Tag Archives: Ukraine

Roundup: Few details on the Canadian coronation

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As the coronation fast approaches, we’re still waiting for details in Canada about what we’re doing here, or what the events happening in Ottawa will be, or who is part of the delegation going to London for the event itself. The level of secrecy is a bit weird, but I have my suspicions that this is trying to be downplayed from the top, meaning PMO.

As for King Charles III himself, the early signs are that he’s looking to be a bit more involved and less removed than his mother tended to be, in part because that was the generation she came from. And what does that mean for Canada? Well, that’s dependent entirely upon the prime minister, because the King can only act on the advice of the PM. And this PM, well, doesn’t like it when the spotlight is away from him. He likes the “ceremonial” aspects of the job, and a lot of that stuff is what the Crown and the Governor General does. So while we’ve just had some incredibly important events in our country as a constitutional monarchy—the loss of the Queen who had been our sovereign for seventy years, and now the installation of the new King—it’s being downplayed in ways that are not healthy for us as a country, but our civic literacy about this is at terrible lows, and there is an organised campaign of misinformation about the role and nature of the Crown in this country, and Trudeau could do something about that, but he won’t, and it erodes the nature of our democracy even more.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian Forces are yet again claiming to have achieved more of a foothold in Bakhmut, while Ukrainian forces continue to insist they’re holding the line. There are also a bunch of denials as to whether or not the Ukrainians have established a foothold on the eastern bank of the Dnipro river in the south of the country. Russian forces are also claiming to have repelled a drone attack against their Black Sea fleet in the Crimean port of Sevastopol.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1650111231196536832

https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1650012022371753984

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Roundup: Angst over a poor metric

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A lot of ink (or, well, pixels, I supposed) has been spilled over the past week about those leaked documents where Justin Trudeau allegedly told NATO leadership privately that Canada will never reach the two percent of GDP defence spending target, which shouldn’t be a shock to anyone who has paid a modicum of attention. And while we get these kinds of analysis pieces that try to dig more into the two percent target and its significance, we have to remember that it’s a lousy metric. Greece has been above it for years because of a stagnant economy and including military pensions in their calculations—and you can easily get to 2 percent of GDP by tanking your economy, while growing your economy makes that spending target increase impossibly. The other thing that the two percent metric doesn’t capture is engagement—Canada routinely steps up to meet its NATO commitments even without reaching the spending target, while certain European countries may meet the spending target but don’t participate in these missions (again, looking at you, Greece, but not just Greece).

Part of the problem is that while this is a conversation that requires some nuance, the two percent target is too easy for journalists to focus on, and that becomes the sole focus. It’s a problem because We The Media keep reducing this to a single binary “are we meeting/not meeting that two percent” rate, which doesn’t help advance the conversation in any way, but most of us refuse to learn because a simple binary is easier to understand/convey.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Fighting continues in the western part of Bakhmut, as Wagner Group mercenaries are worried about the coming Ukrainian counter-offensive. Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation says that new technologies are going to help them win the war, particularly as they enhance the accuracy of modern artillery.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1649397099300093954

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Roundup: Questions on regulatory efficacy

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The Environment Commissioner released a series of reports yesterday, and I have some questions about a couple of them. His first report looks into the plan to plant two billion trees and states that it won’t be achievable unless there are big changes, citing that last year’s targets weren’t met, and that the agreements with provinces and territories around this are still being worked out. While I did notice that his graph about the plans for planting these trees does backload much of it because it will take time to grow enough saplings to plant, I’m not sure that one year’s data is enough to declare imminent failure. Maybe I’m just being optimistic.

