Tag Archives: Veterans

QP: Too tired to land a punch

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While the prime minister was landing in Rwanda for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, his deputy was supposed to appear virtually, but didn’t in the end. Every other leader was present, one of them with a special guest. Candice Bergen led off, script on her mini-lectern, and she read the accusations that the PMO interfered in the investigation of the Nova Scotia mass shooting, and demanded an independent investigation into the matter. Bill Blair recited that there was no interference and no pressure, and pointed to the statement of the RCMP to corroborate this. Bergen insisted the government has a pattern of interference, and repeated her demand, and Blair repeated his own denial under the banner that this was the truth. Bergen pivoted to inflation, and demanded tax cuts, saying the government would rather let people suffer than accept their ideas. Jonathan Wilkinson reminded her that they have a package of affordability measures, and that they are working with global partners to stabilise the global oil supply. Luc Berthold took over in French to lament inflation and demanded tax cuts, and Rachel Bendayan denied that the Conservatives’ proposals would lower the cost of living, and that the government won at the Supreme Court to win about carbon prices, and that the Liberals have a plan. Berthold then raised the issue of passport lineups, and Karina Gould assured him that they have strategies to get those who need their passports expeditiously.

Yves-François Blanchet led for the Bloc, and he too raised the passport lines with a dose of sarcasm about the prime minister’s international travel, and Gould reiterated that the situation in Montreal is unacceptable but different from elsewhere in the country, and that they have management teams to assist the situation. Blanchet gave it a second go and got the same response. 

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, his daughter on his arm, and he decried high inflation, demanding action for families. This gave Gould an opening to talk about child care. Singh repeated the question in French, and Gould repeated her points about child care.

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Roundup: Doug Ford broke the fact-checker

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It’s now approximately day ninety-eight of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russian forces have captured half of the city of Severodonetsk in a “hail of grenades,” while fierce street fighting continues. A rocket strike also hit Sloviansk, also in the Donbas region, which killed three and wounded six. As previously mentioned, the Russian strategy seems to be to try and take the Donbas region as fast as possible, before more heavy western weapons arrive, and lo, it looks like the US will be sending medium-range rockets to Ukraine after a promise that they wouldn’t fire them over the Russian border. Meanwhile, here is a look at Médecins Sans Frontières treating civilians wounded in the fighting near Ukraine’s front lines, and how it’s at a scale they have never faced before.

Closer to home, the Toronto Star’s attempt to fact-check Doug Ford for a week wound up being an exercise in misery, as he “broke” said fact-check system. Now, to be clear, the Star’s whole fact-check exercise between the federal and provincial elections has been fairly risible. It’s not a good system where you take everything the leaders say for a week each, and then evaluate them based on number of falsehoods per time spoken. And because it’s done by someone for whom politics is not their regular beat, they don’t have enough context to know whether what is being said is true or not, and a lot of stuff is being given a pass that shouldn’t be precisely because they don’t know enough of what is going on to have a reasonable bullshit detector throughout. This having been established, Ford still broke their system by barely speaking at all, and when he does, it’s largely in generalities that can’t be easily checked, and it makes it easy for him to get caught up in exaggerations that also wind up getting a pass. Still, he did still lie a lot, particularly about the situation he inherited, but the fact-check system is pretty useless, so why bother?

Nevertheless, this is now the second election where Ford has largely been a blank slate, with little in the way of policy other than his previous move of rebating licence plate stickers, and his promise to expand a highway as though it will do anything about congestion (which it won’t because induced demand). There is no contest of ideas because it’s content-free, and nobody wants to call this fact out even though it is utterly corroding our democracy. But it seems to be a strategy that works for him, and which the media in this province seems to be fine with, because they have given him the easiest ride humanly possible, and it’s just so dispiriting. How are we a serious province?

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QP: Rota’s return to the big chair

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Not only was the prime minister president for QP, as were most other leaders, but Anthony Rota was also back in the Speaker’s chair, for the first time in months. Before things got underway, he took a moment to thank MPs for their support during his absence, and for the care team for his surgery.

