Tag Archives: Chrystia Freeland

Roundup: An end to hybrid sittings?

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Now that the Commons has risen for the summer, the parties are starting to evaluate the hell that is hybrid sittings, and lo, they are largely in favour of returning to regular, in-person sittings once again. Praise the gods on Olympus! They recognise that it’s harder to hold government to account when you can’t see the minister in front of you, and that you can’t build comradery with your fellow MPs, and that there is a sense of futility debating video screens. (And in an interview a week ago, outgoing MP Wayne Easter also noted that it’s harder for MPs within a caucus to form groups to push back against the leadership if they can’t be in the room together).

I’m going to temper that praise a little bit, because they’re already talking about exceptions, whether it’s for MPs with illnesses, or those with small children, and this is where it starts. When they return in the fall, or in the next parliament, whichever comes first, you can bet that the Liberals in particular are going to keep pushing for a number of exceptions so that the hybrid format never really goes away, and therein lies the danger – that the longer it’s able to carry on, future cohorts become more used to these sittings than the ones who are used to in-person sittings, the easier it will be for future populists to start abusing the system to stay out of Ottawa as a point of pride. It won’t happen overnight, but once you open the door a little bit, it will get used and abused.

There was one area where I could be persuaded, which was around committee meetings during weeks when the Chamber isn’t sitting – particularly emergency meetings. Often times, those involve flying into Ottawa for a single hour-long meeting, then flying home, which is a huge waste of time and resources (not to mention the carbon footprint). So I could be persuaded – but the flipside of that is that it removes an element of deterrence for not calling these emergency meetings, which are often done for the sake of a political performance. It’s something to consider in the longer term, but again, now that Pandora’s box is opened and the evil is out in the world, we should try to limit the damage as much as possible.

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Roundup: The problem with pulling out of NSICOP

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The demand for documents related to the firing of two scientists from the National Microbiology Lab reached a boiling point yesterday, as the House of Commons voted to summon the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada to the bar in the Commons to face censure – and turn over the document – while Erin O’Toole also declared that he was pulling the Conservative members from NSICOP, alleging that there is some kind of cover-up happening.

For weeks, O’Toole and Michael Chong in particular, have been trying to paint a story that these two scientists caused a national security breach at the Lab, and that there have been a string of resignations over it. There’s no actual evidence for any of this – all signs point to the firing as being over a breach of intellectual property protocols, which was coupled with the fact that there used to be a permissive culture in the Lab where scientists (especially those deemed “favourites,” and one of the two fired scientists was indeed a favourite), did whatever they wanted and staff were instructed to make it happen – but that management changes started to end that culture, and it’s currently a fairly toxic workplace. (Check out my interview with the reporter who’s been on this story for two years here). The government has insisted they can’t turn over documents because of privacy laws, and the vague notions about national security because the two were marched out by federal RCMP, without any elaboration, and this opacity just made it easier to build up conspiracy theories – especially when they could tie them into the Wuhan lab in China, were samples of other viruses were sent to.

O’Toole withdrawing from NSICOP, a mere day after new members were appointed to the committee, damages the national security oversight in this country overall. Yes, there are legitimate criticisms about how NSICOP is structured – especially when it bumps up against the realities of a hung parliament – but it could also have been used to build trust between national security agencies and MPs, so that when it came up for review in five years, they may have been able to move toward a more UK-like model where it became a parliamentary committee. (More history in this thread). Some national security experts, like Stephanie Carvin, have argued that it should have been where initial determinations about those documents could be made, especially because they could be read in context – you can’t just read national security documents cold and make sense of them. But there is an additional, cultural problem for opposition MPs in this country (of all stripes) is that they prefer to remain ignorant in order to grandstand, and that’s exactly what O’Toole did yesterday – grandstand at the expense of the trust with national security agencies, and the cause of oversight of national security by parliamentarians. Short-term partisan considerations once again take the fore. What a way to run a democracy.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1405508435521806338

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Roundup: Misconduct at CBSA? You don’t say!

