Tag Archives: China

Roundup: Security clearances back in the spotlight

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Day three of the campaign, and Mark Carney remained in Halifax, where he had an announcement at the Irving Shipyard about his plans to continue recapitalizing the Royal Canadian Navy, and pledged to fill all 14,500 vacancies in the Canadian Forces expeditiously (and good luck with that). He also promised to expand the mandate of the Canadian Coast Guard, and that’s a lot of expensive promises for someone who wants to balance the “operating budget” and still give a tax cut. Over the course of the day, Carney also mispronounced the name of one of his “star” candidates in Montreal, and misidentified the École Polytechnique as Concordia (where another shooting did happen), which she forgave him for, but these are more rookie mistakes creeping in. Up next on the tour will be Windsor, Ontario, then London and Kitchener.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1904280770199347527

Pierre Poilievre was in the GTA and promised to expand his proposed GST cut on new homes to now cover all new homes under $1.3 million—a pledge that has both upsides and downsides. There was also a bit of a gaffe with the sign on the lectern, where it looked like two separate verb-the-noun slogans of “Axe the Sales!” and “Tax on Homes.” That wasn’t the case, but someone should have caught that. He also insisted that people wouldn’t lose their federal dental or pharamacare coverage, but was unclear on just who would be covered under his government (and I have a hard time believing that given the scale of cuts that need to happen to fund his promises). He then headed to Hamilton in the evening for another rally.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1904565775353987257

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1904565818949538241

As for Jagmeet Singh, he was in Hamilton and mostly complained about Brookfield being capitalists as a way to talk down Mark Carney, and somehow that was supposed to tie into affordable housing, but I couldn’t see anything actually being announced. He did boast about union endorsements, but did admit that the party is facing challenges (as their poll numbers continue to plummet), but insist he’s still in the fight. Today he’s still in Hamilton for his announcement (trying to save the seats there, no doubt) before heading to London, Ontario.

The big story of the day, however, was the revelation in the Globe and Mail that CSIS did allege that India organised support for Poilievre’s leadership campaign (not that he really needed it), but also that they couldn’t brief him on this because he refuses to get his security clearance. Poilievre insisted this was a partisan smear, spun a conspiracy theory about a trip Carney took to Beijing after he was made the Liberal economic advisor, before returning to the falsehood that getting his clearance would be a “gag order,” and seemed wholly unaware that the bigger issue for him to be briefed on was who in his party may be compromised so that he, as party leader, can deal with the matters internally. This having been said, there are questions about the timing of this leak, but we can’t be sure that this was someone trying to put their thumb on the scales in the election when it’s very possible that the Globe sat on this for a while with the intention of dropping it during the campaign so that they can be seen to be setting the agenda, and not the parties. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a media outlet has done that.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched 139 drones and missiles at Ukrainian targets overnight Monday, with damage and injuries in the Poltava region. A partial truce on energy and sea attacks was reached with American help, though the Americans are looking to ease sanctions on Russian fertilizer (which only helps their war effort, guys). President Zelenskyy warns, however, that Russia is already trying to manipulate and distort those accords, not that this should be a surprise.

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Roundup: Election 2025, Day One

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Around noon on Sunday, prime minister Mark Carney visited Rideau Hall and advised the Governor General to dissolve Parliament for an election. She agreed, signed the proclamation, and the 45th general election was underway. The election will be held on April 28th, making it a short five-week campaign.

Mark Carney spoke afterward, and immediately promised a “Middle Class™ tax cut,” because clearly what’s needed in a time of economic uncertainty, and when we need to ramp up our defence spending and response to the economic predations of Trump, is a tax cut that will disproportionately benefit top income earners. Carney then headed to St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, for his first campaign stop.

Pierre Poilievre got his message out early, and he took a couple of mild jabs at Trump, before doubling down on his usual nonsense about “open border” creating crime (which is completely false), and insisted that his campaign offers hope and change, and insisted that they will “restore” the promise of the country. He then headed off to Toronto for a “Canada First™” rally.

