Tag Archives: Tough on Crime

Roundup: Courting the tinfoil hat crowd

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Over the past few days, the Conservatives have been delving into tinfoil hat territory in their attempts to stir up panic and anger toward the UN compact on global migration, which Canada plans to sign next week in Morocco. According to the Conservatives, this non-binding political declaration will somehow erode Canadian sovereignty and be tantamount to “border erasure,” and that if you listen to the Twitter trolls picking up on Andrew Scheer and Michelle Rempel’s posts about this, it will make criticizing immigration a “hate crime.” All of which is complete and utter bullshit, and even Chris Alexander, one-time Harper-era immigration minister, calls this out as factually incorrect. And yet, the Conservatives plan to use their Supply Day today to force a vote on this very issue so that they can express performative shock and dismay when the Liberals vote it down.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1070071215384080389

While Justin Trudeau and Ahmed Hussen have quite rightly called the Conservatives out on this issue as repeating Rebel Media talking points, I have to see this as yet another example of Conservatives not only shamelessly lying to score points, but trying to dip their toe into extremist territory, and the belief that they can just “just enough” extremist language and talking points to try and stir up enough anger and paranoia that they think it will move their poll numbers, but no white supremacists or xenophobes please, “we believe in orderly immigration.” And of course, real life doesn’t work that way, and they wind up stirring up elements that they say they disavow, but continue to wink at because they think it’ll get some kind of benefit out of it.

The other theory raised about why the Conservatives are going full steam on this issue is because they’re trying to head off Maxime Bernier, who is also trolling on this particular bit of lunacy. Why they think this would be a good strategy, I’m not entirely sure, but it’s not as harmless as they might think it is, and that should be concerning to everyone.

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Roundup: Refusing to learn their lessons

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A former PQ minister wants to run for leadership of the Bloc, and I just cannot. Can. Not. The challenger this time is Yves-François Blanchet, who served in Pauline Marois’ short-lived Cabinet, and has since taken on a political pundit career since being defeated in 2014. He apparently met with the caucus yesterday, and the majority of them – including their past and current interim leaders – all seem to like him, but I keep having to circle back to this simple question: did you learn nothing from your last disastrous leader?

I can’t emphasise this enough. Since their demise in 2011, the Bloc have had a succession of seatless leaders, including Mario Beaulieu (who now has a seat, incidentally, and is the current interim leader), and while he stepped aside so that Gilles Duceppe could return (unsuccessfully), they keep going for leaders who aren’t in caucus, and time after time, it goes poorly for them. Every single time, I have to wonder why they don’t simply do as our system was built to do, and select a member from caucus. Constantly bringing in an outsider does nothing for their profile (ask Jagmeet Singh how that’s going), and their leaders keep being divorced from the realities of parliament. And time and again, they keep choosing another outsider. Why do you keep doing this to yourselves? Why do you refuse to learn the lessons that experience has to teach you?

There is one current MP who is considering a run, Michel Boudrias, and if the Bloc was smart, they would choose him by virtue of the fact that he’s in the caucus, he’s in the Commons, and he knows how Parliament works. Of course, if they interested in ensuring he’s accountable (especially given just how big of a gong show their last leader was), then it would be the caucus that selects him so that the caucus can then fire him if he becomes a problem (again, if history is anything to go by). But that would take some actual political courage by the party, and given their apparent reluctance to learn the lessons from their mistakes, that may be too much to ask for.

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Roundup: Deficits vs spending choices

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It was the autumn fiscal update yesterday, and it should be no surprise that the deficits are going to continue for foreseeable future. It was also notable for the measures that were implemented to compete with the US corporate tax cuts without making similar cuts in Canada, and these were measures that were designed to keep businesses investing in growth rather than simply offering share buybacks or dividends, as we’ve seen in the US. These targeted measures included immediate write-offs of new machinery and equipment, certain clean-energy equipment, and writing off some assets more quickly than before, with the calculated marginal effective tax rate of these measures apparently besting the US’ rates. So there’s that. There were also some tax credits for digital subscriptions in media, and a $600 million fund to offset the cost of hiring staff as part of that. There were also measures around removing internal trade barriers (yet again) and improving supports for businesses looking to export. On top of that, it also noted that the Trans Mountain Pipeline has earned the government $70 million since it bought the pipeline, and is on track to earn it some $200 million per year.

