Tag Archives: Trans Mountain

Roundup: A fresh obvious lie

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As the messages start to sharpen as the election gets ever closer, boy howdy did Andrew Scheer decided to go all in on lying to Canadians. From a campaign stop in Fredericton, Scheer claimed that a Liberal-NDP coalition would hike the GST to seven percent, and then put out a press release claiming all kinds of other tax increases and cuts to social transfers to pay for their platform – a ridiculous figure he reached by adding the two total costs together, never mind that a) it doesn’t work like that, and b) IT WAS A COMPLETE AND TOTAL LIE. And sure, reporters called out that it was a lie, but Scheer shrugged and said it wasn’t misinformation because he didn’t trust Justin Trudeau. Erm, it doesn’t work like that. Meanwhile, the premier of New Brunswick was also at the rally, grousing that Quebec is the “favoured child” of Confederation because he wants an imaginary pipeline to flow to his province despite there being no actual economic case for it, and the inconvenient fact that his province gets far more equalization per capita than Quebec does. (Good luck with Scheer keeping most of his Quebec seats with rhetoric like this, by the way). Scheer’s tour later stopped in Beauce, where he chugged milk to troll Maxime Bernier, and Drummondville.

Justin Trudeau started his day in Whitby, where he had to refute Scheer’s latest lie, and then mumbled some stuff about maybe expanding abortion services in New Brunswick. He then made stops in Orillia, Barrie, and Vaughan. He’ll head to Calgary later tonight, so that could be interesting.

Jagmeet Singh held rallies on Vancouver Island – hoping to keep the Greens from gaining ground there – and started playing coy again about how he’d be in a hung parliament, and hand waved about the Trans Mountain Pipeline as a possible condition for support.

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Roundup: Trying to draw in the Supreme Court

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If this election could get any stupider, it did yesterday. Justin Trudeau started the day off in Sudbury, and after arriving by canoe, he promised not only to further expand the areas of land and waters that are protected areas as part of ongoing roll-out of green policies in advance of today’s “climate strike” rally, Trudeau also promised an expansion of the “learn to camp” programme, including bursaries of up to $2000 for low-income families. As someone who hates camping, this is borderline offensive – but it’s also one of the whitest of white people policies in the book. (Seriously – ask a person of colour how they feel about camping). I get that the idea is that it promotes connecting people with nature and the importance of conservation, but this was probably one of the dumbest campaign promises to date.

Andrew Scheer was not much better. From Trudeau’s riding of Papineau in Montréal, Scheer tapped into the Trumpian “Lock Her Up!” mentality by promising not only a judicial inquiry into the Double-Hyphen Affair, but also to pass a cartoonishly named No More Cover-Ups Act, which would empower the RCMP to go directly to the Supreme Court of Canada for access to Cabinet documents – all of it predicated on the lie that the RCMP are investigating the PMO (they’re not) and that they can’t get access to documents (because the Clerk of the Privy Council said no to a fishing expedition). It’s all very gross and unseemly. Not only do we not demand that the police investigate our political rivals (this isn’t a banana republic, and if the Liberals lose, then they will have faced political consequences for the Affair), but politicising judicial inquiries is a Very Bad Thing. Dragging the Supreme Court into one’s political vendettas is even worse (and I have a column on that very topic coming out later today about that very issue).

As for Jagmeet Singh, he was in Campbell River, BC to reiterate his promise to build half a million housing units, but to also flesh out his promise for income supports of up to $5000 per year for low-income renters. But again, this is provincial jurisdiction so the rental income supports will have to be a carefully designed policy, while he has yet to explain how he’ll rapidly build all of this social housing when the cities where it’s most needed are very tight labour markets, which means there likely aren’t enough construction workers to do the job, and that will drive up the costs of building these units by a lot. (Singh also completely mischaracterised the output-based system on carbon pricing as part of his trying to downplay the current government’s record, because he’s doing politics differently).

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Roundup: Underlying concerns amidst good numbers

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It was hard to miss all of the talk about the job numbers yesterday – particularly as pretty much every Liberal minister, MP and candidate started sharing pre-generated memes about how great the economy is doing under this government (with the caveat that there’s still more work to do). This, like news of much higher than expected GDP growth, are good headlines with some underlying weakness being masked, and as economist Trevor Tombe explains, those good numbers are masking some very real problems in Alberta.

