Tag Archives: Refugees

Roundup: Taking his sweet-ass time to meet caucus

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The Liberals are starting to get restless – members of caucus are feeling put out that they haven’t actually had a formal caucus meeting yet post-election, and many of them are champing at the bit to have a closed-door drag out session about what went wrong in the election, and why their own leadership seemed unprepared for it when they called the blood thing in the first place. And telling the Hill Times that they want to know why the party leadership is taking their “sweet-ass time” to call this meeting was the icing on this particular cake.

I’m having a hard time fathoming why it’s taking Trudeau and company so long to get their collective acts together post-election. They made a whole song and dance about how urgently they needed to act while on the campaign trail, only for them to turn around and take said sweet-ass time in both finalising the Cabinet shuffle (and no, the recounts do not account for how long the delay is) as well as their decision to further delay summoning Parliament – and even his planned international travel does not excuse this. They could have had Cabinet sworn in before the Governor General went on her state visit to Germany, and could have summoned Parliament this week, in advance of Trudeau’s planned travel. That would have given them actual time to get committees up and running, and legislation in the system – particularly around the changes to the pandemic benefits – as soon as possible, as opposed to the current trajectory of a three-week sitting that will accomplish very little before they head back to their ridings for the Christmas break.

Additionally, not having a proper caucus meeting by now has reached the point of disrespecting their own MPs. They have things they want to say after the campaign trail, and they should be able to say it – that’s how this system works. It’s a very bad signal that they are being kept away from the leadership like this, because even aside from it betraying all of Trudeau’s talking points about being open and accountable within his own party, that kind of thing will start to fester if it’s not taken seriously. I’m not sure that’s a situation Trudeau wants to go out on in his final tour-de-force as leader.

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Roundup: Not pushing back on referendum disinfo

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Because this is occasionally a media criticism blog, I’m going to call out Power & Politics once again for completely dropping the ball, this time on the bullshit “referendum” happing in Alberta. They hosted Bill Bewick, who heads a group in favour of the referendum, and gave him a pretty uncritical interview, with only the barest hints of pushback. Because both-sidesing.

Host David Common pushed back on a mere couple of points – that the referendum won’t actually do anything because it doesn’t obligate the federal government to negotiate anything; and the fact that without equalisation, PEI would need a 30 percent HST to make up the same funding. He even went so far as to egg on Bewick about how much equalisation Ontario pays, as if it was relevant, because no province actually pays equalisation, which is a pretty big thing that Bewick and his bullshit ever got called on. Equalisation is simply federal taxes that come off everyone’s paycheque – that a fraction of those funds get redistributed to some provinces who need help in offering comparable levels of service when they don’t have adequate fiscal capacity. And the key thing to remember is that Alberta may pay more federal taxes because they have the highest salaries in the country – by far – even during the pandemic. Crying that the province has a deficit has nothing to do with equalisation and everything to do with the fact that the provincial government refuses to raise their own revenues by means of a modest sales tax like other provinces have, and the fact that they chose to rely on resource revenues instead. Their deficit is a choice.

I am forced to wonder whether Bewick didn’t get any pushback because the host and/or the producers simply don’t have a clue about the truth, or because they feel bound by the need to both-sides everything and plan to have someone credible on to refute the points in a separate interview later today – because heaven forbid that the host actually push back lest he or she be called out as being biased or partisan. But calling bullshit and pointing out fact shouldn’t be considered bias or partisanship – it should be simple fact-checking, which they can’t seem to be arsed to do at the best of times, let alone in a referendum that is fuelled by misinformation and disinformation coming from official sources trying to make a political wedge out of this. In a case like this, it’s especially incumbent upon the media to play their role in pushing back against a government that is lying to its citizens, but this timidity to do so is a very real problem for our media.

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Roundup: Animating the Double-Hyphen Affair zombie

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Because Jody Wilson-Raybould and the corpse of the Double-Hyphen Affair is getting a fresh attempt at necromancy now that her book is being released, we’re going to see a renewed round of questions about what happened. The Conservatives are sending out a bunch of press releases intimating that RCMP is still considering investigating the matter, and Wilson-Raybould herself is calling on the prime minister to allow them to investigate obstruction of justice – because they really want this zombie to wake up and start trying to eat the brain of this campaign.

