Tag Archives: Cyber-security

Roundup: Leaking an MP’s private conversation

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There were plenty of tongues wagging yesterday as a private phone conversation that parliamentary secretary for foreign affairs Rob Oliphant had with a constituent about the situation in the Middle East was leaked to the media, showing how he disagreed with some of the positions the government has taken for political reasons, and how they have badly communicated on some of the particulars. It’s a little bit grubby to have leaked the conversation, because it makes it harder for more MPs to be frank in their interactions for fear of this exact thing happening, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the leaders of other caucuses in particular used this as an object lesson in message discipline and never straying from it. (And before anyone says anything, the NDP tend to be worse than the Conservatives about this sort of thing).

When asked about the leaked comments, prime minister Justin Trudeau didn’t go off, and talked about how it’s great how much diversity of opinion there is in the Liberal caucus, so it sounds like Oliphant’s job is safe, but then again it’s also possible Trudeau was saying this and that Oliphant will be dropped in a week or two, once the spotlight isn’t directly on him, because he broke message discipline, even if this was supposed to be a private conversation.

Regardless, Oliphant says he sticks by his words and says there’s nothing he wouldn’t say publicly, and if anything, he’s probably conveying the delicate tightrope that the government is being forced to walk on this better than the government is doing, in particular because he has a deep knowledge of the region, and can express it better. If Trudeau and his inner circle have any brains, they would get him to do a better job of crafting their messaging for them, but we all know that the communications geniuses in this PMO are allergic to taking any lessons, so I have my doubts that they’ll turn to Oliphant to up their game.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russia launched new missile and drone attacks against several Ukrainian cities, air defences taking out half of them. At least three civilians were killed in an airstrike on the Kharkiv region; in spite of the constant attacks, the people of Kharkiv keep on. Ukraine is withdrawing some of its forces from Avdiivka in order to get them to more defensible positions while one of their special forces heading to the region. France will be signing a security assurances agreement with Ukraine in Paris today.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1758143268313870473

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Roundup: A dubious Federal Court decision, but right about judicial appointments

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The Federal Court ruled yesterday that the federal government must start filling judicial vacancies faster because, which is true, but the judgment itself is something of a mess. It’s hard to see how the Court has jurisdiction here, and the judge seems to have invented a bunch of justification and has handwaved around constitutional conventions, and in the end, declared that the government must fill most of those vacancies “in a reasonable period of time,” which is vague and of little value other than the declaration. Emmett Macfarlane has promised a post on this soon, and Leonid Sirota has a thread here taking issue with the reasoning (though not the underlying issue of not making sufficient appointments—everyone is agreed on that point).

I have been writing on this government’s problems with appointments since probably their second year in office, possibly even sooner than that. While you can look up the myriad of columns I have written, the short version is this: The government wants to make diverse appointments (which is good! This is a good thing!) but they insisted on a system of self-nominations rather than going out and nominating people. We know that women, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ people routinely don’t apply for positions like this because society has drilled into them the message that only straight, old white men get positions like this. Even the Liberal Party itself gets this in their candidate selection process, where they set up systems to be persistent in getting women and diverse people to seek nominations. And even with that, the federal government has utterly dropped that ball and thinks that they can simply say “We’re accepting diverse applications!” and expecting those applications to flood in. They seem to act like the Sesame Street sketch where Ernie simply goes “Here, fishy, fishy, fishy!” and the fish leap into the boat. That’s not how this works, and when they don’t get enough applications, it slows down the process tremendously. And after seven years, they have absolutely refused to learn this lesson. Refused! It’s some kind of giant ideological blinder that they cannot get their collective heads around, no matter how many times the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court warns them, or the Auditor General sounds the alarm about vacancies on port authorities or the boards of Crown corporations, or even their process for appointing senators. They absolutely refuse to learn the lessons of their failures.

It does bear mentioning that there has been an uptick in the pace of appointments in the past few months, and filling vacancies for provincial chief justices and associate chief justices has also picked up speed (and yes, I have been keeping an eye out for this). That said, making federal judicial appointments faster won’t solve the problems with our justice system because a lot more of them involve provinces not properly resourcing provincial courts or superior courts, where you have a lot of cases where there are no court rooms or court staff available, and that causes as many if not more problems. The issue of federal appointments, however, is low-hanging fruit so it’s taking a lot more attention than it should, and once again, premiers are being allowed to skate because of it.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians have struck a hospital and apartments in Selydove in eastern Ukraine, killing three people. Here’s a look at how Ukrainians are decoding Russian battle communications to save lives on the front lines. Russia is pulling old tanks out of storage and refurbishing them after having lost more than 3000 in the fighting in Ukraine over the past two years. Ukraine’s military intelligence is now saying that Russia has been buying Starlink terminals by way of “Arab countries.”

