I am generally tolerant of MPs taking on ministerial or critic portfolios without first requiring a background knowledge in the subject matter, because for ministers, what matters is your ability to manage the department and act on advice that you’re given (as well as being accountable for those actions), while critics are playing an accountability role, and don’t exactly need subject matter expertise in order to do that. This having been said, sometimes ignorance is damaging, and we saw a very real example of that yesterday, where the Conservative finance critic, Pierre Poilievre, started taking shots at the Bank of Canada, saying that their quantitative easing programme is a “pyramid scheme” that is enabling the Liberals’ deficit spending (because we’re in a global pandemic!), and in doing so, is threatening the independence of the central bank. Poilievre also raised the spectre of runaway inflation if the Bank keeps printing money, err, except that we are currently facing deflationary pressure – not inflationary.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1316702304867946497

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1316703965585833984

The CPC line here makes no sense. Inflation is running below target – this is *precisely* when you'd expect and want the Bank of Canada to be taking an expansionist monetary policy stance. https://t.co/j1Tjlqm4F8

— Stephen Gordon (@stephenfgordon) October 15, 2020

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1316854251826683904

There are plenty of economists who can explain these concepts to Poilievre, except we know that he’s not interested. He was given the portfolio in order to be a shit-disturber, to knock Bill Morneau off his game (and Morneau was fairly easily rattled by this kind of partisan buffoonery), and presumably kept in the role because Erin O’Toole thought he was doing a good job of it. Mind you, Chrystia Freeland is not Bill Morneau, and she’s not affected by Poilievre’s antics, and frequently puts him in his place in QP. But the fact that this is the state of the discourse on the economic recovery is both disappointing and dispiriting. We should be having reasonably conversations about what is happening with the economic recovery, not this kind of performative baboon jeering and hooting that we’re getting from a party that claims to be the better economic managers.

Good reads:

• The Chinese ambassador has implicitly threatened Canadians in Hong Kong if Canada grants asylum to Hong Kong protesters. So that’s going well.
• The new commercial rent subsidy will be retroactive to October 1^st, but will require legislation to pass before those funds can roll out.
• Indigenous Services minister Marc Miller says the raid on the Nova Scotia lobster pound on Tuesday was an attack on all Mi’kmaw people.
• The Mi’kmaq chief involved in the fishery dispute says that the RCMP inaction on the scene as their property was destroyed in the raid is systemic racism in action.
• The federal government is investing $20 million in helping bring small modular reactors to market as part of the goal of reaching net zero emissions.
• The RCMP’s union is back in talks around salary increases, after they were delayed for the pandemic.
• The government’s COVID Alert app has a bit of a glitch on Apple phones running older iOS, where it’s telling them they have potential conflicts when the app doesn’t.
• The Bank of Canada is preparing to have a digital currency at the ready in the event it’s needed should Facebook’s planned Libra get blocked by regulators.
• Pharmaceutical companies are threatening not to launch new medicines in Canada if new regulations come to force that would lower some prices.
• Liberals on the finance and ethics committees are continuing their filibusters to avoid resuming the investigations into the WE Imbroglio.
• Economists Andrew Leach and Blake Shaffer consider Alberta’s shift away from coal-fired electricity to be a success story for tools like carbon pricing.
• Susan Delacourt recounts a political scientist’s attempts to interview women MPs about their experiences, and how that translates into changing the political culture.

Odds and ends:

Colin Horgan gives a wake-up call that the end of 2020 won’t bring relief, but will probably make things worse because we’ve exposed the problems in society.

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