Tag Archives: Ukraine

Roundup: Any excuse to delegitimise the Court

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There was a big eruption yesterday after the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the mandatory minimum sentence for possession or accessing child sexual abuse materials, but nearly all of the outrage is based on the headline and not actually reading the decision, because of course it is. Who wants to actually read when you can just rage? While I would suggest you read my story on the decision (go ahead, I’ll wait), the highlights remain that the Court strongly denounced this kind of activity, that the two accused in this instance did receive sentences that met the mandatory minimum, but that the decision focused on the scope of the mandatory minimum. Essentially, it is a challenge to Parliament—if you make laws overly broad, they are vulnerable to being struck down because you risk giving a grossly disproportionate sentence to someone on certain sets of facts, so maybe craft better laws.

That of course didn’t stop the demands for the Notwithstanding Clause to come from Pierre Poilievre, Danielle Smith, Doug Ford, and Scott Moe, who charmingly added that this kind of decision is why Parliament alone should make laws. None of them bothered to actually read the decision. None of them actually thought about what it said, and why using blunt instruments can do more harm than good in certain cases. More than that, there was an immediate need to delegitimise the Court on manufactured outrage rather than accept that the Court still has to safeguard rights when Parliament doesn’t do its job properly. Oh, but wait—these are all premiers and leaders who are less interested in rights than they are in targeting and scapegoating minorities for their own political ends, so of course they want to keep the courts at bay.

Watch out! Kenney's decided to start stroking his rage-boner again!

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-11-01T02:43:07.978Z

We are at a place in this country right now where rights are under attack by populist leaders, be it Alberta, Quebec, Saskatchewan, or Ontario (though Ford is more likely to back down when actually confronted). They like to use language like “the will of the people,” which means that it becomes open season on minorities, which is antithetical to a liberal democracy like ours, and they don’t want any checks on that, which is why they take every opportunity to delegitimize the Court. This particular situation was just too easy for them to weaponise, and so they went with it, to hell with the facts. There is an outcome they want, and that is unchecked power.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-31T22:56:01.799Z

Ukraine Dispatch

President Zelenskyy says that Russia has deployed some 170,000 troops to try and claim Pokrovsk, but Ukraine is slowly whittling them away. To that end, special forces troops have been landed at the city. Meanwhile, Ukraine reports that they have successfully struck 160 Russian oil and energy facilities this year.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1984173351720440022

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Roundup: A new pipeline study—to what end?

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Ontario premier Doug Ford announced that his government would be launching a study about a potential new west-east pipeline, that could either head to existing refineries in Sarnia, or ports along the Great Lakes, Hudson Bay or James Bay. This sounds a lot like it’s going to be a waste of time and money because contrary to what Danielle Smith likes to think, the oil and gas industry has been irrevocably altered since 2014-15, and there is very little demand for these options. Enbridge isn’t going to want to strand its existing pipeline network running through the US, in spite of the arguments about energy security to build a (longer, more expensive) line on Canadian soil, and using northern ports makes no sense as they are only good for a few months of the year when demand its lower.

Energy economist Andrew Leach released a new paper yesterday that takes a look at the case for whether we need another pipeline, and it puts a lot of this in perspective. The oil market has changed since the major price drop in 2014, and American demand has fallen down a lot. While there might be a case for another pipeline to the Pacific, the timelines involved mean running the risk of stranding assets as global demand falls off. Keystone XL, if revived, is likely simply to be used for re-export at the Gulf Coast, while the eastern Canadian market is already well served, and would likely mean more transportation costs, and Alberta would see bigger discounts as compared to world prices. Danielle Smith says that the industry can double production, but that’s not what industry is saying, and more pipelines run the risk of eroding the value of oil, particularly as the rise of electric vehicles and heat pumps push down demand.

One of the other points that the paper makes is that for as much handwringing as there is about how long it takes projects, most of the delays that people point to were regulatory shortfalls and not structural delays. When proponents try to cut corners, or not do proper Indigenous consultations, that is what leads to court challenges and delays, not the actual regulatory system itself, but that’s an inconvenient narrative for certain players. These are things we need to be more cognisant of, and call bullshit on, as the drumbeat for “just one more pipeline” or even “a pipeline in every direction” get more intense.

effinbirds.com/post/7808260…

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-30T14:05:46.292Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched sustained drone and missile attacks on Ukraine’s power infrastructure early Thursday, and killed at least three people. Two others were killed in a bomb strike on a thermal power plant in Sloviansk. Ukrainian forces are bolstering their defences in Pokrovsk as Russian forces have entered the city.

