Tag Archives: Candice Bergen

Roundup: O’Toole out, Bergen in

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It wasn’t even a close vote—Erin O’Toole has been deposed as Conservative leader on a vote of 73 to 45, and he is done for. He says he’ll stay on as an MP, but we’ll see how long his appetite for that lasts now that is ambitions have been dashed. But rather than face the media, O’Toole put out a six-minute statement over social media that tried to claim the party was the founding party of Canada (nope—his party was created in 2003), and a bunch of other things to try and burnish his image on the way out the door. “This country needs a Conservative party that is both an intellectual force and a governing force. Ideology without power is vanity. Seeking power with ideology is hubris,” he recited. Erm, except the pandering to populism is not an intellectual or governing force, he couldn’t even identify an ideology given that he kept flopping all over the place, depending on who was in the room with him at the time. And he keeps floating this notion that Canada is “so divided!” but this has been his go-to talking point for a while, trying to intimate that there is a “national unity crisis” because Alberta didn’t get its own way and get a Conservative government (that would take them for granted and ignore their concerns), never mind that it’s not actually a national unity crisis, but mere sore loserism.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1489082431936372742

Later in the evening, out of seven potential candidates, the party voted for Candice Bergen to be the interim leader, which is a curious choice given how much she swings to the angry populist side of the party, from her unapologetically sporting a MAGA hat, to her full-throated support for the grifter occupation outside of Parliament Hill currently. It makes one wonder about both the upcoming leadership and what that says about unifying the different factions of the party, or whether the party will splinter because these factions may prove irreconcilable. And perhaps it should be a lesson that hey, maybe you shouldn’t just lie to each faction saying you really belong to them, and hope the other side doesn’t find out.

Meanwhile, Paul Wells enumerates O’Toole’s failures, and worries about the direction the party is headed now that it seems to be tearing down the few firewalls it had to keep the worst of Trumpism out of its playbook.

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Roundup: Unnecessary panic about inflation

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It was predictable that it would happen – yesterday was the day when the Consumer Price Index figures are publicly released, and for the past few months, this has turned into a political gong show. Why? Because the Conservatives have decided to misconstrue what the data shows and to light their hair on fire about the top-line figure and wail that we’re in a “cost of living crisis.” Which is false – inflation is running hot for everyone right now, not just Canada, as a result of economies re-opening and global supply chains being disrupted by the pandemic, which affects prices, on top of the fact that there is some distortion in the year-over-year figures as a result of last year’s price crash. And to add to that, much of what is driving the July numbers are higher gas prices – which is a global issue, and good for Alberta’s economy – and higher housing prices, which is a driven by a lot of different factors. And hey, clothing and food prices were down, so there are upsides, right?

The problem, of course, is that this is being politicised – wildly so. When it came up on the campaign trail, Trudeau said that he was going to let the Bank of Canada do their job and worry about monetary policy while he worried about families, but this was truncated in the reporting, and which also got trimmed into Conservative shitposts, and O’Toole was given fresh cause to decry the “crisis.”

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1428104169009909763

Of course, O’Toole isn’t proposing any solutions that actually deal with inflation (and his plans will actually make it worse), but if he wants to start banging on about it and monetary policy, then he needs to start talking about what he thinks the Bank of Canada’s mandate should be – especially as that mandate is coming up for renewal. Should they continue to target inflation between one and three percent? He seems to sound like he wants them to target deflation, so good luck with letting the economy grow under that kind of mandate. Parliament should have this kind of discussion, but they need to actually have it – not just talking points and shots taken that assume people are ignorant about what it means. And the reporters on O’Toole’s campaign need to step up and start asking him these questions rather than just typing up his talking points.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1428094182531510282

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1428096342342213637

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Roundup: Listing invaders as terrorists?

