Tag Archives: Annamie Paul

Roundup: Playing chicken with the variants

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It’s been such a long and dispiriting week, as many of us in this country live under the rule of murderclown premiers who simply refuse to do their jobs when it comes to this pandemic, and keep trying to blame the federal government for their failures, or to at least distract from their inaction. We’re going through that especially in Ontario right now, where Ford and his ministers keep up this song and dance about the borders, without once recognising their own culpability in the spread of variants.

Dwivedi is absolutely right about the role of the media in this, constantly framing this as “squabbling” or “finger-pointing,” and not “there is clear jurisdictional authority for the province and they refuse to exercise it,” which means that these premiers (and Doug Ford most especially) get to escape being held to account. This is why I object so strenuously whenever I hear another journalist or TV host say “nobody cares about jurisdiction in a pandemic.” Sorry, but that’s not how real life works. There’s a division of powers in the constitution that doesn’t care about your feelings.

Meanwhile, Andrew Leach has a few observations about the situation in Alberta that are just as trenchant as the ones in Ontario.

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Roundup: Mark Carney undermines his Bank of Canada successors

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When it was announced that former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney was going to be speaking at this weekend’s Liberal convention, we got the usual amount of tongue-wagging from journalists and pundits who assumed that this would be the time when he announced he was running for the party. The Conservatives put out a nasty press release that considered him the “future leader of the Liberals,” as though this was a replay of the Michael Ignatieff trajectory. Carney didn’t make any announcements of future plans, but he did the next worst thing – he stated that he planned to support the Liberal Party in any way he could.

This is bad. This is very, very bad. I have written about this before, but the Bank of Canada is an institution that needs to be scrupulously independent, much like the Supreme Court of Canada. Monetary policy is not to be trifled with, and the separation between fiscal policy (government and the Department of Finance) from monetary policy (Bank of Canada) is sacrosanct in our system. We had a bona fide political scandal about maintaining this separation decades ago, which was the Coyne Affair, and it led to changes that guaranteed the central bank’s independence. This is why, much like Supreme Court justices, former Bank of Canada governors need to maintain their scrupulous independence after office, because the danger of tainting the institution is too great. Because what are we going to see now? All monetary policy decisions will be viewed through the lens of partisan politics and opportunism – which is toxic to the institution. Opposition MPs will start badgering and hectoring the current Governor when he appears before committee and assuming partisanship in his advice and policy direction – something that we are already getting dangerously close to, as Pierre Poilievre tried to go after the Governor over the decision to buy bonds through the current fiscal crisis (which is perfectly sound expansionary policy at a time when we were seeing deflation instead of the kinds of inflation that the Bank is trying to target). This matters, no matter how many Liberal partisans seem to think that this is something they can just handwave away because he said nice things about them.

If Liberals had a modicum of respect for institutions that they claim they have when those institutions are under attack by the Other Guys, then they wouldn’t keep doing this, and yet it happens time and again. They undermined the Senate, the Governor General, and now the Bank of Canada. They have become an absolute menace to the systems and institutions that are at the heart of how our country operates. This is a problem.

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Roundup: Waiting for the modelling to show up

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If you weren’t convinced up until now that Ontario is being run by a group of incompetent murderclowns, there was a tacit admission yesterday from Solicitor General Sylvia Jones that the government held off on increasing restrictions because they wanted to see the modelling show up in hospitals first.

Let that sink in. Fourteen gods damned months into this pandemic, they still don’t understand that the modelling is a warning, not a prediction. They decided to wait until the lagging indicators – hospitalisation – was prevalent before “locking down” (but not really), which means that by this point, the spread of the virus is out of control. How they could not understand this fourteen gods damned months later is a sign that they are either wilfully ignorant, or they just don’t care. They were content to let people die because they couldn’t be arsed to stop the spread of the infection that they knew was coming for some wrong-headed notion about trying to “balance” the economy rather than ensuring people wouldn’t die – never mind that the economy would come back faster if they squashed the spread of the virus and it we wouldn’t any more lockdowns.

https://twitter.com/mattgurney/status/1380194055112511490

I’m still mad about this. I was mad about it all day since the interview hit social media. I would say it’s unbelievable, but given this particular posse of murderclowns and everything they’ve done in this pandemic, it’s unfortunately all too believable.

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Roundup: Stay-at-home again, complete with feigned surprise

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Ontario is now back under a “stay-at-home” order, issued its third state of emergency, and lo, there has been movement on vaccinations in that they are now going to start targeting high-risk neighbourhoods and essential workers, like they should have started weeks ago, so that’s positive. Oh, but still no paid sick leave because Ford and company continue to mislead people by claiming the federal sickness benefit is the same thing, which it absolutely is not. What most assuredly is not positive is the fact that the provincial government knew this was coming. They have been warned for weeks that this was going to happen, and they were explicitly told that loosening restrictions in the face of the new variants would be a disaster. There was that press conference on February 11th that said just that – and they didn’t listen, and now they have the gall to pretend to be surprised that the numbers are exceeding their worst-case scenarios? Sorry, but no. Get out of here with that bullshit.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1379884476054966272

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1379962777566085120

And here’s Supriya Dwivedi which lays out why Ford has completely ballsed this up and created this Third Wave and all of the illnesses and resulting deaths as a result.

Meanwhile, the National Advisory Committee on Immunization has decided to stick with their advice that second doses can be delayed for up to four months – and the “up to” is key – but given increasing vaccine supplies, that interval is likely to be less. And the reason why they’re saying this is because they are looking at the balance of ensuring that as many people get a first dose as soon as possible in order to have at least some level of protection. The problem is that this isn’t being effectively communicated by most media outlets (the Star piece linked here is actually doing a decent job) and even on Power & Politics last night, after the head of NACI patiently explained all of this, Vassy Kapelos still characterised it as NACI recommending a four-month delay, omitting the “up to” and creating a false impression of the advice, and it makes it easy for certain parties like the Conservatives to deliberately misconstrue NACI’s advice for partisan point-scoring. I do not understand what CBC thinks they are doing by reporting this way. It defies sense.