In response to questions yesterday, Justin Trudeau said he has not been contacted by the RCMP regarding SNC-Lavalin, which…is not actually surprising. I’m not sure what there would be to investigate, really, and why it would be Trudeau they would be investigating. Her own testimony seemed to indicate that the pressure was largely coming from the jackasses who were in Bill Morneau’s office at the time (and it was those same jackasses in Morneau’s office who were letting SNC-Lavalin pull their puppet strings in pushing through the deferred prosecution agreement legislation into the budget implementation bill), and if you actually listen to the whole call with Michael Wernick and not the carefully curated clips that Wilson-Raybould set up in how she steered the conversation, he was looking for information that she had previously sent to PCO, but didn’t reach his desk. There is no actual obstruction of justice happening. The ultimate irony in all of this, however, is that if they had gone ahead and given SNC the deferred prosecution agreement – which it sounds like they wouldn’t have qualified for anyway – the company would have actually faced some consequences. As it was, SNC-Lavalin settled while the case around an executive collapsed and the company got away with a lesser penalty and few, if any, compliance measures, without any interference on anyone’s end.

The worst part of this, however, is that you have columnists who are writing things like “Wilson-Raybould offers a ballot question in an election about nothing,” which is ludicrous. This is not an election about nothing – no election is about nothing. There is plenty at stake in this campaign, but because it’s less so for straight white guys, whom these columnists are, they are blind to it.

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Roundup: False narratives about the Q2 GDP

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The figures for second quarter GDP were released yesterday, and they weren’t as good as had been expected. There was a surprise contraction of 1.1% annualized, which caught economists off-guard (and perhaps Statistics Canada as well, as their flash estimate a month previous had still shown growth). The majority of these declines were in the months of April and May because of the third wave, as June had shown robust growth in nearly all sectors as economies around the country re-opened – and those declines were largely in the areas of home resales and exports. To an extent, the home resales was a bit of a correction – after giant increases in previous quarters, most especially Q3 of 2020, the market slowed down.

For Erin O’Toole and Pierre Poilievre, however, these figures were a cataclysmic sign that Trudeau can’t “manage” the economy, and that it’s deficits that are leading to inflation, which is insane. A lot of the weakness is attributable to the Third Wave and its associated lockdowns, and that is squarely the fault of premiers who opened up too soon, reduced restrictions too fast, and then were too slow to re-impose them (and we’re going to get more of that in the oncoming fourth wave). More than anything, it’s reflective that O’Toole and Poilievre aren’t even bothering to read the data beyond the headlines, and are slotting it into pre-arranged talking points which are so divorced from reality that it should be concerning to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. The fact that Poilievre is goading the Bank of Canada over Twitter is a Very Bad Thing. He’s continuing to politicise them, and feeding into a bunch of poisonous populist narratives, and O’Toole is joining him for the ride. This is a very bad thing for our economy, and it doesn’t matter that they’re doing it all for show and that they probably will keep things status quo should they form government – the fact that they are polarising the debate and riling up these same toxic mobs that have been following Trudeau’s campaign around is absolutely a problem. This kind of rhetoric should be disqualifying for anyone who seeks higher office in this country.

Meanwhile, as you may have heard, Erin O’Toole reiterated his promise to balance the budget without making any cuts (in spite of promising earlier to cut things like the CBC) because he’s going to grow the economy enough. Why does that sound familiar?

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1432799152266694657

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Roundup: Singh needs to start giving details

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We have seen plenty of coverage thus far in the election about how popular Jagmeet Singh is, and how authentic he seems to his audience, and plenty about his personal likeability, but I am not seeing a lot that is pushing back against the things he is proposing. We have a couple of such examples yesterday, first with his pharmacare proposal. Essentially, the current government has put in the work, and established the Canada Drug Agency transition office, and thus far has signed up one province – Prince Edward Island. The other premiers have all balked at this, including the NDP premier of British Columbia, John Horgan, which I find mighty interesting in the current context. So, just what would Singh do differently? Well, he won’t say. Per the CBC:

When pressed by reporters on how he would get the provinces to sign onto his plan, Singh was light on details but committed to partnering with provincial and territorial governments. “We’d work with provinces and territories, I know it’s going to be hard work, but it’s going to save families money,” he said.

Great. He’ll “partner” with provinces that have thus far said no, and lo, he’ll do it by next year when it’s going to take years to negotiate a national formulary for said programme – something that seems to be a surprise to Singh, if you go by their stunt of a private members’ bill in the previous parliament, where they essentially proposed a framework where the provinces pay for prescription drugs and the federal government will then sign over a cheque. Yeah, it doesn’t really work like that. But I haven’t seen this being hammered home – you can’t just keep handwaving promises, particularly promises in areas of provincial jurisdiction, and not provide details on how you’ll accomplish it, and no, just promising to “work with” those provinces is not good enough. The current government has been doing that, and if you’re going to complain that they haven’t moved fast enough, then you need to explain how you’re going to do it differently. And no, the fact that you’re not Justin Trudeau is not an answer.

