Erin O’Toole met with the Toronto Star’s editorial board yesterday, and indicated that any election won’t be his doing, which would indicate that he’s in no rush to call non-confidence with this government – and why would he? Should he topple the government (in a pandemic), he would not only have to wear that decision, but also try to explain how he would do things differently around things like vaccine procurement – something which he won’t actually do because he knows that we don’t have the domestic capacity to produce them, and that the current delays are outside of this government’s control. He won’t say those things out loud, because he needs to create a narrative about this government “failing,” even though he couldn’t do any better, but the truth has apparently never been a barrier for O’Toole (nor his predecessor).

What O’Toole is trying to do is set up a competing narrative for the post-pandemic recovery, where he gets to frame the Liberals’ plans of “build back better” – focused on green and inclusive growth – as being some kind of risky, ideologically-driven “experimentation.” The problem with this, of course, is that his plans for getting the economy back to status quo is that the old normal led us to this point – including the thousands of deaths that happened as a result of this pandemic. It would seem to me that trying to get to the old normal is risky and ideological, because they have proven to have failed, and were stifling growth – remember that calls for inclusive growth predate the pandemic and were highlighted by those radical ideologues at the Bank of Canada as a necessary pathway if the Canadian economy was to continue growing at a point where we had reached “full employment” and future growth was going to be constrained. Nevertheless, O’Toole is pandering to a voter base (and, frankly, a pundit class) that fails to see that the future economic drivers are going to be the green economy and ensuring that we get more women and minorities into the workforce. For a party that likes to fancy itself as “good economic managers,” they seem to be completely blinkered on where the market is heading, and are trying to chart a path that everyone else is rapidly abandoning.

Meanwhile, O’Toole’s finance critic, Pierre Poilievre, has been putting on a big dog and pony show about our unemployment rate over the past few days, and thinks he has a winning line in talking about “paycheques versus credit card debt,” but he’s basing it on a false premise that unemployment figures are directly comparable – they’re not, and as a former employment minister, he knows that and is lying to you. (He also knows that places like the US have their economies opened with massive death tolls as a result, but those are just details, right?)

I'm just gonna' post this link to a handy explainer from Stat Can on how/why the US and Canadian unemployment rates cannot be directly compared without significant adjustment: https://t.co/ZWIGTDu38q He was serving as the Minister of Employment at the time this was drafted. https://t.co/YeP8bTq5H5

— Dr. J Robson (@JenniferRobson8) February 8, 2021

Good reads:

• It appears that Moderna’s vaccine shipment delays are due to supply chain issues, which is not unsurprising (and nothing the government could do anything about).
• The government has set out the criteria for hotels to apply to be isolation sites for returning travellers. Here is more about the different kinds of sites being sought.
• Canada joined like-minded allies on a call to discuss next steps on how to deal with Russia after the detention of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
• It sounds like the government will be giving people who received pandemic benefits they weren’t entitled to in good faith will have a year to repay, interest-free.
• Additionally, those self-employed people who applied for benefits because they were given wrong information won’t be forced to repay their CERB.
• The Clerk of the Privy Council, Ian Shugart, is taking time off for cancer treatment.
• The Privacy Commissioner says that DND violated privacy rules in using artificial intelligence as part of their hiring process, intended to boost diversity.
• The Line talks to Dr. Leah West about the terrorism latch list, and the way the Proud Boys listing went down.
• The Senate has set February 17^th as the date for a final vote on the assisted dying bill, giving any amendments a few days to go to the Commons before the deadline.
• Apparently there is some internal conflict within the Green Party as they try to start making preparations in advance of the next election.
• Alberta is backing down on some of its plans around opening new coal mines (but the minister is using cagey, qualifying language so I would still beware).

Odds and ends:

My latest Loonie Politics video explains COVAX, and why it’s actually essential that Canada take the doses we paid for from it.

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