Tag Archives: Ukraine

Roundup: Plans to half-ass maternity leave

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A piece that caught my eye over the weekend was an interview with new Government House Leader Karina Gould about how she plans to deal with her maternity leave on the second time around, and how it’ll be different from the first time (when she was the first Cabinet minister to give birth while in office). Significantly, she doesn’t want to come back as quickly as she did the last time, where she only took ten weeks off, and then returned with her husband in tow to help with child care duties while she did her job.

What Gould says she wants to do differently this time is to not travel to Ottawa, but attend virtually from her constituency office, while the government whip assumers her duties during her absence. But this gets back to what I have been repeatedly warning about when it comes to remote and hybrid sittings, which is that this is going to create an expectation of presenteeism that is unrealistic, particularly for new parents. And while they absolutely should take the time they need off, it should actually be time off in a proper leave of absence, rather than constantly hovering by their computers to follow proceedings along over Zoom, and being ready to vote using their remote app at a moment’s notice. That, frankly, not only doesn’t help anyone, but creates even more stress on the MP or minister while they’re on leave.

More to the point, it will be exceedingly difficult to do House Leader duties remotely, because part of the job is stage-managing answers in Question Period, and directing who should be responding (though not always effectively as we have seen). That can’t be done remotely, and indeed, Mark Holland got into trouble a couple of times for trying to do it over hybrid format at the height of the pandemic, because he was trying to do so with a phone, and that was forbidden. The best thing is for her to simply take the time she needs, and resume her duties from Ottawa when she’s ready, because she won’t be doing anyone any favours trying to half-ass it from her constituency office when she should be spending time with her newborn.

In case you missed them:

  • My column on the Conservatives preparing a “stolen election” narrative by deliberately confusing basic Westminster parliamentary dynamics
  • My Xtra column on why conservatives posing with “Straight Pride” and “Leave Our Kids Alone” t-shirts are no accident—and a sign of their moral cowardice.
  • My column on the signal that Chrystia Freeland has sent to premiers and mayors when it comes to their plans to beg Ottawa to bail them out.
  • My piece for National Magazine about how competition law has failed the media sector in Canada, and why Bill C-18 was a flawed attempt to deal with it.
  • My column on why a public inquiry into Canada’s COVID response may actually prove impossible, because federalism.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian missiles slammed into an apartment complex and a university building in the central city of Kryvyi Rih, killing six and wounding 75. Russian drones also hit Kharkiv, partially destroying a college dormitory. Ukrainian forces say they have reclaimed 15 square kilometres of occupied territory in the past week, while describing that the fight has been tougher than expected because the Russians have fortified themselves. Meanwhile, a drone struck an office building in Moscow’s financial centre, which Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for, and Russians claim that they destroyed three Ukrainian drones headed for their ships in the Black Sea.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1685580157254307840

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Roundup: Games of inflation denialism

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As opposition parties continued to shitpost about the inflation numbers and the interest rate decision, it got intensely stupid. To that end, Emmett Macfarlane has coined the term “inflation denialism” to characterise these kinds of responses, and he’s completely right about it.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/1681741904797466624

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/1681743338532134912

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/1681744204223979524

As well, economist Stephen Gordon has spent the day calling out “greedflation” theorists, and it was fun to watch.

Programming note: I am away for the next week and a bit, so blog posts are on pause until August. Behave in my absence, and don’t make turn this car around.

Ukraine Dispatch:

There was an early morning Russian strike on the port city of Mykolaiv that wounded 18. Russians have been targeting ports and grain infrastructure in particular in recent days, deliberately targeting it in Odessa, as well as Chornomorsk. Meanwhile, Russia pulling out of the Black Sea grain deal is worrying Ukrainian farmers, some of whom still have last year’s crop stockpiled because they couldn’t get it to market.

