Tag Archives: Admiral McDonald

QP: Concerns over hotel quarantine

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There were four Liberals in the Chamber today, including Catherine McKenna as a designated front-bench babysitter, which we can’t seen in ages – praise be! Erin O’Toole led off, in person and with his script on his mini-lectern, and in a theatrically grave tone, worried about the Chief of Defence Staff and asked if the government was aware of any other senior command staff under investigation. Chrystia Freeland read a script that they take all allegations seriously. O’Toole then turned to the allegations of violence going on in quarantine hotels, essentially demanding the programme be shut down, and Freeland said that they were concerned by the reports. O’Toole demanded to know why the programme was still running, to which Freeland replied that it’s in place because no Canadian is safe from the pandemic, and no one should be travelling for non-essential reasons. O’Toole repeated the question in French, and Freeland said that if Conservatives don’t want to protect Canadians from COVID, it’s up to them, and repeated her concern about the allegations. O’Toole demanded a fix for the programme, for which Freeland recited that the government has some of the strictest border measures in the world.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and he decried that this government wasn’t taking hotel quarantine seriously enough, for which Freeland repeated that these were some of the strongest measures in the world, and that people shouldn’t be travelling. Therrien again railed that the government wasn’t doing its work, and Freeland repeated her reassurances in a calm and measured tone.

For the NDP, Jagmeet Singh led off in French, and he whined that the NDP pharmacare bill was killed and accused the government of being in the thrall of Big Pharma, for which Freeland read the script that they have already done more than any government in a generation to lower drug prices, and they were negotiating with provinces. Singh repeated the baseless accusation in English, illustrated with a sob story out of Oakville, and Freeland repeated her same answer, adding details about the Canadian drug agency, establishing a national formulary, and a rare disease drug strategy.

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Roundup: Fuelling the cynicism over pharmacare

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It appears that Jagmeet Singh is attempting to play a particular kind of political long game, designed solely to increase the level of cynicism among voters through a series of cute legislation, disingenuous moves, and outright mendacity. Case in point was the party’s “pharmacare bill,” which died at Second Reading yesterday – something that was always inevitable, and it was planned as a ham-fisted trap for the Liberals, to be amplified by an incurious media that only both-sides issues rather than calls out bullshit when they see it.

To wit – the NDP’s “pharmacare” bill was shenanigans. Private members’ bills cannot spend money (as that is the sole domain of the government), and the NDP thought they were going to be super clever and instead of outright making a spending commitment in the bill, it would build a framework that would then obligate the government to pass a second bill that would have the spending commitment, but I have particular doubts that this could possibly be considered kosher without a Royal Recommendation, because it tries to bind the government into a spending obligation. Add to that, this particular framework is essentially a top-down imposition on provinces that dares premiers to say no to “free money,” which is a) not free, and b) fraught with complications. Both of those particulars make this bill essentially unconstitutional, and if it’s not, then it’s empty political theatre.

The bill was designed to fail. Singh knew that the Liberals were committed to the process laid out in the Hoskins Report, which they have been pursuing with negotiation with premiers, as well as the establishment of the Canadian Drug Agency, which got funding in the 2019 budget. And the Hoskins Report is quite clear that this could take as long as seven years to negotiate the national formulary as part of this process. It’s not going to happen overnight – but that’s what Singh is trying to claim, that all the federal government has to do is cut cheques to provinces if they pay for all prescription drugs. That’s not how a pharmacare plan works. Singh also claims that the Liberals were voting against the Hoskins Report by killing this bill, which dishonest – yes, the report says a federal statute would need to be drafted, but that is the end-point of negotiations, not the beginning.

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And this is the thing – because this was designed to fail, it was an attempt to paint the Liberals as betraying their promise to implement universal pharmacare, when they’re already doing the hard work to make it happen. This is solely about breeding cynicism, pretending that there are magic wand solutions, or that you can force things on provinces by sheer force of will. Singh likes to make promises he can’t keep, and by trying to paint the Liberals as betraying their promises – which they are keeping, but which take time to implement because federalism is hard – he is just breeding unrealistic expectations and disappointment that will fuel disengagement. There has not been any honest discourse over this bill – and attempts to point out the truth are met with hostile responses, including a bunch of straw man arguments that pointing out that this bill is unconstitutional is Trudeau priming to declare the Canada Health Act unconstitutional, which is batshit crazy logic – and that just poisons the well for everyone. Well done, guys. I had not gauged the level of sheer cynicism that Singh possesses for the political process, but he’s made it abundantly clear.