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Roundup: Alberta uses Notwithstanding Clause against teachers

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The Alberta legislature sat until about 2 AM on Tuesday morning to pass their bill to end the teacher’s strike with the invocation of the Notwithstanding Clause, with time allocation limiting debate at each stage of the bill to a mere hour apiece, which makes this an affront to both parliamentary democracy, and the very notion of rights in the province given that Danielle Smith has decided there is little to fear from her tramping over them. Oh, and while the legislature was sitting until 2 AM, Smith herself was in an airport lounge on her way to Saudi Arabia.

There are too many disingenuous arguments made to justify invoking the Clause for me to rebut here, but suffice to say, merely saying that the Clause is part of the constitution therefore that justifies its use is horseshit, or that the Supreme Court of Canada invented a right to strike, therefore the Clause is justified to pushback against judicial activism is also motivated reasoning. Even more than that, Smith’s government is claiming they can’t meet the teachers’ demands because they’re too expensive is also risible—they’re the richest province in the country, but they made the choice to double down on resource royalties (whose value has been plunging) in order to cut taxes once again. This is self-inflicted, ideological, and one has to wonder when Albertans are going to wake up that their government is quite literally undermining the entire public sector in the province quite deliberately.

https://bsky.app/profile/lindsaytedds.bsky.social/post/3m4azh342fk27

Populations on whom Canadian governments have used or threatened to use the notwithstanding clause, allowing them to override Charter rights: – trans and nonbinary kids- religious minorities – homeless people – teachersedmontonjournal.com/news/politic…

— Anna Mehler Paperny (@mehlerpaperny.bsky.social) 2025-10-28T00:33:22.757Z

We’ll see what the next steps are in terms of responses, given that the teachers’ union has decided against work-to-rule, but for the moment, say goodbye to extra-curricular activities as teachers exempt themselves from them. There is talk of mass protest from other labour unions in the province, and a general strike is always a possibility. But can I just take a moment to say that those of you who are bringing out the “No Queens” stuff already to please just not. We live in a constitutional monarchy and we have a Queen, and aping American protests is lazy and gauche. Find a different slogan.

Guys. Come on.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-10-28T12:56:29.934Z

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— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-28T21:22:02.896Z

Ukraine Dispatch

President Zelenskyy says that he won’t cede land in any future peace talks, just in case you were wondering.

https://twitter.com/KI_Insight/status/1983180684031349128

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Roundup: Only premiers can make pharmacare happen

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The Star takes a deep dive into the notion of pharmacare as a nation-building project, instead of just thinking of mines, pipelines or other major infrastructure, and it’s an interesting piece to read. This being said, it once again ignores the problem of the premiers in the equation, which is starting to feel like a pattern for a newspaper that actually has the resources and the bench depth in their Queen’s Park bureau to actually take on this state of affairs. You can’t look at an issue that is almost entirely squarely within an area of provincial jurisdiction, whether that’s pharmacare or bail courts, and then ignore provincial culpability, and yet, this is what keeps happening in legacy media.

As for the pharmacare issue, yes, there are plenty of good arguments to be made for a universal single-payer system, and yes, the Liberals did spend years trying to build up this system on the back-end before the NDP made this a condition of their supply-and-confidence agreement, and put in the work of doing things like establishing the Canadian Drug Agency and getting an agreement with PEI off the ground for a full co-pay system (because they had no provincial drug plan), but that went entirely unrecognised as the NDP demanded a useless piece of legislation that tried to do things backwards, to legislate before an agreement had been made with provinces, and this is what the media kept their focus on, in particular because the NDP made such a dog-and-pony show about it, while at the same time, refusing to call out their provincial counterparts who actively resisted signing onto a federal pharmacare programme. Former BC premier John Horgan was particularly vociferously opposed, but did Jagmeet Singh, Don Davies or Peter Julian say a gods damned word about it? Nope.

Premiers have been allergic to this issue for decades now, because they don’t want to have to pay for one more thing, particularly as they are trying to starve the existing healthcare system in the hopes that they can privatise it to relieve themselves of the burden of paying for it. But nobody wants to hear that. They’d rather blame the federal government for supposedly under-funding (they don’t), or that they aren’t working hard enough to get a pharmacare deal with the provinces when the Trudeau government worked for years before NDP made their demands, and got an extremely limited agreement and called it a win. And premiers continue to be let off the hook.

