Tag Archives: Andrew Scheer

Roundup: O’Toole hears the siren song of cheap outrage

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He’s barely a week into the job as Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, and Erin O’Toole is already starting to beak off about official residences, and my head is on the verge of exploding. When asked about the CBC story that Stornoway – the official residence of the Leader of the Opposition – is due to get $170,000 in needed repairs before O’Toole and family move in, O’Toole started going off about how he only wanted the very minimum of work done and that he doesn’t even want furniture in his kids’ bedrooms because he wants to use the furniture that their grandfather built in Nova Scotia, and I was both outraged and exasperated.

Let me be clear – the National Capital Commission needs to put work into upkeep of these heritage residences or else they will start to degrade. Everyone was so afraid of necessary upkeep at 24 Sussex for so long that it has literally become a crumbling shitpile, and nobody can decide what to do with it now. Stornoway managed to avoid that fate because when Preston Manning refused to move in, the NCC was able to do the heavy-duty renovations that the residence needed to bring it back up to spec, but 24 Sussex has never had that opportunity, and look where it got us. Nevertheless, this persistent politicization of official residences and casting them as “personal benefits” for political leaders is outrageous to the point of being offensive. These are not personal benefits – they are official residences who belong to the Queen in Right of Canada. And you can bet that a lot of journalists and Liberal partisans on Twitter dug up everything O’Toole said about 24 Sussex and the renovations to Harrington Lake to paint him a hypocrite, but dear sweet Rhea, mother of Zeus, this is such self-defeating behaviour. Stop it.

I will also add lay a certain amount of blame for this on the media, because the impulse is always to write these stories as cheap outrage. The CBC headline is quintessential cheap outrage: “Stornoway getting $170K in taxpayer-funded repairs before Erin O’Toole moves in.” This is the kind of thing that gets Canadians’ hairshirt parsimony and tall poppy syndrome riled up, and suddenly it’s a scandal – no matter how reasonable the costs, or necessary the work. And that’s exactly why 24 Sussex is a crumbling shitpile, and why our government aircraft are so old that they have to constantly refuel, and why the avionics on some of them are so old that they are banned from several major airports. It’s embarrassing, but cheap outrage is like crack to so many journalists’ brains that they can’t help themselves, and we collectively set ourselves back another decade on doing what needs to be done. We need to do better, and stop going for the cheap dopamine hits that these stories give because it’s self-destructive.

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Roundup: Getting the deficit vapours

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau was back making the media rounds yesterday, and one of the things he spoke about was the “ambitious green agenda” to be laid out in the Throne Speech, which has every pundit in the country clutching their pearls about the state of the deficit. Why? Because in Canadian punditry – and many government departments, finance especially – it is 1995 and will always be 1995. And some of that comes with the usual ridiculous assertions about comparing the nation’s finances to a household’s, or that of a business.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1301527104383848449

And then there was one column in particular which doubled down on not only the usual deficit vapours, but the notions that somehow inclusive growth isn’t a real strategy, which credible economists – and not just those on speed dial for certain media outlets who have one answer for every problem – will tell you is a bogus argument. But hey, it’s 1995 and will always be 1995.

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Roundup: The inertia around solitary

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The story of what happened with the panel the government assembled to oversee its supposed elimination of solitary confinement in federal penitentiaries has been a slow-burning story this week, but indicative of some of the incomprehensible ways in which this government operates. The practice of solitary confinement has been declared inhumane and contrary to the Charter by courts across the country, and the government promised to reform it with these “structured intervention units,” but that was already dubious, and unlikely to satisfy the courts – and they knew that, but went ahead with it anyway. A year later, the panel that was supposed to oversee it quit in frustration because they couldn’t get any information they needed to do their work (and the Correctional Investigator gave Correctional Services a pass on this because apparently, they’ve been implementing new software and this has been a problem). But it was only when this story leaked thanks to Senator Kim Pate that Bill Blair sprang into action, promising to reappoint the panel and implement a “work plan” to get them the information.

