Tag Archives: Ukraine

Roundup: Another far-right defeat

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The news out of France this weekend was that the far-right was not the victors in their legislative elections, but rather that the left-wing alliance came in with the highest seats, followed by Emmanuel Macron’s centrists, denying the far-right the victory they had been hoping for. This isn’t great for Macron in that his prime minister has resigned and he will have a hard time getting his agenda through the National Assembly, but nevertheless, his gamble did somewhat pay off in that he thwarted the far right from making any further advances. This, along with the fact that Labour won a resounding victory in the UK days earlier, has plenty of people talking about how hopefully the US and Canada will be next to reject the far-right. I am not wholly mollified.

The US remains the big question mark, particularly given all of the attention on president Biden’s fitness to carry on for another term, and we cannot get too complacent here in Canada. While our own far-right is still marginal, the bigger danger remains that the Conservatives continue to try and court those far-right actors and are increasingly taking pages out of the authoritarian playbook. Nevertheless, the Elder Pundits in this country insist that there’s nothing to see here, that things can’t be that bad under Poilievre, or that the concerns of women or LGBTQ+ people are mere exaggerations. They’re not, and we can’t let our guard down at this critical juncture.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukrainian forces shot down three out of six missiles fired by Russia over the central regions of the country. Russian drones hit an energy facility in the Sumy region on Saturday. Ukrainian drones hit a munitions depot inside Russian territory, causing a massive explosion. Russians claim that Ukrainians were thwarted trying to hijack one of their strategic bombers, but there is no verification of that claim.

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Roundup: Impossible to extrapolate

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As with so many elections these days, it brings out the electoral reform fetishists, and they get self-righteous and say dumb things all over social media, and this week’s general election in the UK is no different. And lo, those fetishists are again making pronouncements about things like “voters’ wishes” because they’re trying to find a grand narrative that confirms their priors, and I fear I may lose my gods damned mind over this.

Once again, let us remember what this election is—650 separate and simultaneous elections, each one for a specific seat. So yes, the voters’ wishes are reflected because they chose who filled each seat. As well, I will once again remind you that the so-called “popular vote” is a logical fallacy because there is too much variation between each electoral contest to make any kind of grand aggregate that is meaningful—particularly in the UK, where the smaller countries have regional parties that England doesn’t, and yes, that does distort the “national picture” (as what happens in Canada with the Bloc). And no, every vote that is cast does not deserve their own seat. That’s not democracy, and it’s actually sore loserism if you believe that your vote doesn’t count if the person or party you prefer doesn’t win.

This is the other aspect of these fetishists spouting off and producing their own graphs of how they claim that Parliament “should” look if they had a PR system, erm, except they seem to always insist that it would be pure-PR (which is almost entirely unlikely), and it discounts that voting behaviour would change, but so would party formation under a system that no longer rewards big-tent brokerage in favour of post-election negotiation for coalitions. In no possible way can you extrapolate a vote like Thursday’s and come up with what a Parliament “should” look like, but that won’t stop the fetishists from trying.

Oh, and if one of these fetishists also tries to bring up lines about how the current single-member plurality system is “bad for democracy,” I’m not sure that PR is having a great run right now, as it legitimizes far-right and extremist parties that is almost impossible under SMP, and that legitimacy afforded to them is allowing them to grow across Europe. The situation in the Netherlands is also cause for concern, given that the far-right parties there have taken months to try to cobble together some sort of working coalition and may prove completely unworkable or ungovernable, and that’s not good for anyone.

Ukraine Dispatch

The Russian advance toward Toretsk in the Donetsk region means that time is running out for any Ukrainian citizens that want to flee. While Ukraine managed to destroy all 32 Russian drones launched Friday night, early Saturday morning was another story—drones hit an energy facility in Sumy, and hits on Selydove and Komar killed eight combined. Meanwhile, the head of Ukraine’s navy says that Russia has  nearly re-based all of its combat-read warships from occupied Crimea, because of the number of successful Ukrainian strikes on the region.