The deficit issue is one that we’ll continue to hear about, and it’s probably more complex than just a “deficits bad” kind of debate to have. On the one hand, the Liberals took government at a time when the books were $70 billion worse off than initially advertised (not to mention the Conservative “surplus” booked a bunch of false savings) so the 2015 promises met a different reality. On the other hand, they are spending any revenue growth rather than paying down the deficit faster, insisting (not incorrectly) that a declining debt-to-GDP figure is a more important measure, and we should remember that the deficits are really quite modest in comparison to the size of our economy. But they are making spending choices, and we should judge them on that. Here’s Kevin Milligan with some more context and analysis:

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John Geddes offers his summary of the update, while Andrew Coyne pans the government’s propensity to spend any new revenues it gets rather, meaning that their deficits continue to be by choice rather than necessity. Kevin Carmichael says that in spite of the deficit problems, the most audacious part of the update was the plan to tackle the overhaul of federal regulation. Susan Delacourt notes the difference in tone between the federal fiscal update and that in Ontario last week.

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Roundup: Not an election issue to fight over

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The leader of the Independent Senators Group seems to have inserted himself into the political discussion by demanding to know where parties stand on the issue of Senate appointments in advance of the next election. Senator Woo’s concerns seem to be that he doesn’t want people to “unwittingly” vote for a party that doesn’t conform to their views on the Senate. I’m going to go ahead and say that this was probably a mistake because it’s very easy to construe that he’s looking to shill for the Liberals since they are the only ones to are half-arsing the issue of Senate modernization, at least in this particular bastardized vision of a completely “independent” Chamber that is more likely to be problematic than anything.

In case you were wondering, the Conservatives say they don’t have a firm position yet, but their democratic institutions critic says she prefers the Harper system of appointing candidates voted on in “consultative elections” – you know, the ones that the Supreme Court of Canada said were unconstitutional because they were attempting to do through the backdoor what they couldn’t to through the front door. Oh, and they support a partisan Senate because they have a “very strong Senate group.” And the NDP, well, they’re still insisting that they want to abolish the Senate, never mind that they will never, ever, get the unanimous support of the provinces to do so. That leaves Senator Woo holding the bag for the Liberals by default, which isn’t a good look if he wants to keep insisting that he’s independent from the Liberals.

And those of us who think that maybe the Senate is better off with Liberals, Conservatives and a group of crossbenchers in roughly equal numbers? Who are we supposed to vote for? I suspect we’re SOL, unless the Liberals decide to change their tune after their “experiment” in a totally independent Senate starts to blow up in their faces and they can’t get bills passed (in part because their Government Leader – err “representative” – doesn’t want to do his job), but yeah. I’m not sure this is an election issue to fight over because nobody knows what they’re doing and we’re going to find ourselves cleaning up the mess made in this institution for a generation to come.

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Roundup: An oil conundrum

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There’s an interesting conundrum happening in Alberta, where the premier and industry leaders are talking about production cuts owing to the supply glut and lack of refining capacity in the US being responsible for near-record lows for Canadian exports. The problem of course is whether the premier should use powers that haven’t been exercised since the days of Peter Lougheed, or if oil companies should voluntarily reduce their own production – and if they do, does this constitute price-fixing? There isn’t any easy solution to any of this, and it’s not just build more pipelines – they would only need to be pipelines to tidewater in order to find markets not hampered by the current refining shutdowns in the US, and that are prepared to take heavy oil and diluted bitumen. It’s also a bit on the unfair side to say that it’s simply “regulatory and political” challenges – as we’ve seen from successive court decisions is that attempts to take shortcuts and to weasel out of obligations is what’s causing delays and to have permits revoked. In other words, part of the problem is self-inflicted, and they try to hand-wave around it by crying “national interest” as though that makes it better.