After several rounds of applause, things launched with Candice Bergen at her mini-lectern, and she accused the prime minister of trying to end the energy sector by way of the carbon price, insisting that he wants high gas prices. (Erm, Candice, Europe would like a word about gas prices). Justin Trudeau somewhat haltingly listed programmes that are indexed to inflation, and reminded her of what families in Manitoba get in the carbon rebate. Bergen then pivoted to trying to find fault with both the gun control bill and the bill that will remove mandatory minimums on some gun crimes. Trudeau took up a script to praise his own gun control bill, and to recite that removing mandatory minimums is about keeping Black and Indigenous people for; being disproportionately affected by the justice system. Bergen read some scripted outrage about criminals getting house arrest, to which Trudeau read a script about systemic discrimination or people going to jail because they struggle with addiction. Raquel Dancho took over, accusing the government of being responsible for the rise in violent crime, denouncing the removal of mandatory minimums along the way. Trudeau, extemporaneously, listed the new measures in the gun control bill tabled yesterday. Dancho insisted the government wasn’t doing enough to stop gun violence, inadvertently listing things the government was already doing as her counter to “useless” gun bans. Trudeau dismissed this as parroting talking points from the gun lobby, and noted they did invest in the same tools Dancho mentioned.

Yves-François Blanchet led for the Bloc, and he complained that the federal government was ready to go to the Supreme Court of Canada over Quebec’s Law 21 and 96, and he wondered if English was really threatened in Quebec. Trudeau took up a script to raise the woman denied a teaching job because she wears a hijab, and it was his job to defend the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Blanchet insisted this was a lie, and that secularism was being attacked, before repeating his question a to whether English was threatened in Quebec. Trudeau, extemporaneously, stated the incorrect truism that French is under threat, and insisted that this was about defending minorities throughout the country.

Alexandre Boulerice rose for the NDP, and in French, he noted that the government agreed to decriminalise small amounts of hard drugs in BC, and wanted support for the private member’s bill on doing this nationally. Trudeau recited a script about the opioid crisis and today’s announcement out of BC. Gord Johns repeated the question in English, and Trudeau read the English version of the same script.

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Roundup: Incoherent housing plans

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We are now on or about day fifty-eight of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russia has declared victory when it comes to their siege of the strategic city of Mariupol, and has ordered its troops not to storm the last pocket of resistance there. But hey, they’ve “liberated” the city by shelling it to rubble, so good job there. It is estimated that some 2000 Ukrainian troops remain on site, spread out in a network of tunnels and bunkers, along with several thousand civilians. Of course, this also means that Russian forces are likely going to simply try and wait out those remaining troops and civilians as they run out of food and supplies, and trap them inside.

Closer to home, Pierre Poilievre has been unveiling more of his housing platform, but…it’s pretty incoherent, in a lot of ways. There isn’t that much financial leverage that the federal government can wield when it comes to ending NIMBYism and seven decades of market incentives for single-family homes that are unsustainable and which only continue to exacerbate the affordability crisis (not to mention the climate crisis). Oh, and Poilievre is defending his own rental property portfolio, citing that he’s providing affordable rental accommodations to two “deserving families.”

The last point on that list is pretty critical—it would undermine central bank independence, and one imagines could actually create a deflationary spiral in the right circumstances that would create a depression, which is precisely what they were avoiding when they engaged in quantitative easing during the pandemic recession. Jennifer Robson has even more concerns about the incoherence of the plan in this thread. Meanwhile, I would also recommend checking out this thread by Mike Moffatt about just how complex the drivers of the housing situation in Ontario is. It’s not just one thing—it’s a lot of moving parts that got us to where we are now.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1517214855572320256

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Roundup: Sour premiers wanted more money

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We’re not on or about day forty-five of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and yesterday’s particular war crime of note was an attack on a train station in Kamatorsk that killed fifty-two Ukrainians fleeing to safer parts of the country. More chilling was the fact that the remains of the rocket had “For the children” spray painted on its side. Meanwhile, an international organization formed in the 1990s to identify the dead and the missing in the Balkan conflicts is preparing to send a team of forensic experts to Ukraine to help identify their dead as a result of Russian atrocities.

https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1512493160013996042

Closer to home, there is more reaction to this week’s budget, and in particular, some of the sour notes coming from provinces. It’s not just the current bit of confusion around just what the dental care programme is going to entail, because we don’t have any implementation details yet, and it sounds like the federal government may try to leverage existing provincial programmes for low-income earners. But more to the point, it’s about health transfers, and the fact that premiers aren’t getting their way with their demands for increased unconditional transfers, ostensibly to ensure that the federal government pays 35 percent of the share of health costs—a figure which is distortionary because since the 1970s, provinces were given tax points instead of direct transfers, so the true cost to the federal government would be far, far higher than the 35 percent figure they like to float. Not to mention, we saw that when federal transfers were higher for a decade, provinces used much of that money on other things, as certain provinces also did during the pandemic. So frankly, I wouldn’t expect the federal government to just hand over more unconditional money in the budget, particularly as they are negotiating with provinces for specific outcomes around mental health and long-term care.