One of his reports also criticises that the government can’t track which regulations reduce how many emissions, which makes it hard to assess their efficacy. I’m just not sure how a government would go about doing so, because there are so many overlapping measures including the carbon price, and emissions have started to bend, so that we’re slowly dropping below pre-pandemic and 2005 levels, particularly as the economy is growing, which is a good sign that measures are working overall, but there is more to do. And while I appreciate what he’s trying to say, I’m just not sure how someone goes about calculating how much the inventory changed for each regulatory measure. He did also talk about how many missed targets there were, but didn’t differentiate between which stripe of government was in power, and how the previous government set targets that they deemed “aspirational,” meaning that they did nothing to attempt to meet them, while the current government’s targets are for 2030, and they could very well still meet them if they continue their current trajectory. I’m sure he doesn’t want to get into that difference as part of his role as non-partisan quasi-Officer of Parliament (he is not a standalone officer but is part of the Auditor General’s office), but it is relevant to the state of the discussion.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian forces had a misfire, and accidentally bombed their own city of Belgorod, near the Ukrainian border. Oops. Meanwhile, the head of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, visited president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, and declared that Ukraine’s future is in NATO (but that can’t happen under NATO rules so long as they have Russians occupying their territory). Ukraine has trained eight storm brigades worth 40,000 troops for the upcoming counteroffensive. Treason charges are being laid against several Ukrainian servicemen for giving away information to Russian force during an unauthorised mission, and those Russians damaged a Ukrainian airfield as a result.

https://twitter.com/euromaidanpress/status/1649030309109813248

https://twitter.com/minpres/status/1649093237632647179

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Roundup: Impressing the Scots

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The Speaker of the Scottish Parliament paid a visit to Ottawa’s Parliament earlier in the week and was apparently so impressed with our Question Period that she plans to write a report to take suggestions from it. I’m frankly a little dumbfounded, because our QP is pretty gods damned terrible in pretty much every respect, but let me first take what her observations are.

One of them is that ours operates bilingually fairly seamlessly. Well, she didn’t see the seams, in any case. In Scotland, they have translation available for those who speak Gaelic, but it’s not automatically provided like English/French is here. But she didn’t seem to see the stress that the pandemic has caused our simultaneous interpretation abilities, from the injuries to interpreters, or the strains to resources that are now severely limiting the function of our Parliament because MPs didn’t care enough about those interpreters as they abused them over Zoom, and lo, we’re staring down a crisis.

She was impressed with the “brevity” of our QP, where it operates in thirty-five second questions and answers. I’m not sure that’s a good thing, frankly, because it has largely just created a demand for talking points, both in asking and answering questions, and so much of the exercise is useless—the questions must contain key phrases (and that’s getting worse), while the answers are frequently non-sequiturs or just bland pabulum that is disconnected from what has been asked. I’m not sure what she saw that was so impressive. The fact that it happened at a rapid pace and bilingually looks impressive from afar, but spend more than a day here, and the uglier underside quickly becomes apparent. Yes, ours can be more dynamic than Westminster’s because we don’t require questions be asked in advance in order for briefings to be prepared, so the PM must be nimble when answering, but again, most of those answers are going to be vague and superficial.

It’s kind of flattering that they’re seeing the good we have to offer, but these days, our rules and system has given rise to an increasingly unserious Chamber, and that’s not something we should be exporting to anyone.

Ukraine Dispatch:

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the border with Poland and Belarus, citing a need to be ready in case Belarus became another invasion route for Russia.

https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1648688637670830083

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Roundup: The optics ouroboros

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So, that big CBC/Radio-Canada “scoop” that dominated the news yesterday about Justin Trudeau’s Christmas vacation. Because this is sometimes a media criticism blog, I figured I would make a few remarks, because there were some very obvious things about it that were just being shrugged off, or actively ignored by some of my fellow journalists. To begin with, there is not a lot of substance to the story. It’s some typical cheap outrage—how dare the prime minister go on a luxury vacation on taxpayer dollars when there are people struggling in Canada—mixed with a specious connection that doesn’t mean anything in substance, but which looks bad when you make it sound sinister in order to fit it in with the current nonsense around the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. Fit those two in a particular frame that makes it sound salacious, and you have the makings of a story that dominates Question Period. Congratulations! You’ve set the agenda for the day, you can pat yourselves on the back to your heart’s content.

But the whole connection to the Foundation is a construction that implies a relationship that doesn’t exist. Yes, the Trudeau and Green families have been friends for 50 years, but the donation to the Foundation was a bequest after the death of one of the Green family members, and it was done two years ago, which was eight years after Trudeau stepped away from any involvement in the Foundation. Implying that there was something untoward about the donation and then vacationing with Trudeau—who has been family friends his entire life—is simply scandal-mongering. And this gets justified with the pearl-clutching about “optics!” But you’re the one creating the optics with the distorted framing of the situation, so you’re literally inventing a mess that doesn’t actually exist, so that you can report on the invented mess, and then report on the follow-up reactions from other political leaders who will tut about “optics.” Which you created in the first place with your framing, like some kind of ouroboros. Very convenient, that.