Here’s a lengthy but good explanatory thread from Josh Wingrove, and it’s well worth paying attention to, because there’s a lot of demagoguery floating around about the issue, and it pays to be informed about why prices are low, and why it’s not something you can wave a magic wand to fix.

https://twitter.com/josh_wingrove/status/1062817943812218894

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Roundup: Parting shots after the furore

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As the furore around the transfer of Tori Stafford’s killer dies down now that she has been moved back to another medium-security facility (but not “behind bars” as there aren’t any in women’s institutions in this country), the Conservatives and Conservatives are trying to get parting shots in. While the Conservatives have been demanding apologies from the Liberals because they’re still sore that they were called ambulance chasers, the Liberals’ parting shot was delivered on Friday as Karen McCrimmon, the parliamentary secretary for public safety, let it be known on Power & Politics that other child killers were transferred to healing lodges under the Conservatives. Hold up, said P&P, and while McCrimmon couldn’t give any names, the show went and checked. And lo, since 2011, twenty people convicted of killing a minor have been moved to healing lodges, 14 of them under the Conservatives. Now, we don’t know any of the details of these transfers, and how along they were in their sentences, or anything like that, because the families of the victims didn’t come forward like Stafford’s father did. But it certainly blows the Conservative narrative that this is somehow a Trudeau/Liberal “soft on crime” policy out of the water.

So, a couple of observations: The Conservatives keep insisting that they weren’t the ones who politicised the issue, and yet they are simultaneously patting themselves on the back for “forcing” the government to act, when the government ordered a review within a couple of days of this transfer going public. That sounds an awful lot like politicising it. Their talking heads have also been going onto the talk shows to insist that the Liberals were the ones who started the “name calling” and “insults” first, when it was only after a day of sustained questions that got increasingly graphic and overwrought that Trudeau accused them of ambulance-chasing politics. In other words, they are trying to play victim. There is also a certain amount of utter shamelessness when they insist that things that happened under their watch (the aforementioned killer being transferred from maximum to medium security, or now these other child-killer transfers) are somehow different because we’re talking about the here and now. I get that this is politics, but at some point, one has to wonder why there is a lack of shame around any of what goes on.

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Roundup: Looking for a domestic MS-13

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Over the past week, Andrew Scheer has been touting his latest pre-election policy plank, which promises to tackle the problem of gang violence – except it really won’t. His proposals are largely unconstitutional and fall into the same pattern of “tough on crime” measures that are largely performative that do nothing substantive about the underlying issues with violent crime, but that shouldn’t be unexpected. The measures go hand-in-hand with their talking point that the government’s current gun control legislation “doesn’t include the word ‘gangs’ even once,” and how they’re just punishing law-abiding gun owners. And while I will agree with the notion that you can’t really do much more to restrict handgun ownership without outright banning them, it needs to be pointed out that the point about the lack of mention of gangs in the bill is predicated on a lie – the Criminal Code doesn’t talk about “gangs” because it uses the language of “criminal organisations,” to which gangs apply (not to mention that you don’t talk about gangs in gun control legislation – they’re separate legal regimes, which they know but are deliberately trying to confuse the issue over.

I have to wonder if the recent focus on gangs as the current problem in gun crime is that they need a convenient scapegoat that’s easy to point a finger at – especially if you ignore the racial overtones of the discussion. Someone pointed out to me that they’re looking for their own MS-13 that they can demonise in the public eye – not for lack of trying, since they focus-tested some MS-13 talking points in Question Period last year at the height of the irregular border-crossing issue when they were concern-trolling that MS-13 was allegedly sending terrorists across our borders among these asylum seekers. The talking points didn’t last beyond a week or two, but you know that they’re looking to try and score some cheap points with it.

With that in mind, here is defence lawyer Michael Spratt explaining why Scheer’s latest proposal is a house of lies:

Or as another criminal defence lawyer, Dean Embry, puts it, if you’re going to make stuff up on this issue, then why not go all the way?

https://twitter.com/DeanEmbry/status/1062102941123907590

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Roundup: Compromising positions vs oversight

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As the fallout from his sexting “scandal” continued, MP Tony Clement was booted from caucus yesterday, which shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. First thing in the morning, Andrew Scheer said that he was assured that it was a one-off so Clement would be allowed to stay, but by Question Period, Clement was out, meaning that more stuff has come to light (possibly the raft of women over social media describing their creepy encounters with Clement online).