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In the aftermath of Wednesday’s assault on Capitol Hill, Canadian officials have been trying to give some assurances that it couldn’t happen here, and that our own intelligence officials are on the ball when it comes to these right-wing extremists. Which is good to know. Meanwhile, certain leaders are demanding that the Proud Boys be declared a terrorist organisation for their role in Wednesday’s attack, so here’s former CSIS analyst Jessica Davis to explain what that would entail and what it would mean.

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1347288295588433920

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https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1347291762759528452

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Roundup: Some vaccine doses arriving soon

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The prime minister was out this morning with a significant announcement about the vaccine roll-out, in that Canada could see its first 249,000 doses being delivered within about a week, pending Health Canada approval. As well, the box from Pfizer that will serve as the “dry run” of the roll-out plans also left Belgium and was heading for Canada for the exercise. The whole vaccine roll-out is going to be taxing to supply chains for things like dry ice, and there is already talk about lowering some expectations for how soon some long-term care residents can receive doses, because the Pfizer vaccine loses effectiveness if it is jostled too much, as it is with transport, so that may mean trying to find ways of getting those residents to vaccination centres instead of the other way around. We’ll see how this goes.

There is an interesting story in the Globe about a private vaccine manufacturer in Montreal, which is right next door to the National Research Council facility that is currently under construction, which is believed to be capable of manufacturing at least one of the potential vaccine candidates, but they appear not to have been asked by the government, or engaged in any meaningful way. I have questions, however, because it doesn’t really specify which type of vaccines could be manufactured (and yes, this does matter), so it may be a case of waiting to see the viability of one of the later candidates for approval before they go too far with licensing or engaging.

Meanwhile, Conservative leader Erin O’Toole has the audacity to blame the Liberals for the anti-vaxx petition that his MP, Derek Sloan, has been sponsoring. O’Toole says that because the Liberals have been so lacking in transparency that these kinds of things are bound to happen – which is some grade-A horseshit if I ever heard it. This as O’Toole spent the morning shifting the goalposts on what he deems to be sufficient transparency from the government. Of course, O’Toole doing the bare minimum and saying he doesn’t support the petition Sloan is sponsoring, but doing little else to stop the misinformation that he has had an active hand in spreading is quite something. Then again, there does seem to be a tendency among many conservative leaders to shift blame and deny that they are responsible for anything, and we apparently are seeing that again here.

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Roundup: Those pesky gasoline prices

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While avoiding condemning Maxime Bernier’s choice of language and engagement (moving from just winking at white nationalists to now trying to delegitimize the media), Andrew Scheer has resumed his practice of shitposting misleading statistics memes over Twitter, and yesterday it was in relation to gasoline prices. Yes, Statistics Canada reported that the inflation rate in June was 3.0 percent, which is the Bank of Canada’s upper bound for their target, and yes, it was fuelled in part by gasoline prices. (Core inflation, stripped of volatile factors like gasoline, remains closer to the 2.0 percent target, so it’s not really anything to worry about). But why would those gasoline prices be higher? Hmm…

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1030574821543829504

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1030574941060517888

That’s right – the world price of oil has increased over the past year after its recovery from the price collapse nearly two years ago, and that’s an unambiguous good thing for provinces like Alberta, who rely on oil prices being on the higher side for their economies. Trying to cast this as a carbon tax issue – and that oh noes, carbon taxes will make this even worse – is a bit disingenuous considering how small of a fraction of the price that entails.

Meanwhile, with a number of voices (Jason Kenney and Scheer among them) calling for the revival of Energy East in light of the Saudi Arabia spat, energy economist Andrew Leach crunched the numbers on the economic case for that pipeline. Short version: there is no economic case. Stop trying to pretend there is one or blaming Justin Trudeau for its demise.

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Roundup: Provocation theatre

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I have been giving a good deal of thought to this whole situation with Rachael Harder and the Status of Women committee, and it wasn’t until Andrew Scheer went on CTV’s Your Morning yesterday to decry the “intolerance” of Liberal MPs for a “strong, competent, dynamic young woman” that it started to click. “The Liberals are trying to politicize this. I actually find it disgusting that the Liberals would treat a young, female Member of Parliament in this way, and it just shows the intolerance of the Liberal party,” Scheer went on to say, which is hilarious because he’s the one who made the very political move of putting his critic into the role of committee chair, which is supposed to be a neutral arbiter of the rules and to facilitate discussion, and who isn’t supposed to vote other than to break a tie.

