around the energy sector. Singh repeated the question in French, and Duguid recited some more climate action plans.

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Roundup: Buying the F-35s after all

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We are now somewhere around day thirty-four of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and there are claims that Ukrainian-forces have retaken a Kyiv suburb as well as another city further east. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is preparing for another round of peace talks with the Russians and sounds like he is willing to declare the country neutral and give up any hope of future NATO membership in exchange for peace and future security guarantees (NATO membership wouldn’t come so long as there are territorial disputes, meaning so long as Russia occupies Crimea and the Donbas regions, it would be impossible). Zelenskyy also briefed Justin Trudeau on the talks yesterday, because they are keeping each other in the loop.

https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1508520970516058121

Closer to home, the announcement was made that the government will finally be settling on purchasing F-35 fighter jets to replace our aging CF-18 fleet, leading to questions about whether the last seven years were wasted when the previous Conservative sole-sourced contract was cancelled in favour of a new competition. And if you read the 2015 election platform promise about cancelling the purchase, it was because it was sole-sourced for a high price, given that the goal of a competition is to get a better price, so we’ll see if that pans out. It’s still not a done deal—they now get to negotiate directly with Lockheed Martin to get the best deal possible—but we have to remember something of what happened with the previous announcement, particularly that it was done poorly, and the Auditor General called out how opaque it was, and that’s kind of a big deal.

We should also remember that the planes are a much more mature platform now, with many of their flaws having been worked out (though I haven’t heard yet whether the ejection seats will still kill you if you’re below a certain height and weight, because that was a real problem). It does sound increasingly like the biggest consideration was the interoperability with NATO and NORAD fighters, meaning we had to be fairly seamless with the Americans, rather than just the promise of regional job creation programmes (though Canada being a participant in the joint strike fighter programme the whole time means we’ve already had some of those industrial benefits throughout). We’ll have to see what more the government can extract from Lockheed Martin in promises as those negotiations carry on throughout the year to see whether that seven-year delay was worth the wait.

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QP: Selectively quoting a PBO report that selectively frames an issue

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With Justin Trudeau away—first to Mississauga to announce the child care deal in Ontario along with his deputy, then off to Vancouver, none of the other leaders bothered to show up in the House of Commons for Question Period today, so happy Monday to you all. Luc Berthold led off, script in front of him, and in French, he regaled the Commons with a tale of how people approached him in the grocery store about complaints about the rising cost of living, and demanded to now how the prime minister intends to feed Canadian families. Randy Boissonnault accused him of creating economic fiction, and recited Statistics Canada data on the growth of the GDP. Berthold railed about the price of gas and what it was doing for inflation, to which Boisonnault praised the child care agreement with Ontario as an affordability measure. Berthold then switched to health care transfers to provinces and the principles the government were attaching to them, to which Jean-Yves Duclos praised their measures to save Canadians’ lives. Kyle Seeback got up and in English, railed about the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report on carbon prices, selectively quoting a report that only selectively looks at a portion of the issue, to which Terry Duguid assured him that the PBO stated that most families will get more back in rebates than they pay. Seeback insisted this was wrong, that the PBO stated otherwise, and Duguid repeated his points.

Alain Therrien rose for the Bloc, and he demanded that health transfers have no conditions and blamed the federal government for underfunding provincial health systems, and Duclos recited some good news talking points about the $2 billion for surgery backlogs. Therrien listed federal failures to insist that they had no competence for healthcare, to which Pablo Rodriguez quipped that the Bloc should invest in shirt-making companies because they keep tearing their shirts every day.

Alexandre Boulerice appeared for the NDP by video and wondered about enforcement of sanctions in Canada, to which Mélanie Joly praised the sanctions and the assets that they froze. Heather McPherson repeated the question in English, and Joly repeated her assurances.

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Roundup: Accountability for transfers is not micro-management

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We are now in day thirty-one of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and things are going badly enough for Russia that the Ukrainians are starting to counter-attack, not only pushing Russian forces further away from Kyiv, but also other areas, which has the possibility of making Russia pay a high enough price that they could be willing to accept some kind of negotiated settlement and withdraw. Maybe. We’ll see, but it’s a good sign nevertheless that Ukraine is able to take these measures. Elsewhere, it sounds like about 300 people were killed when the Russians bombed the theatre in Mariupol, and the city is digging mass graves, while some 100,000 people remain trapped there as the Russians turn the city to rubble.