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It was not really a surprise to see the news that misconduct investigations of CBSA officers has increased over the past year – even in spite of travel volumes being down precipitously over the last year – and cases included things like interfering in an immigration process, belittling clients, abusing authority and sharing private information. Partly why this isn’t a surprise for me is because I’ve been tracking some of this for a while – I’ve heard horrific stories from lawyers, and from the Senators who have been pushing for independent oversight for CBSA for years.

That independent oversight still hasn’t happened. There have been numerous bills introduced in Parliament to provide it, and the most successful to date was a Senate initiative to create an Inspector General for CBSA. This was something the Liberals used to be in support of. Ralph Goodale was set to sponsor the bill in the Commons, until he became minister for public safety, then suddenly wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. When the bill passed the Senate unanimously, no one in the House of Commons dared to sponsor it there, MPs on the Liberal side having been warned away, and Conservatives were certainly not going to sponsor a Senate Liberal bill (and the Bloc and NDP most certainly were not either). The Liberals did introduce a weak sauce version of an oversight bill at the end of the previous parliament, with no time for it to go through, then again early in the current one, which died on prorogation and hasn’t been introduced since. That version would put CBSA under the RCMP’s Civilian Complaints and Review Commission, but for all intents and purposes, CBSA would still be investigating itself, meaning that the oversight is certainly not independent (and the CCRC is having a hard enough time getting the RCMP to sign off on its own complaints, which can’t be formalized until such sign-off).

The political will for this seems to be non-existent, which is strange, considering that the Liberals did reimplement plenty of other oversight for national security institutions like CSIS and CSA, and while some of CBSA’s activities call under the ambit of the new national security oversight bodies, it doesn’t capture the oversight of all of their activities. There are known problems with CBSA, and it’s unthinkable that a law enforcement body like it doesn’t have proper civilian oversight. The disconnect is unfathomable, but puts another mark in the column of Liberals being weasels about their promises once again.

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Roundup: Pledging more action on mass graves

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In the wake of the discovery of the mass grave of Indigenous children at a former residential school in Kamloops, there was a lot of attention directed to the prime minister, particularly on the slow rate of progress on implementing the calls to action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Trudeau, for his part, stated that sure, Cabinet could have swooped down and unilaterally taken actions, but that they would have been the wrong actions because they need to be done in consultation with Indigenous people, and consultation takes time. (Indeed, it seems that every time the government is ready to move forward on something, a number of Indigenous groups declare that it’s all wrong and demand that they start over again with grassroots consultation).

Another recurring narrative throughout the day was the demand for more funding to search other sites, and pointing out that the federal government denied the TRC the $1.5 million they were asking for to do that work in 2009 – but most people failed to follow up and see that the current government did fund that work for up to $10 million in 2016, on top of other ongoing funding for this kind of work to carry on. The minister, Carolyn Bennett, also noted that communities did not want the government to simply hire archaeological firms to do the work, but wanted to do it on their own, which is why the government is providing funds for those who want to do it (though there seems to be some contention about that in the Kamloops case when it comes to who was paying for the ground-penetrating radar).

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1399364989081767937

A couple of other observations – one is that I find the Conservatives’ sudden insistence that this government move expeditiously to implement all of the Calls to Action to be a bit precious given that they dragged their feet on taking this action when they were in government (including denying the funding to search for such grave sites), generally contenting themselves that they made the official apology and established the TRC. (Similarly, their demands that the MMIW National Action Plan be completed immediately also rings hollow considering they resisted calling such an inquiry). The other observation is that the Catholic Church has yet to acknowledge any culpability or apologise for what happened at residential schools, or to offer any compensation, remains a problem, but I’m not sure just how much pressure the federal government is able to put to bear on them for it. Of course, we have seen similar abuse scandals and mass graves in other countries, where race cannot also be considered a factor, and this will complicate the simplistic narratives being applied to this discovery. There is a lot for us as a society to come to terms with, and there shouldn’t be easy answers to be drawn from it.

https://twitter.com/Froggy7777777/status/1399578376516497413

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Roundup: Some pushback on the hybrid sittings

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I felt a tiny glimmer of hope over the weekend as I read this piece that talked to three MPs from each of the main parties about their experience with hybrid sittings, and lo, MPs are unimpressed. Praise be! Mind you, it’s a small sample, and it’s all Manitoba MPs (given that it was a piece in the Winnipeg Free Press), but props for having this conversation with them, and props for not letting it simply go by unquestioned, as is often the case.