The issue of young men in that province is one that I’m not sure enough levels of government are paying sufficient attention to, as the Alberta government seems to think that all that’s needed is for the oil patch to revive and it’s problem solved, but with world oil prices depressed and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, that means the prospect for these young men – many of whom are under-educated because of the lure of high-paying oil patch jobs – are not going to be good in the shorter term. That’s additionally a problem when you have a government that feeds the people a diet of lies and snake oil to keep them angry at imaginary reasons why they’re being kept down (currently Justin Trudeau), because angry young men can be a dangerous thing if allowed to fester. And for the federal government’s part, I wonder just how much their retraining programming is penetrating given that jobs they could be retraining for couldn’t necessarily match the promised paydays of oil jobs in a boom – but that becomes a problem of waiting for the next boom (where the money will get pissed away, like it does every time no matter how often they promise that this time it will be different – really!).

Some of this will come up in the election – not just the lies that Kenney and company are pushing, but the NDP and Greens are trying to make some hay here, as both want to retrain these workers for the “green economy” in some vague way, while the Greens in particular think they could put them to work capping old orphan wells as both an environmental and job-creation measure, but it’s also one that is both expensive, and if the government just starts doing this on its own, it essentially lets the industry off the hook and demonstrates that the “polluter pays” principle is for naught. Add to that, the promises of green jobs retraining falls back to the issue of some of them waiting on the promises of the bigger paydays in a future oil boom, so there is no guarantee that green jobs will be attractive to this cohort. Nevertheless, it’s good that there are at least some ideas, and we should ensure that it’s something that does get discussed during the election.

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Roundup: An expedited process

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The Federal Court of Appeal ruled yesterday that of the twelve challengers to the government’s decision to approve the Trans Mountain pipeline a second time, that they would grant leave to hear from six of them, on an expedited basis, and on the very narrow question of whether or not the government has actually complied with the previous FCA ruling, particularly when it comes to the issue of appropriate consultation with Indigenous communities as it pertains to Section 35 of the Constitution. Immediately there was a bunch of wailing and gnashing of teeth that this would be some kind of delay, and others demanded that the government start using magic wands apparently hidden in the text of the constitution (never mind that they don’t actually exist). Worth noting as well – there is no injunction against continued construction, so that will continue to ramp up in the weeks ahead as this expedited hearing gets underway.

This having been all said, there were a number of questions as to why the federal government didn’t file any materials in defence regarding those leave applications in eleven of the twelve files (though, curiously, the Alberta government did even though they’re not the defence). We didn’t get much of an answer – Amarjeet Sohi (who is not the justice minister) saying that they would mount a defence at the right time, but I have to wonder if this was simply about giving the appearance that they weren’t trying to constantly take Indigenous communities to court. Or, they may have simply felt confident that their position was self-evident, that they fulfilled the conditions from the previous FCA ruling and filing something to repeat exactly that wasn’t worth the time or energy because they didn’t think the Court would grant leave on that basis. Either way, it’s not the “rolling over” that certain opposition MPs have railed in the media about because this is a leave application, and not the actual defence.

https://twitter.com/Honickman/status/1169324576960122881

Meanwhile, energy economist Andrew Leach debunks the myths about what is holding back investment in the oilsands, and lays out the four real reasons, which are very different from what industry lobbyists and Jason Kenney are trying to sell to Canadians. Some of the big takeaways are that corporate tax cuts won’t help, and carbon pricing isn’t hurting it, never mind that those are the kinds of things that Kenney is focusing on, and it’s all snake oil – none of it will make investment come flooding back to the sector because the reasons are bigger and more complex.

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Roundup: Predictable drama, unpredictable overreach

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The outcome of yesterday’s “emergency” meeting of the Commons ethics committee was not unexpected – that the Liberal majority on the committee declined to pursue the matter, and it would go no further, while the Conservatives and NDP wailed and gnashed their teeth to the assembled media outside of the room, ensuring that their media luminaries like Lisa Raitt and Pierre Poilievre were there for the cameras instead of their regular committee members. Also predictable was Elizabeth May’s moral preening that she wanted this to be “non-partisan,” which was never going to happen. It was not unexpected that “maverick” Liberal Nathaniel Erskine- Smith would stand apart and vote to hear from the Commissioner – albeit for different reasons than the Conservatives wanted, which for Erskine-Smith was to get answers as to his thinking because Erskine-Smith is in the camp that the Commissioner got the law wrong (and he’s a lawyer, so he’s perhaps better equipped for this kind of statutory interpretation than some other critics).