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Roundup: Inflation falling into the control range

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The inflation numbers were out yesterday, and headline inflation dropped to 2.8 percent annualized, which is the lowest in the G7, and back within the Bank of Canada’s control range of 1 to 3 percent (though they have stated they are going to keep measures in place it reaches two percent). There are still hot spots—food price inflation is still fairly high, and shelter costs are also running high, but that’s not unexpected given where things are at right now.

Chrystia Freeland called this news a “milestone moment” that Canadians should feel some relief in, while the Conservatives repeated some of their usual talking points. The NDP, naturally, are keeping up with their attempt to blame high inflation on corporate greed, particularly food price inflation, even though the data doesn’t really bear that out, as I pointed out in this thread:

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian forces struck the southern port city of Odessa, and while most of the missiles and drones were intercepted, there were hits and there was damage from debris. This was considered to be retaliation for the explosion on the bridge linking Russia to occupied Crimea. More strikes are aimed at Odessa in the early morning hours. Meanwhile, with the Black Sea grain deal ended by Russia, the EU is looking to transport more Ukrainian grain by rail and road, while the UN says they are floating “a number of ideas” around how to get that grain flowing again.

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Roundup: No sympathy over late night sittings

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In today’s edition of my ongoing exasperation with MPs, I present to you NDP mental health critic Gord Johns, who wants changes made to the parliamentary calendar in order to ensure that there aren’t midnight sittings toward the end of the fall and spring sittings, and he cited Elizabeth May’s hospitalisation as proof about how these twelve-hour days are bad. But there are a few things the matter with his concerns, not the least of which was that May wasn’t hospitalised for exhaustion but rather that she had a stroke, which was caught in time.

First of all, no MP is sitting in the Chamber for twelve hours a day. Even with committee commitments, MPs are only “on duty” for a few of those hours, and they have plenty of opportunity to take shifts during these late-night sittings. And thanks to remote voting (which is an abomination in our system), they don’t have to rush to the Chamber if there are late-night votes for whatever reason, so that’s not even an excuse. Elizabeth May does like to spend as much time in the Chamber as she can, but that is also a choice.

The bigger issue here, however, is that the biggest reason there are late nights late in each sitting is because there is work to get done, and it didn’t get done earlier because of procedural games or dilatory motions, or bullshit filibusters, or what have you. The parliamentary calendar is pretty finite, and there isn’t much wiggle room in there, so if you start playing games (and over the past few years now, this kind of procedural warfare has been fairly constant because they simply oppose the government as opposed to pulling out the big guns for major points of principle), then you have to make up that time somewhere, and that tends to mean late nights late in each sitting. I would have to say that there were actually fewer of them this spring than usual, possibly because the NDP agreed to play ball with more instances of time allocation to head off the procedural games, but it wasn’t that long ago that they were gleeful participants in said procedural warfare, and this is the result. Nevertheless, I’m not terribly sympathetic here, and this is firmly within the fuck around/find out principle, where the fucking around is the procedural warfare, and the finding out is the late nights in June and December.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Another overnight Russian air attack, this time hitting the port city of Mykolaiv, while defences around Odessa have been engaged. Russia has pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal, which could impact world grain prices and cause more problems for the food insecure regions that rely on Ukrainian grain, though Ukraine and Turkey say they will try to keep shipments flowing in spite of Russia. There are more details about the blast on the bridge linking Russia to occupied Crimea, where two people were killed, while damage to the bridge could cut off supply lines to Russian troops in occupied regions.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1680983350692007937

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Roundup: The problem with feel-good legislation

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There was a story out over the weekend about a recently-passed private member’s bill about cancers being faced by firefighters, but how it’s, well, a little bit useless. As well-meaning as the bill is, and there are a lot of well-meaning private members’ bills, it’s also one of those terrible “national strategy” bills that plague our Parliament year-in and year-out.

