Tag Archives: Council of the Federation

Roundup: Paying $85,000 for the privilege of being humiliated

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As if that “big” meeting the premiers had with those mid-level White House officials who ended up trolling and humiliating them couldn’t get any worse, well, it did. It turns out, they paid a lobbyist connected with Don Jr. $85,000 to arrange said meeting, where they didn’t get properly briefed, and froze out the Canadian ambassador (who had a meeting in the White House with actual senior officials earlier that day) in the process.

Because I can’t do it justice, here’s more (full thread starts here):

I’m not sure that I can stress this enough—premiers have absolutely no business trying to conduct foreign negotiations. The federal government not only has been handling the situation, but they have told the premiers not to constantly react to everything coming from the Trump administration because it’s chaotic and incoherent, and then they went and tried to get their own meetings? Them meeting with senators and governors sure, I can understand, because they are more on their level as counterparts, but it’s also pretty useless in the current environment because Trump has absolutely everyone cowed.

I’m also going to point a finger at the media for emboldening these premiers because they keep saying things like “there’s a vacuum of leadership” at the federal level and so on, which is not the case. Trudeau is still on the job, even if he’s on his way out. Ministers are still doing their jobs. We have an ambassador in Washington doing her job. They have explicitly told the media that they are not going to react to everything for very good reason. There is no actual need for the premiers to step in and start freelancing. Doug Ford’s “Captain Canada” shtick was him positioning himself before an election, and thanks to uncritical media coverage, waaaaaaaay too many people fell for it. But the media needs people to light their hair on fire at every utterance, and the premiers have been only too happy to step in and fill that role, or to give the bootlicker position (because both sides!), and the federal government just winds up sidelining itself in the process. We’re handing Trump so many little wins because nobody can keep their powder dry.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian drone attack damaged port infrastructure in Odesa for a second day in a row. Another Russian drone pierced the outer shell of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, and while radiation levels are normal, there is a danger if power goes offline at the site for too long. Russians also claim to have taken control of two more settlements in Donetsk region.

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Roundup: Meeting some “senior officials”

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It was a big day of meetings in Washington—Dominic LeBlanc was there to meet with senior officials to try and talk them out of a trade war, while all of the premiers went down as a pack for the first time, and had their own meetings as well. And then word came down that they got a meeting with the White House, and cancelled the rest of their engagements for the day to hurry over. So just who did they meet with? The deputy chief of staff, and the head of personnel. And after their respectful meeting, said deputy chief of staff sent out a trolling tweet.

This while Danielle Smith insists that “diplomacy is working!” Sure it is. It’s working so well that you got a meeting with the head of White House personnel, and afterwords, they laughed at you on social media and continued making annexation threats and saying to take Trump seriously about it. How exactly does that show that it’s “working”? Yes, you got a thirty-day reprieve for him to keep moving goal posts in order to keep extracting more concessions, while everyone just shrugs and says “He’s a deal-maker.” Have some self-respect.

Ukraine Dispatch

A pre-dawn ballistic missile salvo killed one person in Kyiv. A report suggests that Russia has been able to withstandheavy battlefield losses because of a larger population and newer equipment, but their advantages in terms population and Cole War stockpiles are going to continue degrading over time.

Trump turned his attention to the invasion of Ukraine, and after his defence secretary said that Ukraine can’t expect their proper borders to be restored or NATO membership, Trump himself started talking about Ukraine handing over critical minerals for this bad deal of surrendered land (and people) along with no security guarantees. None of this is good.

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Roundup: Straying far out of their lane

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After their big song and dance about wanting the federal government to stay in their own lane, the premiers decided to start weighing in on defence spending—an explicitly federal jurisdiction—yesterday, trying to insist that Canada should meet its NATO spending target sooner than the outlined plan. I’m really not sure how this is exactly the premiers staying in their own lane if they expect the prime minister to stay in his, but they certainly made no shortage of ridiculous excuses for their demands, such as this being about trade with the Americans and so on, but come on. Justin Trudeau did write a letter in response to Tim Houston and Doug Ford, saying the federal government is only trying to help the provinces improve the lives of Canadians, and that maybe they should sign on rather than be obstructionist.