Those demands for higher transfers are also raised in this op-ed by economist Trevor Tombe and professor Daniel Béland, which accuses the federal government of being uninterested in reforming those health care arrangements. I would dispute that because they have made it clear, during the election and since, that they are very interested in reforming those arrangements, and that those reforms mean strings attached to federal dollars, and those negotiations are ongoing. I’m also troubled by the notion that the federal government should be doing something about provincial debt, which is far more unsustainable than the federal government’s. Is the suggestion that the federal government upload more costs or programme responsibilities? Because I don’t see premiers clamouring for that (though they do want more money). Is the suggestion that the federal government simply pay for everything? Because that’s absolutely not sustainable either. It also ignores that most provinces have the ability to raise revenues the old-fashioned way—raising their own taxes. (Some provinces are admittedly screwed demographically, but again, what levers are we proposing the federal government employ?) Tombe and Béland want an open and collaborative process to rethink the fiscal relationships between levels of government, but we’ve all seen this movie before, and it always winds up with the provinces demanding the federal government give them more money. I’m not sure how that helps.

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Roundup: Prepping for a Euro trip to coordinate more sanctions

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As day ten of the Russian invasion of Ukraine picks up, there wasn’t the same drama around any nuclear facilities, though it now seems that Russia is in control of the Zaporizhzhia facility that they had been shelling the other night, so that’s not great. Ukraine’s requests for a no-fly zone continue, even though it’s not going to happen because that would drag NATO into a shooting war with Russia, which is a nuclear power, and that is a Very Bad Thing. Justin Trudeau made the point yesterday that we need to keep ourselves out of a situation in aiding Ukraine where NATO forces are put in direct confrontation with a Russian soldier, while the hope remains that the ongoing sanctions create the conditions for those around Putin to force him to stand down, because they have been so effectively crippled. But we’ll see. In the meantime, a warning about cyber warfare escalation in this conflict—they have not deployed their full arsenal, and that’s probably for the best.

Trudeau, meanwhile, will be heading to Europe for a series of meetings starting on Sunday, along with Anita Anand, and starts off in London (where he will have an audience with the Queen), then Latvia, Germany, and Poland. It sounds like part of what is being discussed are the next steps in tightening the screws on Putin and his regime, so coordination with allies could be a good and necessary next step.

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Roundup: Emergency orders lifted before the Senate votes were cast

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By late afternoon, yesterday, prime minister Justin Trudeau ended the emergency orders, at a time when the Senate had not yet voted to confirm them. This, of course, led to numerous cries from opponents that they had helped to end it (declaring victory for pushing on an open door), and accusations that Trudeau knew he would lose the Senate vote so pulled the plug beforehand. And then there were the questions about what changed between Monday and yesterday that made it okay to lift the restrictions, of which the official line is “advice from law enforcement,” but one also suspects was that they might have felt it inappropriate to lift it before it had even been brought to a vote, but conversely didn’t want to keep the orders for too much longer after that. I’m not sure. Suffice to say, it’s over, and all of the cries of “tyranny!” and “Trudeau is doing this to increase his own power!” seem pretty stupid right about now.

Speaking of the Senate, they were progressing through a second full day of speeches with no end—or vote—in sight, when the order was lifted and they simply adjourned debate. This is something of an indictment on how the Senate handled this matter in terms of their schedule. They should have recalled the Chamber as soon as the Act was invoked and the emergency orders declared, so that they could receive them on the same day as the House of Commons and debate them concurrently, as it’s not a piece of legislation that has to pass one Chamber before the other, but they didn’t, and their planned Friday recall was cancelled by the police action, further delaying the debate. And then some of the same problems that the House of Commons saw presented themselves in the Senate as well—that absolutely everyone wanted to have their own speech on the record, no matter that having something new to say diminished with each passing speech, but this is what the “new” Senate is becoming—a debating society rather than a deliberative legislative body. And while sure, there were some good speeches, there were also some doozies that repeated the same falsehoods and info ops that the occupation organizers were counting on, so well done everyone.