None of this is to say that Trudeau shouldn’t know better than to take these kinds of trips, because he knows full well that there is an intrinsic culture of petty and mean cheapness in Canadian media, and that his opponents will take full advantage of it. And lo, the story also quotes unnamed Liberal Sources™ who are once again shocked and dismayed that the prime minister once again did something with poor optics, because that’s who he is. And Trudeau then made it worse, as pointed out in my QP recap, by not answering about the gift of the accommodations, which just perpetuates the story rather than cutting it off at the start. “Yes, I accepted the gift of the accommodations. Yes, the Ethics Commissioner cleared it. Yes, I paid the equivalent commercial rate for the flight.” And it stops their ability to try and stretch this into a scandal. But Trudeau and the people who advise his communications are so tone-deaf that they keep doing this. They keep stepping on every rake in their path, every single gods damned time.

Ukraine Dispatch:

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited troops in the eastern city of Avdiivka, which is facing an advance like Bakhmut, which itself is facing an increase in Russian shelling and air strikes. Ukraine has reached a deal with Poland about grain and other food products transiting that country, but the future of the Black Sea deal remains in doubt.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1648431809200553985

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Roundup: Troll-bait taken

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Well, Pierre Poilievre’s troll-bait worked, and everyone was frothing at the mouth over the application of “government-funded media” to CBC’s main Twitter account (but not its news accounts, or any of their French accounts). And the Conservatives lapped it up; Andrew Scheer, pleased as punch and in full smirking doofus mode, even gave a trollish member’s statement ahead of Question Period which was quickly clipped for use as a shitpost. In protest, CBC declared they would “pause” their use of Twitter, which just cedes the field the flood of bullshit. And then later in the day, Elon Musk decided to adjust his tag to say “70% government-funded,” as if it makes a difference to the insinuation Poilievre was trying to impart, only for a short while later, change that to “69% government-funded,” because this is Musk and Poilievre we’re talking about, and they have the mentality of twelve-year-olds in their quest to become shitposting edgelords.

 

Justin Trudeau, somewhat cleverly, noted that Poilievre ran to the arms of American web-giant billionaires to support his attack on Canadians, which bolsters the Liberals’ narrative about their legislation to curb the power of web giants and forcing them to pay into the Canadian content ecosystem (which the Conservatives have been falsely decrying as government censorship). The NDP and the Bloc went with the tactic of calling this an attack on Quebec culture, which may do more damage to the Conservatives in the province where they are hoping to make inroads.

But this is all culture war bullshit, and yet, people fell for the troll bait. The Liberals immediately tried to fundraise off of this, and played right into the Conservatives’ hands.

I did note that three former CBC bureau chiefs did impart their experiences about editorial independence, and governments going after them for their reporting, which is not exactly the narrative that Poilievre has been trying to prompt.

Ukraine Dispatch:

The Ukrainian grain deal is threatened as Poland, Hungary and Slovakia have all banned Ukrainian grain as part of protectionist measures, and the EU is likely to mount some kind of response. The prisoner exchange on Sunday saw 130 Ukrainians returned, but it’s not clear how many Russians were turned over. A top Ukrainian official said that they will launch their counteroffensive when they’re good and ready, and not before.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1648018653885898756

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1647891561915596800

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Roundup: Taking Poilievre’s troll bait

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I suspect we’re going to get a bunch of wailing and gnashing of teeth today because Twitter slapped the “government-funded media” label on the CBC account, at the behest of Pierre Poilievre. And frankly, we shouldn’t give Poilievre the satisfaction. This is clearly just him being a troll. He wants to spend his time being a shitposting edgelord on Twitter, as do Andrew Scheer and a bunch of other members of their caucus, because that’s who they are.

