Tag Archives: Supreme Court

An omnibus bill to burn down their goodwill

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The Carney government opened the fall sitting by tabling a massive 243-page omnibus bill, titled the—wait for it—Building Canada Strong Act. Dear reader, I am beyond tired of every iteration of “Build Canada Strong” that the prime minister utters and names things with. Get some new adjectives. Please. I implore you. This aside, the bill covers three major areas—a promise to reform environmental assessments so that they only take a year; amending the Canada Labour Code so that they can try to head off labour disputes in federally-regulated sectors; and putting in place a trade corridors strategy that includes a council to monitor the situation with said corridors.

First of all: Steven MacKinnon claiming this isn’t an omnibus bill because it’s all related to the economic situation is pure bullshit, and he should be absolutely shame-faced that he tried to get away with saying with a straight face on live television. We’re not idiots, and it’s not great when the government tries to treat us like we are. Secondly, trying to fast-track environmental assessments is likely to just wind up in more lawsuits. Stephen Harper tried this tactic and it failed. And trying to rush resource-strapped First Nations through consultations on an expedited basis without providing them with more resources to do the work is going to result in more delays and more litigation. And I really, really dislike the notion that proponents can both just pay a fee when they disrupt fish habitats, because that just means it’s the cost of doing business and doing nothing for actual environmental protection. Or that they can start construction before project approvals, because then that just turns into “Well, now you have to approve it, because of sunk costs.”

Between this environmental betrayal and the government’s dubious actions when it comes to labour rights, they are trying really hard to burn all of their progressive credentials while claiming it’s because we’re in some kind of crisis, and because the country is still in love with Finance Daddy that they’re going to get away with it for a while, but that will eventually come to bite them in the ass, and right now, I don’t think any of them are thinking that far ahead. Burning the public’s trust is a dangerous game, and a Teflon leader only lasts so long before it starts to peel and flake, and turn toxic.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-09-21T19:08:01.518Z

Potash

Also yesterday, Trump tried to troll Canada by saying he was going to get potash from Belarus for cheaper than he could get it from Canada, and that set off a whole bunch of people, clearly unaware that earlier in the day, noted ABBA superfan Alexander Lukashenko said that they don’t have any spare potash to send to the US even if they wanted to (to say nothing about the logistics of transporting it, since they are landlocked and it couldn’t go through the EU). But boy, did a bunch of people fall for it. Especially the “Blame Canada” crowd.

Setting aside the fact that Belarus wouldn’t come close to having enough potash available for export to replace Canadian imports, imagine thinking relying on **Belarus** to grow your country’s food supply was a viable option! 🤦🏼‍♂️

— Blake Shaffer 🇨🇦 (@blakeshaffer.bsky.social) 2026-09-21T18:58:29.803Z

https://twitter.com/andrew_leach/status/2102118094487630058

My Latest:

  • For National Magazine, I delve into Friday’s Supreme Court of Canada decision about that election nullification in Terrebonne, and the interesting 6-3 split.
  • My weekend column worries about the chaotic state of the Alberta referendum.
  • For National Magazine, I preview the fall sitting of Parliament and what’s on the Order Paper now that they’re back.

New episodes released early for C$7+ subscribers. This week I'm talking to @patricklennox.bsky.social about his new book, "On Treason: Alberta Separatism, Foreign Interference, and Canada's Survival in a Revolutionary Age" #cdnpoli

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-09-22T00:26:01.392Z

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There’s no such thing as associate membership in the EU

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Because everything is stupid, over the weekend, an American newspaper made reference to prime minister Mark Carney working toward “associate membership” with the European Union, which to be clear, is not actually a Thing. It’s not a real title, and means nothing. That didn’t stop the Conservatives from rising up en masse to declare this to be the worst thing ever. Remember that this crew has more than a few people in their ranks who believed that Brexit was a good thing, and lent their support to the cause. And so, Pierre Poilievre decried that we weren’t going to be the 51st state, or the 28th state in the EU, and then decried the whole thing, and demanded Parliament be recalled (it’s back next week regardless), and that he doesn’t have a mandate for this, so he would need an election. Other members of the caucus chimed in with their own bugaboos around “mass migration” and so on, because of course they did. But remember that at no time did anyone say anything about actually joining the EU.