Well, turns out members of that panel aren’t exactly keen to be reappointed because they’ve been jerked around for a year, and were doing this on a volunteer basis, which cost them a lot of time and money for nothing but headaches. But this all feels like another case of this government meaning well, and talking a good game without doing the actual work involved and then hoping that everything will be forgiven because they have good intentions. That’s not good enough, and yet they keep behaving like that’s all well and good. It’s not.

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Roundup: Taking a personal day

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Of all the possible misplays for Justin Trudeau to make at the height of a controversy around his poor choices, ethical blind spots, and insistence that he’s being open and transparent, the first day of a two-day recall of the House of Commons saw him absent with the only excuse on his daily itinerary being a “personal day,” which sent the opposition into a frenzy. It’s not like Trudeau chose this day for the Commons to be recalled and for there to be a proper Question Period – erm, except he did. And then wasn’t present. Way to read the room.

Andrew Scheer had his own attempts to make hay, insisting that if the Liberal backbenchers don’t oust Trudeau (without a mechanism to do so, it should be noted), that they were signalling that they were okay with his “corruption” – never mind that a conflict of interest is not actually corruption, and he’s not exactly someone who should be throwing stones considering that he was forced to resign his own leadership after it was revealed that he was helping himself to party funds to the tune of almost a million dollars.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives are also pushing back against the bill being debated, objecting to the “complexity” of the wage subsidy changes, despite the fact that for there to be a proper phase-out and to ensure it’s more broadly encompassing than the programme was initially, there needs to be added complexity. Their objections won’t matter for much, considering that the Bloc has agreed to support the bill regardless so there are enough votes to go around, but it is a change from bills being supported unanimously at all stages, and something that resembles a sense of normalcy slowly returning to Parliament, which is a good thing.

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Roundup: Pearl-clutching about the deficit

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For the first time this week, prime minister Justin Trudeau held a presser, wherein he praised the agreement with the First Nations on moving ahead with transferring control over child welfare, mentioned the virtual Cabinet retreat that was held over the previous two days, and mentioned that new pandemic modelling was on the way, noting that there are still hot-spots around the country. And then it was the takeaway message of the day – a mere couple of hours away from the fiscal “snapshot” being delivered, Trudeau made the case that they chose to support Canadians rather than leaving them to fend for themselves, and that the cost of doing nothing would have been far greater on both healthcare and the economy. He reiterated that this was not the time for austerity, but that they have been building a “bridges” to a stronger, more resilient Canada, and drove home the point that the federal government took on debt so that ordinary Canadians wouldn’t have to. He pointed to the low debt-to-GDP ratio, and that historically low interest rates mean manageable borrowing costs. And with one final word on Bob Rae being appointed to the UN, he took questions, one of the first of which determined that he didn’t recuse himself when the WE Charity sole-source contract came before Cabinet, which is something the Ethics Commissioner is looking at. He spoke about the necessity of childcare, that Bill Blair has been engaged on the subject or the RCMP and police brutality as part of the broader Cabinet workplan on combatting systemic racism, that they were following the recommendations of the Auditor General on CBSA, and then reiterated again that with historically low debt-servicing costs, it was easier for the federal government to take it on in order to prevent Canadian households from having to do so. When asked about the relationship with Donald Trump, Trudeau once again reiterated that they have concerns about the possibility of new tariffs, and that it will only hurt American industry because they need Canadian aluminium as they can’t produce enough of their own.

And then the fiscal “snapshot.” While Bill Morneau’s pabulum-heavy speech was pretty much all self-congratulation and a recap of measures they’ve taken, the accompanying documents did show a $343 billion deficit projected for this year (though it has been speculated that this was an outer bound limit designed for them to come under), and that the total debt by the end of this fiscal year could be $1.2 trillion – numbers everyone clutched their pearls about while ignoring that the debt-servicing costs continue to decrease even though the size of the debt has increased. There was mention that the wage subsidy is going to be extended, but with modifications on the way “sooner than later,” but there wasn’t much indication about the broader recovery plan thus far.

