Tag Archives: Bill Blair

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: Alberta’s big budget hole

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Alberta released a fiscal update yesterday, and it was pretty abysmal, projecting a record-breaking $24.2 billion deficit. The problem? Was that the province’s finance minister spent much of it lying to the legislature and Albertans about the state of their books going into the pandemic, not to mention not having a real plan for the recovery. But it to put some of the staggering numbers in context, the province is taking in more revenue from gambling, alcohol and cannabis than they are from oil revenues – you know, what they have based their economy on. Meanwhile, their non-existent recovery plan is bro-heavy, and they still insist that they have a spending problem on services rather than a revenue problem from having the lowest tax rate in the country and no sales tax – and you know that’s going to mean the province is looking to slash and burn services, and they’ve already started by picking fights with doctors in the middle of a global pandemic, and those doctors are already shutting down their clinics and moving away. So yeah, Alberta’s got problems.

Economists Andrew Leach and Lindsay Tedds have more, starting with this preview thread by Leach that set the stage for the speech of lies that was to come.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1299171987655327744

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1299173816577347584

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Roundup: Manufacturing an “attendance” record

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The big headline that everyone was talking about yesterday was a load of manufactured bullshit, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone, but it was what everyone was throwing around nevertheless. The Globe and Mail crunched the numbers from the Zoom log-ins from the special COVID-19 committee that has been sitting in lieu of regular House of Commons sittings, and found that lo, the Conservatives had the worst “attendance record.” Which is kind of hilarious because it completely misunderstands how this whole farcical process works. Oh, but the Conservatives must be hypocrites, because they’re demanding full sittings! Well, no – you’ve just found some numbers that you’re applying disingenuously in order to make them look like hypocrites. It’s exactly the kind of stunt that causes people – and small-conservatives especially – to distrust the mainstream media, because it looks an awful lot like they’re not being given a fair shake. Of course, Andrew Scheer didn’t do himself any favours when he called it “Liberal spin” rather than pointing out that this was a false construction, but his inability to do anything other than meathead partisan talking points was and still is his downfall.

Why this is such bad-faith “reporting” is because it ignores the fact that there is a set speaking list every day. If you’re an MP – particularly a Conservative MP in a rural riding where you have spotty Internet to begin with – what incentive is there for you to log into Zoom and watch it that way when you have no chance to participate when you can simply follow the proceedings on CPAC and get a better experience because the translation tends to work better? It also operates on the assumption that all 338 MPs are in the House of Commons at all times when Parliament is sitting regularly, which isn’t the case – the only time all MPs are in the Chamber are during Question Period and for votes, and no, despite the sales job that the government has been trying to foist onto the public, this committee is not Question Period. Trying to hand out attendance awards for participating in a Zoom call on steroids is a waste of everyone’s time and resources, and is a distraction from the actual issues related to the calls to have proper in-person sittings – or it would be if the majority of media outlets could actually report critically on it rather than swallowing the government’s lines.

Speaking of outrage clicks, the CBC has again been misrepresenting some Senate matters, like how the Selection Committee works, as part of their story wherein Senator Dalphond is calling for committee chairs and deputy chairs to rescind their “bonuses” in the current session because of many haven’t sat because of the pandemic. But it occurs to me that it’s unlikely that chairs have even been getting their stipends because most committees haven’t even been constituted yet, which makes this look even more like this is part of Dalphond’s particular vendetta against Senator Yuen Pau Woo, and Woo’s insistence on chairing the Selection Committee, and he’s trying to use a larger point about chairs’ salaries (using false comparisons with the House of Lords as ammunition) in order to provide cover from making this look personal. I am becoming extremely concerned about Dalphond’s behaviour here – though my disappointment with how the CBC covers the Senate is pretty much standard. Cheap outrage clicks on the backs of misrepresenting the Senate is par for the course for how journalism runs in this town. (I wrote more on the backstory here).

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Roundup: Developing an app

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The day’s presser began with prime minister Justin Trudeau congratulating the winners of the UN Security Council seats, and gave an articulation of why it was important to Canada to try, and a promise that he would keep working to these laudable foreign development goals, even if we weren’t at the table. From there, he announced that the Canadian Digital Service, in cooperation with BlackBerry and Shopify, had been creating a mobile app to assist with contact tracing that was soon to be tested in Ontario, and this was a system that would collect no personal or location data – that it had a database of anonymized identifier numbers that could be triggered if someone tests positive – and that unlike other contact tracing apps, this one simply needed to be installed on the phone and it would run in the background, and not need to be open, which would drain the battery. (And Trudeau got really into it, because he is a geek about these kinds of things). Closing off, he spoke about new applications for the cultural industry and funds for national museums.