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1164239833235111936

But there was one completely bonkers event that happened that should be alarming for everyone involved, which was when Lisa Raitt moved a motion to have the committee summon journalist Aaron Wherry in order to get his notes and interviews with Trudeau for his newly released book, because Raitt claims that Trudeau breached Cabinet confidence in how he detailed his meetings with Jody Wilson-Raybould. First of all, the notion that he can breach Cabinet confidence is absurd because he’s the prime minister – he can pretty much determine what he wants to keep confidential; and secondly, summoning a journalist to testify at committee is a very, very bad and stupid thing, and it’s utterly mind-boggling that Raitt didn’t see this. It’s even more egregious that Peter Kent, former journalist (and now profligate conspiracy theory monger) voted in favour of Raitt’s motion. Fortunately, the NDP had enough sense to distance themselves from this huge overreach, but it’s galling that she would even propose it in the first place. (Also ridiculous is this notion that there is some kind of criminal obstruction of justice at play, but that’s also the narrative that they’re putting forward as they performatively demand that the RCMP investigate – because calling on the RCMP to investigate your political rivals isn’t totally a banana republic move). Politics and playing to the cameras can make MPs do dumb things, but this was alarming in how far they were willing to take this to score points.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1164261091591053313

Meanwhile, Chantal Hébert reads the polls to see that the Commissioner’s report hasn’t really hurt the Liberals, meaning that pursuing this has diminishing returns for the Conservatives, and she parses what that could mean in the weeks ahead.

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Roundup: Whinging on the way out

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Once again, the brave political culture of Ottawa manifests itself with another column featuring anonymous MPs complaining to credulous columnists about how terrible their lives are, this time courtesy of John Ivison, who transcribes the miseries of Liberal MPs who aren’t running again about how everything is centralized in the PMO, that they’re being placated with busywork in committees, and the humiliation of being forced to memorize softball scripts to read in QP. And it’s all just so tiresome, because the vast majority of this is just learned helplessness.

I have increasingly less patience for this kind of anonymous whinging from MPs because they have all the power to change their situation if they wanted to do anything about it, but they instead learn to simply accept their situation even though they can change it. They don’t have to take the orders from the PMO if they think it’s humiliating or degrading. They don’t have to ask the questions prepared for them by PMO for QP – they can ask their own. The key is that they need their fellow backbenchers to back them up, and behave similarly. If you think the prime minister is going to throw a tantrum and threaten to not sign the nominations of his whole backbench, well, you’d be mistaken. They have this power. But instead they whinge to columnists about how unfair their lot in life is, never mind that they made this bed, and if they really wanted to change things, they would take back their power and stop electing leaders in quasi-presidential primaries that only serves to give them a false sense of “democratic legitimacy” at the expense of MPs. Again, they have the power to change this if they really wanted to.

As for these columnists, I would add that they need to get over this jejune notion that just letting MPs do more private members’ business will solve things. It won’t. In fact, it will probably just make things worse, because it will just bottleneck in the Senate, and MPs will spend more of their time working on these hobby horses rather than doing their actual work of holding government to account. That’s not how Parliament is supposed to work.

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Roundup: What high cost exactly?

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As people talk more and more about the upcoming election, the notion about the “high cost of living” is a theme that keeps recurring, and it’s fairly interesting because it’s something that, well, doesn’t really bear out in the data. Inflation has held relatively steady for decades now, and in the past few years has remained within the target range (between one and three percent, with two percent being what they generally aim for), and was on the low side of it for a while, briefly flirted with the high side of the target range and has been back to two percent.

As part of populist rhetoric, all parties have been trying to make this a selling feature – the Conservatives with promises to cut carbon pricing (even though that has not had a significant effect on inflation or even gas prices) and the restoration of boutique tax credits (that don’t benefit low-income people), the Liberals through the Canada Child Benefit, and the NDP through promised massive spending programmes (that have zero details on implementation). So it’s worthwhile asking just what exactly they’re referring to when they rail about the high cost of living, because it can refer to specific things that have specific solutions that they may or may not be advocating.

Housing prices are one thing that are lumped into cost of living, but isn’t really, and again, that’s very dependent on which market you happen to be in. Toronto is coming back to normal after being on a housing bubble, but Vancouver is still high in part because of housing supply. Alberta and Saskatchewan are depressed because of the oil market, but other parts of the country? Not really an affordability issue, and some plans to deal with housing affordability will just drive up prices by the amount of the incentives and not deal with the structural problems (which is what the Liberals tried to circumvent with their shared equity plan in the last budget). Essentially, when the parties start talking about dealing with the “high cost of living,” we should be pushing back and asking what, specifically, they’re referring to. There is enough populist bilge out there that means nothing and promises snake oil, so unless you can get specifics, don’t trust that they will deliver anything of substance.