Of course, the obsessions among all of the media coverage was the deficit and debt figures, because our reporting narratives remain firmly affixed in the mid-1990s, and no one can break free of them – not to mention the hyperbolic mentions about how this was the biggest deficit since the Second World War (never mind that this is a virtually unprecedented global pandemic we’re facing with a demand-side shock that people can’t seem to wrap their heads around). And because the framing devices remain in the 1990s, headlines obsessed that there wasn’t a plan to curb spending – because of course we know how the epidemiology of this pandemic is going to play out until we get a vaccine at some point in the future. But perspective? You need to turn to the economists on Twitter for that.

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Roundup: Hot and Bothered for Basic Income

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The idea of a Basic Income has been a hobby-horse of parliamentarians for a while, and yesterday the Parliamentary Budget Officer came out with a report that purported to cost one out in a couple of different scenarios. But it’s a bit of a horror show of a report because what it’s actually describing is a cash transfer and not an actual Basic Income scheme, and more than that, some of the things it purports to strip in order to pay for its high price tag are a number of disability supports. Remember that while a Basic Income may sound like a left-wing idea, there is plenty of right-wing support for it if it dismantles the welfare state, where replacing tailored disability programmes with a one-size-fits-all cash transfer is a feature and not a bug. (More from economist Mike Moffatt here).

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280537746881212422

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1280630991661535238

Suffice to say, this report got some senators all hot and bothered, including Senator Yuen Pau Woo, who put out a press release on the topic, calling for a pilot project, so here’s Lindsay Tedds, who worked on BC’s Basic Income project for the last two years, and who knows a thing or two about Basic Income.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1280562781142388736

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Roundup: That 21-second pause

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Sometimes the news out of prime minister Justin Trudeau’s daily pressers is unexpected, and yesterday was no exception. After first acknowledging that he would be speaking more on the situation with anti-Black racism in the House of Commons later, Trudeau turned to the subject of the government’s efforts to procure more personal protective equipment and the industry retooling to supply it domestically in Canada. But none of this was the actual news. It was during the Q&A that, after a question on Hong Kong (Trudeau: We are very concerned because there are 300,000 Canadian citizens there), he was put on the spot about what Donald Trump is doing in the US, and what Trudeau’s silence in not denouncing it says. And then Trudeau paused. Gathering his thoughts, for twenty-one seconds, there was uncertainty as to what was going on in his mind, when he finally spoke about the “horror and consternation” of what was going on in the US – but he was very diplomatic and not calling out Trump on anything specifically. There is a relationship to manage there, especially during this global pandemic. When asked about Israel, Trudeau reiterated the support for a two-state solution and that he is “concerned” about annexation plans into Palestinian territory and that he told both prime ministers of that country (because there are now two) about it personally. He was also was asked about the MMIW Inquiry report and its finding of “genocide,” and Trudeau prevaricated somewhat, using the term “cultural genocide” before talking about the need to do better and work on the road to reconciliation, but wasn’t going to allow himself to be drawn into using other language.

A short while later in the Commons, Trudeau stood to give his speech on racism, and made sure that he had MP Greg Fergus and minister Ahmed Hussen in the frame behind him – because it’s always about optics. Nevertheless, he stated that he didn’t want to be another white politician lecturing about racism, and said that not being perfect is not an excuse for not doing anything, before he listed actions his government had taken in engaging the Black community, for what it’s worth.

Andrew Scheer gave a far more predictably milquetoast denunciation of racism, name-checking convenient names for his narrative along the way, like Lincoln Alexander and John Ware. But in his denunciation of racism – including anti-Asian racism and anti-Semitism along the way in light of a recently vandalized synagogue, he kept going on about peaceful protests over riots, and the importance of freedom, singling out economic and religious freedom. There was zero awareness from Scheer about structural racism, or self-awareness in how his party’s “tough-on-crime” fetishism contributes to over-policing at the heart of these protests.