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— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-27T13:08:08.642Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukrainian forces are reinforcing positions in Pokrovsk as some 200 Russian troops have infiltrated the city in small groups. A UN inquiry has found that Russians have been using drones to hound and hunt down civilians who live near the front lines.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1982823855799554100

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Roundup: An “explainer” that ignores provincial culpability

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The Star had a supposed explainer piece on bail reforms over the weekend, which talked a lot about over-incarceration, and poorly explained stats about certain offenders being out on bail with no context as to the charges they were facing prior to the alleged second offence, but absolutely nothing about the actual problems that the system faces, which is the continued and pervasive under-funding of courts by provinces, and Ontario most especially. It’s absolutely maddening how an explainer piece can lack that whole entire and most vital piece of the supposed puzzle. (It’s not a puzzle).

Part of the problem is who the reporter spoke to, being the “balanced” choices of the Toronto Police Association and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. The CCLA is just fine, because they provided a lot of relevant points about lack of data that means we don’t actually have any proper information on reoffences on bail, or anything like that (because—wait for it!—provinces have refused to fund that data collection). But police associations, by and large, are not credible sources. (Police associations, by and large, exist to protect bad apples within police forces, and remain a huge problem when it comes to reforming police services). There was nobody from the broader legal community interviewed for this piece, neither Crown nor defence counsel, who could have explained the resourcing issues. Am I biased because I write for legal publications? A little, but the perspective from my piece on bail reform differs vastly from the “explainer” in the Star for that very reason.

This is one of the most quintessential policy issues of our times where provincial underfunding is having an outsized impact on the system in question, this being the justice system, and it keeps getting ignored by the vast majority of legacy media, while the federal minister is behaving naively when he says that his provincial counterparts say they understand the problems in the system. But the problem is them, and their governments not funding the system. They like to complain that the problem is the Criminal Code, or that judges are being too lenient, but no, the problem is the provincial funding, and no changes to the Criminal Code will ever change that. And for yet another legacy media publication to ignore this, and let the provinces off the hook yet again, is beyond irresponsible.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-25T21:10:02.092Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian attacks on Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk killed four and wounded at least twenty early Saturday, while attacks early Sunday wounded at least 29 in Kyiv.

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Roundup: Terminating talks (but there is no deal to be had)

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The day was largely dominated by the fallout of Trump’s declaration that he was terminating negotiations with Canada in the wake of that Reagan ad after the Reagan Foundation—which is being run by a Trump loyalist—falsely claimed that the material was misleading and that it was used without permission. It was neither misleading, nor is permission required for presidential speeches (transcript here). Doug Ford had insisted that he was going to keep airing them, and Wab Kinew egged him on while David Eby said that BC was preparing similar ads of their own. But then Ford had a conversation with Mark Carney and decided to back down on the ads as of Monday (which means they will still run over the weekend, during the first two games of the World Series).

https://bsky.app/profile/emmettmacfarlane.com/post/3m3wzidltvs24

Meanwhile, Trump’s loyalists are on American TV badmouthing Canada, saying that we’re not collegial and difficult to work with, when what they mean is that we haven’t unilaterally capitulated to them like everyone else has, which is a problem for them. The point has also been made that while there seems to be a strategy at play to try and energize the Reaganite Republicans against the MAGA Republicans, this is ultimately a losing strategy because the Reaganites have long-since capitulated and have no energy or will to have that fight, so Canadians trying to make that their strategy seems self-defeating in the long run.

The thing is, there is no deal to be had with Trump, and never has been. This was never about ads—it was about finding an excuse to end the negotiations, because this was never about a trade deal, but about trying to dictate terms of our economic capitulation. Trump ending negotiations just rips that band-aid off—we need to stop pretending that there is an achievable end-goal here, or that we can somehow get a better deal when there are no deals to be had—only capitulation. Carney needs to send the signal to Canadian industry that we can’t count on things returning to status quo, and wasting our time trying to get to that outcome because it won’t happen, and everyone is better off spending their energy and capital transitioning to whatever is next.

https://bsky.app/profile/emmettmacfarlane.com/post/3m3wxv2byos24

Trump is posting on Truth Social that he's terminating negotiations with Canada over a "fake" ad criticizing tariffs (that was run by Ontario, and which isn't fake.)It's all theatre. There was never a deal to be gotten. Trump just wants to claim victory. #giftlink www.thestar.com/opinion/cont…

— Justin Ling (@justinling.ca) 2025-10-24T12:12:12.132Z

I broke things down further here.I'm starting to think we're wrong to even say that Trump's trade negotiations are getting "deals." They're not deals. They're the terms of other countries' economic capitulation. #giftlinkCanada is lucky not to have signed!www.thestar.com/opinion/cont…

— Justin Ling (@justinling.ca) 2025-10-24T12:23:27.974Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia claims to have taken control of three more villages—one in Kharkiv, one in Donetsk, and one in Dnipropetrovsk regions. President Zelenskyy was at a coalition of the willing meeting in London, calling for deep-strike weapons, and saying that Ukraine will need to find a way to produce more of its own air defences.