The thing about “national strategy” bills are that they’re trying to legislate in areas of provincial jurisdiction, largely around healthcare, but sometimes around certain environmental concerns, and so on. Because MPs know that people are about these issues that aren’t in their areas of jurisdiction, they instead come up with these feel-good bills that call on the federal government to coordinate with provinces to create a “national strategy” about whatever the issue is, in the hopes that they’ll come to some common ground, or the like. But also remember that these bills are not only about an area of provincial jurisdiction, but they also can’t spend any money, so they don’t create any incentives that the federal government can use to bring provinces on-side. So about the most that these bills tend to do is raise some awareness about the issue in question in the media (as is demonstrated by the CBC piece over the weekend that I’m referencing here), but aside from that, it’s a lot of thoughts and prayers.

My point here is largely that we see these bills time and again, which largely raise a lot of false hopes, and which can be a bit of a waste of peoples’ time. MPs get one shot a private member’s bill in any given parliament, and a lot of them don’t even get that because of the fact that it’s a lottery system that determines the order in which they appear, and for them to waste that shot on a feel-good bill that doesn’t actually do anything just gets tiresome after a while, and it can be really hard on the people whose hopes have been raised for nothing to happen, because it’s just a feel-good bill.

Ukraine Dispatch:

One civilian was killed by Russian shelling on Kharkiv, and seven wounded in a Russian attack on Zaporizhzhia. Elsewhere, there appears to have been a blast on the Russian bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1680272192993472513

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1680525991418929156

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Roundup: Toronto’s asylum-seeker problem

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There is a bit of an issue happening right now around asylum seekers in Toronto and other parts of the GTA unable to find shelter spaces and some of them sleeping on the streets, and everyone wants to blame the federal government, because of course they do. Reality is, of course, far more complicated and you’d better believe that there is plenty of blame to go around.

To start: the federal government is responsible for refugees, meaning those who have had a status determination, most of whom came over with sponsorship and under some formal programme or structure, and that usually comes with supports, either provided by government or communities. What is the bigger problem in Toronto are those asylum seekers who don’t have a status determination, and may have entered the country in an irregular manner, and because they don’t have status, they also can’t get work permits until they do. And this largely is the responsibility of provinces and municipalities until they get that status determination. But this isn’t to say that the federal government isn’t helping with this situation, because they are, operating certain resettlement services including hotels for some claimants, and they have sent hundreds of millions of dollars to help provinces and municipalities most affected offset their costs. But of course, this money it’s not enough, in part because there are bigger challenges that cities like Toronto haven’t overcome.

In a very real sense, this is a culmination of how broken things have become, particularly under decades of austerity measures by conservative governments and city councils. Provinces are under-funding social services and affordable housing, driving more people to shelters, while the city resists building housing in order to please NIMBY residents clutching their pearls about their property values, so that keeps people in shelters who shouldn’t be there, including these asylum claimants. And because both Toronto and the Ford government have decided the solution to these deep-seated problems is to simply demand more money from Ottawa rather than accepting responsibility for their share of the problem and, oh, doing something about it, it’s leaving the federal government in the position of trying to push back and say things like they need all levels of government to work together, which is also true. I suspect we’ll see some additional federal funds in the next few days as yet another stopgap measure, but this shouldn’t let cities or the province off the hook, as they need to properly step up and start fixing the underlying problems that have led them to this point.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian launched an overnight drone attack against president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih, and sixteen of the seventeen were shot down, but the last drone and falling debris caused damaged and injured one woman. Progress in the counter-offensive remains slow as Zelenskyy says that the Russians are throwing everything they have at it. Here is a profile of Kyrylo Budanov, Russia’s spy chief. Meanwhile, it sounds like Zelenskyy’s pressure tactics at the NATO summit riled people in the White House, and there was much fighting over the language of the communiqué around Ukraine’s eventual membership in NATO.

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Roundup: Misguided “free-rider” complaints

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The Wall Street Journal had an unsigned editorial board op-ed yesterday that denounced Canada as a “military free rider,” but then did little to actually back up their assertions, omitted a bunch of facts, and went on a tear about the current government’s mission to fix the toxic culture within our armed forces, citing “See how that cultural manifesto works on the Ukrainian front lines.” Um, considering that our soldiers are successfully training the Ukrainians into a fighting force that is nimble and not just throwing bodies at the enemy like the old Soviet system did, it’s working fairly well? And how is Russia’s toxic masculinity doing on the battlefield anyway? Oh, right. In a similar vein, the editorial rages that we don’t spend enough on defence while we “shovel money into public unions and social-welfare programmes.” Like our health care system, which even in its current broken state is still far superior to the Americans? I mean, really?