I’m just getting so tired of this desperate search for relevance in the current moment. We’re not going to be EU members. “Associate membership” is not the same thing, and it’s especially nowhere near forced annexation by the US. Grow the fuck up, guys. We need a competent opposition party.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-09-13T20:22:37.264Z

Carney and his office had to engage in damage control to insist that Canada is not seeking EU membership (which we can’t join anyway, because it’s quite explicit in their constitution that it’s not open if you’re not in Europe), but that he is merely seeking an “unique alliance,” to which the EU will be opening an “antenna office” in Ottawa to help with coordination. None of this is EU membership. But that didn’t stop the Conservatives from going absolutely haywire over it, because they can’t resist the siren song of American culture war bullshit, where the far-right derides “decadent” Europe and claim that it’s dying economically and socially, while they act as catspaws for the tech bros who resent that Europe is trying to regulate the internet and force them to be responsible, which they don’t want to be, and for which they’ve coopted the US government to protecting them. More than anything, this is just a sign of how desperate and grasping the Conservatives have become for relevance in the current moment. It was a pathetic display that just demonstrates how adrift they are as a party.

My Latest:

  • My Loonie Politics Quick Take has a concrete suggestion for what the new Digital Transformation Canada should be doing, and it’s not pushing more digital asbestos.
  • For National Magazine, I delve into Friday’s Supreme Court of Canada decision on sentencing delays and why they’re fundamentally different from pre-trial delays.
  • My weekend column calls out Evan Solomon for complicity in manufacturing consent for worse digital asbestos outcomes, including deaths, rather than regulating it.

New episodes released early for C$7+ subscribers. This week I talk about the Alberta referendum and why it won't solve the imaginary grievances Albertans have been told to believe in. #cdnpoli

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-09-14T02:20:29.215Z

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Unveiling the counter-tariffs

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The government announced the details of their dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs yesterday, and it was a fairly broad list, but largely focused on protecting domestic markets than extracting a price from the Americans—there is a whole explanation of defensive versus offensive tariffs here. In many cases, these are things where there are domestic alternatives available, which means that it creates a price incentive to buy the Canadian alternative, which is laudable. And there does seem to be some distribution where the effect of those retaliatory tariffs does seem to disproportionately impact swing states, which is also not a bad thing. Of course, that’s not to say that there isn’t a discussion to be had about whether we shouldn’t be trying to maximize the political price for the Americans, particularly as the midterms approach, whether that is export taxes or otherwise on things like potash or energy, which is particularly fraught, because it could invite even harsher retaliation from the Americans. However, if this is indeed an economic war and we are fighting for our sovereignty, that could mean using bigger economic guns, and ensuring that the burden faced by Canadians is more evenly shared than it is right now (especially by Alberta and Saskatchewan).

Where do Canadian retaliatory tariffs land? Based on all affected products on Sept 8 (including pre-existing tariffs), here's the value of exports times tariff rates as a share of each state's GDP. #cdnecon #cdnpoli

— Trevor Tombe (@trevortombe.bsky.social) 2026-08-25T18:50:14.657082Z

Also announced were some of the tweaks to EI to support workers, but it’s not a lot of tweaks as they do nothing about the hours worked requirements. I will also note that this government promised EI reform years ago, and did a lot of work on it (and I can personally say that a friend of mine worked on the file and did a tonne of work that has apparently never seen the light of day), and nothing came of it, whether it was because it was too politically unsaleable, or some other reason we don’t know.

https://bsky.app/profile/jrobson.bsky.social/post/3mtwaluxa2k2g

https://bsky.app/profile/jrobson.bsky.social/post/3mtwalvxp4k2g

Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre continues to demand that the “text” of the trade deal be released, when there may not have been a finalized text, and it’s a Cabinet confidence in any case, and shouldn’t be released because it can point to particular pain points in future negotiations. Poilievre is also calling for his economic “plan” to be adopted, with its tax cuts, environmental law repeal and his bizarre notion about zero tax on capital gains being reinvested in Canada, which I will remind you Jim Flaherty tried to implement in the Harper era and gave up because it was way too complex to manage. But Poilievre has one set of ideas (doubling-down on trickle-down), and he’s going to keep swinging that hammer for every problem under the sun, no matter how inappropriate it may be. And then there’s Danielle Smith who wants negotiations to resume right away, even though there is no trade deal to be had because the Americans are not interested in trade, only in subjugation. Unbelievable, but also unsurprising, that she is so keen to be a Vichy premier.