Jagmeet Singh accused the Liberals of letting the country “rot from the inside,” and that he’s about people and not billionaires. (All tens of them in Canada?) From his initial Ottawa launch, he then headed to Montreal for his first stop.

And the Green co-leaders Elizabeth May and Jonathan Pedneault called for unity during the election in order to stand up to Trump and the global oligarchs that are seeking to destroy democracy.

In the background of all of this was an interview that Danielle Smith gave to Breitbart News in the US, where she claims that she told members of the Trump administration to hold off on tariffs in order to help get Poilievre elected, because he would be more in sync with them. This is pretty shocking, if she is indeed telling the truth and not just giving some kind of boast to make herself look good for the Breitbart crowd. Poilievre insists that Trump wants Carney to win because he’ll be a pushover, and I mean, come on. Carney gave his usual points about needing respect from Trump before they’ll talk. Nevertheless, the fact that we have premiers freelancing foreign policy like this is a Very Bad Thing and they need to be reined in.

 

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched 147 drones at several cities across Ukraine overnight Sunday, and killed at least seven. On Saturday, Russian shelling killed three in Pokrovsk. The blaze at Russia’s Krasnodar oil depot has been burning for over five days now.

https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1903740311689363767

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Roundup: Unrealistic Ring of Fire promises

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Pierre Poilievre was in Sudbury to pronounce that if he forms government, he’ll set a deadline of six months to approve any federal permits for mining in the “Ring of Fire” region in Northern Ontario, and put $1 billion toward connecting roads in the region to the highway network (to be paid for by cuts elsewhere). Absent from his pronouncement? Any representatives of the First Nations in the region, for whom consultation and cooperation is necessary (and yes, most of the First Nations in the region were not thrilled when they heard this). Poilievre says that there aren’t shovels in the ground because the Liberals have a “keep it in the ground” mentality, which is hard to square with the fact that they have been moving ahead on plenty of other critical mineral projects that are better connected to existing infrastructure, the pipeline they bought to get oil to tidewater, and the fact that oil and gas production are at record highs. So much keeping it in the ground! He also didn’t learn a single gods damned lesson from the Harper years, where trying to slash the review process for big projects only meant that they wound up in litigation.

Meanwhile, a group of energy sector CEOs are demanding that, because of the trade war, the federal government use “emergency powers” to approve more resource (mostly oil and gas) projects, which seems hard to square with the fact that a) there isn’t much in the way of emergency powers that could be deployed, let alone that could affect provincially-regulated projects; b) that they are vague on the market for these products if they’re not going the US, particularly as there is little in the way of cross-country pipeline infrastructure or the fact that the East Coast isn’t going to want to pay a premium for western Canadian oil; or c) the changing energy market means that they seem to be advocating to build a bunch of assets that would be stranded before too long. As this is going on, Danielle Smith is trying to pass yet more unconstitutional/useless legislation to prevent the federal government from acquiring oil companies’ data for their planned emissions cap, because yes, everything is that stupid.

On a related note, you have farmers and Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe urging capitulation to China in order for them to lift their canola tariffs, which were placed in retaliation for the EV tariffs (which in turn were done at the Americans’ behest under Biden in order to protect the EV industry they were trying to build from Chinese dumping). Well, China just executed four Canadian dual-nationals on drug-related charges, in spite of pleas by the Canadian government for clemency. It’s a message that they’re not looking to seek our favour in spite of the fact that Trump has turned against us (and his other allies). Caving to China on this canola issue is not going to work out well in the long term, because they know this is a pressure point that they can exploit. They have exploited it in the past, and it’s why they’re doing so again, and if we cave again, they’ll just move the goal posts and make more demands of Canada that will be harder and harder to resist.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia claims that Ukraine is trying to sabotage the moratorium on striking each other’s’ energy facilities after a drone strike on an oil depot. Ukraine also attacked an airfield near a Russian strategic bomber base in southern Russia. Russia and Ukraine each swapped 175 prisoners, one of the largest exchanges to date.