Also from the meeting, Manitoba and Newfoundland and Labrador expressed an interest in resettling some the asylum seekers who landed in Quebec, but that hasn’t stopped Doug Ford from demanding more money for resettlement, nor has it stopped David Eby and Danielle Smith from demanding money for “newcomers,” when the specific issue is just what obligation the federal government has for asylum seekers before their refugee claim is approved, at which point they genuinely become a federal responsibility. This isn’t about helping to settle economic migrants or other mainstream immigrants, which aren’t the federal government’s sole responsibility, but they want to pretend that it is because they want to whinge for more money when what they’re trying to conflate has nothing to do with the actual obligations of the federal government. Again, it’s not really that tough to understand, but these premiers are going to be obtuse and engage in sophistry along the way.

Meanwhile, because several of the premiers are talking equalisation again, I cannot stress enough how badly the CBC described the programme in their article today. Provinces do not write cheques for equalisation. Not province transfers money to another province. It is paid for out of the federal treasury from the income taxes collected from all Canadians, and distributed to those provinces who fall below the threshold of fiscal capacity to have equal programming. Even more to the point, while not raised in the CBC piece, fiscal capacity has nothing to do with whether or not a province is running a deficit, because that would be absolutely absurd and no province would run a surplus if they thought they could get equalisation dollars if they didn’t. Regardless, this was extremely sloppy journalism from the CBC and reads to me like the reporter just relayed how one of the premiers described how the programme works rather than actually looking it up or asking someone who has a clue (and that’s not any of the premiers). Hermes wept…

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia and Ukraine exchanged 95 prisoners of war each yesterday.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1813524697964823028

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Roundup: An incoherence of premiers

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The premiers have been meeting in Halifax, and they rode into town full of bluster and declaring that they had a message for Justin Trudeau, and that it was to stay in his lane (constitutionally speaking). But because these are provincial premiers in Canada, they couldn’t even keep a coherent agenda because even as they were arriving, Doug Ford had a grand idea about trying to focus on speeding up pharmaceutical drug approvals, which is explicitly a federal power. Meanwhile, Scott Moe is refusing to remit a perfectly legal federal levy, breaking federal law in the process, because that’s respecting jurisdictional boundaries. I mean, come on.

Possibly one of the most incoherent and possibly obtuse is BC Premier David Eby, trying to sound tough on the eve of an election, as he insists that he just wants the prime minister to sit down with the premiers and that it’s not about money—before complaining that BC isn’t getting their “fair share” of money, and that he wants to join Newfoundland and Labrador’s doomed court challenge around equalisation (because there’s nothing like pissing away millions of dollars to be performative rather than spending that money on fixing healthcare, starting with paying doctors and nurses better). Eby’s appearance on Power & Politics should have been embarrassing as he was being obtuse about his own positions, such as insisting the federal government is “imposing” programmes in their jurisdiction, using the school food programme as an example, and when it was pointed out that the programme is to literally give the province and existing programmes money, he prevaricated. Possibly the most telling was his exasperated “The federal government should just give us the money and not tell us how to spend it,” which is the real issue here. The federal government has been doing that for decades, and nothing is getting fixed while the federal government continues to get the blame. That’s why they’re putting strings on things, and having separate application processes for funding, because just giving money to the provinces isn’t working. When Eby says that working with Ottawa can feel like “beating our head against a wall,” how exactly does he think the federal government feels when the provinces keep saying they’ll spend the money to fix things and then don’t, putting it toward their bottom line or tax cuts instead while the initial problems persist? The absolute lack of any self-awareness on the part of the premiers is utterly infuriating if you’ve paid the slightest bit of attention. (Not to be outdone, Newfoundland and Labrador premier Andrew Furey came up with a cute slogan about how he wants to work with the feds, not for them, and kept repeating it on television while being specious in his complaints. Politics in 2024).