Pierre Poilievre demands that the PM adopt his economic plans, no matter how nonsensical they actually are. Because he has one set of solutions for all of Canada’s problems, and he will not be dissuaded.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-08-25T17:06:31.112Z

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-08-25T19:08:02.395Z

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The (garbage) Reform Act won’t stop an autocrat

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Over the weekend, the Globe and Mail ran a lengthy opinion piece called “It Can Happen Here,” about how we are supposedly more vulnerable to an autocrat taking power in this country, under our rules, than the Americans were with theirs. I am dubious. While I very much respect the professor who wrote the piece, I worry that there were a few fundamental misunderstandings in some of the points he was trying to make. For example, there is a section about how we don’t have an impeachment mechanism in our constitution, and of course we don’t. Our system operates on confidence as opposed to a fixed clock, so we don’t need impeachment. If the government goes pear-shaped, Parliament can withdraw confidence and the government is out. If a caucus loses confidence in their leader, they can vote non-confidence in him or her at any point, and no, they don’t need the (garbage) Reform Act rules to do so.

Our rules can be pretty effective. For example, when Charles Tupper tried to hold onto power after losing an election, the Governor General refused to make any of the appointments that Tupper wanted him to, so he was forced to vacate the office. Oh, but what if the autocratic PM appoints a lapdog GG? People in serious positions tend to take up the seriousness of those positions even when everyone thinks they won’t. Not saying it’s an impossibility, but so far that’s been the case. And yes, some of our rules are “unwritten,” for which he suggests we need a Cabinet Manual to codify them, but I am dubious there too. Codifying those rules in such a manner invites people to look for legalistic loopholes rather than a principles-based system that makes it easier to point out when someone is trying to do through the backdoor what they cannot do through the front. I also find that the piece very much misread and oversimplified what happened with the whole SNC-Lavalin affair as one of the examples of how power can be abused, because in the end, it was Bill Morneau’s office that was lousy with SNC-Lavalin lobbyists and not PMO, and a more pliant Attorney General was not appointed and didn’t result in the deferred prosecution agreement. (In fact, when SNC-Lavalin eventually pleaded guilty, they got a lesser penalty than the DPA would have stipulated).

My biggest problem with the piece, however, is that it treats the (garbage) Reform Act as a kind of panacea that needs to be more widely adopted. It absolutely does not. What it actually does is put up a bunch of unnecessary rules and barriers to what is a simple vote of non-confidence, and more to the point, it tries to convince MPs that they have lost power over time, or that this will “empower” them when in fact it actually disempowers them because of its formalistic barriers. Yes, we do need to beware leaders who can become autocrats, but the Reform Act will not help avoid that in any way, shape or form.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-08-10T19:08:01.763Z

My Latest:

  • For National Magazine, I delve into the Alberta case that the Supreme Court of Canada has recently granted leave to appeal about lawyers’ oaths to the Crown.
  • My column points to the things that the sanitized tales of Conservative “infighting” over generational change are ignoring or glossing over.

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Hybrid rules are still bad (in case you were wondering)

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Because it’s the summer doldrums, The Canadian Press has decided to check in on the “hybrid” Parliament rules, which are inexplicably still in place, long after the height of the pandemic ended. Well, it should be inexplicable, but for those of us with longer memories, we know that the Liberals were trying to institute these rule changes long before COVID happened, and were never able to get them over the finish line (for good reason!) until COVID, and well, they didn’t let a good crisis go to waste. A lot of them were very committed to the idea that these rule-changes are necessary because of parental responsibilities, and so on. Of course, we now have a handful of MPs who simply don’t show up in Ottawa (one of them was NDP MP Niki Ashton, before she got voted out, but there are others), while we are devaluing the in-person aspects of the job, which cannot be ignored.

