Tag Archives: Trade

Roundup: A few straw men and some rhetoric about immigration

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Andrew Scheer gave another one of his “economic vision” speeches yesterday, this time on the subject of immigration policy. And while it was all “yay economic immigrants,” there were still a few questionable pronouncements throughout. It should be pointed out that off the top, he made a big deal about how they don’t want racists or xenophobes in the party (in apparently contradiction to the succour they gave avowed racists when they thought they could use them to paint the Liberals as the “real” intolerant party), and invoked his belief that we’re all God’s children so nobody is inferior regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation, and if they didn’t like that, the door was that way. So there’s that.

As for the policies, they were not only deficient when it comes to detail, but there was some of his usual problems of straw man arguments and hollow promises. For example, he repeated his usual argument that privately sponsored refugees do better than government-sponsored ones, but nobody is disputing that, and nobody is arguing against private sponsorship, but there is a place for government sponsorship which has to do with the most vulnerable who need more timely relocation and who may not have private sponsorship lined up. And yet, it’s part of his dichotomy about private groups being better than government. He also vowed to stop irregular border crossings, and good luck with that, because it’s always going to happen, and unless he can also stop Donald Trump from threatening immigrants and refugees in his own country, it’s not going to stem the flow coming into Canada irregularly – it’ll just push them to more dangerous crossings. He also didn’t stop the usual rhetoric that pits immigrants against asylum seekers that this kind of vow just exacerbates, so that’s not exactly turning over a new leaf. He also promised that economic migrants would get their credentials recognised in Canada faster, but good luck with that because credentials recognition is a provincial responsibility, and the federal government has precious few levers there, and successive federal governments have tried to deal with this situation in the past and not had much success, ensuring that his promise is empty. But what was perhaps most frustrating was his talk about intake levels – and while he took a dig at Maxime Bernier for calling on them to be reduced, he also said that the level should change every year based on “Canada’s best interests,” which is a giant loophole for that same kind of talk about reducing levels for bogus reasons.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1133506929442131971

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1133508491438624769

Meanwhile, the IRB says they need more funding if they’re going to tackle the asylum claimant backlog (which again, they inherited from the Conservative government) rather than just stabilize growth, which is what they’re projecting currently – but the real kicker here is that they’re still relying on faxes and paper copies rather than emails or electronic files, because they can’t share information effectively with CBSA, which should boggle the mind. And this problem was identified a decade ago (as was pointed out by Liberal MP Alexandra Mendès at Public Accounts), and it’s still a problem. I’ve talked to immigration and refugee lawyers who say that it’s a huge frustration for them that until recently, they couldn’t even schedule hearings by email. The IRB say they’re seized with the issue, but cripes, this should be embarrassing.

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QP: Organized labour versus the media

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While Justin Trudeau was present today, Andrew Scheer was not, for whatever reason. Lisa Raitt led off and she concern trolled about Unifor being on the advisory panel to name the panel that would determine the media tax credit, to which Justin Trudeau stated that they wanted views from employers and employees, and they wanted to save the media rather than Scheer, who wanted to destroy the CBC. Raitt railed that Trudeau was undermining the credibility of journalists, to which Trudeau reminded her of the job of media, which was why both employers and employees needed to be part of the panel, before accusing the Conservatives of hating organised labour. Raitt took exception to that characterisation, and demanded to know why he didn’t do better with this file, and Trudeau reminded her of the anti-union legislation her government passed before repeating his lines about hearing from employers and employees on the panel. Alain Rayes took over in French and he repeated the demand to remove Unifor from the panel, to which Trudeau repeated his lines in French. When Rayes listed Quebec journalists “uncomfortable” with this bailout, Trudeau repeated that the Conservatives hate unions. Jagmeet Singh was up next for the NDP, and he railed about public service spending levels versus corporate funding, to which Trudeau wondered why the NDP voted against the Canada Child Benefit, which has lifted tens of thousands out of poverty. Singh tried again in French, and Trudeau listed measure they took like raising taxes on the wealthy and lowering them on the Middle Class™. Singh then demanded to pressure the American government to change the New NAFTA per the American Democrats’ demands, and Trudeau stated that they got a good deal and quoted Unifor President Jerry Dias’ praise for the deal — which led to peals of laughter from the Conservatives. Singh tried again in English, and Trudeau repeated the praise, adding in Alexandre Boulerice’s closed-door praise of the deal.

