Tag Archives: Childcare

Roundup: Unvaccinated MPs should stay home without pay

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It has begun – Conservative MPs warning that there will be a privilege fight if they don’t get to come to work in the House of Commons unvaccinated. This time it’s Mark Strahl, who was the party whip in the previous session, and he thinks that they should be allowed to attend if they submit to rapid testing, which is not a prophylactic against COVID. And a privilege fight is nonsense, of course – it’ll be the MPs themselves who set the rules that you need to be vaccinated to be in the Chamber (or possibly in the entire Precinct) – and by then, the rules around needing to be vaccinated to board a plane or train should also be in force. And if Conservatives on the Board of Internal Economy want to protest this rule, they’ll be outvoted, and that’ll be it. And if he brings a privilege motion to the House, the majority there can vote it down as well. There is no winning hand for anti-vaxxer MPs here.

The real question here is whether the other parties will bow to some sort of accommodation scheme, like letting unvaccinated MPs stay home and attend virtually – something I think should be opposed (the Bloc is already opposing it) because Parliament doesn’t work well in a hybrid setting. We tried it, and it was terrible. And frankly, MPs should also insist that those who refuse vaccination should not only have to stay hope – and not participate virtually – but should lose salary as well.

Parliament is an essential service, and they have a lot of work to do, and catering to a small percentage of conspiracy theorists and malcontents is only going to prolong this pandemic, and continue to overburden our healthcare system and create a lost generation of youth who will have missed out on opportunities. MPs are supposed to set an example – that starts with doing the responsible thing and being vaccinated.

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Roundup: Awaiting the (garbage) Reform Act votes

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Today is the Conservatives’ first caucus meeting of the new parliament – in person, no less – and everyone is anxiously awaiting news of whether they plan to vote on the (garbage) Reform Act provisions that would give caucus the ability to call for a leadership review. While I wrote about this for my column, coming out later today, I will make a few additional notes here.

As the column spells out, these provisions don’t actually provide an accountability mechanism, and they will wind up protecting O’Toole more than they will threaten him. So when I see MPs like Tom Kmiec saying that he wants MPs to accept the (garbage) Reform Act powers on a leadership review, citing that it provides a clear process, what he omits is that the 20 percent threshold insulates O’Toole, because those 24 MPs would need to openly sign their names to a letter to the caucus chair, meaning they will be easily identifiable for retribution if O’Toole survives the subsequent vote and/or leadership review, and that retribution can include not signing their nomination papers. That’s not an insignificant threat against them.

Meanwhile, Senator Michael MacDonald, a former Harper-era organizer, is urging a vote on a leadership review, citing O’Toole’s decision to say anything to whoever was in the room as being a threat to the party’s future chances.

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Roundup: Misleading to the point of misinformation

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As they tend to do after every election concludes, Power & Politics had David Meslin on to talk about electoral reform, because apparently, we are going to re-litigate it once again. (The saving grace is that this time they didn’t have Meslin using his LEGO to show different PR results). The problem? The graphic that the show produced as an example of how the results of this election would be under PR was essentially misinformation.

https://twitter.com/Catelli2Oh/status/1440818668217135110

The assumptions made to produce said chart is that Canada would employ a system of pure proportional representation, and then allocate seats in that regard. But this would be a PR system that nobody is actually asking for, and which would be unconstitutional because seats are allocated on a provincial basis, while such a system would be unable to take that into account under the current 338 seat model. That’s a pretty big deal. Most people advocate for some form of mixed-member proportional, where you vote for a local MP, and then vote a second time for a party, which will then allocate someone from a list into a number of seats designed as “top-ups” to make the seats more closely resemble the “popular vote” (even though such a thing is a logical fallacy under our current vote construction). Furthermore, it would assume that we’d have the same parties, which is unlikely (and Meslin went at great length about how great it would be for the big tent parties to break up), and even more to the point, under a different voting system, voting behaviours would be different. With all of this in mind, the fact that the gods damned CBC produced an infographic with a misleading characterisation of what Monday’s vote might have looked like under PR is not just irresponsible – it’s downright misinformation.