I have consistently said this, and I will keep saying it—much of the value of what happens in Parliament are the conversations that happen in corridors, in lobbies, at the sides of committee rooms, that you cannot have online. People underestimate how huge that is. Keeping MPs online also keeps them in party silos, where they don’t see other MPs as human beings, but opponents. In-person meetings and the ability to connect on a human level increases collegiality and decorum. (See: Ending evening sittings in the 1990s and the demise of collegiality). But more than that, there is now a culture of presenteeism where they feel they need to be online all the time, when they should be taking leave for family issues, or medical care, or so on. You can pair votes for absences. You can have someone cover for you at committee. This happened for 150 years, and Parliament functioned just fine. The excuses for why they feel they need this are poor, and it creates more problems than it solves. MPs need to wind down these “hybrid” rules, and end remote voting (because that’s particularly offensive to parliamentary democracy), and engage with one another in person like they’re supposed to.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-08-04T19:08:02.941Z

My Latest:

  • My weekend column wonders how it was that Mark Carney had become an even worse communicator than Justin Trudeau was.
  • My column makes note of the premiers’ attempt to get back to a 50-50 healthcare funding formula, ignoring that they got revenue tools they now refuse to use.
  • For National Magazine, I delve into the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision to strike down the law that bars the Ethics Commissioner’s reports from judicial review.
  • My long weekend column looks at the falling crime rates before Carney’s performative tough-on-crime legislation, and points to how credulous he really is.

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More hints about future Senate appointments

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There were a couple of bits of Senate news yesterday, one of which was that prime minister Mark Carney has made new appointments to the senate appointment committee, filling vacant spots for a number of provinces. One of those appointments is former Senate Liberal leader James Cowan, and as this blog is a big Jim Cowan fan, I say this is a good person to help vet candidates, but it will do nothing to quell the constant chattering about partisan appointments. We also learned from the Canadian Press reporting that Carney himself chose Tom Pittfield and Richard Martel for appointments, while the other two came from the former committee recommendations that had apparently been sitting for months, which makes a tonne of sense.

This was followed up by Carney’s Senate Leader, Senator Pierre Moreau, who said that while they’re not going to revive a Senate Liberal caucus, Carney might appoint more Conservative senators because they’re dangerously low and he believes in the role for the official opposition in the Senate as a “mirror” of the House of Commons (erm, no, that’s not how this work), which is again, incoherent. Don’t get me wrong—I am not opposed to partisan appointments on either side of the aisle, so long as it’s done properly. The House of Lords has managed a very good system where their appointments board can recommend both partisan Lords and non-partisan cross-benchers, and they keep the numbers fairly in balance so that no one swamps the Chamber, and that is something we should be striving toward. Of course, Carney has not articulated any of this, and we’re instead left with the ongoing incoherence of his position, because nobody knows what the hell they’re talking about (most especially some of the Trudeau-appointed independent senators).

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-07-15T13:08:04.280Z

My Latest:

  • My (belated) Loonie Politics Quick Take points to some of the signs of resilience in the Canadian economy over the past year, amidst so much turmoil.
  • My Loonie Politics Quick Take calls out Carney’s trip to kiss the ring of Prince Bonesaw, and why it’s a really bad look for Canada.

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Votes aren’t that important in the Senate

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On Friday morning, the CBC put out a deeply ignorant article that was Very Concerned about senators missing “key votes,” and that “some legislative changes pass with barely half of all senators casting a vote.” OH NOES! Except that there are pretty much no key votes in the Senate, and that very few legislative changes are so important that they need all hands on deck to vote. Legacy media and a number of academics who have spent zero time watching the Senate simply do not understand how it operates, and for the most part, votes are not all that important. Government bills are going to pass, unless it’s something extraordinarily egregious, so there is less impetus to vote for things, because nobody wants to cause a constitutional crisis by voting down these bills. There are almost no close votes in the Senate these days, unless it’s on some contentious procedural matters—such as what was being rammed through with some of those bills at the end of the sitting—but again, that was on the timing of studies and not on the bills themselves. The votes are not important—the committee work is, and that’s where senators focus most of their attention.