This being said, I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet in terms of what the lasting implications of these hybrid changes will be, particularly when there are west coast MPs who are loudly praising the hybrid format, and when groups like Samara Canada are already lining up the excuses to allow it to keep happening, which is exactly the kind of slippery slope that I have been warning about since before this began. Don’t forget that the Liberals were pushing for these kinds of changes for nearly five years before the pandemic hit, and this was the perfect excuse for them to finally implement them, even if it was under the rubric of it being for the duration of the emergency. But as you’ve heard me warn before, they will soon find a list of excuses – just as Samara provided for them – to keep them going in some capacity, which will have a long-term erosion on our system and the norms therein. I am especially worried that there will be pressure to keep the voting app system going, even though, as the interviews in the article pointed out, this system greatly benefits the government because it doesn’t allow opposition MPs to use the votes to register displeasure (such as slow-voting). So while it’s great that some MPs want a return to proper sittings (one of them being an advocate for a parliamentary bubble, to little avail), there is still going to be a fight to ensure these changes stay are relegated to the dust heap once the pandemic is over.

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Roundup: Aping the Americans for the sake of chaos

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I frequently chide NDP leader Jagmeet Singh for his propensity to create jurisdictional confusion with the intent of making promises he can’t keep, and trying to make the Liberal government look unwilling to help (when they simply don’t have levers at their disposal), and yet, he keeps it up, again and again, and refuses to be called out on this particular brand of bullshit. And yesterday was case in point, yet again, as he laid out how an NDP government (post-election) would handle the vaccine distribution – using the military, and setting up federal vaccination sites.

As you can expect, this particular pledge is just more bullshit masquerading as a solution to which problems don’t actually exist. Oh, and yet another example of Singh simply lifting what the American Democrats are doing and insisting that it’ll also work for Canada. Never mind that in the US, where they don’t have public health care, the need for military intervention in the problem is more acute, especially as the rollout is a complete gong show in many states. This is not really a problem here, even though certain provincial governments are less than competent – but it’s certainly not the problem that the Americans are facing, so we don’t need their solutions. This having been said, while Singh thinks that federal vaccination sites will speed up delivery, the problem is not human resources, for which provinces have plenty of trained people and access to Red Cross volunteers, but it’s largely logistics. The notion of setting up federal sites in parallel to existing provincial ones, where it’s unlikely that their IT will communicate well (seriously, every province has their own IT systems and health record formats), and they will only create back-end confusion that will simply cause chaos in trying to determine who has been vaccinated with which product, and whether they’ve had both doses, and how to contact people who need second dose appointments if you have two systems that don’t interface well. There is no world in which this ends well. He should know this and ensure that the federal role is to ensure provinces have all the support they need, but no, he needs to keep trying to inflate the federal role (probably so that he can look like the hero).

His particular demands for publicly-owned vaccine and PPE manufacturing is also problematic in a number of ways. We can all see the need for some domestic manufacturing capability of PPE, it would seem to me that public ownership is a solution in search of a problem, particularly given that federal management of emergency stockpiles was not exactly stellar. As for publicly owned vaccine manufacturing, which particular platform would this entail? It’s highly unlikely that a publicly-owned vaccine manufacturer would have invested in mRNA technology while it was still unproven for wide-scale vaccinations, which wouldn’t do us any good in the current environment. I get that they have an ideological bent to public ownership, but articulate the problems you’re trying to solve – something that they refuse to do when called out.