Closer to home, the federal government announced a one-time special transfer of $2 billion to provinces to help them with their surgical backlogs as a result of COVID, but they want some conditions of a sort, and cited five areas of focus for upcoming healthcare talks: backlogs and recruitment and retention of health-care workers; access to primary care; long-term care and home care; mental health and addictions; and digital health and virtual care. And some provinces, predictably, are balking at this because they think this is federal “micromanagement” of healthcare when it’s nothing of the sort. They simply need assurances that provinces are going to spend this where they say they’re going to, because we just saw Doug Ford put some $5.5 billion in federal pandemic aid onto his bottom line, and giving out rebates for licences plate stickers in a blatant exercise in populist vote-buying rather than using that money where it was intended—the healthcare system.

https://twitter.com/journo_dale/status/1507478370300628996

More to the point, provinces are insisting that they are unanimous that hey want unconditional health transfers that will bring the federal share of health spending up to 35 percent, but that’s actually a trap. They are deliberately not mentioning that in 1977, provinces agreed to forego certain health transfers in exchange for tax points, which are more flexible, and that increasing to 35 percent will really be a stealth increase to something like 60 percent, because they’re deliberately pretending that they don’t have those tax points. On top of that, provinces were getting higher health transfers for over a decade—remember when the escalator was six percent per year, and what was health spending increasing at? Somewhere around 2.2 percent, meaning that they spent that money on other things. They should have used it to transform their healthcare systems, but they chose not to, and now they cry poor and want the federal government to bail them out from problems they created, and are blaming the federal government for. It’s a slick little game that doesn’t get called out because the vast majority of the media just credulously repeats their demands without pointing to the tax points, or the fact that they spent their higher transfers elsewhere, or that Doug Ford sat on that pandemic spending, as other provinces did to balance their budgets (Alberta and New Brunswick to name a couple). So no, they do not need these transfers to be unconditional, and the federal government would be foolish if they acceded to that kind of demand.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1507418761912983561

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Roundup: Displacing and dispersing Ukrainians into Russia?

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We are now on day thirty of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and while Kyiv remains safe, there are reports that as many as 400,000 Ukrainians have been forcibly relocated into Russia, where they are being dispersed to economically depressed regions in that country. The Russians are claiming that these relocations are voluntary, but Ukrainian officials worry they may be used as hostages. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the NATO summit happening in Brussels and asked for aircraft and tanks, but was mostly only promised more of the same kinds of aid that they have been receiving to date.

Closer to home, there are now two more prospective entrants into the Conservative leadership race—former floor-crosser-turned-deputy leader Leona Alleslev, who has launched a website and who has volunteers getting the necessary signatures required to launch a bid; as well, a failed candidate named Joel Etienne from York Centre, who has also put up a website and is collecting signatures. One of the other leadership candidates, Marc Dalton, seems to have enough self-awareness that he knows he’s a long-shot candidate, but seems to be pinning his hopes on the vagaries of preferential ballots as his salvation. Oh, and he still hasn’t lined up his entrance fee yet, so that’s probably a sign about his chances.

As these entrants keep lining up, Candice Bergen is warning them not to call those in the race that they disagree with as “not Conservative” because that’s “identity politics,” and they don’t want to wedge, divide and polarize, because that’s what they accuse the Liberals of doing—which is kind of hilarious when you think about it. They’ve explicitly framed this contest as one for the “soul of the party,” and the contest is going to entirely be about whether they find a leader who can appeal to enough of the moderate Canadians in the suburbs who can deliver them an election victory, or whether they retrench into their “values” and electoral consequences be damned because they’re acting like Conservatives and not Liberals. And when you set up the contest as one about what constitutes those “values,” with a purity test or two thrown up around them, who is and is not a Conservative is going to be a bigger sticking point in this race the longer it goes on.