It’s also concerning that Meslin thinks that as many as 21 seats for the People’s Party under such a system is no big deal, and he thinks we should have more radical parties for the sake of “innovation.” The notion of a far-right party getting 21 seats and putting them in the potential position to be kingmakers in a coalition government is frightening to say the least, but we’ve also seen in other countries that use PR, such as Germany and the Netherlands, that when far-right parties breach the threshold to attain seats, they grow in popularity because they are given respectability and a platform to espouse their views. One of the great strengths of big-tent parties, that Meslin completely ignored, is that they moderate extremes, which is actually a good thing in politics. Big tent parties build coalitions of regions and factions within themselves, rather than having smaller parties building the coalitions externally post-election. It’s one reason why radical parties are short-lived, and why disruptive parties tend to “self-correct” within a couple of election cycles, because they can’t maintain the necessary organisation that Canada requires. These are features of our system – not bugs, and it would be great if CBC didn’t turn to the same guy every election to make the same misleading points, time and again.

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Roundup: Animating the Double-Hyphen Affair zombie

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Because Jody Wilson-Raybould and the corpse of the Double-Hyphen Affair is getting a fresh attempt at necromancy now that her book is being released, we’re going to see a renewed round of questions about what happened. The Conservatives are sending out a bunch of press releases intimating that RCMP is still considering investigating the matter, and Wilson-Raybould herself is calling on the prime minister to allow them to investigate obstruction of justice – because they really want this zombie to wake up and start trying to eat the brain of this campaign.

In response to questions yesterday, Justin Trudeau said he has not been contacted by the RCMP regarding SNC-Lavalin, which…is not actually surprising. I’m not sure what there would be to investigate, really, and why it would be Trudeau they would be investigating. Her own testimony seemed to indicate that the pressure was largely coming from the jackasses who were in Bill Morneau’s office at the time (and it was those same jackasses in Morneau’s office who were letting SNC-Lavalin pull their puppet strings in pushing through the deferred prosecution agreement legislation into the budget implementation bill), and if you actually listen to the whole call with Michael Wernick and not the carefully curated clips that Wilson-Raybould set up in how she steered the conversation, he was looking for information that she had previously sent to PCO, but didn’t reach his desk. There is no actual obstruction of justice happening. The ultimate irony in all of this, however, is that if they had gone ahead and given SNC the deferred prosecution agreement – which it sounds like they wouldn’t have qualified for anyway – the company would have actually faced some consequences. As it was, SNC-Lavalin settled while the case around an executive collapsed and the company got away with a lesser penalty and few, if any, compliance measures, without any interference on anyone’s end.

The worst part of this, however, is that you have columnists who are writing things like “Wilson-Raybould offers a ballot question in an election about nothing,” which is ludicrous. This is not an election about nothing – no election is about nothing. There is plenty at stake in this campaign, but because it’s less so for straight white guys, whom these columnists are, they are blind to it.

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Roundup: No knockouts in the TVA debate

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The first official debate took place last night – TVA’s “Face-à-face” which was a debate in a slightly more behaved format than we tend to see with the consortium/commission debates. All four leaders displayed adequate French – though Erin O’Toole’s accent and pronunciation started to degrade the longer it went on – and it was broadly organized around three particular themes: the pandemic, social policy, and the Canada of tomorrow. As with most debates, there was no “knock-out punch,” the leaders largely held their own, and unlike 2019, no one got cornered and slaughtered as what happened to Andrew Scheer.

There were contentious issues – early on, the other leaders tried to gang up on Trudeau about the “unnecessary” election, which Justin Trudeau countered Yves-François Blanchet’s accusations with a reminder that on four occasions Blanchet voted non-confidence in the government and obviously wanted an election. O’Toole also claimed that Parliament was working together and that made the election unnecessary, but that was a complete lie, and there were five months of procedural warfare brought on by his MPs to drive that point home. Trudeau also made the point that the twenty percent of the population that remained unvaccinated shouldn’t be able to stop democracy, and that our institutions were robust enough to deal with it. Blanchet laid into O’Toole about his plans to cancel the child care programme and withdraw the promised money from Quebec in exchange for tax credits that won’t help create any child care spaces. Blanchet and Jagmeet Singh also got into it on a few occasions, particularly around who called whom a racist in the House of Commons, and on any issue that touched on race, Blanchet kept insisting that Quebeckers weren’t racist. It being a Quebec-centric debate (as opposed to inclusive of francophones outside of the province), it had its moments of parochialism, like the moderator demanding assurances from each of the leaders that the future Moderna plant will be built in Quebec and not Ontario.