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Roundup: Positive feelings about a useless meeting

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We seem to be caught in a pattern where Donald Trump will invite a world leader to the White House—yesterday it was NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte—and he goes on an unhinged rant while they’re sitting there, trying to avoid saying anything that will set him off. And yesterday’s rant included a full-on threat to annex Greenland (while Rutte tried to downplay NATO’s involvement in any way, which is true to the extent that it only operates by consensus), and went on an extended rant about Canada not working as a real country, and made up the lie that America pays for our military (not true in the slightest), before repeating the falsehood that the US subsidizes us.

Meanwhile, Dominic LeBlanc and François-Philippe Champagne had their meeting with Howard Lutnick, with Doug Ford along for the ride as he continued to try and make himself the main character (and I watched Conservative talking head pundits also putting forward this distorted view of reality). Ford came out of the meeting, effusive about how “positive” it was and how they were going to have more meetings next week (and was later corrected that officials were going to meet, not him), while the two ministers basically talked a lot and said nothing, because nothing could be accomplished here. But they had to pretend that something came from this meeting when obviously nothing did, as there were no changes to any tariffs, and Ford’s pressure tactic around the electricity “surcharge” remains off the table again.

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Elsewhere, Trump’s pick for US ambassador to Canada had his Senate confirmation hearing, and when asked, he said that Canada is a sovereign country, and tried to claim that Trump’s expansionist rhetoric is about “negotiation tactics,” but it certainly doesn’t seem to be. And yeah, he said the bare minimum to ensure that he wasn’t PNGed before he could even arrive in the country. Closer to home, Scott Moe continues to call for capitulation to China regarding their tariff fight, because of course he did, and claimed it was about protecting Quebec’s industries over Saskatchewan’s, except Quebec doesn’t really have much of an auto sector, but Moe’s brain is pretty smooth, after all.

Ukraine Dispatch

An overnight attack on Dnipro injured three women and damaged apartment buildings. Ukrainian forces are in retreat in parts of Kursk region, which means losing a bargaining chip in possible peace negotiations. And Putin has all kinds of conditions on a possible ceasefire, because he’s not serious, and Ukraine only went along with the plan to call his bluff.

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Roundup: Refusing to defend his own bill

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Because this parliament has descended to the absolute depths of performative uselessness, Conservative MP Arnold Viersen is refusing to testify to his own private member’s bill, and his Conservative colleagues on the justice committee are filibustering to keep the clock running out on the bill rather than extend the time to hear from witnesses, in the hopes of reporting back without amendments. And why is Viersen avoiding testifying? Because the Liberal and NDP members are likely to ask him about his pro-life views and activities—for clips for their own socials.

The bill, which would mandate certification of age and consent for those who appear in porn, got all-party support before going to committee, but I suspect that this bill is completely unenforceable (as we are net importers of porn), and is likely to suffer from some of the same problems from the other age verification bill, which is unworkable and an absolute privacy nightmare. And it would be great if the committee could actually hear from experts who could say so, but they are unlikely to at this stage. (Conservative filibusters also limited witness testimony on the age verification bill, which meant they could not hear from experts who would tell them it’s unworkable and a privacy nightmare).

Nevertheless, I think that because of these kinds of shenanigans, if an MP refuses to testify about their own bill, the committee should vote it down, and it should be killed as a consequence for wasting everyone’s time. I’d even be happy putting that in the Standing Orders. We also need to change it so that if a PMB needs a royal recommendation, it doesn’t even get debated rather than the current practice of letting it go as far as the final vote, because again, that wastes everyone’s time, and time is a precious commodity in Parliament, and plenty of MPs could have used that time for their own PMBs who won’t get the change.