During the Q&A, Trudeau said that the late start to the Security Council race hurt us (and he’s not wrong there – many countries need the full eight to ten years to make a successful bid), for what it’s worth. He also made some fairly vague promises around trying to rein in the RCMP when it comes to their use of force, particularly against Black and Indigenous people. He also refused to condemn Jagmeet Singh’s outburst on Wednesday, saying it wasn’t for him to judge how a racialised leader perceived what happened.

On a completely different note, I was pleased to hear that the MPs in charge of the Centre Block renovations have decided to keep the existing footprint of the original Commons chamber, and didn’t take up the options to either expand into the lobbies behind or completely move the West wall and expand outward from there. They also say that the renovated Chamber could accommodate up to 420 MPs, but it also sounds like they may be leaning toward using benches, which would be terrific because desks are an Americanism, and simply encourage MPs to be doing work other than paying attention to the debates (and we’ve all seen the piles of Xmas cards that start showing up in the fall). I am less keen on the talk about physical distancing as part of the renovations, because they won’t be done for a decade, and we are likely to be over this pandemic by then, and we can work with the existing chamber and set-up perfectly well if we really wanted to.

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Roundup: Trudeau played chicken, and lost

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There was no presser for the prime minister yesterday, as he was instead at Carleton University delivery commencement addresses in both official languages for university graduates across the country. When the House of Commons did meet first for the usual COVID committee, it was a spectacle of Andrew Scheer making disingenuous attacks about the Auditor General’s budget, and Trudeau responding by trying to shame Scheer into supporting their bill later in the afternoon – a tactic he also tried with the attacks by the other opposition leaders.

And so, when the committee ended for the day and there was a brief pause for the Commons to transition to an actual (abbreviated) sitting, things degenerated. The government tried to pass a motion to do their usual tactic of passing the bill at all stages with a couple of hours for speeches, and that was defeated. They tried again, this time splitting out the disability portions of the bill to pass them swiftly first before going back for the rest, and that failed. Andrew Scheer tried to move a motion to suspend and reconvene a short while later, presumably so that they could engage in further negotiations, and that didn’t pass. And then the Bloc moved their own motion to suspend until such time that the House leaders signalled that they had come to an agreement. And that too failed. Out of options, the Speaker decided that since they couldn’t agree on how to conduct the day’s business, that the House would suspend until the next scheduled sitting day – next Wednesday, when they plan to pass the Estimates in one fell swoop. It was like watching some kind of farce film, but all too real.

The government played political chicken, in their presumption that one of the opposition parties would blink because this was about disability payments (for only about 40 percent of disabled Canadians, if the figures are to be believed, because this was the only real mechanism that the federal government had access to because disability supports are largely an area of provincial jurisdiction). Pablo Rodriguez says they’re still negotiating, but the Conservatives want the House of Commons to have proper sittings (though they are reticent about remote voting – quite rightly); the NDP want more support for people with disabilities and the CERB fraud penalties taken out; the Bloc are demanding a fiscal update, a first ministers’ meeting on health transfers (without strings or conditions of course) – because the weekly teleconference with premiers isn’t enough – and a ban on political parties taking the wage subsidy. I do, however, object to this being dismissed as “partisan sniping” because six months ago everyone was falling all over themselves to rave about how great hung parliaments were because they force parties to work together, and well, this is the result – everyone has priorities they want to advance and everyone thinks they have leverage, and the government tried to play chicken rather than meaningfully engaging at least one of those groups, hoping that the banner of “helping people with disabilities” would be enough to make the opposition roll over like they have been over the course of this pandemic. So no, it’s not sniping – it’s MPs doing their jobs (well, partially anyway), and we shouldn’t be dismissive of it.

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Roundup: Honest mistakes and sticking points

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s daily presser was far more lacklustre yesterday in terms of announcements – mostly just an update on how many more shipments of personal protective equipment have arrived, and contracts that have been signed with domestic producers in order to supply more. There was a little more action in the Q&A – on the question of proposals when it comes to punishing fraud for CERB, Trudeau insisted that this was only about people for whom there was demonstrable intent for fraud and not honest mistakes, though that is not reassuring to everyone. On the lack of a fiscal update, he insisted that things were still too much in flux because we have no idea how the economic restart is going to look like, but then went into his song and dance about just how open and transparent they’ve been because they take questions from the media every day and at the special COVID committee in the House of Commons, except that those are more about the performance of asking questions and less so about providing substantive answers (but being performative on transparency is on brand for this government). Part of the fiscal update measures was wrapped up in a “but the deficit!” moans from one reporter, whom Trudeau did rebuke a bit given that we are in an era of historically low interest rates. On MP Marwan Tabbara, he reiterated that he only found out about the arrest on Friday (and while people don’t believe that, we have to remember that the leader’s office doesn’t track every MP like a convict, and they’ve all been somewhat preoccupied with the pandemic – and it was up to Tabbara to disclose to them). On body cameras for the RCMP, Trudeau said that the was only one measure among many they were discussing, which gives him a bit of wiggle room as this becomes an issue of debate.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1270384288601567233

