Tag Archives: Supreme Court

Roundup: Not getting a normal Xmas

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Things are getting serious, but as much as our political leaders beg people to stay home, the numbers continue to climb. Prime minister Justin Trudeau held his presser outside of Rideau Cottage once again today, a signal that he wants people to work from home where they can, and that he plans to do the same as much as possible (so we’ll see if he’s back in the Chamber during the last three sitting weeks of the year). And he said flat-out that we’re not going to have a normal Christmas this year, because we’re too far beyond that point. And while Quebec is trying to come up with a “moral contract” plan to allow people to celebrate – a plan which is just as likely to accelerate the spread of the virus in that province – the Toronto and Peel regions in Ontario are headed back into lockdown as of Monday, because Doug Ford finally decided to pull the trigger (far too late to do much good). The new federal supports which included additional lockdown supports received royal assent this week and people can begin applying for them on Monday, with the rent supports retroactive for a couple of months.

This having been said, the Conservatives have already been trying out new lines of attack, which Erin O’Toole debuted right after his meeting with the prime minister on Thursday, in which he lays the blame for the second wave at the feet of the federal government. These lines were repeated in Question Period yesterday, and when Conservatives appeared on the political shows, and include lines like “the lockdowns were supposed to be temporary to let the government find a solution.” Right – that was the point. And it was the premiers, whose jurisdiction testing, tracing, and isolation is in, who pissed way the summer and didn’t invest in increasing the capacity necessary to do that, and lo and behold, we are too late now. O’Toole and his MPs demand “better data” about outbreaks, which again, is supposed to be coming from the provinces, but most of them are falling down on that job as well. Much of the Conservatives’ rhetoric is aimed at the notion that rapid testing – including at-home testing (which has much lower sensitivity) will allow people to go to work and the economy to re-open, and they point to all of these other countries that approved rapid testing, either omitting that many of the approved rapid tests in places like the US had their approvals pulled because they turned out to be useless, or the fact that they are virtually all facing massive spikes of their own in the second wave, meaning that lo, those tests were not the panacea at all. Additionally, we had the Chief Medical Officer of Health in Alberta talking about how people were lying about symptoms or tests in order to visit people in hospitals, and continuing the spread, so how can we actually think that giving people at-home tests is going to be at all feasible if they are going to lie about their results?

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But this is about creating a narrative – one that absolves their provincial allies from responsibility, which relies on historical revisionism about the early days of the pandemic, and on wishful thinking around rapid tests. It’s also about disinformation, which is self-contradictory because of jurisdictional issues. And this gets added to other lies and disinformation they’re promulgating, like Pierre Poilievre walking right up to the line of conspiracy theories with the “Great Reset” sustainability initiative, where he is trying to play into NOW truthers under the “I’m just quoting Trudeau,” knowing full well how this stuff fuels the crazies. But they don’t care. They will be as irresponsible with this kind of messaging as possible because it’s only about scoring points, and they don’t care what they burn to the ground along the way. It’s a hell of a way to demonstrate how they would run the country if given the opportunity.

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Roundup: Such a serious country

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The country is fixated on the election south of the border, while we’re failing to effectively deal with a global pandemic, but what shiny thing caught everyone’s attention yesterday? The fact that Whole Foods’ uniform policy forbade employees from wearing poppies. The horror! The horror! Politicians from all stripes across the country were outraged – outraged! Doug Ford leapt into action to declare he would pass legislation to make it illegal for businesses to prohibit employees from wearing poppies, which is more than he’s done about dealing with the pandemic in his own gods damned area of jurisdiction, so make of that what you will. Erin O’Toole got worked up and posted a video calling on people to boycott “Woke Foods,” which is not only not clever, but not even close to a reflection of the situation – in fact, Whole Foods came under fire for not allowing their employees to wear masks that said “Black Lives Matter” on them, so that’s hardly being Woke™. (Then again, when you wield a shitpost-shaped hammer, everything is a woke-shaped nail). It was the lead question in QP. Three separate unanimous motions were passed in the House of Commons after Question Period to condemn Whole Foods, to encourage all businesses to let their employees to wear poppies, and to summon the Whole Foods CEO to the Veterans Affairs committee to explain himself. Everyone needed a piece of their outrage pie.

