Roundup: Accountability for transfers is not micro-management

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We are now in day thirty-one of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and things are going badly enough for Russia that the Ukrainians are starting to counter-attack, not only pushing Russian forces further away from Kyiv, but also other areas, which has the possibility of making Russia pay a high enough price that they could be willing to accept some kind of negotiated settlement and withdraw. Maybe. We’ll see, but it’s a good sign nevertheless that Ukraine is able to take these measures. Elsewhere, it sounds like about 300 people were killed when the Russians bombed the theatre in Mariupol, and the city is digging mass graves, while some 100,000 people remain trapped there as the Russians turn the city to rubble.

Closer to home, the federal government announced a one-time special transfer of $2 billion to provinces to help them with their surgical backlogs as a result of COVID, but they want some conditions of a sort, and cited five areas of focus for upcoming healthcare talks: backlogs and recruitment and retention of health-care workers; access to primary care; long-term care and home care; mental health and addictions; and digital health and virtual care. And some provinces, predictably, are balking at this because they think this is federal “micromanagement” of healthcare when it’s nothing of the sort. They simply need assurances that provinces are going to spend this where they say they’re going to, because we just saw Doug Ford put some $5.5 billion in federal pandemic aid onto his bottom line, and giving out rebates for licences plate stickers in a blatant exercise in populist vote-buying rather than using that money where it was intended—the healthcare system.

https://twitter.com/journo_dale/status/1507478370300628996

More to the point, provinces are insisting that they are unanimous that hey want unconditional health transfers that will bring the federal share of health spending up to 35 percent, but that’s actually a trap. They are deliberately not mentioning that in 1977, provinces agreed to forego certain health transfers in exchange for tax points, which are more flexible, and that increasing to 35 percent will really be a stealth increase to something like 60 percent, because they’re deliberately pretending that they don’t have those tax points. On top of that, provinces were getting higher health transfers for over a decade—remember when the escalator was six percent per year, and what was health spending increasing at? Somewhere around 2.2 percent, meaning that they spent that money on other things. They should have used it to transform their healthcare systems, but they chose not to, and now they cry poor and want the federal government to bail them out from problems they created, and are blaming the federal government for. It’s a slick little game that doesn’t get called out because the vast majority of the media just credulously repeats their demands without pointing to the tax points, or the fact that they spent their higher transfers elsewhere, or that Doug Ford sat on that pandemic spending, as other provinces did to balance their budgets (Alberta and New Brunswick to name a couple). So no, they do not need these transfers to be unconditional, and the federal government would be foolish if they acceded to that kind of demand.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1507418761912983561

Good reads:

  • Because clips are circulating, here is a rundown of the far-right MEPs who denounced Justin Trudeau after his speech at the European Parliament.
  • The federal privacy commissioner wants explicit safeguards in any cross-border data-sharing agreement with American authorities.
  • Hormone-treated Canadian beef is emerging as a sticking point in trade talks between Canada and the UK.
  • YouTube says that pushing Canadian content could cut Canadian creators off from foreign revenues (which sounds like bullshit to keep them slaves to the algorithm).
  • The World Health Organisation is reviewing their policies after rejecting use of the Canadian-made Medicago vaccine because they are part owned by a tobacco giant.
  • Pierre Poilievre has decided to go hard on the “Ethical Oil” promises.
  • Jason Kenney defended calling his opponents “lunatics trying to take over the asylum” or “bugs attracted to bright lights,” which means the “leak” was deliberate.
  • Stephanie Carvin looks into why Russia’s vaunted information warfare capabilities utterly collapsed during their invasion of Ukraine.
  • Robert Hiltz castigates Doug Ford’s choice to abandon public health measures as the virus is on the uptick again, for the sake of electoral gain in June.
  • My Xtra column is a conversation with immigration minister Sean Fraser about a number of his files that affect the LGBTQ+ communities.
  • My weekend column looks at the political calculus of what the NDP gets out of the supply and confidence agreement with the Liberals.

Odds and ends:

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