In other news out of Halifax, the premiers say they want to ensure they maintain trade ties with the US, regardless of who wins the next election (but good luck with that because one is a protectionist and the other is looking to apply tariffs to everyone). The northern territorial premiers say they want a greater focus on Arctic sovereignty, which has pretty much the government’s hook for their latest defence policy.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia and Ukraine are expected to exchange 90 prisoners of war today. Ukraine and a Czech ammunition maker signed an agreement to build a munitions factory in Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is proposing legislation to strip honours from those found to be “traitors,” like certain pro-Kremlin businessmen.

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Roundup: A failed vote, a policy pretzel

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It was not unexpected that the Conservatives’ non-binding Supply Day motion on removing the carbon price from all forms of home heating failed, because the Bloc had no interest in supporting it, and lo, none of the Liberals broke ranks and voted for it either. (Liberal MP Ken McDonald, who had voted for such motions previously, “scratched his head” with two fingers as he voted, which the Conservatives took to be giving them the finger, and lo, cried victim about it). And once the vote was over, Conservatives took to social media to call out all of those Liberal MPs they had been targeting in advance of it, because this is the bullshit state of where Canadian politics have degenerated to.

In advance of the vote, Jagmeet Singh was in the Foyer, twisting himself into a pretzel to say that he didn’t really agree with the Conservative motion, but he was going to vote for it anyway to send a message to the Liberals that he disagrees with them, but he also wants to push his boneheaded “cut GST on all home heating” policy, which is as dumb as a bag of hammers. (No, seriously—it would be impossible to disentangle the heating portion of certain sources of heating, such as electric heating, or what natural gas goes to heating and what goes to hot water tanks, or natural gas barbecues; plus, the policy disproportionately benefits the wealthy, who have bigger houses). There is no policy coherence, because this is all about posturing and performance, and Canadians are ill-served as a result.

While this was going on, the premiers met in Halifax, ostensibly to talk healthcare but it would up being another gang-up session where they all demanded that the federal government remove the carbon price on all home heating out of “fairness” (never mind the problems of energy poverty, that heating oil is four times as expensive as natural gas, and that some of those premiers should have been doing more about this problem years ago). They also groused that the federal Housing Accelerator Fund was being negotiated directly with municipalities and not them, which, again, forgets that they have studiously ignored the housing problem in their own provinces for decades and now they’re getting put out that the federal government has had to step up after they refused to. But that’s the state of our federation, and it’s a

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Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian air strikes on Odessa late Sunday night struck the city’s principal art gallery and wounded eight. A criminal investigation has been launched into the decision to hold a troop-honouring ceremony in Zaporizhzhia which was easily detected by surveillance drones, allowing the Russians to target it; around the same time, the top aid to Ukraine’s commander-in-chief was killed when a grenade was hidden inside a birthday present.

https://twitter.com/kyivindependent/status/1721649238642245908

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Roundup: The usual NATO meeting tropes

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In advance of the NATO summit happening today in Latvia, Justin Trudeau was in Latvia to announce that Canada would be doubling our military presence in that country by 2026, which is actually easier said than done with the current state of our Forces. This was, of course, superseded by news that Turkey has agreed to drop their objections to Sweden joining NATO (leaving Hungary as the last to sign off, though they insisted they won’t be the last). Here’s Stephen Saideman to parse what this means.

Of course, as with any NATO meeting, we get the usual lazy tropes about Canada supposedly being a “freeloader,” because we don’t spend the minimum two percent of our GDP on defence. But that analogy doesn’t actually work because NATO isn’t a club where members pay dues and then it does stuff with them—it’s a military alliance that depends on the participation of member countries, and Canada participates. We participate more than a lot of other countries who have a higher percentage of defence spending than we do. And it bears reminding yet again that the two percent target is a stupid metric, because the fastest way to meet the target is to tank your economy and have a recession, and it’s easier for countries with a smaller GDP denominator to meet. But hey, the two percent target is easy fodder for media because they can make hay about it with little regard for the nuance, which is why it has been a fixation for years now.

