Tag Archives: Supply Management

Roundup: Why the Bloc’s two-bill demand is actually impossible

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In advance of yesterday’s confidence votes, Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet laid out his new conditions for support ongoing—government support for Bills C-282 and C-319, and for them to pass by October 29th. The problem? These are both private members’ bills, and the government has little control over when either can pass, and you would think that as parliamentarians who know the system and who like to pretend that they are the adults in the room would know that such a deadline is an impossible ask, but we are unfortunately in the stupidest timeline.

For starters, Bill C-282, which seeks to protect Supply Management in future trade negotiations, has already passed the House of Commons and is in the Senate, but senators don’t seem keen on passing it with any alacrity because they want a better sense of how this will tie the government in the future. The truth is that it can’t—you cannot actually bind a future government with legislation, so this is little more than a handwavey gesture that a future government can repeal at any point, making this a giant waste of everyone’s time and resources. But more to the point, as a private member’s bill, there is no mechanism in the Senate to speed it along, and certainly not one that the Government Leader in the Senate possesses. In fact, when the Conservatives tried to change the rules of the Senate on this in the Harper years, there was tremendous pushback and the attempt was dropped.

The other bill, C-319, is the bill to increase the OAS for seniors aged 65 to 74, for which there is no reasonable justification for (there are other mechanisms to deal with the needs of low-income seniors), and would cost something in the order of $3 billion per year. It passed the House of Commons at report stage yesterday, but again, it’s unlikely to pass third reading by October 29th even if it gets a royal recommendation, which it needs to spend money (which PMBs are normally forbidden to do). So if the government gives it the royal recommendation, and if they get it passed the House of Commons before the 29th, once again, there is no mechanism to speed its passage in the Senate. None, for very good reason. The Bloc made a big show yesterday of insisting that their demands were reasonable and that the bills were sufficiently advanced to make the deadline reasonable (when it’s really chosen so that an election could theoretically be held before Xmas), but they are in fact impossible, and nobody actually pointed that fact out yesterday.

Meanwhile, the Star has gamed out other demands from both the Bloc and the NDP for potential support going forward, and how feasible or how costly they are, and most of it remains in the domain of fantasyland. Price controls? Giving Quebec full immigration powers? Nope and nope.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian guided bombs struck Kramatorsk in the east, killing at least two and injuring twelve more. As well, 28 out of 32 Russian drones were downed overnight. Also in east Ukraine, Russian forces claim to have captured two more villages on the path to attacking the town of Vuhledar, considered a stronghold.

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QP: Spiralling into a cavalcade of bullshit

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The prime minister was back from New York and in Question Period for his proto-PMQ day, and his deputy was then along with him, in advance of the confidence vote that was to happen right after. Pierre Poilievre led off in French, and rattled off some slogans to demand an election. Justin Trudeau said that they only thing they have to offer are cuts and austerity, while the government was investing in Canadians and Quebeckers. Poilievre trotted out the lines about people in poverty already living in austerity, made claims about when he was “housing minister,” and demanded an election. Trudeau said that if Poilievre was so concerned about single mothers, he shouldn’t have voted against child care or the Child Benefit. Poilievre switched to English to rattle off his slogans again to preface the confidence vote. Trudeau dismissed this as a “clever little slogan” that disguises his self-interest rather than help for Canadians, before saying they would have an election “in the right time,” but the rest got drowned out by competing applause. Poilievre said that if he wants an election if he would call it today. Trudeau said that today, they would see that the House doesn’t have confidence in the leader of the opposition, before mouthing pabulum talking points. Poilievre again called for an election and made some swipes about politicians versus people deciding, while Trudeau rattled off the lines about eight out of ten families getting more back, before saying that Poilievre doesn’t understand science, math, or economics, and and that they can arrange briefings for him that won’t require a security clearance. 