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Roundup: Independence and admissions of political ignorance

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Somewhat unexpectedly, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott each announced that they would be running as independents in the next election, eschewing the Green Party (even after Elizabeth May said that she would even step aside as leader if Wilson-Raybould was interested in the job). Both of them made speeches that were variations of the same theme – that they want to “do politics differently,” that they were tired of parties, and wanted “non-partisan” ideas and to do things by “consensus” – all of which betrayed an ongoing naiveté and lack of understanding about Responsible Government and Westminster parliaments. Talking about “cooperation” and “non-partisan” ideas, or “consensus” sounds good, but it doesn’t understand how things actually get done. Partisanship when done properly (as in, not devolved into tribalism) is about having competing ideas – which is a good thing. Add to that, “consensus” may work in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut where you have small assemblies and a cultural predisposition to it, but it’s not the same in the House of Commons with 338 MPs – not to mention that consensus demolishes the ability to hold governments to account. When everyone is responsible, then no one is accountable. And sure, the pair might decry that there is “too much power in the centre,” but I’ve said time and again that the cause and solution of centralised power in our parliament is about the way in which we choose leaders, and done in a way that gives them an imaginary “democratic mandate” that they then abuse. Having more independent MPs won’t change that – assuming that they can get re-elected on their own. (Celina Caesar-Chavannes, incidentally, said that their speeches were “inspiring” and she too is now considering running again as an independent after previously saying she planned to bow out of elected political life).

In hot takes, Andrew MacDougall assesses what kind of stars would need to line up for either Philpott or Wilson-Raybould to win as independents, with Éric Grenier crunching the numbers of past independent MP victories. Chantal Hébert considers the long-game implications for the decision to run as independents, and how it lines them up for future moves or influence if the next election results in a hung parliament. Paul Wells looks to both history and Jerry Macguire to look at the lessons that this whole quixotic independent run amounts to, and how the lessons for other MPs may just be the opposite of what Philpott and Wilson-Raybould intend.

Meanwhile in Alberta, the UCP’s House Leader wants to ban floor-crossing in the legislature, which is complete patent nonsense and an affront to our Westminster system of government. Our system is predicated on how we elect individual MPs/MLAs as individuals, not as party ciphers – no matter what your calculus is in the voting booth. That’s why we don’t elect party lists or the likes. If the UCP can’t understand that, for as much as they like to talk a big game about respecting democracy and traditions, then it shows how craven they really are. All this move does is demonstrate that they view their own party members to be drones for the leader, at which point you may as well replace them all with battle droids and be done with it.

A reminder to Philpott, Wilson-Raybould, and Nixon – all of you may want to read my book in order to get a proper grasp of how Westminster democracies actually work.

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QP: Rigging a dangerous game

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Justin Trudeau was away for Monday, but Andrew Scheer was present. Before things got underway, Elizabeth May led her new MP, Paul Manly, into the Chamber in order to take his seat. Scheer led off, demanding to know why Unifor was on the panel to help determine who gets funding for the media bailout and called it the Liberals stacking of the deck. Pablo Rodriguez said that Scheer was playing a dangerous game, and that any suggestion that journalists could be bought was insulting while the government was supporting the industry as a number of daily newspapers had closed in recent years. Scheer tried again, and got the same response, and then Scheer railed that government had not limited their own spending on ads in advance of an election, to which Karina Gould read a statement about how the government has focused their advertising and cut it in half. Steven Blaney stood up to repeat the question on Unifor being on the panel in French, and Rodriguez gave him much the same response, and they went another round of the same. Jagmeet Singh was up next for the NDP, and he demanded the government adopt their Pharmacare plan, to which Ginette Petitpas Taylor insisted that she listens to all sides and they have a national plan in the works while they have taken other measures. Singh tried again in French, got much the same response, before Singh lauded US Democrats’ attempts to change the New NAFTA, to which Chrystia Freeland insisted that they held out for a good deal. Singh tried again in English, and Freeland urged Singh to talk to some actual Canadian workers. 

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Roundup: A six-point sham

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Over the weekend, Andrew Scheer went to Calgary to further outline his “economic vision,” which included a short-term six-party plan which…does nothing about the economy. Those six parts are to scrap the federal carbon price, repeal Bill C-69, repeal Bill C-48 and end any tanker ban in northern BC, establish timelines for project approvals, end the “foreign interference” in project approvals, and invoke the constitutional authority to build major projects. Do you see a pattern here?

To be clear, these six proposals are all, well, hot air. Ending the federal carbon price won’t get energy projects built – most oil and gas companies are in favour of it. Repealing Bill C-69 won’t help because the 2012 environmental assessment legislation the Conservatives put into place just wound up in litigation, and that will continue if he reverts to it. Ending the tanker ban won’t have any measurable impact because there are no pipelines in the area, no plans for any, and if he thinks he can revive Northern Gateway then he didn’t pay attention to the reasons why the Federal Court revoked its approval. Establishing timelines for approvals? Again, nice in theory, but without a framework behind it (like Bill C-69 would ostensibly provide), it will likely mean yet more litigation. That “foreign interference” in project approvals is largely the conspiracy theories that the conservative movement is clinging to (ignoring the foreign funds that go into their own thinktanks like the Fraser Institute). And that “constitutional authority” is not a magic wand, and would only sow confusion because any project that crosses a provincial boundary is already a federally regulated project, so there’s nothing to invoke. So Scheer’s “six point plan” should perhaps better be called a “six point sham.”