A couple of hours later, the veterans affairs minister, Lawrence MacAulay put out a release saying that he spoke to said CEO and everything was okay – employees would be able to wear poppies after all. Phew! Of course, we got all parties on-side for the most useless and ridiculous of symbolic controversies, because that’s just how serious we are as a country. Well done, everyone.

Meanwhile, there’s still a pandemic where the second wave is spiking in Canada, and none of the premiers seem to want to do anything about it. Doug Ford is set to loosen restrictions on some of the most hardest-hit regions of Ontario, while his promise to hire thousands of more long-term care workers lacks any details, which sounds about right for Ford. Jason Kenney is calling on people to voluntarily stop having house parties, but won’t make any actual restrictions, nor will he sign onto the federal contact tracing app. You’d think that we’d be spending the day raking these premiers over the coals for their unwillingness to do anything (because it’ll hurt small business – when they have the capability of offering supports for them), but no, we can’t even do that either.

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Roundup: Expediting another bill

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If you were to judge by the mainstream political shows in Canada, there wasn’t anything happening here – well, unless you count the budget in Ontario, which got a brief mention, but these are federal politics shows. But hey, it turns out there was something pretty major happening, which was an extended debate on the new pandemic relief bill.

In order to pass it by tomorrow, the parties agreed to skip committee hearings and have a four-hour Committee of the Whole session instead, where Chrystia Freeland got to field questions for the duration, and wouldn’t you know it, Pierre Poilievre was consumed with questions about the state of the deficit and how the government planned to repay it once the pandemic was over. Never mind that the point of this spending is to bridge businesses so that fewer of them fail, which will ensure that when the pandemic ends, we will have a faster and stronger recovery, and that economic growth will help deal with the deficit, but that’s not Poilievre’s schtick.

The Bloc, for their part, haven’t been without their own shenanigans, as they are proposing an amendment to the bill that would ban political parties from using the wage subsidy. (The Conservatives have pledged to repay what they used, for what it’s worth). I doubt it’ll pass, because the Liberals, NDP and Greens have also availed themselves of the subsidy, but the Bloc will make their point – and it likely means additional votes which will probably keep the Commons later than usual tomorrow as a result (as the agreement was to have it passed before end of day). Even though the point of this was for swift passage, neither Chamber is sitting next week because of Remembrance Day, but the Senate’s national finance committee has agreed to meet over the week to do what amounts to pre-study of the bill (even though pre-study is technically before the Commons passes it so that they can pass along amendments before it is agreed to), but that will expedite it somewhat so that it will almost certainly get royal assent before the 19th, and then we’ll see how long it takes to actually implement so businesses can get their rent subsidy in place.

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Roundup: Preparations at the border?

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Everyone is going to spend the day obsessing about the US election, and while I just can’t, I figured that I should at least make the point that I’m hoping that in this government’s preparations, there includes some for the border because if there is a Trump victory (or violence that breaks out if the result is unclear or a narrow enough Trump defeat), I would expect a rush of would-be asylum seekers heading for our borders, particularly vulnerable minorities who are already in precarious situations in the US and are likely to become targets of violence if things degenerate. That means that this government is going to need to have proper quarantine protocols in place, as well as hopefully a plan that involves more than simply turning them back as they have been since the border closure in March, because a deteriorating situation in the US would mean that sending them back would almost certainly be unconstitutional – this as the government is already fighting with a Federal Court decision that says that the US is not a safe third country and that the agreement to turn these claimants back violates the constitution. This may all be for naught, but the US is on the verge of becoming a failed state, and we need to be ready for how that will affect us, in the short and long term.

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Roundup: Confidence maintained, control wrested

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It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the government survived the confidence vote – it was very much an example of Wells’ First Rule – and the NDP and Greens voted to keep parliament going. Of course, the narrative that both the Conservatives and NDP adopted was that the Liberals were pushing for an election – the Conservatives (and Bloc) claiming it was because the Liberals really wanted to cover something up, and the NDP self-righteously declared that they weren’t going to give Trudeau the election that he wanted, but would keep parliament going to get things done for Canadians. Of course, if Trudeau really wanted an election (which he doesn’t), he could just head next door to Rideau Hall on any given morning and ask Julie Payette to dissolve Parliament, but he won’t, because that’s not what today was about.