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Roundup: Political theatre over terrorist listings

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After Question Period yesterday, Jagmeet Singh rose to propose a motion that the government get serious about tackling white supremacy, which included listing the Proud Boys as a terrorist organization. After a brief interruption where Elizabeth May wanted the Soldiers of Odin added to that list – which was ruled procedurally out of order – Singh’s motion passed, and it was a big social media coup for him, which was also turned into a fundraising pitch so that they could “keep the pressure up” on the Liberals to actually go through with it.

The problem? This is all political theatre – and dangerous political theatre at that. The motion was non-binding, and does not automatically list the Proud Boys, but serves as political direction for the relevant national security agencies to do so, but they can’t actually do that, because there are clear processes set out in law to do so. The Conservatives tried this a few years ago with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and to have them listed – which still hasn’t been done, because there’s a process, and established criteria that it appears they don’t meet the threshold of under existing Canadian law.

To add to that, this kind of precedent should be absolutely alarming because it was a year ago that there were people demanding that Indigenous protesters blockading railways be declared “terrorists,” and if this were up to votes in the Commons (though, granted, this was a motion that required unanimous consent), that could turn bad very, very fast. There are established processes for terrorist listings for a reason, and they should be respected – not being used so that MPs can pat themselves on the back and virtue-signal that they oppose white supremacy. That doesn’t solve problems and can make the jobs of legitimate national security agencies more difficult, but hey, MPs get to make some hay over Twitter, so that’s what counts, right?

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Roundup: Delays for new doses

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The pandemic continues to trend poorly, and new modelling suggests there could be as many as two thousand deaths in the next ten days, and if the current restrictions don’t curb people’s interactions, spread could triple as our hospitals are already out of space. It’s grim. And to compound it, news came down yesterday that Pfizer’s plans to retool part of their vaccine production facility in Europe means that for the next few weeks, shipments could be reduced by as much as fifty percent – shortfalls that will likely be made up once production is up and running because they’ll be able to increase their output capacity, but it’s still disappointing. It’s also funny (in a black humour sort of way) to watch premiers struggling to deliver this message without taking shots at the federal government because they know that it’s beyond their ability to do anything about.

Part of why this is a problem that needs to be communicated is because there seems to have been a brewing sense that vaccines are here, so we’ll be able to start lifting restrictions soon, and that’s not actually the case. Even once everyone gets vaccinated, we’ll probably still have restrictions and mask-wearing for the time being because we don’t yet know if people can transmit the virus once they’re vaccinated, and it will take time for everyone’s immune response to sufficiently build even after they’ve had their second dose. And then we don’t know how long the immunity will last either, while the virus is starting to mutate. So seeing this delay to vaccinations (and it’s mostly a delay on the early phases and less likely to be so for the general public, who will still likely get their shots at the same time as was planned) as a delay for returning to the old normal is just not something that anyone should be counting on, and we should be communicating that effectively.

As for international travel, prime minister Justin Trudeau hinted that they are looking at tighter restrictions, but this comes with a host of other problems, not the least of which is the fact that mobility rights are Charter rights, and trying to define what travel is deemed “essential” is going to require some actual definition (unlike what Ontario has done with its current stay-at-home order). But with unchecked community spread already happening, and variants identified in the UK and South Africa also having been identified here, it may already be too late. The better tactic may be better enforcement of quarantine orders, but that may also be a question of resources. Nevertheless, there are no easy solutions to the problem.

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Roundup: A reasoned amendment

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Something very usual happened in the Senate yesterday, in that Independent Senator Kim Pate decided to move a reasoned amendment to the government’s supply bill. A reasoned amendment is basically a procedural move to decline to give a bill second reading, meaning you don’t even agree with the bill in principle. This is a very rare move, and the fact that this is being used on a supply bill is a sign that this is a senator who is playing with fire.

