Roundup: Giroux tries his hand at semantics

Posted on by

Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux is at it again, deciding that he wants to play talking head pundit rather than sticking to the confines of his job. Case in point was his report on the proposed Digital Safety Office, and his calculations around staffing and the costs thereof (which the Conservatives have disingenuously suggested was reason to kill said office should they form government, when we know it has nothing to do with the costs). But Giroux has decided to make some utterly incomprehensible musings, talking about how “Canadians need to decide” if this is just “bureaucracy” or “enforcement” of the Act.

I’m not even sure where to start here. For one, of course it’s enforcement—that’s the whole gods damned point of the office. And there will be cost recovery in the way of fees and fines from the web giants, but Giroux didn’t bother to calculate what those could look like, because apparently, he can only pull certain methodologies out of his ass, but not others. But to try and play semantic games about whether or not this is “bureaucracy” is frankly baffling. What exactly is he trying to say? How is this at all related to his statutory responsibilities of providing economic and macro-economic analysis? It’s not, and Giroux should know that if he wants to be a pundit, he should resign and actually go do that.

But that’s not all. Giroux put out another report that is disputing Canada’s defence spending vis-à-vis GDP, so that he can weigh in on the Narrative about our commitments to NATO (without any actual context). Giroux claims that we’ll be below because the Canadian Forces has been lapsing certain levels of spending (which is true, and also a sign why we can’t just budget even more money that they can’t spend), but beyond this, he also decided he was going to use his own calculations for the GDP denominator instead of the OECD calculation that NATO uses, because he knows better, apparently. I mean, why have an apples-to-apples comparison that’s actually useful when you can pull a bespoke method from your ass in order to make a point, which again, is not within his remit to be doing. I’m going to be generous and say that there is a legitimate point about lapsing spending, but whatever he’s trying to do here is hardly within the confines of his job description, and more in line with his desire to be a media star.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched a daytime airstrike against Ukraine that hit a children’s hospital in Kyiv, and which killed at least 41 civilians in total. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Warsaw to meet with the president of Poland to discuss strengthening air defences, as well as signing a bilateral defence cooperation agreement. Zelenskyy vowed retaliation for the strike, and called on allies to stand with him. Russia is claiming that Ukraine launched tens of drones at them, and that two power substations and an oil depot caught fire as a result.

Good reads:

  • From Washington, Justin Trudeau condemned the Russian attack on the children’s hospital in Kyiv, ahead of this week’s NATO summit.
  • Mélanie Joly was in London to meet her new British counterpart, and was the first foreign minister that he met (pointing to the strength of our relationship).
  • Mark Holland announced that the new portal for dentists to use for dental care payments is now operational, so they can still process claims without signing up.
  • Diane Lebouthillier is calling for an external review of fisheries officers who arrested two Mi’kmaq fishers and dropped them off with no shoes or phones.
  • Privy Council Office says they didn’t actually check the online aliases of the new chair of the Human Rights Commission, and that it was an “oversight.”
  • Saskatchewan says they got their court injunction to stop the CRA from collecting the carbon levy from their accounts—which is not actually a win on the merits.
  • Former Saskatchewan Cabinet minister Eric Cline calls out the province’s utter mismanagement of royalties from the potash industry.
  • Steve Paikin offers a history lesson about the care and feeding of caucus members, and how Mulroney learned the lesson, while Trudeau struggles with it.
  • Justin Ling points to the ways in which Conservatives have been contributing to the backsliding in respect for LGBTQ+ rights in this country.

Odds and ends:

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1810277974765129923

Want more Routine Proceedings? Become a patron and get exclusive new content.