While everyone is going to assert that either Blanchet won out of natural advantage, or that their own preferred leader “won,” just because I did want to make a couple of observations. Trudeau is still having difficulty articulating the need for an election – most especially around the toxic parliamentary session in the spring. Erin O’Toole kept repeating that he has a plan, and that he has a “contract with Quebec,” and just repeating those assurances, ad nauseum. He also did most of the interrupting and talking over others throughout the evening. Blanchet was chippy and peevish for much of it, while Jagmeet Singh would dodge direct questions in favour of his usual tactic of reverting to some kind of an anecdote about someone he allegedly met. And here are a collection of quotes from the evening, for what it’s worth.

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Roundup: Ford’s vaccine certification falsehoods

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Ontario’s science table released some dire modelling yesterday that showed that unless vaccination rates reach over 85 percent, we may need yet another lockdown to prevent the healthcare system from becoming overwhelmed – yet again. Thus far, only 76 percent of people over the age of 12 are fully vaccinated, so we have a way to go if we don’t want things to get dire, once more.

With this in mind, Doug Ford begrudgingly agreed to finally roll out vaccine certificates (not calling them “passports”) as of September 22, with the app coming a month later, but as with anything Ford and his band of incompetent murderclowns do, it’s half-assed and largely inadequate. In this case, they’ll require these certificates to enter non-essential businesses like indoor dining and theatres, but at the same time, they won’t require staff at these places to be fully vaccinated, because that makes so much sense. And most gallingly, Ford tried to claim that he has to do it because the federal government won’t – which is, frankly, bullshit because this is firmly within provincial jurisdiction, and after provinces grudgingly allowed the federal government access to their records for international travel purposes, many of them either refused to allow the same data to be used domestically (including Ford up until yesterday), or stated that they were moving ahead with their own certification so no need to bother with a federal one (thinking especially of Quebec).

Here’s Justin Ling with receipts about why this is bullshit, including when Ford’s flacks tried to “prove” that they wanted national vaccine certification, when it was in fact for international travel, and they’re content to lie to us to try and shift the blame when the anti-vaxxer crowd starts protesting (and yes, they did immediately after).

And because it was too spot-on, here’s Brittlestar’s take.

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Roundup: Singh needs to start giving details

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We have seen plenty of coverage thus far in the election about how popular Jagmeet Singh is, and how authentic he seems to his audience, and plenty about his personal likeability, but I am not seeing a lot that is pushing back against the things he is proposing. We have a couple of such examples yesterday, first with his pharmacare proposal. Essentially, the current government has put in the work, and established the Canada Drug Agency transition office, and thus far has signed up one province – Prince Edward Island. The other premiers have all balked at this, including the NDP premier of British Columbia, John Horgan, which I find mighty interesting in the current context. So, just what would Singh do differently? Well, he won’t say. Per the CBC:

When pressed by reporters on how he would get the provinces to sign onto his plan, Singh was light on details but committed to partnering with provincial and territorial governments. “We’d work with provinces and territories, I know it’s going to be hard work, but it’s going to save families money,” he said.

Great. He’ll “partner” with provinces that have thus far said no, and lo, he’ll do it by next year when it’s going to take years to negotiate a national formulary for said programme – something that seems to be a surprise to Singh, if you go by their stunt of a private members’ bill in the previous parliament, where they essentially proposed a framework where the provinces pay for prescription drugs and the federal government will then sign over a cheque. Yeah, it doesn’t really work like that. But I haven’t seen this being hammered home – you can’t just keep handwaving promises, particularly promises in areas of provincial jurisdiction, and not provide details on how you’ll accomplish it, and no, just promising to “work with” those provinces is not good enough. The current government has been doing that, and if you’re going to complain that they haven’t moved fast enough, then you need to explain how you’re going to do it differently. And no, the fact that you’re not Justin Trudeau is not an answer.

But he didn’t stop there. No, he also opined on vaccine passports, saying that the federal government should just go ahead and implement it federally – but again, didn’t say how they should, given that they don’t control the vaccination data because the delivery of healthcare is a provincial jurisdiction. These particular details matter, and you can’t just handwave them away. We need to start pressing Singh for details, because his answers aren’t good enough, and if he’s going to present himself as a serious contender for government, he needs to be asked the implementation questions so that he can answer them – and be made to answer them.

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Roundup: A debasing “debate” on inflation

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Because sometimes this is a media criticism blog, I find myself outraged at the hack job that Power & Politics has been doing on this bullshit story about inflation, and it’s turned to being completely irresponsible. Yesterday was a perfect example of how shows like this are more interested in horserace bullshit than they are in economics, and lo, for an MP panel, the host wanted each party to give a single example of how their party would tackle inflation, even if it’s a complex issue, and lo, each MP gave a pitch to their party’s platform. Nothing about monetary policy and the Bank of Canada and its mandate – nothing. Just parties serving up their talking points to one another. So enlightening! Later, during the “Power Panel,” said host kept saying “we’re not going to talk about monetary policy” when talking about inflation, and that makes about as much sense as talking about climate change while declaring you’re not going to talk about GHG emissions. It’s kind of central to the point.