Yves-François Blanchet led for the Bloc, and asked if the government would agree to their demands on the OAS and Supply Management bills. Trudeau said that they have already shown a commitment to seniors and to protecting Supply Management. Blanchet again wanted assurances, but Trudeau took this as an opportunity to plug dental care, which the Bloc didn’t support.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, and Jagmeet Singh complained that Trudeau wasn’t standing up to Danielle Smith on healthcare. Trudeau said that they stand up for universal healthcare, and that in those provinces, the NDP couldn’t stand up to conservatives in those provinces to protect healthcare. Singh demanded Trudeau use his powers to stop Smith (HOW?!), and Trudeau talked up their agreements to get accountability from provinces for the money that gets sent to them.

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Roundup: Questions on regulatory efficacy

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The Environment Commissioner released a series of reports yesterday, and I have some questions about a couple of them. His first report looks into the plan to plant two billion trees and states that it won’t be achievable unless there are big changes, citing that last year’s targets weren’t met, and that the agreements with provinces and territories around this are still being worked out. While I did notice that his graph about the plans for planting these trees does backload much of it because it will take time to grow enough saplings to plant, I’m not sure that one year’s data is enough to declare imminent failure. Maybe I’m just being optimistic.

One of his reports also criticises that the government can’t track which regulations reduce how many emissions, which makes it hard to assess their efficacy. I’m just not sure how a government would go about doing so, because there are so many overlapping measures including the carbon price, and emissions have started to bend, so that we’re slowly dropping below pre-pandemic and 2005 levels, particularly as the economy is growing, which is a good sign that measures are working overall, but there is more to do. And while I appreciate what he’s trying to say, I’m just not sure how someone goes about calculating how much the inventory changed for each regulatory measure. He did also talk about how many missed targets there were, but didn’t differentiate between which stripe of government was in power, and how the previous government set targets that they deemed “aspirational,” meaning that they did nothing to attempt to meet them, while the current government’s targets are for 2030, and they could very well still meet them if they continue their current trajectory. I’m sure he doesn’t want to get into that difference as part of his role as non-partisan quasi-Officer of Parliament (he is not a standalone officer but is part of the Auditor General’s office), but it is relevant to the state of the discussion.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian forces had a misfire, and accidentally bombed their own city of Belgorod, near the Ukrainian border. Oops. Meanwhile, the head of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, visited president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, and declared that Ukraine’s future is in NATO (but that can’t happen under NATO rules so long as they have Russians occupying their territory). Ukraine has trained eight storm brigades worth 40,000 troops for the upcoming counteroffensive. Treason charges are being laid against several Ukrainian servicemen for giving away information to Russian force during an unauthorised mission, and those Russians damaged a Ukrainian airfield as a result.

https://twitter.com/euromaidanpress/status/1649030309109813248

https://twitter.com/minpres/status/1649093237632647179

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Roundup: A failure to condemn Carlson

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The increasing unseriousness of our Parliament continues apace. After Question Period yesterday, NDP MP Matthew Green stood up to move a unanimous consent motion to condemn Fox “News” personality Tucker Carlson for his comments calling for an armed invasion of Canada in order to depose Justin Trudeau, apparently before we “become Cuba.” (Carlson also called for a “Bay of Pigs” invasion, apparently not understanding how badly that went for the Americans). And when the Speaker asked if there was consent to move the motion, a few Conservatives said nay (and no, I couldn’t tell which ones did).

https://twitter.com/markgerretsen/status/1620592776697237505?s=61&t=KIxQXaMgTmXV7qHS5V9-FQ

A couple of points. Number one is that Green shouldn’t have bothered because this just gives Carlson the attention he craves, but we know what this is for—social media clips, so that he could plaster it over Twitter and whatever other socials he’s on that he got Parliament to condemn Carlson, and isn’t he a hero for doing so. It’s performative bullshit, and that’s what our Parliament runs on these days to our detriment. Point number two is that the Conservatives could have shut up and not shown support for foreign regime change, but they did not, meaning they a) agree with Carlson, b) want to appease the Carlson fans in their base, or c) didn’t want to give Green the clip he was fishing for. None of those three are good looks, and just shows the continued decline in the state of debate. Everyone should rethink some of their life choices here.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 343:

The villages of Klishchiivka and Kurdyumivka, which are on the southern approach to Bakhmut, came under renewed Russian fire. As well, a new assault against Vuhledar is unlikely to make gains. Meanwhile, a new US aid package to be announced later this week is said to include longer-range rockets, which Ukraine has been asking for.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1620441189710450690

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Roundup: The Ontario horror show

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It is now day one hundred of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suspects that Russian forces now hold some twenty percent of the country’s territory, and asks for more Western weapons. Russians hold most of Severodonetsk, and they are moving onto its twin of Lysychansk, which will help them secure control over the Luhansk province. Meanwhile, Ukrainians who return to their homes often find them to be destroyed, with all of their possessions.