Of course, if things were really being fair and scrupulous, then the entire Postmedia chain, along with the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail would get the “government-funded” label as well, because they absolutely get it. (Television broadcasters CTV and Global technically don’t get government subsidies, but that’s only a technical point, because the simultaneous substitution rules that they live by are absolutely a kind of subsidy programme that they pretend isn’t one as they complain about the CBC’s stipend). But nobody actually wants to have a meaningful discussion here. Instead, it’s about beating up on the CBC under the rubric of their supposedly being either controlled by the Liberal government or by Liberal partisans, which isn’t true (CBC News is some of the most scrupulously egregious both-sidesers in the business). This is just culture war bullshit, where facts and logic don’t actually matter. This will be used as another fundraising appeal by Poilievre, and on and on it will go. Nobody should take this bait.

Ukraine Dispatch:

In spite of it being Orthodox Easter, Russians continued to shell areas of Ukraine including Zaporizhzhia, though a prisoner exchange was had over the weekend because of the holiday.

https://twitter.com/kyivindependent/status/1647166252669079552

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Roundup: The dog and pony show around Telford at committee

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After weeks of haranguing, filibusters, and Question Period clown shows, the prime minister’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, appeared at the Procedure and House Affairs committee. Shortly before she appeared, documents were tabled to show some dates of briefings the prime minister had with his National Security and Intelligence Advisor, but there weren’t many specifics, and in her testimony, Telford didn’t fill in any of those blanks. And nearly two-and-a-half hours were spent with Telford largely telling MPs that she couldn’t confirm or deny anything, except when the Liberals asked her to pat herself on the back for all of the actions the government has thus far taken around taking foreign interference seriously.

And of course, the Conservatives spent the time putting on a show for the camera, whether it was Larry Brock playing prosecutor—in spite of committee chair Bardish Chagger repeatedly warning him that this was a committee and not a court room—or Rachael Thomas’ rehearsed Disappointment Speech at the end. It was nothing but a dog and pony show.

This never should have happened. Telford never should have been summoned. We’ve once again damaged the fundamental precepts of parliamentary democracy and Responsible Government for the sake of some cheap theatre and clips for social media. Our Parliament should be a much more serious place, but this was just one more incidence of MPs debasing themselves and the institution for the sake of scoring a few cheap points.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian missiles struck the eastern city of Sloviansk, hitting residential buildings and killing at least nine people and wounding over 21.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1646844031190614017

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Roundup: Poilievre’s fictions about crime

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Pierre Poilievre held a press event in Edmonton yesterday, and it was…quite something. From the bullying of the Canadian Press reporter, the doublespeak and particularly notable omissions in his “defund the CBC” shtick, the economic illiteracy, the complete fiction he was peddling about violent crime, it was just another sign of how things are degenerating in our political discourse. The name of the game is flooding the zone with bullshit, and being an odious troll. Much of his base knows that he’s lying and they love it because he gets away with it, sticking it in the faces of people who care about things like facts or the truth (while the ignorant portion of said base laps up everything he says uncritically, which he also likes because they’re easily manipulable). It’s corrosive to political norms that we rely on, and he doesn’t care. This can’t end well, and I worry things are going to get worse.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1646585470866915354

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian forces have been shelling Bakhmut unrelentingly, and have also fired on the southern city of Kherson. Here’s a look at LGBTQ+ soldiers fighting in Ukraine, and the added challenges they face while doing their part to defend their country.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1646534358415671302

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Roundup: Governance troubles at the Trudeau Foundation

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It sounds like things may have been worse off at the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation than was initially believed as the CEO and board resigned. According to La Presse, there may have been bigger governance issues as they discovered that their attempt to return the $140,000 donation from that Chinese businessman (which wasn’t the $200,000 initially promised/reported) was met with revelations that names and businesses didn’t match up and there was nobody there to return the money to. That points to a lack of due diligence within the organisation, and in light of that, they have called in an outside investigator. None of this excuses the myriad of conspiracy theories that have been built up around Foundation, nor is the prime minister implicated in any of this as it all happened after he left the organisation, but it’s not a good look for them.

And because he continues to want to be a shitposting edgelord rather than a serious politician, Pierre Poilievre sent a juvenile letter to David Johnston yesterday, reflective of the seriousness of the situation of foreign interference allegations. Our democracy is in trouble.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1646364111691710464

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces continue to rebut the Russian Wagner Group claims that they have all-but entirely captured Bakhmut. Ukrainian officials have launched an investigation into a video that purports to show Russians beheading a Ukrainian soldier in a war crime.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1646183682833629184

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1646155719278751745

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