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QP: Crocodile tears for the anti-vaxxers

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As the prime minister was in Europe, and his deputy in “private meetings,” it was another day with virtually no leaders present, save one. Michael Barrett led off, quoted the health minister as saying that it was “complicated” to lift federal vaccine mandated, and wondered why it wasn’t complicated for provinces. Jean-Yves Duclos listed the number of people who have been vaccinated. Barrett accused the government of moving the goal posts and demanded a number for when the mandates be lifted, and Duclos noted that the mandates worked, otherwise they would not be all sitting in the chamber again. Barrett tried again, raising the provinces that lifted their mandates, but Duclos did not change his answer. Dominique Vien took over in French, and demanded the mandates be lifted, and Duclos reminded her that her party kept saying that Canada would be the last country in the world to be vaccinated, and that vaccines were great. Vien tried again, insisting that provinces are following science, but Duclos reminded them that COVID is still with us, which is why they need to be careful.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and complained that while the government tabled a bill to maintain Quebec’s seat count, their relative influence continues to wane as more seats are gained elsewhere. Pablo Rodriguez insisted that the Bloc was only trying to pick a fight and reopen the constitution while the government was protecting Quebec. Therrien repeated his complaint that it wasn’t good enough, and Rodriguez repeated his response.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, and wanted more supports for Ukrainian refugees when they arrive in Canada, and Marie-France Lalonde read some talking points about their new travel authorisation programme. Singh repeated the question in French, and Lalonde read the French version of her response.

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QP: Looking for the “secret agreement”

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With Justin Trudeau back in Europe for more NATO and G7 meetings, most of the other leaders didn’t show up either, even though it was caucus day. Candice Bergen was present, however, and led off, concern trolling about the confidence agreement between the Liberals and the NDP, and insisted there was a signed agreement between them that is being kept secret (never mind that the details of the agreement are public). Mark Holland noted that Canadians expect MPs to work together in a hung parliament, which is a foreign concept to Conservatives given that they didn’t even try when they were in similar circumstances under Stephen Harper. Bergen insisted that there must be a signed agreement and that there is a so-called new executive committee that excludes the opposition, and Holland repeated that they are always looking to work together whenever possible. Bergen railed about “social experiments” (like pharmacare?) and decried the “nightmare socialist deal” that would be hugely expensive, and Holland gave another paean about working together to get things done. Luc Berthold took over in French, and he worried about “secret committees” under the agreement, to which Dominic LeBlanc reminded him that the Conservatives wrote a whole book on how to sabotage committees, so it was rich for them to insist the government didn’t respect Parliament. (Note that this government’s parliamentary vandalism is largely relegated to the Senate). Berthold worried this agreement would trample on Quebec’s jurisdictional rights, to which Pablo Rodriguez got up to list things the government is doing for Quebec.

Alain Therrien led off for the Bloc, and he too worried about Quebec’s jurisdiction, and LeBlanc lamented the Bloc’s frustration which led them to picking fights, and assured him they do respect provincial jurisdiction. Therrien read a statement from the Quebec government that gave a nonsense reading about the revenues they send to the federal government, and Rodriguez listed things they are doing that is good for Quebec, which is bad for the Bloc.

Rachel Blaney rose for the NDP, and she lamented that their motion on an excess profit tax failed, and wanted the government to tax companies and not people. (Erm, you know that people pay corporate taxes, right? That it’s not a magical money tree?) Randy Boissonnault acknowledged the sentiments behind the motion but that that the government was building a fairer and more affordable country with more benefit for people while taxing the rich. Alexandre Boulerice repeated the question in French, and got the same answer.

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QP: In the din of clinking glasses, talk of a political marriage

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It was to be the only day that the prime minister was going to be present this week, given that he’ll be off on a red-eye flight to Europe tonight for NATO and G7 meetings over the rest of the week, and all of the other leaders were present as well. With Speaker Rota recovering from scheduled heart surgery, his deputy, Chris d’Entremont, was again in the big chair. Candice Bergen led off, script in front of her, and she railed about the “secret backroom deal” between the so-called new NDP-Liberal government, to which Trudeau calmly noted this was about stability in order to deliver the things that Canadians asked for in the election, instead of the toxicity we had seen. Bergen falsely stated that inflation was because of government spending, and that the “new NDP-Liberal government” would spend even more. Trudeau returns to the line about working across party lines to avoiding the toxic atmosphere that has developed. Bergen worried that natural resource and fisheries jobs were in danger because of this deal, for which Trudeau worried about how toxic partisanship slowed down delivery of help for Canadians, while this job would get good jobs for Canadians while respecting Parliament. Bergen insisted that the deal disrespected Parliament and voters—which is blatantly absurd—before railing about gas prices and demanding taxes on it be cut. Trudeau cautioned her about spreading misinformation and that they had plenty of room for debate and disagreement under the agreement like Parliament works. Luc Berthold took over in French and acted confused about who was in charge and trolled that Jagmeet Singh should be named deputy prime minister, and Trudeau repeated that this deal would allow the House to operate more constructively.