To add to Steve Saideman’s comments, where the paper seems to fall into that same basic trap of not understanding how NATO works, which is that it requires participation from countries, and we participate. We may not spend to the same percentage, but several high-spending countries don’t actually participate, and because the two percent target is a really stupid metric, it ignores that the denominator is far higher in Canada than in a lot of these higher-percentage countries. Could our spending be better? Yes. Is our procurement system completely screwed? Yes. Have we been something of a free-rider in continental defence because we know the Americans will be there regardless? That’s fair. But trying to assert that it’s because we’re too “woke” is just puerile.

Oh, and about their seeming to prefer Poland, who is sliding into illiberalism and who has a major problem with homophobia, there was this gem on the wire yesterday about how that government broke EU law by suspending a judge who for criticising the government. Yeah, that’s totally who should be replacing Canada at the G7 and in a leadership position in NATO. Well done, WSJ. Slow clap.

Ukraine Dispatch:

At least 20 Iranian-made drones attacked mostly the Kyiv regions early Thursday, with debris wounding two people. American intelligence suggests that Wagner mercenary forces are no longer participating militarily in Ukraine in any significant capacity. Russia appears to be detaining thousands of Ukrainian civilians without charges, and appear to be planning to create even more prison colonies.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1679477329804902401

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Roundup: Another rate hike, more nonsense talking points in response

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Not unexpectedly, the Bank of Canada raised interest rates another quarter point yesterday because inflation is becoming sticky, particularly in the core measures that they use to strip out the highly volatile measures like gasoline prices. If you read through the Monetary Policy Report, which shows the state of the global and Canadian economies, economic growth in Canada remains stronger than expected—too strong to tame inflation—and there is still too much demand in the system, particularly for services as opposed to goods, which is keeping those prices higher, as they are especially sensitive to the tight labour market. To that end, the Bank is now expecting inflation to last around three percent for most of the next year before finally getting back to the target of two percent, which is later than they anticipated because economic growth is still too strong.

Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre continues to spout absolute nonsense about the causes of this inflation—it’s not government spending, and that isn’t indicated in the MPR anywhere—and lo, media outlets like the CBC simply both-sides his talking points rather than dismantling them. He’s talking about how he’s going to cut taxes, which would actually fuel inflation rather than do anything to tame it (and no, carbon prices are only marginally inflationary and cutting them would do nothing to slow it). And then there’s the NDP, who think that the Bank should lay off and instead use windfall taxes, as though “greed-flation” is what’s driving inflation (again, not indicated anywhere in the MPR). But as economist Stephen Gordon has pointed out, this kind of promise of painless measures to fight inflation are the provenance of quacks and faith healers. It won’t help, and it will make things worse.

Ukraine Dispatch:

It was a third consecutive night of Russian drone attacks directed to Kyiv, and falling debris has killed one person. Elsewhere, Ukrainian troops are reporting “some success” around Bakhmut.

https://twitter.com/kyivindependent/status/1679340673357557761

https://twitter.com/davidakin/status/1679031785764659201

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Roundup: A pathway for Ukraine but no obvious timeline

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From the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, we saw some movement on the question of Ukraine’s membership, but with no timeline attached. And while Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy railed that this was “absurd,” that’s pretty much entirely for show because everyone knows that it’s baked into the rules that you can’t join so long as you’ve got an active war taking place in your territory, because as a mutual defence pact, it would draw in the other members, and we don’t want this to turn in to World War III. The other conditions are all largely being waived, because Ukraine is largely becoming interoperable with NATO countries thanks to the training they’ve been receiving from countries like Canada and the UK, and because they’re getting and being trained on more western equipment as it displaces old Soviet equipment; there is also the issue of combatting corruption in their government and ranks, which are also conditions for entry into the European Union, so again, there’s a lot of progress on fast-tracking Ukraine’s membership, but there can’t be a timeline because there’s no timeline as to when the war will be over.