More to the point, the show – and several other outlets – used a truncated quote from Justin Trudeau to frame his response in a misleading way. To wit, the question he was asked by Bloomberg:

 You mentioned the Bank of Canada’s mandate, that mandate is expiring at the end of this year. If re-elected, the review, or the extension of the mandate is probably the first big economic policy decision you will make after the election. There is some talk of allowing the Bank of Canada to make some tweaks to its mandate to give it the flexibility to tolerate higher inflation and help the economy a little bit more at this difficult time. Do you have a position on the mandate? Would you support a slightly higher tolerance for inflation?

And Trudeau’s answer:

I don’t know. When I think about the biggest, most important economic policy that this government, if re-elected, would move forward, you’ll forgive me if I don’t think about monetary policy. You’ll understand that I think about families. When we first got elected in 2015, the very first thing we did was raise taxes on the wealthiest one per cent so we could lower them for the middle class. Similarly, if re-elected, the Liberal government will continue to invest in supports for families, for students, for seniors. Investing in housing, because we know that it is not right that so many people right here in the Lower Mainland and indeed across the country can’t afford their first home. We know that these are the policies that make a difference in the growth of our country, in the jobs people get, and the opportunities people have to grow and prosper. That is what we will stay focused on.

The clear implication is that he’s not focused on the Bank of Canada’s mandate, but on his own affordability agenda. But all anyone picked up on was “I don’t think about monetary policy,” and turning that into him being flip, and the host of P&P went so far as to compare it to Trudeau saying that budgets balance themselves – itself a truncated quote, where the original line, when asked about a commitment to balancing the budget, was: “The commitment needs to be a commitment to grow the economy and the budget will balance itself.” Which is true. Erin O’Toole is making the same pledge in his platform.

While I yelled at the TV over Twitter, my reply column filled up with assertions that the show was in the tank for the Conservatives, or that they were out to get Trudeau, but that’s not really the case. They’re not really in the tank for anyone – they want to get clips that will generate headlines and simplistic narratives, and that’s why they ask inflammatory questions designed to give explosive answers, and why they truncate quotes to be as sensational as possible. Part of this is the current host’s fault – she’s a reporter who is geared toward getting a “gold quote” out of people rather than a nuanced understanding of the situation. A bigger problem is the people who produce the show, who are more concerned with partisan talking heads giving simplistic and facile responses than actually understanding what is going on, and they’ve chosen the laziest, least-effort format to fill air time and generate some kind of spark of interest, which is usually partisans sniping at one another. Yes, it’s a big problem for our civic literacy, and it hurts our media literacy as well. Nobody was served by the “debate” on inflation, particularly as there was no context to what it was about, or what monetary policy means, and all it did was make everyone dumber. This kind of “journalism” has become a scourge.

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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: A GST holiday gimmick

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For a campaign platform chock full of gimmicks, Erin O’Toole spent the day touting one of them – a proposed “GST Holiday” in the month of December, ostensibly as a way to stimulate economic activity. It’s a hugely expensive proposition, but also a hideously complicated one – by promising to make this come off at the till rather than as a rebate from CRA, he is loading all kinds of complication onto businesses, who may not be able to easily disentangle the federal GST from provincial sales taxes, particularly if they are harmonized in an HST as they are in most provinces. (It also won’t make those purchases “tax free” as O’Toole says in his video, unless you’re in Alberta). And even the Canadian Federation of Independent Business thinks this is a dumb idea that is more complicated than it’s worth.

We also should call out the fact that this is not only a gimmick, but O’Toole keeps trying to message around the cost of living and food prices, which a GST holiday would do nothing about because the vast majority of food items are GST exempt. O’Toole keeps trying to make inflation an election issue, never mind that it’s the domain of the Bank of Canada and not the federal government, and if he thinks the Bank’s mandate should be changed to target deflation instead of slow and steady 2 percent inflation growth, he needs to come out and say so rather than this posturing about rising prices. Prices are supposed to rise – inflation is not a bad thing when it’s low and predictable, because that helps the economy to grow. But this is populist noise, and for the so-called “party of the economy” to mislead people about this is telling.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1427636793420169217

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1427637831002886155

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