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Roundup: Jivani’s tour for disaffected young men

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Something that has gone largely unnoticed has been Conservative MP Jamil Jivani’s campus tours, modelled after the late fascist Charlie Kirk’s campus tours that were deemed essential to youth outreach for Trump’s MAGA movement. There has been some acknowledgement that under Poilievre, the Conservatives have been attracting a lot of disaffected young men, but as Jivani’s little campus tour is showing, this is much more explicitly about disaffected young white men, who are tired of being confronted about the concept of toxic masculinity, who don’t think that they can speak freely, and who can’t find jobs.

If anything, there is some bitter irony in Jivani cultivating this particular demographic because he has been beating the anti-DEI drum that Poilievre has appropriated from the MAGA cult, but part of this tour is about getting these young white men to present themselves as the real victims. To suggest that they need special policies to address their needs is pretty hard to square with the whole cry about “merit” that is supposed to replace DEI. If they need special programs, then they are not able to get ahead by merit alone, no? Of course, we know that the real reason why they want to eliminate DEI is precisely because they can’t compete based on merit, so they want to return to a system that systemically discriminates against those who are deserving but can’t get a fair shake.

This of course gets to the real issue in play—that these rallies are attracting groups who are Diagolon-aligned, and whose talk about “remigration” is code for ethnic cleansing. Sure, Jivani can tell them that it’s “complicated,” but this is not a group that believes in nuance. The fact that Jivani can’t denounce that kind of rhetoric but instead tries to mollify it is an indictment about where the Conservative party is headed in this country. Someone remarked that this is no longer the party of Stephen Harper. Unfortunately, it’s becoming the party of Donald Trump, whether they want to believe it or not, and that’s a very terrifying prospect for where things could be headed in this country, because there is no “good parts only” version that they think they can achieve.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-23T21:27:02.365Z

Ukraine Dispatch

An attack on Kyiv overnight Wednesday wounded nine people. Two Ukrainian journalists were killed by a Russian drone in Kramatorsk, while an investigation has been launched into Russian soldiers killing five civilians in a village in the Donetsk region.

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Roundup: Poilievre’s second backtrack attempt

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Still under fire for his comments about Justin Trudeau and the “despicable” leadership at the RCMP, Pierre Poilievre has been forced to backtrack a second time. The first was his tactic of issuing clarifications only to media outlets and not his social media or party channels, and that didn’t mollify people, so this time he held a media availability and insisted that he didn’t say what we all heard him say, and then sent his MPs out to do media to also overly parse what his language was, and to try and spin it to say something other than what we all heard him say, and to insist that what we all heard him say was out of context. (It was not). He is now claiming that he didn’t say Trudeau should be jailed—only that he “clearly” broke a law that would impose jailtime (even though it was not clear he broke said law), and that clearly isn’t the same thing. Kind of like how they’re not scapegoating immigrants, they’re just criticising Liberal immigration policy (wink).

Meanwhile, members of his caucus are getting restive, and while they all made a big show of publicly supporting him, several have been quietly talking to media outlets about their dissatisfaction. While some are saying they’re undecided if they want to vote for him continuing in the leadership review, I also suspect that there are very few Conservatives in the caucus who have the spine or the intestinal fortitude to actually vote against him, no matter how inappropriate the comment, because there are precious few MPs in any party who would dare stand against their leader and face the wrath of having their nomination papers go unsigned.

Carney Speech

Prime minister Mark Carney gave a speech last night that was intended as a kind of pre-budget positioning, but also a kind of victory lap to pat themselves on the back for all of the work they’ve been doing since the election. Carney promised that the budget was going to unleash all kinds of private sector investment, but I also feel like we’ve been hearing that refrain for the past two decades and not a lot of it has really materialized. He said he wants to double non-US exports over the next decade. He spoke about “betting big,” and getting back to a culture of doing big things, but the thing about that kind of talk is that it ignores the people who were impacted by that, most particularly Indigenous people who were displaced or exploited in the process. He said that this is going to take more than a few months and can’t happen overnight, but he also talked about “sacrifices,” particularly as he talks about cutting government spending.