https://twitter.com/twitscotty/status/1270506759153766400

The issue of the penalties for fraud with CERB look like they will be a sticking point with the NDP, no matter Trudeau’s assurances that this is not about people who made good-faith mistakes, and that it aligns the penalty regime with people who defraud EI (but without all of the same accountability measures for defence – and it should also be noted that the EI fraud rate is about two-to-three percent). And funnily enough, it seems like some of his own MPs aren’t keen on this either. This could be the kind of punitive measure that will get the Conservatives on-side, but they will be objecting to the fact that the bill will be attempted to get passed in one fell swoop today rather than with a proper legislative process, and the Bloc don’t appear to want to play ball because they want even more measures for seniors, so this could start getting sticky for the government. I guess we’ll have to see what compromises got made, and what deals were cut.

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Roundup: Cautious progress in most places

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For his daily presser, prime minister Justin Trudeau led off by teasing that new federal modelling numbers were on the way, before mentioning the global vaccination pledging conference, and then turned to domestic measures to help seniors, announcing that their additional OAS and GIS payment would go out on July 6th. During the Q&A, there were questions on Huawei (as the US is making more clear threats to limit intelligence sharing with Canada if they aren’t banned), the fact that he hasn’t been more equivocal in denouncing Trump, and recent instances of police violence and misconduct in Canada such as one in Nunavut.

As promised, the new federal modelling numbers were released shortly thereafter, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that the two biggest problem areas in the country remain Toronto and Montreal. There remain warnings that we could see another outbreak if testing and tracing regimes aren’t increased. This having been said, I think it was the data released by BC yesterday that was even more interesting.

One is the data around contact tracing (which that province can seem to manage, but Ontario can’t in its epic managerial incompetence), and it shows that once lockdown measures were in place, the number of contacts that infected people made dropped from 10.7 per case to 3.6, which is a pretty effective demonstration of why physical or social distancing matters.

The other is this analysis of the genomic epidemiology of the virus – as in, where it’s travelled from, because there are small mutations based on where it’s come from, and lo and behold, the vast majority of them were from European/Eastern Canadian strains and very few from China. But hey, the Conservatives and others keep insisting that if only we’d closed the border to China sooner, this all could have been avoided. This data proves that simply wasn’t the case (despite what people like Dr. Theresa Tam have been saying already) – not that it will stop their revisionist history. Nevertheless, it’s interesting stuff.

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Roundup: Holding up a mythical threat

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The first day of the new Cabinet, and Justin Trudeau, along with Chrystia Freeland and Jim Carr, had their first meeting as a group with Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi, who held up the now-former Bill C-69 as the source of much of the anger in Alberta, and his demands that it be changed. The problem here – and Nenshi acknowledged – is that the pre-existing system that Stephen Harper’s government put into place in 2012 did not work, and Nenshi could list projects being held up by it, which is all the more reason why his strident condemnation of the new assessment system is all the more baffling. Part of the problem here is that the bill – along with the now-former C-48 – have been used as scapegoats for the frustrated economic ambitions of the province. Never mind that C-48 was largely symbolic – there is no pipeline project that would head for the northwest coast of BC, nor is there going to be, and no, Northern Gateway is not going to make a comeback because the obstacles identified by the Federal Court of Appeal were almost certainly insurmountable. And C-69 is in no way a “no more pipelines” law.

I talked to a lot of environmental lawyers on both sides while C-69 was being debated, and the biggest source of unease on the proponent side was the uncertainty as to whether the legislated timelines would have the problem of issues stopping the clock – thus dragging out those timelines – much of which was alleviated when the draft regulations were released. Again, the talk about the carbon budget in the bill was clarified in the regulations, which also alleviated many of their concerns (and caused some on the environmental side ulcers). So while the government is now talking about tweaks to the regulations, that seems more than entirely appropriate for the reality of the situation, and their refusal to scrap the law is entirely rational and just.