Meanwhile, Matt Gurney calls for more information as to what constituted the continued use of powers in advance of their being lifted. Andrew Coyne puts the nine days of the emergency orders into perspective versus how it has been portrayed by bad faith actors across social media and certain political parties.

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QP: The trauma of vaccine mandates

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It was unusual but happened nevertheless—that Justin Trudeau was present for a third QP in a row. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen this, and one is forced to wonder if this is to put down the notion that he has been absent or in hiding because of the grifter occupation outside. Candice Bergen led off with her script in front of her, lamenting that the occupation has been there for two weeks, and requested a meeting with Trudeau to “end the impasse.” Trudeau called her out for encouraging the blockades and their fundraising, and said that they will see an end to the blockades, and called on the Conservatives to get on side. Bergen blamed the prime minister for the situation, and demanded their support for their Supply Day motion to capitulate to the occupiers and end all vaccine mandates, to which Trudeau expounded on the virtues of vaccines. Bergen gave some wounded faux confusion, and wondered if the prime minster wouldn’t lift mandates until there was 100 percent vaccination. Trudeau reminded her that vaccines are the way out of the pandemic. Luc Berthold took over in French to ask again if the prime minister wanted 100 percent vaccination rates, and Trudeau repeated his lines about the Conservatives going to bat for the occupiers. Berthold demanded a re-opening plan by all levels of government, and Trudeau said he was happy to hear the Conservatives calling for the occupiers to go home, and he hoped that the Conservatives would stop encouraging the other blockades.

Yves-François Blanchet led for the Bloc, and he too demanded a meeting with the prime minster and all party leaders, for which Trudeau reminded him that he is in contact with all levels of government but he could arrange a briefing if Blanchet wanted. Blanchet said he wanted to hear from all of the leaders, before raising the other tactics the occupiers were engaged in, and Trudeau said they were working with other governments to minimise the impact of the illegal blockades. 

Jagmeet Singh appeared by video, and whinged that the prime minister was “hiding behind jurisdiction” and demanded he fix the mess—for which the Conservatives applauded. Trudeau noted that they have been furnishing resources to the municipalities affected, which is why they called on the Conservatives to call for the blockades to end instead of cheering them on. Singh repeated his question in French, and got the same answer.

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Roundup: Poilievre first out of the gate

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First out of the gate to declare his intention to run for the leadership of the Conservative Party was Pierre Poilievre, who opted not to run the last time citing family concerns. Of course, numerous Conservative MPs and partisans have immediately lined up to support Poilievre, while others over social media have been digging up his long history of petulance, racist comments, and outright fictions, not that this will dissuade those who think that he’s just the guy to “own the Libs,” and move the party even more in a populist direction. Brace yourselves for an onslaught of outright fiction, because that’s the kind of politician Poilievre is.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1490119318981562372

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1490121403127021568

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Roundup: Another grifter convoy on the way

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Sucking up much of the oxygen in the news cycle is this so-called “Freedom Convoy” on its way to Ottawa, which looks to be just a lame repeat of the Yellow Vesters convoy from 2019, which turned out to be a big damp squib once it arrived. It’s been organised by the usual network of right-wing organisers using a bunch of trumped-up bullshit (truckers are vaccinated at a higher rate than the general population), and is quickly becoming a catch-all for a bunch of other anti-vax/anti-mask nonsense, and some of their demands, like around vaccine mandates in restaurants, are squarely within provincial jurisdiction, so “blockading” Parliament Hill won’t do anything about it. And an organizer for the Maverick Party in Alberta set up a GoFundMe, which has amassed some $3.7 million in donations, but those funds are being held until the service can determine how the funds will be disbursed—not that it’s stopping said organiser, which is a pretty good signal that this is just more grift.

Of course, Conservative MPs are signing right up to this (and I have a column on this out later today), tweeting nonsense things like that the prime minister is pushing a “vaccine vendetta,” which makes no sense unless you’ve been infected with these kinds of hyper-partisan brain worms. And Erin O’Toole won’t give a straight answer as to whether he supports this convoy (as many of his MPs are tweeting), so one suspects he’s waiting to see which way the wind is blowing before he makes any kind of definitive statement, but it’s all looking very familiar with what his predecessor did in 2019 (who is also tweeting support for this convoy).

https://twitter.com/Garossino/status/1485748899495112707

https://twitter.com/Garossino/status/1485750505431179266

https://twitter.com/Garossino/status/1485752969794523136

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