You don’t mess around with supply bills. This is about money the government needs to operate, and if it fails, they can’t just keep funding government operations with special warrants. It’s going to be a giant headache of having to recreate the bill in a way that isn’t identical to the one that just passed (because you can’t pass two identical bills in the same session), go through the process again as the House is set to rise for the holidays (the Senate usually lags a few days later) is going to be a giant headache that is going to lose this senator any of the support she’s hoping to gain. Now, because the Senate isn’t a confidence chamber, defeating a money bill won’t make the government fall, but this is still a very bad precedent to try and set, or worse, given other newer senators ideas about how they should start operating.

There are plenty of objectionable aspects of this stunt of Pate’s – and yes, it is a stunt – but part of it is misunderstanding what that the supply bill is not about new pandemic aid programmes – it’s about keeping the civil service functioning. Her particular concern that 3.5 million people remain the poverty line is commendable, but Pate has been advocating for the government to implement a basic income for a while now, and a lot of people have been misled by the way in which the CERB was rolled out into thinking that this is a template for a basic income, which it’s not. And implementing a basic income – of which certain designs can be useful, but plenty which are not – is a complex affair if you talk to economists who have been working on the issue for years, not the least of which is that it’s going to require (wait for it…) negotiation with the provinces, because they deliver welfare programmes. And if Pate thinks that this kind of a stunt is going to force the government to suddenly implement one, she’s quite mistaken. I am forced to wonder who is giving her this kind of procedural advice, because she’s operating out of bounds, and asking for a world of procedural trouble. It’s fortunate that the Senate adjourned debate for the day shortly after she moved this motion so that others can regroup, but this is a worrying development for the “new” Senate.

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Roundup: From the Bank to Finance

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Tongues were set wagging late Sunday night as word came down that the government was planning to appoint Michael Sabia, currently the head of the Canada Infrastructure Bank, to be the new Deputy Minister of Finance. There had been a bit of concern over the last week when it was reported that Freeland was interviewing five candidates to replace her deputy, who had announced his resignation the day after the fiscal update, given that it’s unusual for this to happen in our system. But deputy ministers are Governor-in-Council appointees, so while it’s unusual for ministers to choose their own deputies rather than the Clerk of the Privy Council recommending one to the prime minister, capacity for such decisions do exist. One does wonder, however, what signal this sends to the Infrastructure Bank, given that they just put Sabia in charge a couple of months ago, and now they’re moving him again.

This having been said, it was not unexpected that the outgoing deputy would not last there too much longer, because he too was of the generation in the public service for whom it is 1995 and will always be 1995 – and already the pundit class for whom this is the unifying theory are already chirping about his departure. Why this may turn out to be important is because we are going to have to start thinking out federal finances in a different way as the pandemic moves into recovery mode. Why? Because the old obsessions around debt and deficit (which is the mindset of the 1995 crowd) may lead to more damage than good, and we could see ourselves in a Japan-like situation if we’re not careful. And while yes, there are “guardrails” and planned “anchors” once we’re fully into the recovery stage, it may be time for a fresh mindset in the senior ranks – though given how much attention they put on Sabia when they brought him into the Infrastructure Bank, moving him to Finance right away seems mighty cozy, and this will no doubt launch another round of the current witch hunt going on in committees.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1335269637769060352

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1335270894571237378

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1335271066701344768

Good reads:

  • One of Pfizer’s top executives says that Canada could be getting vaccines within 24 hours of Health Canada approval, possibly by the end of this week.
  • Major-General Dany Fortin says they are expecting a constant flow of vaccines into the country by January once approvals are completed.
  • A (small) rise in cases in PEI has the province moving to a “circuit-breaker” lockdown before the cases start rising – like other provinces should have done.
  • An internal review at Global Affairs found no standard process for vetting honorary consuls, and they have since developed a new code of conduct.
  • Speaker Rota reflects on his first year in the big chair, at a time of pandemic, “virtual” and hybrid sittings.
  • Susan Delacourt details how the Liberals are preparing for a possible election in the spring, even though they don’t necessarily want one.
  • Chantal Hébert evaluates Erin O’Toole’s first 100 days as leader, and finds it wanting, not only for the lies, but also the evasion on his own plans.

Odds and ends:

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