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Roundup: Frivolously calling in CSIS

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Because there is nothing that the current strategic geniuses in the Conservative leader’s office won’t do to turn an issue into some kind of cartoonish conspiracy or a theatrical production, they decided yesterday to write an open letter to CSIS to demand that they open an investigation into John McCallum, citing that he was trying to direct the Chinese into interfering in the Canadian election. No, seriously.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1149729121230045185

To not put too fine of a point on this, calling in national security agencies over a partisan issue is not only highly unserious, it’s dangerous because it not only politicises CSIS, but it also fuels the current rage by those on engaging in illiberal populism of accusing those who engage in legitimate political disagreement of being treasonous. And while Lisa Raitt would take to Twitter to try and defend this with overly cute legalistic justifications, the broader point stands. Leave CSIS out of your political theatre. This should be a no-brainer. And yet…

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1149745283825315840

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Roundup: Intelligence and context

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There was a lot of flurry yesterday about supposed revelations made in Federal Court that CSIS has been spying on peaceful environmental groups. Except, people who used to be at CSIS, will tell you that’s exactly not the case. And the reporting on this hasn’t exactly helped either because it’s in a very defined frame with tropes that somewhat credulously take what these groups are saying and putting it with the redacted documents and drawing conclusions, that again, people who used to work there, will dispute, and those voices aren’t in the reporting. So here’s Stephanie Carvin and Jessica Davis, both of who used to work at CSIS, offering some proper context for what those documents say.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148217645986131969

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148217647852642304

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1148233105825812480

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https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1148235626380181505

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148301752770408448

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148222236832215040

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148230145968418817

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Roundup: Sensation over nuance

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The big headline over CBC yesterday was that five of the six most recent federal judicial appointments in the province of New Brunswick all had some kind of ties to Dominic LeBlanc – never mind how tenuous those ties were. This of course led a bunch of Conservative apologists to compare this with the Dean French/Doug Ford situation in Ontario, which is absurd given that judicial appointments have a more rigorous merit-based system around them (more rigorous than it was under the Conservative era), and many of the French/Ford appointments had to do with whether someone was connected to French by family or lacrosse, many with no obvious competences in the roles they were appointed to. The Conservatives also declared that this was somehow related to both Loblaws winning a competition around fridge refits (no, seriously), and that this was reminiscent of the Arctic surf clam contract that LeBlanc was involved in wherein the definition of “family” used by the Ethics Commissioner differed from that in other statutes. (Not mentioned was the time when the Conservatives appointed most of Peter MacKay’s wedding party to the bench in Nova Scotia).

Reading deeper into this story, I found that some of the connections that were being highlighted were a bit dubious. The most dubious was the fact that one of the judges named was not actually someone that was recently named, but rather promoted to the Chief Justice of province’s Court of Appeal by Trudeau, though she was originally a Conservative donor and had been first named to the Bench by Harper. The fact that she bought a property from LeBlanc next to his summer cottage was deemed to be curious in this. Likewise the fact that two of them were part of a group that paid off LeBlanc’s leadership campaign debts a decade ago (each would have donated a few hundred dollars) is a pretty dubious link between them. The only one that might raise eyebrows is the fact that one of the five is married to LeBlanc’s brother-in-law…but even then, at what point do we start disqualifying someone whose relation is by marriage twice-removed?

The other bit of nuance that we can’t forget here is that New Brunswick is a very small province with a very small population, and legal circles in a province like that would be very tight – especially when you consider that the provincial political culture is far more nepotistic than the federal culture is. While the CBC piece cites a paper that says that people with political connections get judicial appointments at a rate double that in other parts of the country, but one has to remember that it can be harder to avoid, which is why fighting nepotism in those places can be much harder. And this is the point where people will bring up the fact that Jody Wilson-Raybould objected to the fact that names that were short-listed needed to be sent to PMO for vetting by the Liberals’ database, but again, it needs to be stressed that they need to go through all sources to check for red flags because the prime minister is politically accountable for those appointments. It’s called Responsible Government. Does that mean that these five appointments didn’t have some influence from LeBlanc tapping the justice minister and saying he wanted them appointed? Anything is possible, but it’s unlikely given the vetting process and the fact that most of these connections are tenuous at best. But it’s also regrettable that this kind of journalism strives for sensationalism and an attempt at being gotcha than it is with nuance.

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