Closer to home, the Ontario election was, well, a disaster for everyone involved. Ford gets a larger seat count on a hollow platform he won’t know what to do with, while most of his experienced performers have left politics. The NDP lost nine seats and still think they’re the “strongest” they’ve ever been, but Andrea Horwath did say it was time to step down, as well she should have. Steven Del Duca also stepped down after he lost his own seat, as well he should have. Voter turnout was extremely low, which tells you that people had nothing to vote for, but this breakdown of how each party lost votes is pretty instructive about the level of disillusionment with each, for what that’s worth as the opposition parties start to rebuild. (My full column on the election will be out later today).

https://twitter.com/mattgurney/status/1532558713948708887

https://twitter.com/mattgurney/status/1532535636485455872

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Roundup: Why Canadian MPs resist security clearances

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Talk of reforming NSICOP into a full-fledged parliamentary committee is circulating, and it’s all just as well. While I have a full column on this coming out later today, I wanted to post this thread from professor Saideman to set some of the context for that, and to explain part of why we’re in the state we are in Canada when it comes to these things.

https://twitter.com/smsaideman/status/1483076151417389057

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Roundup: A late start isn’t an extra week off

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I’m not sure whether it’s because it’s a very, very slow news season, or if the basic knowledge of how Parliament works is that lacking, but we got a lot of really bad headlines yesterday about how the Senate plans to take an “extra week off.” Which is not actually true, and distorts the situation. And in some cases, it’s being spun this way by certain media suspects completely out of bad faith, because anytime they can badmouth the Senate they’ll grab the opportunity and run.

To clarify: The Senate does not have a fixed sitting schedule the way the House of Commons does, and in no way are they bound to match the sitting schedule, because they do different work, and the timelines are different. The Senate frequently doesn’t convene at the same time as the House of Commons after the winter or summer break because they simply don’t have enough work on their Order Paper to justify it. They passed all of the bills that the Commons sent to them before they adjourned for the break, so coming back at the same time makes no sense—especially when they are competing for IT resources and interpreters with the Commons in the current hybrid context (which has, frankly, screwed the Senate over, but they’ve also allowed it to happen). More to the point, there are many years where the Senate will sit for weeks after the Commons rises for its break, and they will have break weeks out of sync with the Commons every now and again because their workloads are different. But this isn’t communicated effectively, either by the Senate itself, or by the media reporting on it—and it most especially isn’t communicated or even mentioned by the bad faith actors whose only agenda is to paint the Senate in a bad light. It’s disappointing, but not unexpected.

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Roundup: Enter Omicron

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If it all feels like a little bit of history repeating, the World Health Organization declared a new variant of concern, B.1.1.529, designated Omicron, yesterday, and in the lead-up to that decision, there was a lot of the same kinds of usual behaviours from the usual suspects. The variant was detected in South Africa (where there is apparently good surveillance), and has been spotted in seven southern African countries thus far. Conservatives demanded travel advisories and wailed that the border needed to be closed – never mind that there are no direct flights between Canada and South Africa – and gave some revisionist history about their demanding the borders be closed with the original COVID outbreak (when they demanded the borders be closed to China, whereas the vast majority Canada’s infections came by way of Europe and the United States).

But by mid-afternoon, the government did lay out new restrictions, but we’ll see how much of it is effective, or how much of it is pandemic theatre.

This is happening at a time where COVID cases have been ticking back upward across much of the country, prompting fears of a fifth wave being on the horizon as people get lazy with public health measures and start taking masks off indoors, or the like, while those who refuse to get vaccinated remain petri dishes for new variants to emerge or for it to enter into new animal reservoirs where it can mutate yet again. Essentially the way out of this remains getting vaccinated and keeping up good public health measures – most especially masking because we know that this is airborne – and maybe we can keep this fifth wave blunted and the Omicron variant largely tamed. But people are idiots, so things could get a lot worse once more.