It was then that I finally understood what was going on. Andrew Scheer is trying to be a Dollarama knock-off Ann Coulter/Milo Yiannopoulos provocateur.

The signs were all there, from his preoccupation with free speech on campus, to his appropriation of the kinds of alt-right language being used to weaponize free speech across North America, and this move with Harder fits that bill entirely. I’m pretty sure that Scheer knew exactly what he was doing when he put someone who was avowedly pro-life into the Status of Women portfolio as a poke in the eye to the Liberals (for whom there are still some unhealed wounds over Trudeau’s dictate that the party is a pro-choice, full-stop), and it was an even bigger deliberate provocation to try and put her into the chair position of that committee, no matter how inappropriate it was to put a critic into that role. Of course, this is Scheer, so his timing has been inept enough that he created his own distraction from the tax proposal issue that he has been all sound and fury over (then tried to blame the Liberals for creating the distraction). It was also his way of provoking another round of discussion about the abortion issue without his having to deliberately raise it – he just ensured that the Liberals and NDP would do it for him, and he could stand back and accuse them of “politicizing” the issue, and then getting Harder to play victim.

Of course, some of the pundit class is trying to brand this as the Liberals being “in contempt of Parliament” (which is a specific Thing, and this is not it – and when you point that out, the correction is “having contempt for Parliament.”) Which is ridiculous. Walking out on votes is as much a parliamentary tradition as filibusters and any other procedural protest. And when it’s being done because someone wants to play provocateur in order to virtue signal to a portion of their base that they want to solidify, it’s all the more eye-roll inducing.

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Roundup: Chagger vs Bergen

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The big news yesterday was Rona Ambrose shuffling up her shadow cabinet after the summer of leadership announcements, and naming Candice Bergen as the new Opposition House Leader in the place of Andrew Scheer. What is of particular interest is that you have two fairly inexperienced people in the role in both the government and the official opposition, which could make for some very interesting times going forward.

To refresh, the role of the House Leader is to basically determine the agenda of the Commons (deputy leaders fill this role in the Senate), when it comes to determining what items will be up for debate on what days, the scheduling of Supply Days for opposition parties, and basically doing the procedural management. Why the fact that two relatively inexperienced MPs will be doing this is interesting is because we’ll see what kinds of ways that they prioritise things. (Bergen does have experience as a parliamentary secretary and minister of state, but little in the way of procedural experience as far as I’ve been able to determine). What everyone will be paying attention to in particular, however is tone. The fact that for the first time in history, it’s two women in the role is going to have people waiting to see just how that affects tone (as Rosemary Barton gave as her item to watch in this week’s At Issue), because we have been fed a number of gender essentialist narratives that women do things differently and without as much of the partisan acrimony – not that I necessarily believe it, given that Bergen herself is a pretty die-hard partisan. The added spoke in this wheel is the NDP’s House Leader, Peter Julian, whom I have it on good authority is unreasonable to work with at the best of times. When the tension between the House Leaders boiled over into Motion 6 in the spring (and the subsequent The Elbowing that broke that camel’s back), I have little doubt that it had a lot to do with Dominic LeBlanc losing his patience with both Scheer and Julian (who totally insisted that they weren’t even being obstructionist, which I find a bit dubious). So will they be able to work together to push through what promises to be an extremely busy legislative agenda? Or will Bardish Chagger need to start resorting to procedural tactics to ensure that bills can get passed without endless Second Reading debates that the opposition refuses to let collapse so that they can get to committee (which was constant in the previous parliament when the NDP were official opposition). I’m not going to make any predictions, but it is something that I am very curious to watch as the era of “openness and cooperation” rolls along.

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