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Roundup: It’s not logistically impossible

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For the past week-and-a-half, it has been nothing but handwringing over the Toronto—St. Paul’s by-election results, and the demands that Justin Trudeau either step aside, or to at least meet with his caucus. I took a full week for Trudeau to finally take questions from the media and said that he’s “committed” to staying on the job. And in response to the demands for an in-person caucus meeting now and not in September, Trudeau said he’s having one-on-one conversations with members of the caucus, and some of them are saying he needs to change “key players.”

And then comes along Liberal caucus chair Brenda Shanahan, who insists that it’s “logistically impossible” to have an in-person caucus meeting before September, to which I call bullshit. MPs can all get on a plane to Ottawa at any point, even if it means they have to cancel a barbeque appearance at some point. It’s not impossible, it’s a choice, and that choice is to not respect the members of the caucus, because frankly the leader doesn’t feel the need to be afraid of caucus because we have trained MPs to believe the falsehood that they are powerless and that the leader can push them around. That’s not actually true, and the caucus collectively has the power to vote non-confidence in the leader if they actually had the intestinal fortitude to do so. But therein lies the problem.

I’m also going to point out that all of the breathless reporting on Thursday about Chrystia Freeland saying that the Cabinet is fully behind Trudeau—of course they’re fully behind him. If they weren’t, they’d be out of a job. This isn’t rocket science, guys.

In case you missed them:

  • My weekend column where I talked to the author of the book Theatre of Lies about the situation we find ourselves in Canadian politics and what to do about it.
  • My column points out that one of the problems the Liberals face is how they choose their leaders, and that a proper Westminster system would have solved this by now.
  • My Loonie Politics Quick Take wonders just what Danielle Smith thinks she wants to “opt out” of around dental care.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukrainian forces shot down 21 out of 22 Russian drones overnight Thursday. Ukrainian troops were forced to retreat from one neighbourhood in Chasiv Yar after their defensive positions were destroyed, risking further casualties. A Russian missile strike in Odesa killed a woman, while a guided bomb in Kharkiv region killed a man. Russians have started targeting Ukrainian air bases in advance of the delivery of F-16 fighter jets. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán went to Kyiv for a frosty meeting as Hungary assumes the rotating presidency of the EU. Orbán then headed to Moscow, no doubt to get fresh orders from Putin.

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Roundup: Electoral reform tries to take the spotlight

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In addition to the constant wanking of pollsters and polling analysts, while the Elder Pundits continue to pronounce the end of Justin Trudeau’s political career, there has been an entire sub-category of commentary that is trying to tie this by-election loss to the failure to enact some kind of electoral reform, even though Trudeau has won two elections since then. Justin Ling wrote up a whole op-ed about this for the Star yesterday, given that the 84 candidates on the by-election ballot were because of a tantrum by electoral reform group to use the stunt to call attention to Trudeau’s broken promise. And Ling makes some wild assertions along the way.

This notion that MPs are more beholden to the party than to their constituents would not be fixed by changing the electoral system. In fact, the current system is the one that most empowers MPs to be beholden to their constituents, as most PR systems rely on party votes, and party lists to fill “proportional” seats, and that makes those MPs even more beholden to the leader because they don’t have the connection to a riding as a result. That’s an even worse outcome, and hands even more power to the leader to centralise, worse than they already do. The ability to be independent under such a PR system is even less than under the current system, so I have a hard time fathoming why anyone thinks that this solves any of those problems.

The current dysfunction that Ling complains about in the piece is not a result of the electoral system—it’s because of the perverse incentives that have developed, compounded by the Trump Effect, that have made rational discourse impossible because everything is about driving engagement over social media, not in the Houses of Parliament. Changing the electoral system wouldn’t change that—in fact, it could make it worse as parties fragment and fragile coalitions emerge that rely on extremists to play kingmaker, forcing parties to behave in even more outrageous fashions. Electoral reform doesn’t solve problems—it takes an existing set of problems and replaces them with a new set of problems. Resurrecting this debate in order to once again flog this dead horse is not helping anyone, and if anything, is just distracting from the actual frank conversations that parties need to be having amongst themselves with their members about how to meet the moment to solving the problems this country faces. PR won’t make that happen, and we have to stop entertaining the notion that it somehow will.