Part of what has irked me in this is the way in which the Conservatives’ motion was being described, which is innocuously. One writer went so far as to call it a “pedestrian motion,” which it was anything but, and I highly suspect that nobody actually read through it except for the two other procedural wonks in the Gallery. Aside from the inflammatory title of “anti-corruption,” or the proposed alternative whose four-letter abbreviation would have been SCAM (both instances that demonstrate that it’s a group of juvenile shitposters running O’Toole’s office who are treating the Order Paper as a game of who can be the most outrageous), the proposed committee’s terms of reference would have put the government at a structural disadvantage with three fewer members (generally committees in the current parliamentary composition are split, and on committees where the government chairs it, the opposition has the votes to outweigh the government), but it would have given the committee first priority for all parliamentary resources, and compelled production of all documents they wanted and witnesses to appear, no matter who. This essentially means that both ministers and the civil service would be at the committee’s beck and call, and that they would have to drop everything to attend it – which is what Pablo Rodriguez meant by the committee being meant to “paralyze” government. They could go on unlimited fishing expeditions with little to no ability to push back, and given the fact that there aren’t any smoking guns here, it would be constant wild goose chases while Parliament was unable to get anything else accomplished. More than that, it would also have enshrined that the prime minister’s extended family – meaning his mother and brother – would be considered legitimate targets, and have their financial information put into the open for no good reason. And funnily enough, not one story from yesterday mentioned these facts – not the Star, not the National Post, not CBC, nor The Canadian Press. Yet this seems like some pretty vital context for why the government would so strenuously object to this “pedestrian” motion.

There was another consideration, that former Paul Martin-era staffer Scott Reid expounded upon, which is control of the agenda. That’s a pretty important thing in a hung parliament, and under the current circumstances. Trudeau hasn’t been able to make much progress on any file (admittedly, much of this is his own fault for refusing to bring parliament back in a sensible way, followed by his decision to prorogue), but being hamstrung by that motion was going to make things moving forward near impossible. Now that he’s stared down O’Toole, I suspect he has some breathing room again.

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Roundup: Special committee games

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The competing offers for special committees got even more crowded yesterday as the Liberals suggested their own possible special committee to examine pandemic spending, in a bid to jam both the Conservatives and NDP as they make their own offers. The Conservatives, you may recall, are employing a stunt to call for a special “anti-corruption committee,” as though the penny-ante bullshit that happens here were actual corruption that happens in other countries, and called explicitly for the purpose of decrying any lack of support for this committee idea as being in support of corruption. The NDP have their own proposal for a pandemic spending committee, but it was intended as a kind of super-committee to draw in not only the WE Imbroglio, but to revisit other non-scandals such as the Rob Silver affair (which the Ethics Commissioner declined to investigate), or the fact that one of the many pandemic procurement contracts went to a company whose owner is a former Liberal MP (whose departure was a bit huffy and drawn out at the time, one may recall).

The Liberal plan is to offer a “serious committee” to do “serious work,” which is a political gambit in and of itself – citing that if the other parties don’t agree to this particular committee (whose terms of reference one expects will be fairly narrowly circumscribed), then it proves that they are simply motivated by partisan gamesmanship rather than helping Canadians. And they’re not wrong – that’s exactly what both the Conservatives and NDP are looking for, at a point where they can only expect diminishing returns the longer that they drag on the WE Imbroglio (though, caveat, they do have a legitimate point in the Finance committee about producing the unredacted documents because that was the committee order that the government didn’t obey, and risks finding themselves in contempt of parliament over; the Ethics Committee demands are going outside of that committee’s mandate).

To add to the possible drama, the Liberals are also contemplating making the Conservatives’ upcoming Supply Day motion on their committee demand a confidence vote, which will wind up forcing the hands of one of the opposition parties into voting against it because nobody wants an election (and that could mean a number of Conservative MPs suddenly having “connectivity issues” and being unable to vote on the motion to ensure its demise). Of course, there is always the possibility of an accident – that seat counts weren’t done properly and the government could defeat itself, though that’s highly unlikely in the current circumstances. Nevertheless, this game-playing is where we’re at, seven months into the pandemic.