While Cabinet ministers including Ralph Goodale don’t believe that this incident with Clement actually breached national security, the bigger worry by experts in the field is the fact that the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians is still nascent and building trust, and the fact that Clement was a member of that team and obviously ignored the training he was provided about not putting himself in compromising positions could shake the domestic trust of this new committee, especially given that this level of parliamentary oversight of our national security is new and largely untested.

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Susan Delacourt notes the three ways in which Clement has damaged himself, and possibly his party as well. John Ivison ponders the security implications of this whole sordid affair. And on Power Play, Stephanie Carvin explains why this is an issue with national security considerations.

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Roundup: Immigration concern trolls

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Amidst the other disingenuous, fear-based campaigns going on in the political sphere right now – Statistics Canada, and the carbon price, in particular – the issue of immigration is also threatening to get worse, in part because the simmering issue around irregular border crossers is being conflated with the government’s announcement of new immigration targets. And we need to drill this into people from the start – immigration and asylum are two very different things, and shouldn’t be treated or conflated. We don’t accept refugees because we think they’ll fill out our workforce – we accept them for humanitarian reasons, which is why the expectations that they’ll find work right away is also problematic, as usually they’re traumatized upon arrival. That’s why it’s especially problematic when you have partisan actors like Michelle Rempel standing up in Question Period to decry the new immigration targets as having some form of equivalency with the irregular border crossers – they’re not the same thing, and conflating them is using one to demonize the other. Even more problematic is the kind of concern trolling language that we’re seeing from other conservatives – that they “support immigration” but are concerned about the “confidence in the system.” There is a certain dogwhistle quality to those “concerns” because it implies that the “confidence” in the system is undermined by all of those bad newcomers arriving. It’s subtle, but the signals are still there.

To that end, the government decided to launch a pro-immigration ad campaign, which the Conservatives have immediately derided as an attempt to paper over the irregular border-crosser issue, despite the fact that they’re separate issues, and they’re actively undermining confidence in the immigration system that they claim to support by conflating it with the asylum seekers they’re demonizing. And this cycle of conflation and demonization gets worse when the federal minister pushed back against the Ontario minister’s politicizing of the issue and attempt to blame asylum seekers for the city’s housing crisis (and more importantly pushed back against her claims that “40 percent” of shelter residents are now irregular border crossers and that they used to be 11 percent as being fabricated because the shelter system doesn’t track that kind of data). The Ontario minister responded by calling Hussen a “name-calling bully” (he didn’t call her any names), and on it goes. Would that we have grown-ups running things.

Meanwhile, The Canadian Press’ Baloney Meter™ checks the government’s claim that they’ve reduced irregular border crossings by 70 percent (it was one month’s year-over-year data), and Justin Ling gives an appropriately salty fact-check of the political memes decrying the planned increase in immigration figures.

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QP: “Soviet” StatsCan

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With Justin Trudeau off to Churchill and Vancouver, Andrew Scheer also decided to be elsewhere. That left Gérard Deltell to lead off, and he immediately launched into an attack on the Statistics Canada plan to use financial transaction data. François-Philippe Champagne responded with a script about how StatsCan already deals with Canadians’ personal data appropriately, that the Privacy Commissioner was working with them, and that the Conservatives were fear-mongering. Deltell tried again, got the same answer, and when Mark Strahl took over in English, Champagne repeated his spiel in English. Strahl railed about how often there have been personal data beaches by the government, and Champagne responded by reading his points with more vigour. Strahl angrily made a point about consent, and Champagne angrily repeated his own points. Guy Caron was up next for the NDP, and demanded a GHG reduction plan. Dominic LeBlanc responded that hot air about climate change wasn’t coming from his side of the chamber, that they did have a plan that they were implementing. Caron repeated the question in French, and LeBlanc reiterated that they took the issue seriously, unlike the Conservatives. Linda Duncan trolled for support for her motion about tougher GHG targets, but LeBlanc wouldn’t indicate support, but pumped up his own party’s plan instead. Alexandre Boulerice returned Caron’s first question and Quebeckers threatening to take the government to court over climate change, and LeBlanc responded that Quebec has been a leader on climate change.

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