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Roundup: Danielle Smith goes draconian on LGBTQ+ youth

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Alberta premier Danielle Smith unveiled her province’s “parental rights” plan in a seven-minute social media video with no written materials, no legislation, and the press conference won’t be until almost 24 hours later, because that’s a responsible way to run a government. And that plan is the most draconian plan this country has seen yet to restrict the rights of trans and queer youth, all done as Smith coos about having empathy and being supportive when the plan is de facto conversion therapy for a generation of youth.

I’ll likely be writing about this more elsewhere in the next day or two, but reaction has been pretty swift, and a couple of notable ones I wanted to highlight, one being Hannah Hodson, who is a former Conservative candidate whom I believe has left the party over this kind of thing. As for federal justice minister Arif Virani, I’m at a loss as to just what levers he thinks he can use to stand up for the rights of these youth, but I guess we’ll see if they announce anything in the next few days.

It is curious just how much the “freedom” and “bodily autonomy!” crowd seems to want to restrict the freedoms and bodily autonomy of people they don’t like and how Smith is going along with it because she doesn’t want the leopards to eat her face like they did Jason Kenney.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukraine shot down 14 out of 20 drones launched by Russia, but a hospital in Kharkiv was struck. There was a large prisoner exchange, in spite of Russia’s unconfirmed claims that POWs were aboard a downed aircraft. There rumours that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy could sack the country’s top military chief because of disagreements over the handling of the war.

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Roundup: Trying to escape child care obligations

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Some Alberta daycare operators are starting “rolling closures” to protest the new funding regime that goes along with the $10/day early learning and child care programme, saying that they’re not getting enough to make ends meet. This is 100 percent a provincial problem—they signed onto the agreement with the federal government, knowing what the funding agreement was and that they had obligations for provincial funding, and that included increasing the wages of the people who work in the sector (because there’s no excuse for it being so low, particularly as there is a gendered element to it).

So what’s Danielle Smith’s response? Aside from denigrating the operators doing these rolling closures, she is trying to blame the federal government, claiming that their spending caused inflation to rise, which is what is making these operators face problems. Which is, of course, bullshit. Federal spending has nothing to do with the rise in inflation (as the Bank of Canada has stated many times over), and even more to the point, this child care programme has been disinflationary (at least for the early years, before the base-year effect kicks in, meaning it’ll be a one-time drop in inflation). Nevertheless, because she’s blaming the federal government, she wants to shake them down for more money, because that’s what provinces do every single time. Thus far, federal ministers are holding firm and pointing out that provinces knew what they signed onto, but legacy media, of course, is once again trying to make this a federal problem.

And this keeps happening. We never hold provinces of the premiers to account for anything. Another good example is social housing—as former minister Sheila Copps pointed out, back in the eighties, the provinces insisted that the federal government get out of housing because it was provincial jurisdiction, and just give them the money, and they knew best how to spend it. And happens every single time, they spend the federal money on other things, and then blame the federal government once things reach a crisis because of their under-spending. Same with healthcare. Because we are allergic to holding premiers to account in this country, and that’s a very real problem.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russia is refusing to turn over any of the purported POW bodies from that downed plane, because it totally isn’t a psy-op. The head of Ukrainian military intelligence says that he expects the Russian offensive on the eastern front to fizzle out by early spring, by which point they should be exhausted. Lviv in western Ukraine has become the first city to remove all of its Soviet-era monuments.

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Roundup: Federal Court says Emergencies Act didn’t meet the threshold

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The Federal Court ruled yesterday that the invocation of a public order emergency under the Emergencies Act didn’t actually meet the threshold for such a declaration. (Full decision here). As a result, some of the uses of emergency powers were overbroad, such as the curtailment of freedom of expression in clearing the occupation, or that the police just kind of made it up as they went along as they froze the bank accounts of the owners of trucks participating in the occupation (and really, only about 57 individuals were affected). The federal government declared immediately that they were going to appeal this decision, citing in part the fact that the public inquiry didn’t come to the same conclusion. While I have a full story coming out later today on this, it’s important to note that the ruling was fairly narrow and technical, rejected a number of the complainants that were part of it, and largely affects future invocations of the Act, having little effect on what happened (because we can’t turn back time).