Meanwhile, here’s some further analysis of Scheer’s decision to back away from his pledge to eliminate the deficit in two years, whether it’s because of Liberal warnings of austerity, the unpopularity of Doug Ford’s cuts playing out in Ontario, or the desire to try and deprive the Liberals of their talking points. But it does also take the wind out of Scheer’s own rhetoric about the evils of deficits, particularly those that are small and sustainable like the ones we’re seeing right now.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1131728209018380288

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Roundup: Harder tries to play hero again

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After hosting most of the Alberta senators to a lunch in Edmonton, Alberta premier Jason Kenney has written a letter to Senator Peter Harder, Leader of the Government in the Senate – err, “government representative,” to say that he and the leaders of the other two main parties in Alberta are willing to accept Bill C-69 if they keep it as amended by the committee. Those amendments, mind you, were largely all written by industry lobbyists, and gut much of what the bill was trying to accomplish, which was an overhaul of the environmental assessment process, because what’s on the books now (which is the process that Harper gutted in 2012) isn’t working and is only resulting in court challenges.

And Harder? Well, after his whip – err, “government liaison,” Senator Grant Mitchell, has been pushing for the bills to pass largely unamended, Harder says that he now wants to send this bill as amended back to the Commons, as well as the recommendation that Bill C-48 (the tanker ban) – though I’m not sure how that would happen given the de facto committee recommendation is that it not proceed – and let them decide whether or not to keep the amendments. Let the government deal with it – or rather, wear the decision for not accepting the amendments so that Kenney will turn his ire to Trudeau, and not the Senate. Because Harder is such a hero like that (while making up parts of his job description that don’t actually exist).

Meanwhile, former Senator Hugh Segal is taking to the pages of the Globe and Mail to warn the Senate against defeating C-48 because he says it would contradict the Salisbury Convention. *sigh* No. The Salisbury Convention doesn’t exist in Canada, no matter how many times Harder of luminaries like Segal bring it up. It’s contrary to the Constitution, we don’t have the same historical reasons for why Salisbury was adopted in the House of Lords, and it also goes against the whole notion of a more “independent” Senate. Nor is C-48 an election promise so far as anyone can gather, which is a trigger for Salisbury – if it existed (which it doesn’t in Canada). There are plenty of reasons why the Senate shouldn’t defeat C-48, but making up that it’s contrary to Salisbury isn’t one of them.

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Roundup: Rationalizing a deciding vote

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Yesterday, Independent Senator Paula Simons wrote a piece for Maclean’s to explain her vote last week that essentially ensured that the Senate’s transport committee would not vote to report Bill C-48 (the west coast tanker ban) back to the Senate without amendments. It’s a mere delay to the bill, ultimately, and it’s likely that the full Senate will vote to reject the committee report and may entertain another amendment or two at Third Reading, but I would be mighty surprised if this bill didn’t get pass largely unmolested. But as much as I do respect the good Senator, I will take exception to a few of the things she wrote in her piece.

The biggest thing I will always, always object to is when senators say that it’s not their job to defeat bills passed by the democratically elected House of Commons. That’s false – it’s absolutely their job under the Constitution – that’s why it has an unlimited veto. The question is when they should use it, and I’m not sure that this is a good example of a bill, because it doesn’t fail any particular constitutional tests (Jason Kenney’s nonsense rhetoric aside). But for as much as Simons prevaricates on the question of how appropriate it is to block bills in the newly empowered “independent” mindset of the Senate (insert more back-patting about the lack of whips here), she then says that the other tradition is to defend her region, which she did. I have reservations about this line of thinking, because it gives rise to parochialism and some of the flawed thinking that gave rise to a bogus school of thought that believed that a “Triple-E” Senate could somehow force the hand of a government with a majority in the Commons (rather than just become a repository for 105 new backbenchers). If she really were defending her region, she should remember that her region includes BC, whose northern coast the bill is intended to defend. As well, her concerns ignore the process that Trans Mountain has been undergoing for the past year – just because it hasn’t started construction doesn’t mean it won’t, and trying to provide an alternate route that was proved far more problematic in the past – witness the Federal Court of Appeal decision regarding Northern Gateway – I’m now sure that she’s doing anyone any favours by letting the rhetoric of Kenney and the oil industry dominate her thinking.