Meanwhile, member countries pledged to boost their spending to at least two percent of GDP (which, we’ve explained previously, is a really dumb metric), and yes, we’ll re-litigate Canada not spending enough yet again, even though we don’t have the capacity to spend more. We can’t spend the current budget allocation, and even if the budget allocated the requisite two percent, a lot of that would lapse and roll over into the next year because we don’t have the capacity to spend it. And this is also the part where I remind you that when Stephen Harper committed to the two percent target, he then cut defence spending and it fell below one percent of GDP, so whatever bellyaching James Bezan and Michael Chong get up to over this, they need to have a good hard look in the mirror about their own record.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1678933048346263552

As well, the cluster munitions issue came up again. While the US, Ukraine and Russia are not signatories to the international convention banning them, the excuse is that they are running out of other munitions, so the Americans are going to send these instead, which seems…problematic in reasoning considering the reason why they’re largely banned. There doesn’t seem to be any particular move to sanction the US or Ukraine for using them, but or an appetite to prosecute any war crimes for their use, but it’s still not a great sign.

Meanwhile, here is some good analysis from Queen’s University’s Stéfanie von Hlatky that is worth your time to watch.

Ukraine Dispatch:

There was a second night of drone attacks on Kyiv in a row as the NATO summit is underway. As the counter-offensive continues, helmet cam footage is being selectively released, but can’t really provide proper context for what we’re seeing from it. The F-16 pilot training coalition is now firmed up, and training is due to begin in August. Meanwhile, survival skills training is taking off in Ukraine, as the war drags on.

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Roundup: The usual NATO meeting tropes

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In advance of the NATO summit happening today in Latvia, Justin Trudeau was in Latvia to announce that Canada would be doubling our military presence in that country by 2026, which is actually easier said than done with the current state of our Forces. This was, of course, superseded by news that Turkey has agreed to drop their objections to Sweden joining NATO (leaving Hungary as the last to sign off, though they insisted they won’t be the last). Here’s Stephen Saideman to parse what this means.

Of course, as with any NATO meeting, we get the usual lazy tropes about Canada supposedly being a “freeloader,” because we don’t spend the minimum two percent of our GDP on defence. But that analogy doesn’t actually work because NATO isn’t a club where members pay dues and then it does stuff with them—it’s a military alliance that depends on the participation of member countries, and Canada participates. We participate more than a lot of other countries who have a higher percentage of defence spending than we do. And it bears reminding yet again that the two percent target is a stupid metric, because the fastest way to meet the target is to tank your economy and have a recession, and it’s easier for countries with a smaller GDP denominator to meet. But hey, the two percent target is easy fodder for media because they can make hay about it with little regard for the nuance, which is why it has been a fixation for years now.

And yes, one of our biggest issues when it comes to our military spending and capacity to spend is our ability to recruit, which we have had a hard time doing—it’s a very tight labour market, and it can take a long time for applications to be processed, by which time potential recruits are likely to have found new jobs. It also seems to me that the military has never adapted to the changes that happened about two decades ago, when they could no longer rely on economically-depressed regions (such as the Atlantic provinces) because of the rise of the oil sands and the ability for people to fly out to Fort McMurray on two-weeks-in-two-weeks-out shifts, that changed their fortunes. We’ll see if they can fix their recruiting now that they are allowing permanent residents to apply, but that is one of the major challenges they need to address.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russia launched 28 drones over Kyiv and Odessa in the early morning hours, 26 of which were downed. Ukrainian forces also say that they have trapped Russian occupation forces in Bakhmut and that they are pushing them out. A statistical analysis shows that as many as 50,000 Russian men have been killed in the fighting to date.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1678651881185243137

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1678332390052098048

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