Yves-François Blanchet led for the Bloc, and worried that the basis of the agreement, with pharmacare and dental care, would trample over provincial jurisdiction, to which Trudeau insisted that they believe in working collaboratively with provinces, but they would ensure all Canadians get high-quality healthcare. Blanchet worried that the NDP were hostile toward Quebec’s Law 21, to which Trudeau gave a paean about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, and he demanded support for their Supply Day motion on higher wealth taxes, to which Trudeau reminded him of their previous actions, and the investments they are making, but did not signal support. Singh repeated the question in French and got the same answer. 

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QP: Another rail disruption sets the narrative

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Monday back from March Break, and none of the party leaders were present, nor was the Speaker, leaving his deputy, Chris d’Entremont, in the big chair instead. Luc Berthold led off in French, a script in front of him, demanding a resolution to the CP Rail strike/lockout, given how much economic damage it could cause. Seamus O’Regan insisted that they had confidence that the parties could reach a negotiated solution. Berthold tried again, got the same answer, and on a third question, Berthold raised inflation and wanted agreement on their “solution” on a GST break on gasoline and diesel, but O’Regan repeated his answer. Marilyn Gladu took over in English to demand a resolution to the CP Rail dispute, and O’Regan gave his same response about a negotiated solution in English. On another round of the same, O’Regan noted that he was in Calgary and both sides were still at the table, and they were counting on a negotiated solution. 

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and asked about federally-chartered flights for Ukrainian refugees, for which Sean Fraser said they were prioritising Ukrainian applications, and they were working to facilitate faster arrivals. Therrien insisted this was not fast enough, and Fraser insisted he was working on getting as many people here as fast as possible.

Daniel Blaikie rose for the NDP, and after raising them CP Rail dispute, went into some party bromides about reducing the cost of living and making the wealthy pay. Randy Boissonnault listed some of the government’s affordability measures. Niki Ashton took over to demand that the rich be taxed to “provide relief” for Canadians (without any particular follow-through on that logic), and Boissonnault reminded her that they voted against the government’s bill to raise taxes on the one percent.

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Roundup: Joly on a charm offensive?

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We are now in day twenty-four of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and things continue to be in the same holding pattern—though there are continued air strikes, some now hitting Kyiv, one hitting an aircraft repair facility outside of Lviv. Some 6.5 million Ukrainians are internally displaced, and considering how many have headed to Lviv, the air strikes there are all the more concerning. In the meantime, negotiations with Russia continue, and there seems to be a bit of a shift in some of the tone. Meanwhile, President Biden had a two-hour video call with Chinese president Xi Jinping to sound out where China stands on this conflict, and to essentially warn the Chinese that there will be consequences if they side with Russia in this. As well, Russian and NATO commanders appear to be in constant communication to ensure that any mistakes made don’t wind up touching off a larger conflict by accident.

Elsewhere, in the wake of her comments about Canada being a middle power who was good at convening others, Mélanie Joly had a conversation with Janice Stein of the Munk School of Global Affairs yesterday that generated a number of pieces. In it, Joly acknowledged that the Canadian Forces need to be better-equipped, which tends to spiral into the trap of taking the NATO two-percent goal seriously (when it’s a terrible measure). But she’s not wrong about the equipment, as the pivot from Cold War tactics to fighting the Taliban has left the Canadian Forces largely under-equipped for the kind of situation facing Ukraine right now. As well, she praised the role American intelligence has played in helping Ukraine to thwart the Russian advance, and in uniting the West. Joly also says that she wants to position Canada as a leader in combatting propaganda and disinformation starting with social media, which is going to be a very big fight if the way that the conversations around amending the Broadcasting Act last year were any indication.

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