Roundup: That 21-second pause

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Sometimes the news out of prime minister Justin Trudeau’s daily pressers is unexpected, and yesterday was no exception. After first acknowledging that he would be speaking more on the situation with anti-Black racism in the House of Commons later, Trudeau turned to the subject of the government’s efforts to procure more personal protective equipment and the industry retooling to supply it domestically in Canada. But none of this was the actual news. It was during the Q&A that, after a question on Hong Kong (Trudeau: We are very concerned because there are 300,000 Canadian citizens there), he was put on the spot about what Donald Trump is doing in the US, and what Trudeau’s silence in not denouncing it says. And then Trudeau paused. Gathering his thoughts, for twenty-one seconds, there was uncertainty as to what was going on in his mind, when he finally spoke about the “horror and consternation” of what was going on in the US – but he was very diplomatic and not calling out Trump on anything specifically. There is a relationship to manage there, especially during this global pandemic. When asked about Israel, Trudeau reiterated the support for a two-state solution and that he is “concerned” about annexation plans into Palestinian territory and that he told both prime ministers of that country (because there are now two) about it personally. He was also was asked about the MMIW Inquiry report and its finding of “genocide,” and Trudeau prevaricated somewhat, using the term “cultural genocide” before talking about the need to do better and work on the road to reconciliation, but wasn’t going to allow himself to be drawn into using other language.

A short while later in the Commons, Trudeau stood to give his speech on racism, and made sure that he had MP Greg Fergus and minister Ahmed Hussen in the frame behind him – because it’s always about optics. Nevertheless, he stated that he didn’t want to be another white politician lecturing about racism, and said that not being perfect is not an excuse for not doing anything, before he listed actions his government had taken in engaging the Black community, for what it’s worth.

Andrew Scheer gave a far more predictably milquetoast denunciation of racism, name-checking convenient names for his narrative along the way, like Lincoln Alexander and John Ware. But in his denunciation of racism – including anti-Asian racism and anti-Semitism along the way in light of a recently vandalized synagogue, he kept going on about peaceful protests over riots, and the importance of freedom, singling out economic and religious freedom. There was zero awareness from Scheer about structural racism, or self-awareness in how his party’s “tough-on-crime” fetishism contributes to over-policing at the heart of these protests.

Yves-François Blanchet was less equivocal than Scheer, going on about the anthropology of there being no such thing as race and that racism was about othering – but then stated that the Canadian and Quebec governments “weren’t racist” (erm, you do know what Bill 21 in Quebec was all about, right?) before saying that there may be “traces” that create systemic barriers. And then this shifted to a demand to process the claims of certain asylum seekers (because there’s nothing like the reliance on low-wage and untrained labour that is a direct beacon to the systemic barriers that these very minorities face) before citing that peaceful protests were legitimate and violent ones were not.

Jagmeet Singh kept saying that the government needs to make concrete action instead of making “pretty speeches,” and that the prime minister has the power to do things beyond words, demanding things like ending racial profiling, ending the over-policing of Black and Indigenous bodies, subsequent over-incarceration of Black and Indigenous people, and the need for race-based data. But as Singh can’t even grandstand properly, when he was up to question Trudeau several minutes later in the special committee, he seemed to indicate that things like ending racial profiling could be done with the snap of a finger, and when he demanded that boil water advisories be lifted in First Nations communities, Trudeau reminded him that they are on schedule for doing just that.

Elizabeth May closed out the speeches by naming as many Black and Indigenous deaths at the hands of police that she could recall, before talking about the cyclical nature of these kinds of denunciations every few months, acknowledging her white privilege, denounced Trump, and called on the government to root out white supremacist groups as a terrorist threat, particularly within police forces in Canada.

Good reads:

  • We got our first look at the Estimates that will be voted on by the Commons on the 17th, and a bit a sense of the cumulative spending over the course of the pandemic.
  • The government has procured some 37 million syringes for the eventuality that we have a vaccine for COVID-19.
  • Here’s a good longread from Associated Press about the early days of the pandemic, and what was happening behind the scenes at the WHO and China.
  • The Federal Court has approved interim payments for Sixties Scoop survivors while their compensation claims processing has been slowed by the pandemic.
  • Bell and Telus have decided to build their 5G networks with Ericsson technology, dropping Huawei in advance of any decision the government makes.
  • The Speaker says that they have the technology to allow remote electronic voting for MPs, and I cannot stress enough that this is a parliamentary abomination.
  • Here is a further profile of Conservative leadership candidate Leslyn Lewis, with some additional context on the current anti-Black racism discussion.
  • Kevin Carmichael looks at Stephen Poloz’s last day as Bank of Canada governor, and what he is turning over to his successor in terms of the economic situation.
  • Heather Scoffield ponders that long pause of Trudeau’s, and what can be done to alleviate some of the systemic barriers facing new immigrant workers.
  • Chris Selley suggests the government dial down their sanctimony in acknowledging the existence of racism and points to their broken promises in not fixing problems.
  • My column sees the Senate as a kind of Greek tragedy unfolding, where the efforts to reform the institution threaten to turn it into the very thing proponents decry.

Odds and ends:

Here is the tale of how Campobello Island in New Brunswick, which has no land connection to mainland Canada – only to Maine – is coping with the pandemic.

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3 thoughts on “Roundup: That 21-second pause”

  1. “There was zero awareness from Scheer about structural racism, or self-awareness in how his party’s “tough-on-crime” fetishism contributes to over-policing at the heart of these protests.”

    Or barbaric cultural practices, or the phrase “old-stock Canadians,” or giving a pep talk to the yellow vests, or hiring Rebel Media to run his campaign, or voting against M-103, or dog-whistling conspiracy theories about the U.N., or calling irregular migrants “illegals,” or Sloan’s vitriol against Dr. Tam, or…. pretty much anything that’s come from the Reform Republicans since MacKay handed Harper and Manning the keys to the kingdom and let the inmates overtake the asylum.

    “B-b-b-b-b-but blackface!” Yeah, we know. We’ve heard it already. Trudeau doesn’t need to wear a hair shirt the rest of his life. But he addressed it anyway: “not being perfect is not a free pass to not do the right thing.” There’s a middle ground between “poke the bear” (Singh’s approach from the cheap seats) and Scheer’s “can’t be arsed to bother.”

  2. “Bell and Telus have decided to build their 5G networks with Ericsson technology, dropping Huawei in advance of any decision the government makes.”

    I think you will find that Bell and TELUS made this u-turn precisely so that the Trudeau government wouldn’t have to make a decision on Huawei until a more “convenient” time.

  3. Scheer’s conservative boast their stand of zero tolerance for racism and their support for law and order, which is euphemistically a call to make sure that all people that don’t look like them should toe the line. Racism like religion has to be taught to young children. When they become indoctrinated racists they take away the freedoms of “others”, when they learn religion they lose their freedom. Nasty stuff, what?

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