Programming Note: I’m taking the long weekend fully off of blogging, as well as a few days next week in order to work on another project.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukrainian forces say that they have forced Russian troops out of part of Chasiv Yar. Some Ukrainian commanders are complaining that the Canadian-built Senator armoured vehicles aren’t built for off-road capability, break down too often, and aren’t well suited for the front lines. With the EU security pact now signed, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on European allies to fulfil their promises around arms and supports.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1806344642041917773

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1806321424446951489

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Roundup: Nothing to opt out of

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Breaking through the endless wank-a-thon of the pundit class declaring that Justin Trudeau needs to go was a story where Danielle Smith had sent a letter to Trudeau declaring that Alberta will “opt out” of the dental care plan, and that they want to negotiate “compensation” that they would apply to their own provincial low-income dental assistance programme, but this seems to completely misunderstand how the programme works. It is very literally an insurance programme. Dental offices bill Sun Life through a portal, and the federal government then reimburses Sun Life. Yes, the rollout was poor and confused (because the whole implementation of this programme has been a bit of a gong show, thanks entirely to the NDP), but this is not a federal transfer programme. There is nothing to compensate the province for because this is a 100 percent federal insurance scheme.

The reason it’s structured this way is because the NDP demanded, as part of the Supply and Confidence Agreement, that this needed to be a fully federal programme, and not cost-shared like early learning and child care, and because dental care is ostensibly provincial jurisdiction, it had to be structured as insurance, and the model they would up choosing was to get Sun Life to do it, and they just pay Sun Life, rather than stand up a federal bureaucracy to administer this. This should have been a federal-provincial transfer so that provinces could bolster their existing dental programmes to federal guidelines, but no. As a result, I don’t see just what Smith can “opt out” of, let alone be compensated for.

Of course, federal health minister Mark Holland didn’t help matters by going on Power & Politics and not explaining how the programme works, and instead suggested that she could opt out if she could guarantee the same or better coverage, but again, opt out of what? The province isn’t billing Sun Life. They are out of the equation entirely, and Holland should have pointed this out, rather than just trying to sound conciliatory and saying he doesn’t want a fight, and repeating the same lines about how many tens of thousands of seniors have availed themselves of the programme to date. Smith doesn’t appear to understand how the programme works, and has created a strawman around it to make it look like she’s standing up to Trudeau (at the expense of her population), and claiming they already have a great dental care programme and that this is duplicative (it’s not—the Alberta programme covers very few people and is a burden to administer).

There is an added issue here with how the media have covered this. CBC, CTV, The Canadian Press, all ignore the programme structure and just retype Smith’s letter, and then get comments from the provincial dental association about either their disagreement on the federal programme or some minor pushback about Smith’s comments about the existing provincial programme, but the fact that this is an insurance company where the dentists bill Sun Life and the province has no involvement at all is a pretty crucial part of the story, which nobody mentions. This should not be rocket science, and this would show that Smith is engaging in bad theatre, but of course they don’t do that, and readers are being given a disservice as a result.

Ukraine Dispatch

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited troops on the front lines in the eastern Donetsk region. Zelenskyy is expected to sign a security agreement with the EU later today.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1805883881356186102

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Roundup: Pledging to do things differently—really!

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If by some chance you managed to survive the complete and utter wank-fest of pollsters, poll analysts and Elder Pundits doing the media rounds yesterday without straining your eyeballs as they rolled endlessly, well, good for you. Just don’t expect anything but this to dominate the media landscape for the next several weeks to come, because going into this, the Elder Pundits declared that this was a sign that Trudeau needs to go, and they feel themselves perfectly vindicated, and they want you to know it. (Such a healthy media ecosystem we have in this country). So, while the entrails of this by-election get picked over, expect nothing but demands for a leadership review (which the Liberal Party’s constitution only allows for after a general election loss), for Trudeau to step down, and for successor chatter to spin up, with Mark Carney’s name all over the place in spite of all evidence to the contrary. (Gretchen, stop trying to make Mark Carney happen. It’s not going to happen).