Speaking of committees, the Conservatives want an “immediate” recall of the public safety committee, rather than waiting for its regularly-scheduled meeting next week, to discuss the arrests of two teens who planned to bomb a pro-Israel rally on Parliament Hill. But in spite of the seriousness of the topic, we all know what this is really about—getting clips for their social media of them talking about how “divisive” Trudeau is, and that he personally caused this kind of radicalisation. It’s as predictable as it is stupid, but this is where our Parliament is right now.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukrainian forces shot down two cruise missiles, two ballistic missiles and thirty-seven drones headed for Kyiv, where it looks like renewed attacks are being made on power systems ahead of winter. Ukraine’s General Staff also says that they repelled four attacks on the city of Kupiansk in the northeast. Here’s a look at Ukrainians trying to support those on the front lines while they collectively wait to see what Trump 2.0 brings.

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Roundup: Another threatened frivolous lawsuit

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There is a weird little case of monkey-see-monkey-do happening between different conservative parties around the country that has accelerated with the three provincial elections, and Danielle Smith’s upcoming leadership review, and it would all be childish if the stakes weren’t so high. A few days ago, Scott Moe started claiming that the federal carbon levy was costing the jobs of teachers and nurses in the province—a transparently bullshit claim—but the talking point got picked up in Question Period by Pierre Poilievre, and soon other premiers were doing it, including Danielle Smith. Yes, it demonstrates an intellectual and moral bankruptcy that is stunning to behold, but also just how little imagination there seems to be among parties on the right in this country (not that the NDP has much imagination of their own, as they crib the notes of the “justice Democrats” in the US with alarming frequency).

After Blaine Higgs declared that he was going to launch a fresh legal challenge against the federal carbon levy—which will immediately be thrown out of court—Danielle Smith decided she couldn’t let that one go either, so she is now threatening a new legal challenge of the federal Impact Assessment Act, which has just been through changes after the Supreme Court ruled that the earlier version did not pass constitutional muster. And just like Higgs’ challenge that has no new legal arguments to draw on, Smith is also citing things that are not legislative in nature as she plans to challenge the amended law.

The federal government isn’t having it, and Steven Guilbeault has called her out over this, but I’m not sure her behaviour will change too dramatically once she’s on the other side of her leadership review because, well, she needs to prove to her base that she is doing more than just listening to them, but acting on their batshit crazy desires as well, so we’re going to see more of this nonsense going forward.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukrainian force shot down nine out of nineteen Russian drones targeting critical infrastructure overnight Thursday. Russian advances have knocked out about 80 percent of the critical infrastructure in the logistics hub of Pokrovsk, which they are trying to capture. President Zelenskyy visited the Sumy region, which borders the captured areas in Russia’s Kursk region. Reuters has a photo gallery of the all-female anti-drone mobile air defence unit known as the “Bucha witches.”

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Roundup: An own-goal that makes it worse for everyone

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It was an own-goal for the media today as CTV was found to have spliced a Poilievre quote in a news story and was forced to apologise for it. Of course, this had every single Conservative salivating and insisting that this was “proof” of “fake news” and that media were trying to be unfair to Poilievre, and that this was in service of their government funding (which television outlets like CTV don’t get), and other ridiculous accusations of bias. Because that’s where we are now.

While I don’t personally know what happened, what is likely to have happened was you had someone trying to fit the story into their both-sides narrative frame and needed a short quote, and took the long paragraph from Poilievre and extracted words to come up with what they were looking for to fit the piece. It’s bad practice, but it’s almost certainly not done with malevolent intention, but because they’re overworked, under-resourced, and lacking proper editorial supervision, as with nearly every outlet these days. Because that’s where every media outlet is at, and it’s not sustainable, and things are going to continue to deteriorate if we try to keep doing what we’re doing.