But he didn’t stop there. No, he also opined on vaccine passports, saying that the federal government should just go ahead and implement it federally – but again, didn’t say how they should, given that they don’t control the vaccination data because the delivery of healthcare is a provincial jurisdiction. These particular details matter, and you can’t just handwave them away. We need to start pressing Singh for details, because his answers aren’t good enough, and if he’s going to present himself as a serious contender for government, he needs to be asked the implementation questions so that he can answer them – and be made to answer them.

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Roundup: Debating the “manipulated media” tag

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Because this campaign is already reaching levels of stupid that are hard to comprehend, we got into the supposed health care debate portion over the weekend, with Chrystia Freeland tweeting clips of Erin O’Toole responding to a question where he praises certain elements of privatizing healthcare – apparently to help “drive efficiencies” – but what the clip didn’t show was him saying that he still felt universal healthcare was paramount. And while this raged back and forth over social media, Twitter slapped the “manipulated media” tag over the French version of the video (but not the English, leading to some speculation that it was because of the subtitles), and lo, did all of the Conservatives on social media have a field day.

Of course, said field day simply outlines their own hypocrisy, as they went into the weekend widely sharing shitposts of Justin Trudeau saying he doesn’t think about monetary policy – while having truncated the clip so that you don’t hear him talking about affordability. It’s a game they’ve long played (hello, the truncated quote of “budgets balance themselves” anyone?) so they can’t claim to be the wounded party here, and their wounded tones about Freeland proving she wasn’t such a statesman after all is all partisan bullshit, and yet, we’re in a campaign so it’s not wholly unexpected. But seriously, guys, tone down the sanctimony – and the gloating.

Meanwhile, a couple of reminders when it comes to the healthcare debate:

https://twitter.com/tammyschirle/status/1429525317866115079

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1429546698184003589

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Roundup: Let’s just ignore the toxic spring

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We are coming out of the first week of the campaign, and we still see a bunch of pundits and talking heads questioning why the Liberals called it in the first place, and I have to wonder just how much they paid attention to what went on during the last session of Parliament. It was a toxic environment – the most toxic I have seen in over a decade. Non-money bills didn’t advance for months because of procedural warfare, and at least one pandemic support bill was months late in being able to deliver for people who needed it. Committees were holding witch-hunts and the civil service was busy sending millions of pages to committees on wild goose chases. But did anyone bother to explain this? Not really, because then it would become a “process story,” which we are supposed to be allergic to. Putting the events of the spring into context, along with some of the considerations about timing (there are municipal elections in Quebec and Alberta in October) should be part of the media’s job, so that we’re not just being stenographers to what the parties are telling us (so we can then both-sides it). But that might be too much effort.

Of course, this is Justin Trudeau, and while he was perfectly happy to point out the obstruction on the days leading up to dissolution, once the campaign started, he was all about his upbeat, positive narratives, and talking about people being given a say in the “most important election since 1945,” because that’s his campaign persona and style – upbeat, upbeat, upbeat. Happy-clappy at all times. That doesn’t mean that those of us who follow Parliament can’t look past it and point out what was going on.

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Roundup: Cynicism and paid sick days

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a couple of election promises yesterday that felt a bit cynical, and one of them is federally problematic. The first promise was to implement ten employer-paid sick days in federally-regulated workplaces. This was something that he should have done some 18 months ago, but given that they had mandated three employer-paid sick days previously – the highest in the country – they felt they were in good standing, and tried to persuade provinces to do the same. They did not.

After Trudeau made the announcement, Jagmeet Singh went on a tear about how “disgusted” he was that Trudeau had made this promise when he’d been calling for it for over a year. But there are differences here, and yes, they matter. Some of you may recall that Singh wanted the federal government to give paid sick leave to everyone in the country, but the federal government can’t do that. They can only mandate employer-paid sick leave – which is the best kind because it means that there are no interruptions on pay cheques and job security is maintained – in federally-regulated workplaces, which account for six percent of jobs in the country. That’s it. The provinces have to amend their own labour codes to cover the remaining workplaces, and Singh consistently refused to acknowledge that reality. Meanwhile, the government recognized that there were people who didn’t have access to employer-paid leave because they’re self-employed or part-time, so they created the Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit, which was a kludge – you had to apply for it, and only after you missed half of the week, and it took more time for the money to arrive. Singh demanded that the federal government “fix” that programme, but there wasn’t much more they could do to it – there are limits to the federal back-end IT infrastructure used to administer the programme, so it couldn’t be seamless like employer-paid sick leave. And the premiers, for whom the other 94 percent of workplaces are under their jurisdiction? They balked, especially because business lobbies like the CFIB lobbied heavily against mandating more sick days, so they forced people to rely on the CRSB, or created their own temporary kludges to mimic the CRSB. For Singh to now claim that Trudeau is doing what he demanded is not true – yes, Trudeau should have mandated more employer-paid sick days federally, but this is not the same as CRSB, and the two should not be equated like he’s doing here (and yes, it is cynical politics for him to claim otherwise in order to drive disillusionment).