And yes, one of our biggest issues when it comes to our military spending and capacity to spend is our ability to recruit, which we have had a hard time doing—it’s a very tight labour market, and it can take a long time for applications to be processed, by which time potential recruits are likely to have found new jobs. It also seems to me that the military has never adapted to the changes that happened about two decades ago, when they could no longer rely on economically-depressed regions (such as the Atlantic provinces) because of the rise of the oil sands and the ability for people to fly out to Fort McMurray on two-weeks-in-two-weeks-out shifts, that changed their fortunes. We’ll see if they can fix their recruiting now that they are allowing permanent residents to apply, but that is one of the major challenges they need to address.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russia launched 28 drones over Kyiv and Odessa in the early morning hours, 26 of which were downed. Ukrainian forces also say that they have trapped Russian occupation forces in Bakhmut and that they are pushing them out. A statistical analysis shows that as many as 50,000 Russian men have been killed in the fighting to date.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1678651881185243137

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1678332390052098048

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Roundup: Premiers playing the deflection game

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We’re in day one-hundred-and-forty-five of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russian forces have been intensifying their shelling of cities in Ukraine, and not just in the Donetsk region (and here is a look at what life is like in that region currently). Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired the head of the country’s security services and the prosecutor general, citing Russian collaborators within their departments.

Closer to home, there was some more discussion/whinging over the weekend about last week’s Council of the Federation meeting, and how it was mostly a gripe-fest directed at Ottawa. CBC’s Janyce McGregor wrote an excellent piece summarising the event and the arguments on both sides, but made a very salient observation in that the premiers were conspicuously silent on agenda items that were solely in their own wheelhouse, over things like harmonising regulations, or regulatory bodies, or interprovincial trade barriers. All of those require zero input from the federal government, and yet the premiers were silent on any progress made on these (intractable) issues in favour of simply a chorus of blame Ottawa. And it’s a very good point, because it points to the absolute deflection of the performance art that John Horgan and the others were engaged in. They’re not doing their own jobs. It was their lack of action during the pandemic that cratered the healthcare systems that they starved beforehand (particularly when they were getting higher federal transfers that they then spent on other things). Now they’re trying to deflect from their culpability by trying to rope in Ottawa, who has been sending them a lot of money, which many of those premiers have either not spent and just applied to their bottom line to pad their surpluses, or if they did spend it, didn’t track it so we know how it was actually spent. That’s on them. Trying to blame Ottawa is their way of avoiding culpability, and the media shouldn’t be simply acting as stenographers for them along the way.

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Roundup: The premiers think we’re all stupid

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It is now day one-hundred-and-forty of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Ukrainian forces are claiming to have hit a Russian ammunition depot near the captured city of Nova Kakhovka in the south. At the same time, Russians continue their attacks on the cities of Sloviansk and Toetsk in the Donetsk province, killing at least nine civilians. Here is a look at efforts to train Ukrainian soldiers and civilians in combat first aid. Over in Russia, the government is poised to enact legislation that can force companies to supply the military, including making employees work overtime, as the country tries to replenish its supplies after depleting them in the invasion thus far.

Closer to home, the Council of the Federation meeting ended, and lo, the premiers were unanimous in demanding that the federal government come to the table with them to, well, accept their demands to give them more money with no strings attached. Only they had both a wounded tone, which quickly switched to sanctimony when they were challenged, particularly about the pandemic spending that couldn’t be tracked. Some premiers, Tim Houston most especially, seem to think that we all have amnesia about 2004 to 2014, when the bulk of those six percent health transfer escalators were spent on other things. Saying that they all want improved outcomes is one thing, but the federal government isn’t stupid—they are well aware that provinces would be just fine with status quo that the federal government paid more for, and that they spent less on. That’s why they want conditions—so that provinces don’t pull this kind of thing once again. Premiers were also pretending that they had no idea what kinds of outcomes the federal government is looking to achieve, because most of the is in last year’s election platform. It’s not hard to find. And frankly, federal health minister Jean-Yves Duclos is right when he says that these outcomes should be agreed to at the ministerial level before the first ministers sit down to talk dollars, because you want to have a plan in place before you attach dollars to it, rather than the opposite, which John Horgan seems to think is how government should function. (You can find my thread as I was live-tweeting the closing press conference here).