This being said, the Conservatives’ war against the media is only going to get worse, and this incident, plus others, shows that they have a vested interest in catching out every single mistake from media, or to invent problems where they didn’t actually exist. For example, Poilievre likes to go on about the three corrections that The Canadian Press made to a story about his remarks, but the “corrections” were because the writer had spelled out what Poilievre was only referring to obliquely (quite deliberately) and Poilievre complained that he didn’t say what the story says he did, even though he actually did if you thought about it for more than five seconds. But this is the kind of petty, bad-faith bullshit that they’re going to engage in, and most of our media outlets are unprepared to deal with it. Legacy media is in serious trouble in this country, and it’s only going to get worse as this campaign against them from Poilievre intensifies.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian forces made a new series of strikes on Zaporizhzhia, killing one. At the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague, Ukraine is accusing Russia of trying to illegally seize control of the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait. President Zelenskyy is in the US, not only to attend the UN, but to discuss his “victory plan” with the American government.

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Roundup: Bringing in the spouses?

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The fallout from Jagmeet Singh’s confrontation with members of the Asshole Brigade who are harassing people in front of Parliament Hill has taken a couple of strange twists. In his post about the incident, Singh said that “That’s the country that Pierre Poilievre wants,” which of course sent the Conservatives into the usual bit of performative victimhood. Among those was Michael Cooper, who was seen hanging out with some of those members of the Asshole Brigade, and he tweeted out that he didn’t know them, that they approached him at the restaurant he was eating in…but there is video that shows him meeting with them before the restaurant, so perhaps that’s a very judicious use of the truth.

The stranger part was that Anaida Poilievre wrote a long Twitter missive to rebut the accusation and to praise Poilievre’s good character, while taking shots at Singh and Justin Trudeau. There has been a long-held convention in Canadian politics that spouses stay out of things, and they get a semblance of anonymity as a result. The fact that she has been very active in Poilievre’s campaign is a sign that she could be much more active in a future where Poilievre becomes prime minister, and that’s a bit of a problem because we don’t have “First Ladies” in this county like the Americans do, because our “First Lady” is Queen Camila. If she plays an active role, does she then become a target for other parties? Does that open up attacks for their spouses? I worry about that given the coarsening of politics as it is, and the fact that far too many people are already targeting MPs’ homes as part of protests. We don’t need them to become fair game as things continue to race to the bottom.

https://x.com/AnaPoilievre/status/1836225640938508466

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian shelling in Zaporizhzhia killed one woman and injured two others, while another attack targeted energy facilities in the central city of Kropyvnytskyi. Ukrainian drones have struck a Russian military base north of Moscow, causing an “earthquake-sized” blast. President Zelenskyy will be addressing the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday.

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Roundup: Angry over an invented grievance

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Two new Senate appointments were made over the weekend, both from Alberta, which naturally resulted in a mountain of utter bullshit, because neither were from the so-called “senators in waiting” that Alberta periodically “elects” as a stunt in order to invent a grievance against the federal government. There was also more of this nonsense hand-wringing that one of the two is a habitual Liberal donor and held roles as an organiser in the party in the past, but hasn’t for well over a decade. Nevertheless, clueless journalists and bad faith opposition members decry this as “partisan,” even though there is no actual Liberal caucus in the Senate for them to sit with, nor any Liberal whip to direct their votes (even though that has only ever really been illusory in the Senate).

The whole “Senate consultative elections” schtick in Alberta has only ever been a stunt—even when Stephen Harper appointed those who won them, because he was trying to make a point about reforming the Senate through the backdoor without actually doing constitutional changes. The logic of how they’re “just consultations” and that they are still appointed and don’t have any additional legitimacy within the Senate was laid bare during the Supreme Court hearings when Justice Cromwell asked the person making the argument “So why isn’t a consultative auction just as legitimate?” and they didn’t have an answer. But really, the whole thing was just to invent one more reason to make people mad at the federal government, at a time when there was a political impetus to stoke such regional divisions and resentments because that always helped them score political points, and lo, it’s still working for them decades later as they continue to get angry about something they just invented for the sole purpose of making them angry. It’s predictable, and it’s childish, and we should expect provincial governments like Alberta’s to behave like adults (but good luck with that these days).