Yves-François Blanchet was less equivocal than Scheer, going on about the anthropology of there being no such thing as race and that racism was about othering – but then stated that the Canadian and Quebec governments “weren’t racist” (erm, you do know what Bill 21 in Quebec was all about, right?) before saying that there may be “traces” that create systemic barriers. And then this shifted to a demand to process the claims of certain asylum seekers (because there’s nothing like the reliance on low-wage and untrained labour that is a direct beacon to the systemic barriers that these very minorities face) before citing that peaceful protests were legitimate and violent ones were not.

Jagmeet Singh kept saying that the government needs to make concrete action instead of making “pretty speeches,” and that the prime minister has the power to do things beyond words, demanding things like ending racial profiling, ending the over-policing of Black and Indigenous bodies, subsequent over-incarceration of Black and Indigenous people, and the need for race-based data. But as Singh can’t even grandstand properly, when he was up to question Trudeau several minutes later in the special committee, he seemed to indicate that things like ending racial profiling could be done with the snap of a finger, and when he demanded that boil water advisories be lifted in First Nations communities, Trudeau reminded him that they are on schedule for doing just that.

Elizabeth May closed out the speeches by naming as many Black and Indigenous deaths at the hands of police that she could recall, before talking about the cyclical nature of these kinds of denunciations every few months, acknowledging her white privilege, denounced Trump, and called on the government to root out white supremacist groups as a terrorist threat, particularly within police forces in Canada.

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Roundup: The House un-suspends

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The House of Commons is to resume ordinary sittings today, with the suspension motion having expired, but how long this state of affairs lasts remains an open question as the parties are negotiating new motions on what comes next for the next few weeks and possibly months, as we adapt to these pandemic times. The Conservatives want a resumption of regular sittings with a maximum of 50 MPs present, along with some kind of mechanism for electronic voting and for all committees to have their full powers restored – as they are especially keen on getting powers to summons back. The Liberals, however, are proposing that they extend the special COVID-19 committee to four days a week until June 17th, when they would rise for the summer, but come back four times in July and August. And it’s going to come down to which other parties either side can convince to join them.

I think the Conservatives are half-right in their proposal – the problem being the system of electronic voting, because that is a Pandora’s box that we do not want to open. Where the Liberals are going wrong is the fact that they think that the special committee’s remit of essentially holding extended QP-like sessions is good enough, when it makes a mockery of what Parliament is. Parliament is not Question Period, and yet they are acting as if that’s all it is, and it’s almost certainly a cynical calculation that preys on the popular perception that it is. But one of my biggest bugaboos is the fact that we’ve now had five pieces of emergency legislation that haven’t had anything resembling proper legislative scrutiny, haven’t had witnesses called, haven’t had any outside commentary or evaluation, and where everything is agreed to behind closed doors, and the government seems to think that’s good enough. It’s not, and we have more bills on the way. For them to carry on and pretend that this special committee and endless questions are going to satisfy the demand that we have a functioning parliament is frankly insulting.

Meanwhile, here’s a look at how the West Block has been adapting to pandemic life as MPs and staffers still show up to work – and yes, those “virtual” sittings still require staff to show up, and in fact require twice as many staff as in-person meetings, in case anyone thinks that “virtual” is somehow safer for all involved. It’s not, and people should stop pretending otherwise.

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Roundup: LEEFF details and mask recommendations

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As is becoming the norm on days when there is a special committee sitting, it was the ministers who were out first – specifically Bill Morneau, who was announcing more details for the Large Employer Emergency Financing Facility (LEEFF), and how that was going to work – including more of the attached conditions such as ensuring that there was some kind of beneficial arrangement for the government in the form of warrants, and the possibility of a government observer on boards of directors.

Prime minister Justin Trudeau was up next for his daily presser, wherein he repeated his pleas to employers to use the wage subsidy to re-hire their workers, and for commercial landlords to take advantage of the rent subsidy programme, which would begin taking applications on May 25th. He also said that more assistance for large retailers would be coming.