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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: Flirting with unconstitutional legislation

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The bill to mandate sexual assault training for judges was a bad idea from the start, when Rona Ambrose first tabled it years ago, and the current iteration that this government is putting forward is little better, especially now that MPs have decided they need to start amending it to add other things. While Ambrose’s initial bill was blatantly unconstitutional (that the Commons passed on a whim because of the political syllogism: Something needs to be done, this is something, therefore we must do this), and needed to be gutted in the Senate to make it acceptable, the current version was more or less acceptable (barring one or two possible issues), but it seems that MPs want to make it blatantly unconstitutional again.

Former Supreme Court of Canada executive legal officer Gib van Ert warned back in February that this bill would be an invitation to demand that judges take training in other areas than just sexual assault, and lo and behold, we are there, with demands for the “social context of systemic racism.”

https://twitter.com/btaplatt/status/1321246603781570560

van Ert makes the point that if judges need to be seen as independent, then bills like this, where politicians appear to be giving them marching orders, is a bad look and will undermine the justice system. But since when to populist impulses consider the consequences of their actions? They don’t.

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Roundup: Conflating the “leader’s courtesy”

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New Green Party leader Annamie Paul is running for a seat in the upcoming Toronto-Centre by-election, and this has already caused a bit of a friction between outgoing leader Elizabeth May and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. Why? Because May argues that Singh should repay the courtesy that the Greens extended him when he was running for his own seat in a by-election in the previous parliament and not run a candidate to oppose him. The problem? That May’s conception of “leader’s courtesy” is not really what she thinks it is.

First of all, “leader’s courtesy” largely only existed when it came to government or official opposition – third, fourth, and fifth-place parties are not really owed any particular courtesies. Second, what this particular courtesy involves is a member of the new leader’s own party voluntarily resigning their seat so that the new leader can run there in order to get into the Commons as soon as possible – it’s generally not about unheld ridings, even if it just happens to coincidentally be the same riding where Paul ran in the last federal election. The Liberals are certainly not obligated to not run to keep their own seat for the sake of giving Paul a seat, no matter if she is a Black woman. Hell, they’re running a Black woman of their own in the riding. Not to mention, less than a year ago, during the election, Paul came in a distant fourth place in the riding with a mere seven percent of the vote-share. Bill Morneau, incidentally, got 57 percent, and the NDP came in second at 22 percent – even if Singh did the “classy” thing, as May demanded, and didn’t run a candidate, it’s still unlikely that Paul would win – especially when she’s running against a legitimate media personality like Liberal candidate Marci Ien.

I would also add that demanding that the other parties surrender their candidates so that Paul can win it because she’s a Black woman leader smacks of tokenism, and is an implicit declaration that she couldn’t win the seat on her own. Not to mention, it deprives the voters of the riding the chance to make the decision on who they want to represent them. Again, the historical “leader’s courtesy” was about a riding that the party held, and it was usually intended to be a short-term measure so that the leader would have a seat, and would then run in their intended seat in the next election and return the riding to the MP who stepped aside for the leader. This is clearly not what is happening in Toronto Centre, so unless May wants to resign her own seat so that Paul can run there, she’s conflating just what exactly this “courtesy” really is.

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Roundup: The coded language of “social experiments”

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There was an analysis piece published over the weekend that wondered about why Erin O’Toole is talking about “social experiments” as part of his rejection of the Throne Speech, but while the piece went on to look at polling data and so on, it merely said that O’Toole didn’t exactly say which part of it was the “social experiment.” Of course, you’d have to have been living under a rock to not realise that small-c conservatives have been using this language for a while, particularly when it comes to things like gender equality.

Much of the thinking around this language is that the “social experiment” is the disruption of the so-called “natural” state of family life – that women in the workforce and childcare outside of the home is going to be some kind of sociological destabilizing force – and much of that line of reasoning also goes hand-in-hand with some garden-variety homophobic nonsense about same-sex marriage somehow “devaluing” regular marriage (as though straight people weren’t already doing that on their own). And let’s face it – the Throne Speech was heavy on inclusive growth and the need for childcare as part of its main themes. Of course, this isn’t really “experimental” at this point either – we have plenty of data to show the economic benefits of women in the workforce and what subsidised childcare can do to facilitate it. And if O’Toole is really that concerned about the deficit and economic growth, you’d think that he would be enthusiastically supporting plans to expand subsidised childcare and early learning because it’s been proven to have far greater economic returns than what it costs a government.

But we also need to remember that O’Toole is beholden to the social conservatives in his party for his leadership win, and he’s spent his time as leader trying to play both sides on a lot of issues – talking about the importance of free trade while promoting protectionist “Canada First” policies, or saying he’ll go to Pride – but only if they allow uniformed police to march, or that he opposes conversion therapy but won’t support that particular bill because of hand-wavey discredited reasoning. I am not unconvinced that this isn’t more of the same – O’Toole winking to his social conservatives using their own coded language about “social experiments” without actually saying what it is out loud so that he can’t be called out on it by those who know that things like enhancing childcare is sound economic policy, and that this recession, which has disproportionately affected women and minorities, won’t be solved by the same tired bro-recovery that provides stimulus for bro-jobs. To dismiss the kinds of inclusive policies that this economic recovery demands as “social experiments” gives a clue as to who O’Toole is pandering to.

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