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Roundup: Absent other measures

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Yesterday, the Parliamentary Budget Officer released a report that unsurprisingly states that the federal carbon price will need to increase significantly, absent other measures. This is not news. We all know this is the case. We also know that the government is finalising all kinds of other non-price measures as part of their plans to exceed our 2030 Paris targets, including the Clean Fuel Standard, and we have Jonathan Wilkinson on the record stating that they are nearly ready and should be out before the end of the calendar year. Why the PBO and others feel the need to keep repeating that absent other measures the carbon price would need to increase significantly to meet those targets, I’m not sure, because all it does is start a new round of media nonsense about how awful the current prices are (they’re not), and that this is all one big socialist plot, or whatever. And there are more measures on the way, so the question becomes fairly moot.

Speaking of the Clean Fuel Standard, there was a bunch of clutched pearls and swooning on fainting couches over the past couple of weeks when a former MP and current gasoline price analyst indicated that said Standard would be like a super-charged carbon price, and a bunch of Conservatives and their favoured pundits all had a three minutes hate about it. What I find amusing is that these are the same people who a) claim to believe in the free market, b) oppose the carbon price which is a free market mechanism to reducing carbon emissions, and c) are calling for more regulation, which the Clean Fuel Standard is, even though regulations are opaquer as to the cost increases that will result. There is an argument to be had that the government should focus on increasing the carbon price over other regulatory measures (though I would disagree with the ones that say all of said measures should be abandoned in favour of the price), but getting exercised because the very regulatory measures you are looking for cost more money means that you’re not really serious about it in the first place.

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Roundup: Announcing a limited plastic ban

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The big news yesterday was that the federal government finally unveiled the first phase of their single-use plastics ban, focusing on six primary culprits – plastic bags, straws, stir sticks, cutlery, six-pack rings, and polystyrene take-out containers (though I’m not entirely clear if the can’t-recycle-in-this-country black plastic take-out containers would also be included). Most of these items are things for which there are alternatives that are fairly easily obtainable, and will likely become more affordable the more their production ramps up and they get scale in the economy that had thus-far been denied to them.

But there is immediate push-back. The Chemistry Industry Association of Canada bristles that in order to achieve the ban, the government is using the toxic substances mechanisms available to them, and the industry is aghast that they are in the same category as asbestos and lead – err, except that the proliferation of microplastics, particularly from plastics that break down, would quite probably fit that bill very well. The Alberta government is also grousing because they think this will affect investment in their petrochemical industry, even though the ban is quite limited and wouldn’t affect high-quality plastics which are will still see broad use, nor would it really affect their plans to turn Alberta into a hub of plastics recycling (which is important because there is very little plastics recycling in North America as we had relied on off-shoring the work to places like China, which shut their borders to it). The province’s energy minister also found it “ironic” that this announcement was made a day after Jason Kenney made his own announcement on plastics and recycling being part of Alberta’s “diversification” efforts, even though a) it’s not actually ironic, and b) this has been something the federal government has been talking about for over a year, did the necessary consultation process required under the Toxic Substances Act, and as a minister, she knows that these kinds of announcements aren’t dreamed up overnight but take some fair amount of planning and coordination. But Alberta is going to Alberta, whatever happens, so this is nothing new.

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Roundup: Taking credit for changing nothing

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It’s becoming a tale as old as time, where NDP leader Jagmeet Singh calls a late-afternoon press conference to declare that he has achieved a great victory of pushing on an open door and getting nothing new that the Liberals weren’t already going to do, to be followed by his supporters taking to social media to crow about it. And thus, late Friday afternoon, Singh held a press conference to say that he had struck a deal with the Liberals about paid sick leave, and that this, along with their previous decision to keep EI and the recovery benefit at CERB levels, meant that he was likely to vote confidence in the government, thus avoiding the election that was never going to happen anyway.

But let’s review – you can be assured that the Liberals didn’t decide to boost the EI and recovery benefit levels from $400 to $500/week because of Singh’s pressure, but rather because they can see the COVID case counts climbing like the rest of us, and with the second wave here earlier than anticipated. That’s likely going to mean more shutdowns, even if they’re not as bad as the initial one in March, and their commitment to having Canadians’ backs means that it was easier to keep the benefit levels the same. On top of that, they had already committed to paying for the sick leave benefit that the provinces would implement, based on negotiations that happened at the behest of BC premier John Horgan (as Trudeau assiduously assigned him the credit and not Singh). When Trudeau got this assurance from the premiers, Singh declared victory and his supporters crowed that it was all him that did this when it clearly wasn’t. And now, Singh is again taking credit for this benefit, even though nothing has actually changed.