What made no sense was the Thing that journalists made of the fact that Trudeau has increasingly been seen with a non-medical mask in certain public situations, followed by Dr. Theresa Tam making an “official recommendation” that people wear such masks when physical distancing is difficult. Erm, except she’s been saying that for weeks now, so why this was such a big deal that journalists needed to play up and then dissect the “evolution” of her position is boggling. Nothing has changed – the message has always been that these masks won’t prevent you from contracting the virus, and that you still need to maintain physical distancing and proper hygiene (and more to the fact that these masks can instill a false sense of confidence, and that people are more likely to touch their faces more with them on). But hey, our de facto parental authority figure is telling us this “officially” now, so that obviously has some kind of psychic weight, or something. (Seriously, guys).

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Roundup: Threats over Keystone XL threats

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Back from the Victoria Day long weekend, prime minister Justin Trudeau started off his daily presser by announcing that the government had agreed to extend the partial border closure with the US for another thirty days, before he started talking about how the government was working to expand the eligibility for the Canada Emergency Business Accounts so that more small businesses and entrepreneurs could apply for them. He also made a plea to employers to rehire their workers and use the wage subsidy programme, which is why it’s in place, but I guess we’ll see what kind of uptake that will get. In response to questions, Trudeau said that they were trying working to create a national framework around things like testing and contact tracing before the borders could re-open, but this being areas of provincial jurisdiction, it requires that kind of cooperation. On the subject of the resumption of Parliament, Trudeau was dismissive, citing concerns over MPs who may not be able or willing to head to Ottawa (as though accommodations can’t be made). When asked about the comments by Joe Biden in the US that he would cancel the permits for Keystone XL, Trudeau reminded everyone that he supported the project even before he was prime minister.

On the Keystone XL file, Alberta has recently put a $1.5 billion financial stake, alogn with $6 billion in loan guarantees, in completing said pipeline (after they pleaded poverty on keeping teaching assistants on the payroll and refusing other forms of pandemic aid in order to force them into federal coffers), so they’re threatening legal action, and Jason Kenney is promising to file a trade action if Biden is a) elected, and b) revokes the authorizations. But it also many not be that easy, and Alberta could be on the hook for major losses if this comes to pass.

Good reads:

  • Here’s a deeper look into the commercial rent subsidy programme, where the details are still being negotiated with the provinces before it is finalized.
  • The National Post tried to get a picture of Ontario’s preparations for economic re-opening, and there seem to be a lot more questions than answers.
  • The President of the CMHC says that this pandemic could raise household debt levels and cause a drag on GDP growth. (You don’t say).
  • The Royal Canadian Navy is relying on US Navy drones to help locate the wreckage of the Cyclone helicopter that crashed off the coast of Greece.
  • Here is a look at the challenges of running election campaigns in a time of pandemic (but the piece omits that Saskatchewan needs to have an election this fall).
  • The UK has released a preliminary post-Brexit tariff list, which gives Canada a start in terms of what kind of trade deal we will have to work out by the end of the year.
  • A Toronto attack from three months ago has been reclassified as an incel terrorist attack, which is the first time that incels have been branded as such.
  • Apparently Andrew Scheer discontinued his process to revoke his American citizenship, given he was no longer going to be prime minister.
  • Rona Ambrose has joined the board of directors of a vape company.
  • The leader of the Quebec wing of the Green Party is accusing Elizabeth May of having consolidated power through her “parliamentary leader” role.
  • New Brunswick’s legislature is adapting to in-person sittings by having some MLAs sitting in the visitor galleries to maintain physical distancing.
  • Max Fawcett notes the curious silence from the usual “ethical oil” types about the news that Saudi Arabia is investing in the Alberta oil sands as others pull out.
  • Susan Delacourt delves into how closely the Canadian and American governments have had to work to keep the border closed, in spite of their divergent approaches.
  • My column delves into the Procedure and House Affairs committee report on virtual sittings and finds the fix is in to make virtual elements permanent post-pandemic.

Odds and ends:

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