Of course, Trudeau isn’t going to step down. He has convinced himself that he’s the one who can stand up to Poilievre, and that he wants to keep doing the work. Justin Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland and Karina Gould were all making the point that they have to listen more and work harder to regain trust, but the one that stuck out for me the most was Gould telling Power & Politics that they need to “do things differently,” but therein lies the problem with Trudeau. They don’t do things differently, starting with the fact that Katie Telford is still on the job and hasn’t decided that she needs to do something more with her life that just this, and being the central person by which everything flows (becoming part of the bottleneck of files this government needs to address). They are still communicating the same way after having been told time and again that it’s hindering them, and the most they’ve done is get some Gen Z staffers to put them in cringey TikToks (from their personal phones!) in addition to the same pabulum that they keep feeding us. They continue to pat themselves on the back for declaration over actions to implement those declarations. I get that they are trying to say the right things right now, but I have yet to see any desire on the part of Trudeau to do things differently, and maybe that should be the lesson here.

And in reaction, we have Susan Delacourt pointing out why this becomes a problem for Poilievre’s expectations management. Jen Gerson mockingly declares Trudeau to be dead in the water, because of course she does. Paul Wells also makes the observation that Trudeau will espouse making changes but won’t, and will just keep doing what he’s been doing the whole time.

Ukraine Dispatch

The shells obtained by the Czech initiative are starting to arrive in Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia exchanged 90 prisoners of war. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed an International Criminal Court warrant for two more Russian military leaders.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1805173797705728292

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Roundup: Getting Stuff Done?

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While everyone concerned themselves last night with the ice hockey and the by-election, I thought there was an interesting tweet out that deserved a bit more consideration.

Usher is not wrong here. The early focus on “deliverology” fell to the wayside and the Liberals stopped measuring the number of promises that they had fulfilled, and which ones they could not fulfil or which ones they were abandoning (such as the promise around electoral reform, which was a dumb promise to have made, and where the committee process around it resulted in a hot garbage report that was functionally useless other than to prove it was a dumb promise to have made in the first place). But it’s also cultural. Paul Wells has observed that the Liberals are increasingly made up of the kinds of people who go to leadership conferences, but who haven’t really accomplished much else. Once upon a time, they were people who had built things and a record of professional accomplishment, but now it’s mostly people who just talk about doing things without actually doing them. And it’s a fair observation, but also points to a broader malaise in Canadian culture, where as a country we’re building fewer things while MBAs manage what we have, and wealth funds acquire companies and then strip them for parts until they’re forced to declare bankruptcy. You can’t pin that entirely on the Liberals, but Getting Stuff Done is proving a challenge for this government, and they should put some energy on doing that rather than just churning out some more communications pabulum.

And to make the point about Pwning for Pwning’s Sake, here’s Andrew Scheer wishing the country had fallen into a full-blown recession, because reasons.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian missiles struck Pokrovsk in the eastern Donetsk region, killing at least five people and wounding at least 41 others. A Russian missile also struck a storage facility in Odesa, injuring three. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that Ukraine has hit over 30 Russian oil refineries and depots thus far. Zelenskyy also ordered a purge of the country’s state guard after an assassination plot was uncovered. And today is the day that the EU begins membership talks with Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1805173797705728292

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Roundup: A first step in breaking up the RCMP?

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RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme was making media rounds this weekend, and said something interesting about how the government is planning to make changes to the structure of the RCMP, and to separate out the federal policing role (which the RMCP has not been doing a very good job of) while leaving the contract policing with provinces intact (more or less). Having a separate and dedicated federal policing agency would be a good thing, because then maybe it can be properly resourced and staffed to do the work that they’re supposed to be doing, rather than the money and personnel all being sapped by the contract policing wings. This could mean a more specialised police force for those roles, which are different than front-line policing.

This being said, I’m not sure that this is a solution to much, because maintaining the RMCP for their contract policing duties is not going to solve many problems because the Force is toxic and broken, and needs a radical overhaul that I don’t think is going to be possible from within the organization. Part of the problems that it has are because of its centralised nature, and sending officers fresh from training at Depot to parts of the country they have absolutely no familiarity with, and that creating its own source of problems. I get why the federal government wants to keep it around (aside from the branding of the Red Serge), which is that they basically subsidise the police forces of those provinces that use them, but that’s part of the problem, and it’s part of a hard conversation that should be had federally.