And then we get supposed dunks like this one. Nothing changed. Nothing the federal government does will unilaterally change provincial labour laws that will actually implement this sick benefit, especially on the permanent basis that Singh wants it to be. Sure, the federal government says they’ll pay for those two weeks of sick leave, but does that mean that the person’s job is going to be protected? Nope. There are provinces, like Nova Scotia, who were reluctant about it because they felt it was up to collective bargaining between employers and labour to come to an agreement on this leave. Does this agreement that Singh got change that? Nope. Nothing has changed, and yet he’s suddenly the new Tommy Douglas. Girl, please.

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Roundup: The creeping presidentialization of national addresses

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As far as Throne Speeches go, it was on the long-side – fifty-four minutes in total – while the scene was sparse owing to the pandemic. A common refrain from the commentariat was asking what exactly was new in the speech – much of it was a recitation of the Liberal Party’s greatest hits, with a newfound sense of urgency to some of those long-standing promises (most of which require negotiations with provinces who are reluctant to take on costly new social programmes), and the assurance to Canadians that this is not the time for fiscal austerity as we need to “build back better.” There were some relevant things about ensuring a green and inclusive recovery,

https://twitter.com/AdamScotti/status/1308932151925145602

The post-Speech responses in the press conferences that followed were pretty typical – the Conservatives hated everything about it, and complained about things that their leader has been shitposting the opposite of for the past couple of weeks. The Bloc have decided that it somehow violated the rights of the provinces, when it talks about negotiating national programmes with them. The NDP weren’t going to pan it outright, but Jagmeet Singh instead demanded that the government implement paid sick leave for every worker in Canada – something that the federal government can’t do because the vast majority of workplaces are provincial jurisdiction. So that’s fun.

And then, a short while later, were the big national addresses. Trudeau started off good, talking about the fight of our generation, and that Thanksgiving is now out of the question but we still have a shot at Christmas if we can get the second wave under control, which means get a flu shot, wear masks, wash your hands, and download the COVID Alert app. But then he started selling the Throne Speech, and it turned into an infomercial, in spite of the promise that this was going to be an urgent message about the pandemic and not about politics. That assurance was completely lost on Erin O’Toole, whose only nod to the pandemic was to say that his family’s situation shows that we all need to be extremely vigilant – before he pivoted to Western alienation, and complaining that Trudeau didn’t listen to any of his (performative) demands around the Throne Speech, and concluded by warning about Communist China. So that was something. Yves-François Blanchet, also in COVID isolation, addressed his reply to Quebeckers and Francophones, and then accused the prime minister of interfering in Quebec’s jurisdiction (he didn’t), and demanded unequivocal transfers to Quebec in a week or he’ll vote against the Throne Speech. Erm… And then there was Jagmeet Singh, who started off with the empathetic approach of “I know you’re worried and we’re going to fight for you,” but quickly pivoted to demanding a wealth tax. So…that was the “urgent” and “not political” use of prime-time airtime. The worst part of the whole exercise, however, was the creeping presidentialization of it – addresses that should have happened in the House of Commons were forced to dinnertime television in the hopes of getting a bigger audience, for messages that came off sounding like pre-election posturing. If Trudeau had stuck to his first couple of minutes – that we need to get our shit together and flatten this infection curve – then that would have been fine. But the sales job on the Throne Speech with him giving the clips and not Julie Payette was a complete misstep.

Meanwhile, Heather Scoffield finds good things for the economic recovery in the Speech, but hopes the government can gets its act together when it comes to implementing them. Economist Lindsay Tedds sees a lot to like in the Throne Speech, particularly the pledge around automatic filing of income taxes so that marginalized people who often don’t file will finally be able to get benefits they are entitled to. Susan Delacourt contrasts the two speeches on Wednesday, and what each’s tone is trying to convey. Paul Wells pans the whole thing, and notes that nothing has changed since before the prorogation. Jen Gerson puts the whole display in a wider context of a world in which real trouble is brewing, and Canadian politics is utterly unprepared for it.

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