Amidst the various reactions, revisionism certainly was on display among the talking heads over the course of the evening, who insisted that the government had more “surgical” tools they could have used instead of invoking the Act, erm, except no, they didn’t. The problem was that Doug Ford washed his hands of the whole thing, and eventually the federal government had no other option than to invoke the Act because nobody else was getting control of the situation. And the Conservatives? They are eating up this decision and spreading shitposts far and wide over their socials about how this was a condemnation of Trudeau, and how “divisive” he was, and so on. This feeds directly into their dystopian world-building where they are pretending that Trudeau is some kind of jackbooted dictator taking away people’s rights, when that’s explicitly not what happened here, or any reflection of our objective reality whatsoever. But they want to create the illusion that this is true for their believers, because when you can get them to stop believing in our objective reality, people are so much easier to manipulate.

In commentary, Emmett Macfarlane makes a reasoned case for disagreement with the decision which is well worth reading, while Paul Wells makes more of a case for this decision over the public inquiry, though I suspect he too falls a little into the trap of revisionism because the existing tools weren’t working precisely because Doug Ford refused to act.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian missile strikes on Kyiv and Kharkiv have killed 18 people, which Russia claims are all hits on the military-industrial complex. It is more likely that Russia is probing Ukraine’s defences for weakness as they suffer from shortages because Western arms manufacturers are slow to produce new ammunition and equipment, and the US’ budget deadlock is not helping matters any. On the front lines, the reliability of drones used by Ukrainian troops is of varying quality because many of them are cheaply and hastily assembled.

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Roundup: Electricians gathering lightning

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We’re still in “extremely slow news day” territory, so the discourse yesterday revolved around video clips of Pierre Poilievre praising electricians who “capture lightning from the sky” and run it through copper wires to light the room that he’s in—and that he’s used this particular turn of phrase on at least four occasions, one of which was in the House of Commons (though nobody said anything at the time). While all of his reply-guys on Twitter are insisting that he’s being “lyrical” or what have you (one of them tried to tell me this was “anthropomorphism”—it most certainly is not, and yes, I do have a degree in English literature), I do suspect that this is possibly some kind of troll, so that he can claim that the people laughing at him are really laughing at the blue collar electricians, whom he has been praising as “extraordinary” for their apparent superpowers. And yes, stoking grievances is his schtick, so let’s keep that in mind.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukraine and Russia had the largest single exchange of prisoners since the start of the invasion. Here’s a look at the losses faced by those whose apartments have been hit by Russian missiles. Türkiye has blocked the passage of two minehunters donated by the UK to Ukraine, citing the 1936 Montreux Convention.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1742484948349575331

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Roundup: The empty threat to sit over the holidays

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Yesterday began with Pierre Poilievre announcing at the start of his caucus meeting that the Conservatives would keep the government from going on their Christmas holidays—because they had allegedly ruined the Christmases of Canadians—unless the government lifts the carbon price from “farmers, First Nations, and families,” which is pretty nebulous, and would seem to mean the consumer carbon price and not the industrial one. Their method of warfare? Thousands of amendments that would force round-the-clock votes on things like their budget implementation bill or the bill to amend competition laws.

The problem is that, despite the threats that Conservatives like Melissa Lantsman are making, is that they can’t actually force the House to sit past December 15th. MPs long ago put the fixed calendar into the Standing Orders, and it would take a unanimous consent motion to change that date, which they’re not going to get. And if they think they’re going to exploit the loophole of keep voting going for days on end (which would technically be one sitting day that lasts beyond twenty-four hours), well, Poilievre is going to find his own MPs are going to start getting pretty upset with him because they have families, and constituency business to attend to, and this kind of thing gets pretty tiresome really quickly.

It’s an empty threat, and it’s the same kind of thing that happens every June, and every December without fail. The opposition parties start thumping their chests because it’s their last chance to flex their muscles and look like they’re being tough on the government, and without fail, they go home on time, if not a day or two early, because everyone is tired, cranky, and just wants to get the hell out of there. I would be incredibly surprised if the House didn’t rise for the holidays by the end of the 14th. Of course, this will be a different matter for the Senate, who will once again complain bitterly that these amendment vote-a-thons will delay their getting the bills, which will mean rushed passage, and that same song and dance will play out yet again, as it does at the end of every session.

In short, everyone needs to grow the hell up, and frankly, MPs need to go home sooner than later and think about their atrocious behaviour.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces shot down 41 out of 48 Russian drones in a major overnight attack. Russian forces pressed again on Avdiivka, with both sides each claiming they made gains. It was Armed Forces Day in Ukraine yesterday, with president Volodymyr Zelenskyy insisting they would win a fair peace “against all odds,” while his defence minister was in Washington to try and secure more aid from the Americans, who are holding it up to try and force concessions around their border. A former Ukrainian MP who was regarded as a traitor was shot dead outside of Moscow, and sources say that Ukraine’s security service was responsible.