In the meantime, we should brace ourselves for another round of obnoxious talk about the “Salisbury Convention” (which doesn’t apply to Canada and never has), and about the original intent of the Senate. It won’t be edifying.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1130956002029916162

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Roundup: A weekend of Norman

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Over the course of the long weekend, there was another push about the Vice Admiral Mark Norman story, but there were some problems in how this has all been unfolding. The National Post had a longread that was the first to interview Norman and his family about the ordeal, but in the process, in focusing on making Norman a martyr to his cause, I’m not sure that they did him any favours because it did seem to make it look like he did what he was accused of doing – this, while everyone kept tweeting about how enraging this story was on Norman’s behalf.

There were other threads – General Jonathan Vance, the Chief of Defence Staff, gave a somewhat exasperated sounding interview to state that the decision to suspend Norman was his and his alone, while the Globe and Mail reported that it was the former National Security advisor to the prime minister and the former Clerk of the Privy Council – both Harper appointees, it should be noted – that called in the RCMP to investigate the leak after their own internal investigation was inclusive. This blows up the narrative of the Conservatives that it was somehow a personal vendetta to destroy Norman’s career, or that the prime minister was personally directing this – though that narrative is also about trying to match up Trudeau’s stupid misspeaking about the Norman case likely winding up in court before charges were even laid that had them trying to spin a narrative about interference. (The Conservatives, meanwhile, keep hoping that there will be more embarrassing revelations, but they don’t seem to be coming). Likewise, the attempts to insist that the government was orchestrating the withholding of documents hasn’t actually matched up with the realities of the processes involved.

But while the Post story was curious enough, I found this analysis piece by the CBC’s Murray Brewster to have its share of framing problems, in saying that the allocation of responsibility was throwing people under the bus – like Vance (never mind that he admitted it was his decision). Brewster also seems to confuse the arguments that Crown prosecutors were making with those of “senior government officials” framing the prosecution, because I have never read anything about senior officials framing the prosecution – nor have I read anything coming from government or officials framing the allegations against Norman as an issue of civilian control, which is why I always found it odd because that’s at the heart of what was being alleged. Beyond that, Brewster wonders why the Liberals aren’t asking questions of the Conservatives about how they rewrote the rules on that procurement in the first place, or why the former Conservative ministers didn’t speak to the RMCP after the charges were laid, or why Norman would stake his career on this procurement – all questions that I don’t know why the Liberals would ask. They’re a little past holding the Conservatives to account because the Conservatives aren’t in power any longer, and it would seem to me that it would be more the role of journalists asking these kinds of questions of the Conservatives, as opposed to the government – perhaps more than trying to curry sympathy for Norman.

https://twitter.com/btaplatt/status/1128335527785193472

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QP: The ascribing of dubious motives

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With Justin Trudeau in Paris, and Andrew Scheer outlining his “vision” for the economy, it was up to Candice Bergen to lead off today, and she led off with the news of the formal arrests of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, and called the prime minister a coward — and got censured for it — and demanded he do something for it. Mélanie Joly told her not to play games with their lives, and said that the minister was in touch with her counterparts and Canada’s international allies to secure their release. Bergen then pivoted to the Mark Norman case, compared his treatment to that of Omar Khadr, and demanded a personal apology by the prime minister. Diane Lebouthillier replied in French about the independence of the investigation and prosecution. Bergen said that Norman can’t tell his story because of military guidelines and demanded the government give him an exception, to which Lebouthillier responded that committees are independent, as were the others involved in the case. Pierre Paul-Hus accused Justin Trudeau of not respecting Quebec which was why they didn’t want that contract to go to the Davie Shipyard as it relates to the Norman case. Lebouthillier reminded him of the contracts that Davie has received. Paul-Hus accused the government of wanting to “destroy” Norman, and Lebouthillier reminded him again of the independence of the RCMP and public prosecutor. Peter Julian led off for the NDP, and demanded a public inquiry into money laundering, and Bill Blair noted that there were measures in the budget to combat it that the NDP voted against. Alexandre Boulerice tried again in French, got the same answer from Blair in English, before he railed about the climate emergency. Catherine McKenna stated that the government has a plan which protects jobs. Julian repeated the question in English, and got much the same response from McKenna.

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Roundup: A blow to the tanker ban bill

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The Senate’s transport committee voted last night to not proceed with Bill C-48, which bans tankers on BC’s northwest coast, but before anyone gets too excited, I would caution that it’s not the bill’s end. We just saw the Senate’s national security committee recommend changes to the gun control bill that would gut it, and those got overturned by the Senate as a whole, and I suspect we’ll see a repeat performance of that with this bill – but the Conservatives will put up a fight, and because this was one of the bills that they did not offer a final vote timeline in their agreement with the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, they will dare him to invoke time allocation on this. (I plan to write more about this in column form later).

In the meantime, Independent Senator Paula Simons was one of the deciding votes on this, and she explains it all over Twitter.

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