Incidentally, Duheme also says he hopes that no MP releases any names of possibly compromised MPs from the NSICOP report under the cover of Parliamentary privilege, for what it’s worth.

Ukraine Dispatch

At least one person was killed and eleven wounded in a Russian aerial attack on Kharkiv, while Russian authorities are claiming dozens of wounded from debris from a Ukrainian missile shot down over occupied Crimea. Russians also attacked a residential area of Kyiv, and energy facilities in the country’s southeast and west. Here is a look at midsummer festivals in Ukraine, with their pagan roots, and how this is seen as resistance as Russians try to erase Ukrainian culture.

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Roundup: Provinces learned they can underfund disaster management

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The House of Commons’ national defence committee tabled their report on disaster management earlier this week, and one of its recommendations is for a permanent civilian federal disaster management force that can be deployed for wildfires, floods, hurricanes, or other natural disasters—but they stopped short of recommending a Canadian FEMA, which may not be possible given that this is constitutionally largely an area of provincial jurisdiction, and would require some kind of provincial agreement to operate, and because this is Canada, the provinces would want some kind of say in its operations but wouldn’t want to pay for it, because of course.

One of the problems we’re dealing with as a country is that we’re dealing with the Canadian Forces being at their capacity and they are constantly being asked to deal with disaster management across the country because provincial capacity maxes out too soon. But why does provincial capacity max out? Because they keep cutting funds or under-investing, and creating these situations because they know that regardless of what happens, they can simply call up the federal government to ask them deploy the Canadian Forces, and even more to the point, that they can do it for free because the federal government won’t ask for reimbursement even though they are entitled to. And this has wound up teaching the premiers that there are pretty much no consequences for their under-investing or even cutting the funding for this kind of emergency management, so they are incentivized to rely on the Canadian Forces to do the work for them for free, and now we have reached the end of that being possible.

So, what is the solution? I am wary of the notion of building up a federal force because even if they can manage to get provincial agreements, staff it up (because you would be drawing from the same pool as the Canadian Forces, which has a recruitment and retention crisis), and even if they paid for all of it (which they shouldn’t), this will exacerbate the existing problem of provinces not funding or bolstering their existing forces that are their constitutional responsibility because there will still be a federal backstop. And if the federal government starts asking for reimbursement, either for the use of the Canadian Forces or this hypothetical future force, then the media will be aghast that the federal government is making the province pay in their time of need, completely ignoring that the provincial under-funding created the situation in the first place. We’re at a bit of a rock and hard place, because we have let federalism break down like this, and that’s not good for the country.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian guided bombs struck the Eastern settlement of Selydove, killing two. Ukrainian forces captured a Russian “barn” tank that has been modified to protect against drone attacks. Ukraine launched a drone attack that struck three Russian oil refineries overnight.

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Roundup: Spooking the oil sands companies

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The “Pathways Alliance” consortium of oil sands companies scrubbed their website as the bill that expands the Competition Bureau’s powers around investigating greenwashing gets royal assent, which seems to be suspiciously like a tell. I’m aware that they have been subject to particular legal claims around greenwashing, and when you add to that the parts in that Deloitte report that Alberta commissioned around the emissions cap, there was some specific language in there around the fact that carbon capture and storage is likely just an expensive money pit that won’t do much to lower emissions, it feels like Pathways is feeling the pressure, and that perhaps the oil and gas industry has reached its put-up-or-shut-up moment, that they can’t keep pretending that they can carry on as usual with the promise that CCS will come sooner than later, and we’ll have no more emissions problems (while the industry also makes up specific “cleanest” claims around oil and gas production, which also doesn’t stand up to scrutiny).

This being said, I will acknowledge that Andrew Leach has some specific reservations around the legislation and the enforcement of all green claims, because some of the burden of proof, even with companies that are actually doing clean or green things. It’s an issue to keep in mind in any case.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian attack in Donetsk killed three and injured four, while overnight missile and drone attacks have damaged yet another thermal power plant. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced new plans to mitigate those attacks, and part of it is transitioning to greener sources of electricity .

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1803435004866826530

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