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Roundup: Ford is steering Ontario into the third wave

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Ontario is seeing the biggest rise in the B117 variant of COVID – known colloquially as the UK variant – and yet Doug Ford is promising to start lifting restrictions later this week. We’ve only just gotten first doses to residents of long-term care facilities, and even those vaccinations won’t have a dent in ICU admissions, and yet, Ford and company are barrelling ahead with nonsensical plans. Another example was to delay March Break until April, ostensibly to prevent travel (because there is always travel over holidays), but it seems to also fly in the face of measures related to closing schools to prevent more spread, and that it could have had that utility.

Nevertheless, the province’s own modelling shows a disastrous third wave oncoming because of these more transmissible variants, and point to the need to keep up current restrictions. Ford plans to go ahead with loosening them. And then there was this remarkable exchange where a TVO reporter asked if the province was headed for disaster on this current course, and the public health officials essentially confirmed it.

Ontario is being governed by a group of murderclowns. There is no other explanation.

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Roundup: A freak-out over vaccine math

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With things in a particularly…fragile state around the vaccine rollout, leaking numbers without context should be seen as a Very Bad Thing, and yet that’s what happened yesterday morning, when it appeared to look like Pfizer was cutting the number of vials they were sending us before the end of our Q1 agreement, and there was a freak out. Premiers started demanding federal action (as though Justin Trudeau can just strong-arm Pfizer into producing more doses somehow), or badmouthing Pfizer itself (because that’ll help). And it turns out that it was all for naught.

It turns out that with the possibility that the vials of vaccine will be re-labelled to say that they contain six doses instead of five (which apparently is not uniform, and requires either a skilled operator or different syringes which are in short supply right now), Pfizer decided to rejig the math so that there are the same numbers of doses, but just in fewer vials. Health Canada has not agreed to this re-labelling, and has no timeline on when such a decision could be made, but Pfizer apparently jumped the gun in sending new numbers that got misinterpreted (and misrepresented once the context was actually known), and this government can’t communicate its way out of a wet paper bag at the best of times, so its inability to properly communicate these new figures only made things worse (especially as they didn’t smack it down during Question Period). And if Health Canada doesn’t relabel the vials? Pfizer still sends us the contracted-for number of doses. So the freak-out was for nothing – except maybe yet another kick in the ass for this government to get in the game when it comes to getting ahead of these things.

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Meanwhile, we also found out that Ontario had mis-reported its vaccination figures, and they’ve only vaccinated half as many as they said they did, which really puts the province’s hue and cry into the fact that it was running out of doses into a new light – and also the fact that they have been so desperate to blame the federal government for everything. It’s the “look over there” strategy, that certain members of the media seem to keep falling for, every single time. The absolute incompetence of the Ford government never fails to astound.

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Roundup: The rot in Alberta’s witch hunt

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The Alberta government’s $3.5 million special committee into Un-Albertan Activities “foreign-funded special interest groups” opposed to the energy sector has posted their list of commissioned studies, and they are a collection of climate deniers, and foreign-funded special interest groups – oil companies – who write boosterism for the sector. Oh, and there’s also a bunch of conspiracy theory nonsense in there as well. And yes, they paid thousands of dollars for those reports.

This is what the government spent $3.5 million on, at a time when they are complaining that they are so broke (because they relied too much on a high price of oil) that they are looking to slash and burn public services in the province. The fact that they are funnelling money to hucksters and charlatans, and that they accepted the work of a conspiracy theorist to launch the whole committee in the first place, is par for the course in the province, unfortunately. This whole exercise is a kind of distillation of the absolute rot in Alberta politics that its potency would be fatal if you ingested it. One wonders what the straw that breaks the camel’s back will wind up being (and it may yet be those MLAs’ pandemic vacations), but this particular farce is absolutely galling.

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Roundup: Ignoring workplace spread

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For the last post of 2020, it seems fitting to take one more kick at Doug Ford, whose incompetence has been responsible for the worsening of the pandemic. While Ford continues to try and blame the federal government for international travel bringing in cases – something which the evidence does not support – his mockdown full of half-measures is doing nothing about workplace spread. Case in point is that Amazon facility where some 400 cases were identified, which is a big-P Problem, and yet nothing from the Ford government about this. That’s kind of a problem – but this is Doug Ford, and when he says he’s looking out for the “little guy,” he’s talking about the business owner, not the workers.

Meanwhile, he’s not taking criticism for his failure well, and well, it shows. His “uncle Doug” schtick is failing him, and he doesn’t know what else to do. This could end very badly for all of us.

Programming Note: I am taking the rest of the year off of blogging, as well as there won’t be a new YouTube episode next week. Loonie Politics columns should remain unaffected. Have a safe, socially-distant holiday and we’ll see you in the New Year.

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