My problem with this particular rhetoric is that he never quite makes it clear who will be making those sacrifices, and you can be damn sure it’s not CEOs or rich white dudes. In fact, you can pretty much set your watch by the fact that the “sacrifices” are going to be on the backs of women’s programmes, queer/trans people and other minority groups whose funding is going to be slashed to nothing, it’s going to be the poor who will find that programming designed to assist them will be gone (but hey, they’ll get their benefits thanks to automatic filing, whenever that actually happens). We’ve seen this happen time and again, and the cycle of time is coming around once again, and Carney is making no move to stop it and finding a new path.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-22T22:02:55.404Z

Ukraine Dispatch

The fairly massive attack early Wednesday targeted several cities and killed six, including two children, as a kindergarten was struck. Russia claims it took two more villages in Donetsk region. Sweden has signed a letter of intent about supplying 150 Gripen fighter jets to Ukraine.

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Roundup: More than just the CRA in the Auditor General’s gaze

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It was Auditor General Day yesterday, and boy were there some doozies. Pretty much all of the media attention was focused on the CRA audit, and the finding that call centres pretty much didn’t answer the phones, and when they did, they only gave correct information about seventeen percent of the time in the calls the Auditor General’s office made—yikes! The government is quibbling with the methodology, because of course they are, but also calling the report “constructive criticism” instead of “scathing,” and because these are the Liberals, François-Philippe Champagne thundered that the “good news” was that they had already started their one-hundred-day action plan to fix things without waiting for the report. (No, seriously—he declared this to be “good news” in Question Period). That said, when pressed about whether inadequate staffing was a problem, and what the coming civil service cuts were going to mean, the Secretary of State, Wayne Long, had no answer for it, which you would think is a pretty important detail considering just how embarrassing this is for the government. He also had no answers as to why things deteriorated this badly under the Liberal watch, and just kept saying that he was appointed on May 13th. Come on.

But there were plenty of other reports that were also not good:

  • There are plenty of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, not the least of which is because Shared Services Canada still can’t do their jobs properly since they were established under Harper.
  • Military housing is tremendously inadequate and much of it in a state of disrepair, and housing for single members is needed most especially.
  • Military recruitment is a gong show, and they couldn’t even ask why twelve out of every thirteen applicants abandoned their application.
  • There are still barriers to ending the remaining boil water advisories on First Nations reserves, even though they’ve been at this for a decade, and half of previous AG recommendations still haven’t been implemented.

The good news is that most of the legacy media outlets actually sent reporters to do reporting on these reports rather than just relying on CP wire copy, but really, only the CRA story got attention in QP and on the evening talking head shows, which is too bad because there was plenty more to talk about. But that’s indicative of the state of media these days.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-21T14:08:04.164Z

Ukraine Dispatch

There was a Russian attack on Kyiv overnight. Ukraine struck a Russian chemical plant with its newly acquired Storm Shadow missiles, which was a key supplier of gun powder and rocket fuel.

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Roundup: Fixing CPC nomination races?

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Word has been obtained by the Globe and Mail that the Conservative Party plans to change their nomination processes after riding associations have been making their objections known to the central party about the way those races were handled in the lead-up to the election. You may recall that there were a number of sudden disqualifications, or where would-be candidates had spent months fundraising and selling memberships only for someone else to be parachuted into the riding as candidate in their place, leading to a few of them deciding to help the Liberal in the riding instead because of such a betrayal by their party.

While it sounds good that the party is hearing these complaints and planning to make changes, we’ll see what changes they end up implementing, because this is something that all parties are failing on. Grassroots nomination races are supposed to be the place where the local party members can most influence the party by selecting who they want on the ballot, but it’s also a place where they should be able to hold the incumbent accountable for their actions (or inaction), and replace them on the ballot if they so choose. But increasingly, parties have been protecting incumbents under the dubious rhetoric that they’re too busy in Ottawa to run in an open nomination, or that it somehow prevents mischief when sometimes that means thwarting the will of a local membership base that is dissatisfied.

If the Conservatives re-commit to transparent, open nominations, that’s a good thing for democracy, which is something that the Liberals most especially right now are failing at (thanks especially to rules that Trudeau pushed through when he revamped the party’s constitution to centralise power under the dubious excuse of needing to be more “nimble.”) But I also don’t hold out too much hope that these rules will be the grassroots rules we should have, because too many party leaders have come to depend on being able to put a thumb on the scales of nomination races to get their preferred candidates into caucus, even though that has created more problems in the long run than it solved.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-18T14:08:03.467Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian forces attacked a coal mine in southeastern Ukraine on Sunday, but there were no fatalities. It turns out that during that meeting at the White House last week, Trump was back to using Russian propaganda and demanding Ukraine surrender the entire Donbas region.

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