This being said, the fact that so many of these senators in the article had absences related to doing things like keynote speeches and engaging with certain stakeholder communities is in part a function of the kinds of appointments that Justin Trudeau made to the Chamber, which were a lot of type-A personalities who have some pretty specific interests, and sometimes pursing those interests mean that they’re not in Ottawa as a result. Also, a lot of senators are aged, and that means that some of them have more health issues and they miss sittings as a result, which also wasn’t really addressed. And articles like this one are going to leave the impression that they simply can’t be arsed to turn up, and isn’t it just like those attendance scandals of the eighties and nineties (which it’s not, and yes, the Senate takes attendance and those records are public, unlike the House of Commons). This isn’t the whole “taskless thanks” nonsense that certain past Senate figures *cough*Mike Duffy*cough* tried to make it out to be. It’s just really tiresome that this kind of story comes around every year, often from the same journalists, and nobody bothers to learn a gods damned thing about why the Senate is not the House of Commons.

My Latest:

  • For National Magazine, I delve into Friday’s Supreme Court of Canada decision where they upheld a mandatory minimum sentence (for a change).
  • My weekend column points to just how incoherent Carney’s first Senate appointments were in the broader context of the direction of the Chamber.

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A fantasy pipeline to Sarnia

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Doug Ford and Danielle Smith held a joint press conference yesterday to announce a proposal for a northern pipeline route from Alberta to Sarnia, entirely through Canadian territory. Currently Alberta oil transits to Sarnia through the US because it’s a much shorter and flatter route, and that network is working just fine. Yes, a northern route might be more secure from American threats, but I will reiterate—a Canadian route is much longer, and over much rougher terrain, and is unlikely to find private sector proponents because they have no desire to strand the current pipeline network’s assets.

This sounds an awful lot to me like wishful thinking. There’s no timeline, there’s no price tag, there’s no agreement with Manitoba to go through that province—it’s a line on a map that rests on the wishful thinking that the oil market is going to keep growing in perpetuity. Ford keeps talking about how great it would be if the pipeline could go all the way to the Irving refinery in New Brunswick, but that’s never going to happen because Irving has no interest in paying a premium for Alberta oil when they can get imports for cheaper. (On a similar note, hopes to ship oil or LNG out of the Port of Churchill is also fantasy, because it’s only open for three months out of the year, and if they think that they need icebreakers the rest of the year, well, that’s one hell of a government subsidy).

Meanwhile, Smith going on about how the plan is to build this out now and decarbonise later is also ridiculous. There is a supply glut in the global oil market already (and prices will fall precipitously once the Strait of Hormuz issue is resolved, which it will be). Alberta increasing production to fill all of these pipelines is not going to bring plenty of more dollars, because adding supply to a supply glut further lowers the prices they get. That’s the reason why so much investment dried up after the price crash in 2014. It’s not coming back. This is just fantasy.

Danielle And Doug Ford Are Making A Beautiful Pipeline Togetheryoutu.be/BbOvIjvbMMw

— Clare Blackwood (@clareblackwood.bsky.social) 2026-07-06T19:40:58.929Z

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-07-06T13:08:02.411Z

My Latest:

  • My column on the justice committee hearings being largely a clown show because we don’t have serious bunch of MPs who asked questions of the new SCC justice.
  • My weekend column points out that the extreme weather on Canada Day in Ottawa should have been a wake-up call for Carney, but he refuses to listen.

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Some admissions in the latest “Forward Guidance”