As for the promise around school ventilation, it’s too late for this school year, and at first blush it looks like a federal overreach into provincial jurisdiction. The backgrounder states that this is just extending the Safe Return to Class Fund from August 2020, and they’re basically giving money to provinces with the slenderest of strings attached, which I’m not really a fan of. Because we’re in an election, we’re back to the constant state of promises – from all parties – that rely on provincial cooperation, and there are a lot of loaded assumptions that they’ll play ball, which seems to be fairly rare (and before you raise child care, the success there is in part because there was too much money on the table for provinces to ignore, which is not how it has played out with pharmacare). The Liberals are mostly more careful in their language, citing things like “While a Liberal government will always respect provincial-territorial jurisdiction…” unlike the other two platforms, but this certainly isn’t being picked up on nearly enough by the reporting, and it creates expectations that perhaps it perhaps shouldn’t.

https://twitter.com/JenniferRobson8/status/1428860564676222981

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Roundup: Unnecessary panic about inflation

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It was predictable that it would happen – yesterday was the day when the Consumer Price Index figures are publicly released, and for the past few months, this has turned into a political gong show. Why? Because the Conservatives have decided to misconstrue what the data shows and to light their hair on fire about the top-line figure and wail that we’re in a “cost of living crisis.” Which is false – inflation is running hot for everyone right now, not just Canada, as a result of economies re-opening and global supply chains being disrupted by the pandemic, which affects prices, on top of the fact that there is some distortion in the year-over-year figures as a result of last year’s price crash. And to add to that, much of what is driving the July numbers are higher gas prices – which is a global issue, and good for Alberta’s economy – and higher housing prices, which is a driven by a lot of different factors. And hey, clothing and food prices were down, so there are upsides, right?

The problem, of course, is that this is being politicised – wildly so. When it came up on the campaign trail, Trudeau said that he was going to let the Bank of Canada do their job and worry about monetary policy while he worried about families, but this was truncated in the reporting, and which also got trimmed into Conservative shitposts, and O’Toole was given fresh cause to decry the “crisis.”

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1428104169009909763

Of course, O’Toole isn’t proposing any solutions that actually deal with inflation (and his plans will actually make it worse), but if he wants to start banging on about it and monetary policy, then he needs to start talking about what he thinks the Bank of Canada’s mandate should be – especially as that mandate is coming up for renewal. Should they continue to target inflation between one and three percent? He seems to sound like he wants them to target deflation, so good luck with letting the economy grow under that kind of mandate. Parliament should have this kind of discussion, but they need to actually have it – not just talking points and shots taken that assume people are ignorant about what it means. And the reporters on O’Toole’s campaign need to step up and start asking him these questions rather than just typing up his talking points.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1428094182531510282

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1428096342342213637

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Roundup: Paul’s disqualifying blunder

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It was not a good day for civic literacy or basic constitutional knowledge on the campaign trail, as Green Party leader Annamie Paul suggested that the Governor General “reinvoke” Parliament to hold an emergency debate on the situation in Afghanistan, and worse, cited a section out of the Emergencies Act to make it happen, and my head nearly exploded from the sheer stupidity of it all.

First of all, and this is crucial – the Governor General does not have that power. She has already dissolved Parliament. She can’t un-dissolve it with the stroke of a pen, and there is no mechanism to “reinvoke” Parliament, not even under the Emergencies Act. Parliament has been dissolved. There is nothing to recall in order to hold a debate, which again, is a useless gesture in the current situation. The most that would happen is that MPs would read speeches into the record for about five hours, and that’s it. Paul is perfectly welcome to read a twenty-minute speech to the media if she so chooses, and it would have exactly the same effect as an “emergency debate” would in the House of Commons (and I do use the term loosely). More to the fact, this is not a situation for which the Emergencies Act could be invoked, because it is not a national emergency in any shape or form. Additionally, the section she cites says that Parliament needs to be recalled at its earliest opportunity, even if it’s been dissolved – in which case it means as soon as there’s a new parliament that can be convened.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1427347519751720965

The fact that we have another party leader who is just pulling this out of her ass is bad enough, but she’s also a lawyer and should know better (and this goes doubly for Jagmeet Singh, as he too is a lawyer, and has been inventing powers for the Governor General). The fact that you can’t recall a dissolved Parliament is basic civics – and the fact that she doesn’t know this and is trying to issue demands to the Governor General should be disqualifying. It’s a complete embarrassment – but you wouldn’t know it if you watched the CBC, who glossed over the whole incident and didn’t mention it during their roundup of the day’s speeches. (We had other reporters covering themselves in glory today by asking the prime minister who was in charge during the election. No, seriously). An utter farce all around. This is why we can’t have nice things.

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