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Roundup: Clawing back disability benefits

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Because the provinces continue to be the absolute worst level of government in the country, we see from the briefing binder of Ontario’s social services minister that the province is looking at ways to “mitigate costs” by clawing back provincial disability support payments once the federal Canadian Disability Benefit gets underway. As you might have guessed, this is entirely the outcome that the federal government has been trying to avoid, and why Carla Qualtrough spent months trying to negotiate with provinces in the lead-up to the framework legislation being passed.

This happened a lot during the height of the pandemic, when certain provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan clawed back any kind of social supports when people accessed CERB, because of course they did. It’s kind of perverse the way that provinces are in the business of literally legislating poverty for vulnerable groups like people with disabilities who generally cannot work (which I should point out is not the same as the programme in the US, where “disability” tends to have a different connotation than in Canada). There is a kind of meanness to it that goes beyond the judgmental protestant work ethic that this seems to stem from.

We’ll see what kinds of safeguards the federal government tries to build into the system as the regulations for these payments—which they point out are intended as an income supplement and not a replacement programme—are rolled out (eventually). But because of the division of powers, there may not be any legislative or regulatory mechanism they could use to protect these payments from clawbacks, and it may rely on negotiations and signed agreements, which is probably easier said than done (particularly as many of these premiers are the absolute worst).

Ukraine Dispatch:

Five people were wounded as part of the largest attack on Kyiv since the start of the war, timed for the commemoration of the Holodomor. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told an international food security conference that Ukraine needs more air defences in order to protect its grain exports, as Russia has been targeting them in recent months.

https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1728719618317910451

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Roundup: Long on speeches and imported culture wars

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The Conservative convention this weekend was long on speeches—Poilievre’s speech very much needing an editor as it went on for well over an hour—and was full of praise for the so-called convoy occupiers (from Poilievre’s wife as well as the wife of the “anti-woke general”). Said “anti-woke general” proved himself to be so fragile that he thinks that things like racial equality and gender equality are “destroying” Canada. There was also the Brexiteer from the House of Lords who also showered Poilievre with praise, so some real talent on display there.

Policy resolutions were not focused on things like housing or affordability, but instead prioritised things like vaccines, and culture war bullshit that extended to two separate resolutions attacking trans people (which the party could have used mechanisms to de-prioritise but didn’t, meaning they wanted them to come up for a vote). The Canadian Press has compiled five take-aways from the convention.

https://twitter.com/dalybeauty/status/1700974631468052754

In pundit reaction, Althia Raj looks at how the Conservatives used their convention to woo Quebeckers, and how they are going after the Bloc along the way. Aaron Wherry notes that claims of “common sense” are easier said than done, particularly as Poilievre painted an idyllic 1950s picture of the future he wants. Shannon Proudfoot hones in on the feeling of “enough” that permeated the convention, and the swinging of the pendulum, but also cautioned about who limiting that can be.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian forces staged early-morning drone attacks against Kyiv on Sunday. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that the counter-offensive has made more advances along the southern front, as well as near Bakhmut in the east.

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Roundup: The torqued six attendees

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The National Post’s series on judicial appointments continued apace yesterday, with the torqued and misleading headline that “High-level judges may have paid to meet Trudeau before their appointments,” and members of the pundit class and commentariat swooned with disbelief, and social media was blanketed with caterwauling about “corruption” and “bribery” and so on. Some of the excitable far-right fanboys started ranting about the whole judiciary being corrupted and needing to be bulldozed (because how better to enable fascism?)

But if you read the piece, and put it into context with the previous work, it says that as many as six out of 1308 lawyers who later got judicial appointments may have attended Liberal fundraisers that the prime minister or other Cabinet ministers attended. Which is…nothing. And yet, the framing and the headline suggests that they paid for access and that said meeting resulted in their appointment to the bench, in absence of any evidence to the contrary—just innuendo and correlation that has no relation to causation. This kind of journalism tends to be bullshit.

I have made this case before, and I’ll re-up it again—we absolutely do not want or need purity tests to be applied to applicants to the bench, and we should not bar anyone who has ever donated to a party from receiving an appointment. Donation is a necessary form of civic engagement, and lawyers tend to be more engaged in their communities, and often have the means to donate. This is important—we need people engaged in the system, and if we bar them from promotion because they have donated at one point in time or another, we are losing talent from the judiciary. The process as it stands is working (albeit slow for other reasons), and we don’t need concern trolls dismantling it for the sake of purity tests.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Three Ukrainians were killed in an overnight Russian attack on Poltava, and two others were killed in shelling later in the day in the Kherson region. Ukrainian officials have confirmed that they have liberated the strategic settlement of Robotyne in the country’s south, as they are pushing further in the area as part of the counteroffensive. Russians are claiming that they scrambled jets in response to two US drones flying near occupied Crimea.

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