The problem becomes fighting the narrative that has been created around this law, and the fact that it has grown into a mythological terror is what they will have to grapple with – and compounding this is the fact that this government has proven itself time and again to be utterly incompetent at communications. For as much as Catherine McKenna did some good work when she was the minister, she kept repeating the tired slogan of “the environment and the economy go together” and other nonsense talking points (and then insisting that she spoke like a regular person), which did nothing to counter the lies being promulgated by Jason Kenney, Andrew Scheer, and others, about what was actually in the legislation. And you can’t fight lies with canned talking points. I wish this government – and the communications geniuses in the PMO most especially – would get that through their heads, which is why trying to placate the anger when it’s being directed at the mythology and not the reality of this legislation is going to be an uphill battle.

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Roundup: More trouble in Rideau Hall

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The news out of Rideau Hall is rarely good these days, and yesterday, it was about high levels of harassment and job dissatisfaction being reported by the staff there. I’m not entirely surprised by this, given that most of the established and long-time staff abandoned it shortly after Julie Payette was named governor general, because she and her hand-picked secretary (who had no government or Crown-related experience) essentially made everyone’s lives miserable. This after it was revealed that Payette still refuses to move into Rideau Hall because she’s unhappy with the lack of privacy there, while she has decided to decamp to the Citadelle in Québec City – her other official residence – for the summer. (On that note, it’s probably the most use the Citadelle has had continuously in quite a while). All of this makes one wonder if she wasn’t told when she was offered the position that it’s a very public role and that living in an official residence would come with issues like staff being in the building at all hours. It seems odd that she wouldn’t have known this going into the job (and possibly a sign that Justin Trudeau and his office did a terrible job in either selecting her or preparing her).

Meanwhile, I remain concerned that we’ve heard nothing from the PMO about how they’re planning to replace the lieutenant governor of Saskatchewan following his untimely death this week, because the provincial government will be paralyzed until that is filled. If we had a functioning vice-regal appointments commission, there would have been more names from a short-list on record that could be drawn from fairly easily for a replacement, but now it’s an opaque box, and if there is another Judy Foote-like appointment in the works, that could be yet another self-inflicted wound for this government.

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Roundup: A weekend of Norman

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Over the course of the long weekend, there was another push about the Vice Admiral Mark Norman story, but there were some problems in how this has all been unfolding. The National Post had a longread that was the first to interview Norman and his family about the ordeal, but in the process, in focusing on making Norman a martyr to his cause, I’m not sure that they did him any favours because it did seem to make it look like he did what he was accused of doing – this, while everyone kept tweeting about how enraging this story was on Norman’s behalf.

There were other threads – General Jonathan Vance, the Chief of Defence Staff, gave a somewhat exasperated sounding interview to state that the decision to suspend Norman was his and his alone, while the Globe and Mail reported that it was the former National Security advisor to the prime minister and the former Clerk of the Privy Council – both Harper appointees, it should be noted – that called in the RCMP to investigate the leak after their own internal investigation was inclusive. This blows up the narrative of the Conservatives that it was somehow a personal vendetta to destroy Norman’s career, or that the prime minister was personally directing this – though that narrative is also about trying to match up Trudeau’s stupid misspeaking about the Norman case likely winding up in court before charges were even laid that had them trying to spin a narrative about interference. (The Conservatives, meanwhile, keep hoping that there will be more embarrassing revelations, but they don’t seem to be coming). Likewise, the attempts to insist that the government was orchestrating the withholding of documents hasn’t actually matched up with the realities of the processes involved.

But while the Post story was curious enough, I found this analysis piece by the CBC’s Murray Brewster to have its share of framing problems, in saying that the allocation of responsibility was throwing people under the bus – like Vance (never mind that he admitted it was his decision). Brewster also seems to confuse the arguments that Crown prosecutors were making with those of “senior government officials” framing the prosecution, because I have never read anything about senior officials framing the prosecution – nor have I read anything coming from government or officials framing the allegations against Norman as an issue of civilian control, which is why I always found it odd because that’s at the heart of what was being alleged. Beyond that, Brewster wonders why the Liberals aren’t asking questions of the Conservatives about how they rewrote the rules on that procurement in the first place, or why the former Conservative ministers didn’t speak to the RMCP after the charges were laid, or why Norman would stake his career on this procurement – all questions that I don’t know why the Liberals would ask. They’re a little past holding the Conservatives to account because the Conservatives aren’t in power any longer, and it would seem to me that it would be more the role of journalists asking these kinds of questions of the Conservatives, as opposed to the government – perhaps more than trying to curry sympathy for Norman.

https://twitter.com/btaplatt/status/1128335527785193472

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