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1546912224148688897

On a related note, The Canadian Press devoted several hundred words of wire copy yesterday to the fact that the promised $2 billion to clear up surgical backlogs hasn’t flowed yet…because the budget only received royal assent a couple of weeks ago. And that premiers are complaining they haven’t received the money yet. I mean, premiers know how a budget cycle works. This is not a news story—it’s not even a real process story. It’s complaining for the sake of complaining. The only piece of interest in the story was that the government tabled a bill about the spending commitment, then abandoned it in order to wrap the spending in their budget bill a couple of weeks later. This isn’t the first time they’ve done so, and it’s a really annoying habit that they have, but again, not actually a news story.

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Roundup: An “adult conversation” consisting solely of a demand for cash

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It’s now day one-hundred-and-thirty-nine of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the Russians have resumed pounding the city of Kharkiv, destroying civilian buildings. The Russian government is trying to fast-track giving Russian citizenship to all Ukrainians, an attempt to exert more influence over the country. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is calling out Canada’s decision to return those gas turbines to Russia by way of Germany, saying that Russia will interpret this as a sign of weakness that Russia will try to exploit, and he’s not wrong, but one wonders if there may not be a greater danger in alienating Germany as they are already facing rationing. For what it’s worth, the US State Department is backing Canada’s decision, but this situation was very much a Kobayashi Maru.

Closer to home, the Council of the Federation got underway yesterday, and of course the opening salvos were about healthcare funding, without strings attached. BC Premier John Horgan, who is currently the chair of the Council, was dismissive about the federal government’s concerns, calling them “accounting differences,” when Dominic LeBlanc called them out for their misleading figures about the current transfers, and the fact that several provinces are crying poor while simultaneously bragging about surpluses that they paid for with federal pandemic dollars, of the fact that Quebec is sending vote-buying cheques out to people ahead of their election. And LeBlanc is absolutely right—there need to be strings to ensure that provinces won’t use that money to pad their bottom line, reduce their own spending, or lower taxes, because they’ve all done it in the past. The best part is that Horgan keeps saying he wants an “adult conversation,” but the only thing the premiers are bringing to the table is a demand for more money, and that’s it. That’s not an adult conversation. (For more, the National Post took a dive into the issue, and came out with a fairly decent piece that includes the actual history of transfers, tax points, and provinces who spent those health care transfers on other things).

There will be a few other things discussed, and there’s a primer here about them. Jason Kenney wants to spend the premiers meeting pushing back at the federal emissions reduction targets, because of course he does.

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Roundup: Poisoning the free market well

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Last week, former Reform Party leader Preston Manning stated that conservatives across the country need to get their acts together when it comes to real environmental plans – but then made the boggling case that the Liberals and NDP had “poisoned” the notion of carbon prices, so those were off the table. I can barely even. Stephen Harper called for carbon pricing in the form of a cap-and-trade system when Stéphane Dion was calling for a carbon tax, until Harper decided that doing nothing was preferable to the actual decent plan that he had a hand in developing. For Manning to blame the Liberals and NDP for poisoning the well is more than a little rich – particularly considering that you have a center-left party adopting free market principles in carbon pricing, which you would think would overjoy a small-c conservative. But no.

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1201524374106451973

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Meanwhile, the story about those conservative premiers who signed a Memorandum of Understanding about developing Small Modular Reactors? Well, it turns out that the MOU is basically about declaring interest in the hopes of forcing the federal government to invest in their research and development – so that they don’t have to put any of their own dollars up front. Add to that the temptation for them to treat this as a form of technosalvation – that they can cite it as the excuse for why they’re not doing more to reduce emissions in the short-term – and it all looks very much to be a big PR exercise. (Look surprised!)

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