Of course, where would we be without the conservative columnists in this country, making pronouncements about this without actually understanding a gods damned thing about it. “Not representative of Albertan thinking”? What exactly is “Albertan thinking?” If the insinuation is that their appointment is somehow illegitimate because they’re not conservatives, then I have news for you because the Senate is often a place where political outliers in a province can gain representation, such as Liberals in Alberta, particularly during the “bad old partisan days” where they may be shut out of the province electorally but could still have representation in the Senate and be present in caucus to provide that representation. That doesn’t happen anymore thanks to Trudeau’s short-sighted decision to boot all of the senators from his caucus, which is also why Ivison’s comments about Trudeau “renouncing” his reforms are such utter nonsense, because if Trudeau had renounced them, he would invite senators back into his caucus. He won’t (even though he should), but hey, Ivison needs to think of something from his perch in Costa Rica, and reinforcing a bullshit narrative is about the best it’s going to be.

Ukraine Dispatch

It was a bloody day in Ukraine as Russian missiles struck a military academy and a hospital, killing over fifty people and wounding more than 200. In the hours since, Russia has since launched missiles and drones against Kyiv and Lviv. This as children are returning to school, and in Kharkiv, those schools are now underground because of constant bombardment. Meanwhile, president Zelenskyy continues to call on Western countries who haven’t yet allowed their weapons to be used for long-range strikes inside Russia to not only allow them, but to supply further weapons so that Ukraine can make crucial hits. It also looks like a major government shake-up is on the way after a wave of resignations.

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Roundup: Sophistry and the “Canadian Dream”

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A piece widely shared over the weekend in the Globe and Mail, titled “The Canadian dream is on life support,” was a curious bit of writing, as the Elder Pundits of this country treated it like a damning indictment of the current government. While Omer Aziz’s ultimate conclusions in the piece are correct—that the federal government needs to admit that things have gone wrong, throw out their old assumptions and pivot, and they need to throw away their talking points while they’re at it—his process of getting there was torturous, and full of outright sophistry.

One of the things that really stood out for me in the piece was just how shallow the analysis really was, particularly in the fact that it served as something of an apologia for the premiers. You wouldn’t know it from reading the piece, but while he levels much of his scorn at the federal government, many of the problems he described are the fault of provincial governments, even where he asserts that they are solely federal such as with immigration. His attention to things like international students were the fault of provincial governments—most especially Ontario and BC—who let their post-secondary institutions treat these international students like cash cows (because they cut funding to those institutions), and allowed the public-private partnership colleges that were largely fraudulent to flourish, again because these provincial governments weren’t doing their jobs, while the federal government was told to just trust them (and I’m not sure how the federal immigration department was supposed to be auditing these institutions in the first place). Likewise, provincial governments scream for temporary foreign workers, and the federal government has to operate on a certain level of trust that these provincial governments know their labour markets best. With his condemnation of the supposed laxity of our criminal justice system again ignores that policing and the administration of justice are provincial matters, but that is never mentioned. He even sides with Facebook on their cutting off of Canadian news and says that the Canadian government wasn’t nice enough to them. Come on.

There are things going wrong in this country, but many of them are complex, and have roots in decades of policy choices by federal and provincial governments that have taken us to this point, and it’s hard for any one government to unwind these structural problems. This kind of essay does a disservice by trying to be simplistic about the problems and solutions to those problems.

Ukraine Dispatch

A father and son were killed in a Russian missile strike on the Kyiv region on Sunday, while three civilians were killed in attacks on Kharkiv and Donetsk on Saturday. In the Kursk incursion, Russians claim that they are increasing security in the area (as videos of their troops surrending en masse flood social media), while president Zelenskyy says that this move puts pressure on Russia as the aggressor. There was a fire reported on the grounds of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, but the structure itself appears to be intact.

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