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Prime minister Mark Carney released another of his “Forward Guidance” videos yesterday, and it was…revealing. The historical figure that Carney used as his hook was the founder of Ontario Hydro, and it was all about the energy crises that we find ourselves living through. The problem? That so much of what Carney used as his frames of reference were based on 1) old myths that were not true; 2) revisionist history of the Trudeau government; and 3) wishful thinking. To break it down, Carney gave a line about how when he grew up in Edmonton, the National Energy Project made Albertans feel like “our resources weren’t our own,” which goes to the falsehoods around the NEP, and the generations of grievance politics that emerged from it. The NEP was never the problem—the collapse in global oil prices were. Alberta blamed the NEP, but to this day wishes they had the benefits, like west-east pipelines and a country-wide energy market instead of going north-south. Imagine that. Carney also says that more recently, “we were made to feel that our energy contributions were running against the tides of history.” Really? Trudeau, who bent over backwards for Alberta, built them a pipeline at the cost of his own political capital, and who kept giving money to the industry (who then squandered it)? And under whose leadership production rose to its highest levels ever, which Carney also admitted? Yeah, he was really making them feel bad about their energy contributions—except of course that they blamed him for the oil crash of 2014, that happened before he was in office. Huh. Carney didn’t mention that. Oh, and when Carney talks about how Alberta developed the oil sands, he omits that said development came with federal money and favourable tax treatment (thanks to Jean Chrétien). When your federalist leader keeps conceding the points of the separatists (which are falsehoods), it’s hard to see how he’s defending the country as a whole.

I have zero confidence that Carney will insist on the conditions of having a private sector proponent, or that Pathways happens (and I can pretty much guarantee that he'll shrug and say "Well, it was only going to capture 12 percent of emissions anyway").

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-06-30T15:11:12.884Z

From there, Carney kept going on about building our energy sector, and made some nonsense points about home-grown electrification, which…is already home-grown. We’re not importing electricity in any significant way. We export more. He talks about needing this new pipeline to have “new options,” but once the Strait of Hormuz opens up (which it will eventually), it’ll just be feeding a supply glut, which is going to further depress prices. And then he goes on about building trust internationally, before admitting that we’re not going to meet our climate targets (so, betraying the trust that we were building by saying we were going to meet our targets?) He kept insisting that the commitment to fighting the climate crisis is “absolute,” but he wants to do that by doubling down on oil and gas while also increasing electrification (omitting that said electrification will also mean more natural gas, particularly in Alberta). He also claimed that Trudeau’s climate plan, while it would meet our targets, was “unsustainable” and “too expensive.” Erm, you know how much more expensive climate change is, right? We’re talking orders of magnitude here. Oh, and it was “too divisive,” but only if you’re listening to liars and grifters, which apparently Carney is.

If I were Julie Dabrusin, I’d be pissed. Carney had sent her around to every media outlet to insist that they were “committed” to meeting those climate targets, and essentially demanding that she lie about it, only to pull a bait and switch and say that yeah, you guys were right, we’re not going to meet our targets after all, after spending months insisting that everyone else was wrong. So why should we believe anything this government says? Serious question.

Oh, and if you were playing the “Building Canada Strong™” drinking game, you’d be puking right now.

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A grab-bag of Carney answers

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Prime minister Mark Carney held a press conference yesterday to pat himself on the back for his government’s accomplishments over the spring sitting, but as with most of these exercises, the real interest was in his responses to questions, which he doesn’t do very often. So, what did we learn?

  • That big call with Trump this week with the extremely vague readout was mostly about Iran and NATO, and not about trade.
  • We’re still a long way away from any kind of trade deal with Trump.
  • The six upcoming by-elections will likely be spaced out.
  • We finally got more details on that condo purchase in Vancouver, which is 90 percent provincial funding/10 percent federal, and is intended as rent-to-own.
  • He will be going to Stampede, and plans to defend national unity, and is using Brexit as a cautionary tale (as well he should be).
  • We are sending aid to Venezuela after the earthquakes, and while it might be useful to have some kind of consular services there or in Iran, we’ll go through partners.

Shortly afterward, Pierre Poilievre gave his own press conference to decry the state of the Canadian economy and blame Carney for it, as though Trump wasn’t a factor, or that climate change isn’t affecting things like food prices. In fact, he pretty much admitted he’d accept a bad deal with Trump for the sake of getting a deal. So there’s that.

"It's all an illusion."

— Scott Robertson (@sarobertson.bsky.social) 2026-06-25T19:54:15.597Z

My Latest:

For National Magazine, I delve into the Supreme Court of Canada’s increasing caseload, and why the Chief Justice’s explanation of cleared backlogs doesn’t hold.

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