Roundup: Freeland is setting her policy own agenda—oh noes!

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The Globe and Mail had a strange hit piece out yesterday that was largely targeted at Chrystia Freeland, but it was kind of all over the place and seemed to be missing the mark on a few different tangents. It was framed around Michael Sabia, the new-ish deputy minister of finance, and the fact that he hasn’t made any headway in reining in spending or coming out with a “growth agenda,” as though we aren’t still in a global pandemic that has required extraordinary government fiscal measures in order to keep the economy from spiralling into a depression, or the fact that the last budget was a growth agenda, but it was focused on inclusive growth rather than tax cuts, which a particular generation cannot wrap their heads around (and the fact that the piece singles out the childcare plan is evidence of this fact).

What was particularly troubling about the piece was the fact that it couldn’t quite decide how it was attacking Freeland. On the one hand, it worried that she was too hands-off in the department, leaving Sabia to manage it while she dealt with big policy items (for which she was attacked in absentia during Question Period yesterday), while at the same time, it is overly concerned that Department of Finance officials aren’t driving policy, but the government is. Which, erm, is kind of how things work in our system. The civil service is supposed to provide fearless advice but also do the work of implementing the policies and directives of their political bosses. That’s the whole point of a democracy—this is not a technocracy where the bureaucrats run the show, and if these sore Finance officials have a problem with that, perhaps they either need a refresher on how this works, or they need to find themselves out of the civil service.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1470409184076185600

None of this is particularly surprising, mind you—there are still too many pundits and journalists who still think it’s 1995 and will always be 1995, because that is the established media narrative by which they must always obey (and this hit piece also touches on the Cult of the Insider narrative as well with all of the anonymous inside sources). And the fact that Freeland is a woman holding the job, and is focusing on things like inclusive growth and not the usual “tax cuts=jobs” agenda frankly makes it too easy for the 1995 narrative to keep being circulated. But it’s not 1995, and perhaps it’s time that We The Media stop pretending otherwise, because this kind of hit piece was frankly something that should not have seen the light of day.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau says he’s not bigfooting the fight against Bill 21 in Quebec so that the provincial government can’t weaponize it (not to mention he has no federal levers).
  • Trudeau also said he has proposed “aligning” tax credit incentives for electric vehicles with the Americans, as Canada is threatening retaliatory measures.
  • The government has survived its first major confidence vote on the address in reply to the Speech from the Throne.
  • The bad news keeps rolling in about the transmissibility of the omicron variant.
  • Dr. Theresa Tam is admitting that the public health system wasn’t prepared for COVID, and proposes fixes before the next pandemic strikes.
  • As expected the government renewed the Bank of Canada’s inflation-targeting mandate, with some additional flexibility and maximizing employment.
  • Today’s fiscal update will include a $40 billion sum set aside for the settlement of Indigenous children taken into care, and to help fix the system going forward.
  • Senators doing pre-study of the paid sick leave bill are proposing amendments, which the government says they are open to.
  • Omar Alghabra is planning a federal summit early in the New Year to look at the country’s supply chain and finding ways to reduce the bottlenecks therein.
  • Anita Anand, the Deputy Minister of National Defence, and the Chief of Defence Staff issued a formal apology for not dealing with sexual misconduct in the military.
  • The latest NSIRA report shows that white supremacists embedded in Canada’s military pose an “active counter-intelligence threat.”
  • Thus far, only 8.5 million of the promised two billion trees have been planted—which is in line with a back-loaded, ten-year programme. Seriously.
  • NDP MP Taylor Bachrach has tabled a private members’ bill to lower the voting age to 16, and he’ll be in the first tranche of bills being debated.
  • Manitoba is asking the federal government for fifteen to thirty ICU nurses for the next six weeks (though I’m not sure where they’re going to come from).
  • Kevin Carmichael walks through the decision to renew the Bank of Canada’s inflation-targeting mandate, and what the key features are.
  • Heather Scoffield highlights the language in the Bank of Canada’s mandate around flexibility, and why that’s important for the economic recovery.
  • Althia Raj worries about inappropriate uses of the Notwithstanding Clause, as Quebec did with Bill 21, and whether provinces will be tempted to normalize it.

Odds and ends:

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One thought on “Roundup: Freeland is setting her policy own agenda—oh noes!”

  1. Seems like the Groundhog Day 1995 media has bought into their own self-created hype about Trudeau’s imminent departure and Freeland’s inevitability (Max Fawcett’s provocative, bandwagoning sh~tpost yesterday only adds fuel to the fire). So now they’ve decided to tear down a caricatured “monster” of their own making, before anything actually happens. Same with Blacklock’s latest BS about Anand and her husband. Which only goes to prove that anyone who thinks any other Liberal leader would face fewer headwinds or “polarization” than Trudeau does is either deluded or arguing in bad faith.

    Fife needs to stick to reporting actual news instead of catty “anonymous sources” gossip. If he’s too habitually addicted to “torquing,” then he needs to pack it in and retire.

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