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Roundup: Breakaway caucuses are more headaches for O’Toole

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Things in the Conservative caucus seem to be getting increasingly precarious, as a “small number” of MPs continue to remain unvaccinated, and others refuse to disclose even if they are vaccinated, which is going to be a problem for Erin O’Toole in two weeks when they need to show proof of vaccination to enter the parliamentary precinct, their offices, or reach the House of Commons.

As if this weren’t enough, you have more unofficial “breakaway” caucus groups forming – one of them calling themselves the “civil liberties caucus,” apparently headed by Marilyn Gladu, who are concerned with the loss of “medical privacy” over vaccine status; the other is allegedly rallying around fiscal and deficit issues (and I would be tremendously surprised if this isn’t a faction led by Pierre Poilievre). And for context, particular “caucus” groups are fairly normal, but they tend to be around things like friendship groups with other countries, or other soft parliamentary diplomacy. This is not it, and while Gladu insists that this isn’t about O’Toole’s leadership, but it’s hard not to see it that way – especially as he should have been clamping down on the anti-vax contingent in his caucus and party more broadly because there is still a pandemic going on, and pandering to a group that is heavily influenced by conspiracy theories is frankly insane.

Nevertheless, this is where we find ourselves. O’Toole continues to try and play both sides of the fence, saying he’s encouraging vaccination but won’t enforce it when people refuse for no good reason at all. The fact that the party has made itself beholden to its social conservative and more fringe base because they’re the ones who both fundraise and volunteer is a problem for the party over the long term, as the need to keep appeasing this base isn’t going away. That makes it harder for the rational, moderate Conservatives from having influence (witness the savaging they gave to Michael Chong in 2017, and Peter MacKay last year, even though MacKay wasn’t even a real Red Tory). So long as O’Toole refuses to put his foot down in the face of a global pandemic, he’s enabling more of the decline and that bodes very poorly for the future of the party, and Canadian political discourse.

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Roundup: Mark Holland is optimistic

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New Government House Leader Mark Holland is brimming with optimism that the things that paralyzed the previous session of Parliament will be behind them post-election. It’s a nice idea, but I wonder just how it will actually play out. Yes, the Liberals have broken some of the deadlocks that plagued them (a fact that they didn’t articulate during the election, even when pressed on the subject), and they have a bit of leverage now in that none of the other parties can even contemplate another election anytime soon – the Conservatives are consumed with internal disputes over vaccine mandates and just when they plan to put Erin O’Toole to a leadership review, and the NDP are very broke having spent record amounts of money to gain themselves a single new seat, and the Bloc have no desire to go back to the polls, particularly since their play to be François Legault’s voice in Ottawa didn’t play well for them in the election. This will allow the Liberals to play some hardball and use confidence to their advantage for the time being.

But in spite of this, I would not put it past any of the opposition parties to engage in some of the other shenanigans that got us the election, whether that is tying up the committees in interminable attempts at witch hunts, or drowning in document production requests – and that may yet still happen. The election did end some of that, but much of it could very easily be revived once the committees are back up and running (likely in the New Year).

“There was a very clear message sent to all parties that there’s an expectation that we work together, and I’m operating on the presumption that we will have all heard that message and that we all come ready to work and to collaborate in a constructive and positive way,” Holland told The Canadian Press.

I’m not sure that such a presumption is a good one to make. There was an expectation that all parties should work together during the pandemic, and while they did a bunch of backroom negotiations around emergency legislation – and kept any of the debates off-the-record – they stalled all other bills until the very end, when the NDP and Bloc realized they needed to start playing ball again. I’m not sure what the appetite for playing ball will be on most bills, or whether the political calculus will be to try and stymie the Liberals once again (which could lead to showdowns over confidence). I wish Holland all the luck in the world on this, but I suspect he may start losing the hair he has left because the current state of our parliamentary discourse is pretty toxic, and things like the Liberals’ desire to keep hybrid sittings going will only exacerbate that problem.

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