Tag Archives: Doug Ford

Roundup: Such concern about drugs

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Another day, and other leak that claimed that Trump wasn’t really serious about the tariffs, but that this was just him trying to get an early start on New NAFTA re-negotiations rather than waiting for 2026, and trying to bring more auto manufacturing back to the US-side of the border. But when asked about this during his media availability, Trump insisted that no, he was very serious about the “millions” of people who had come illegally through Canada (it’s certainly not in the millions), and the scourge of fentanyl. He even went on this extended tirade about how mothers never recover when they lose their sons to drugs, and so on. But then he also issued a pardon to Ross Ulbricht, a crypto drug dealer. So yeah, he’s really concerned about the scourge.

Meanwhile, Danielle Smith spent the day in full-on appeasement mode, insisting that we need to find a diplomatic solution rather than stand up to Trump’s bullying. Oh, and she also tried to blame this situation on Trudeau, because of course she did. What I find particularly irksome, however, are the whitebread pundits who also try to keep blaming Trudeau for Smith not falling into line, because he should somehow debase himself in order to get her on-side when it’s clear that she has no interest (and absolutely no incentive) to do so. Her political brand and that of her party right now is about hating Trudeau. Nothing he can or will do will get her on-side, particularly when her ideology is more in line with Trump’s than it is to stand up for Canada.

Back home, Pierre Poilievre is demanding Parliament be summoned because we’re in an “emergency,” erm, except there is nothing for Parliament to do. Cabinet has all of the powers they need in the current situation, and they continue to function. The only reason for the House of Commons to sit would be to have a take-note debate to read prepared speeches that would be used for clips. But more likely, Poilievre wants to try and force an election right now, because that suits his political interests rather than the country’s as a whole (because once there is dissolution, government goes into caretaker mode and really can’t respond to Trump). In fact, Trudeau has a lot more latitude right now because he’s on his way out and doesn’t need to worry about re-election. We’re not leaderless, there is no “vacuum,” and it would be great if the media stopped repeating this nonsense, just because Cabinet hasn’t been lighting their hair on fire on a daily basis.

Ukraine Dispatch

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Roundup: Day one depravity

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Yesterday was inauguration day in the US, and it was pretty much as horrible as you can imagine, with the pardoning of insurrectionists, and the executive order that made a full-on assault on the rights of trans people (which is always the first target of authoritarian regimes, followed by the rest of the queer communities). Oh, and Elon Musk threw a Nazi salute. So yeah, it was pretty much everything you thought it would be.

What didn’t happen on day one was the tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Instead, word came out early in the morning that Trump wouldn’t sign them on day one, and he would instead order an investigation into trade imbalances, and so on. So that was a reprieve, or a stay of execution, right? Danielle Smith certainly thought so, and started taking credit for it. Her followers and media apologists quickly amplified that self-praise. And then, after a few hours, Trump said that yes, the tariffs would be coming as of February 1st. Oops.

That was day one, and we can only imagine what worse predations are to come. There will be a number of demands for retaliation, but the government is keeping their powder dry for the moment, as is probably best. This may yet come to nothing, because Trump believes he’s an ace negotiator and these are his usual tactics to extract some kind of “win” from us, because that’s who he is. It may yet come to naught, but it could still be a kneecapping of our economy. It’s still too early to say, but nobody should be doing victory laps right now—especially those who tried to obey in advance.

https://bsky.app/profile/jrobson.bsky.social/post/3lg7y2jnygs2t

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine’s state investigation bureau has detained two generals and a colonel accused of negligence in failing to adequately defend the Kharkiv region last year.

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Roundup: Smith offside the first ministers

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Yesterday was the big day where the plans to counter Trump’s predations started to take shape in public. There was a briefing on the border plans, which includes two leased Blackhawk helicopters, sixty drones, and other new technologies, and statistics to show an 89 percent reduction in migrants crossing from Canada to the US. And then came the first ministers’ meeting and an agreement to have a common front to counter Trump, that everyone signed on except for one premier—Danielle Smith, who was on Zoom from her vacation in Panama. Smith refused to sign onto any agreement that didn’t take the possibility of export taxes of cutting energy flows to the US off the table.

I get Smith’s objections that export taxes or cutting off oil and gas to the US would have an outsized impact on Alberta, and she has a domestic political constituency and a bunch of face-eating leopards in her political house who are looking for an excuse to eat her face the way they did Jason Kenney’s. I do get that. But by publicly disavowing the nuclear option, and threatening a national unity crisis over it, Smith is undermining the negotiating position of the country as a whole, and giving opportunities for Trump to exploit that weakness—and it looks especially bad after she already started to obey in advance and couldn’t wait to start licking his boots, and headed over to Mar-a-Lago at the behest of Kevin “It’s totally not annexation—really!” O’Leary. It makes it hard to see whose side she is on here.

https://twitter.com/gmacofglebe/status/1879645335494262832

Amidst this, I did find myself absolutely incredulous at the response that Doug Ford was getting because he wore a cap that said “Canada is not for sale,” and he was saying things like “Canada comes first.” And suddenly people were praising him left and right, and one columnist went so far as to say that at that moment, he wished Ford was prime minister. Doug Ford. “Fun” uncle Doug. Whose corruption is out in public. Who was pulling this folksy schtick on a day where there was a news story about how one community saw people line up down the block in the wee hours because a new doctor had come to town and would take the first 500 patients, which is a system that Doug Ford allowed to collapse because he was more interested in putting federal dollars toward his deficit than he was to doing anything about the system. And once again, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Come on, guys.

Ukraine Dispatch

A massive Russian aerial attack which featured more than 40 missiles and over 70 drones forced preventative power cuts in Ukraine. 25 POWs from each side were exchanged in a deal brokered by the UAE.

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Roundup: The shuffle and the kabuki responses

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The Cabinet shuffle happened, and four ministers had a change in portfolio, with eight new faces joining the ranks. Nothing is too much of a surprise here—David McGuinty did get public safety, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith got housing as was expected and that means he is going to run again. Anita Anand is now solely transport but also got “interprovincial trade,” which is interesting. There is no minister from Alberta, as George Chahal remains tainted (and has been vocal in calling for a secret ballot in caucus on Trudeau’s future), so Terry Duguid from Winnipeg is pretty much it for the prairie representative. In some respects, this may be a “caretaker” Cabinet as the leadership question remains in the air, or it could have a short shelf-life, as threats of non-confidence circle ever-closer. It doesn’t solve any problems, it doesn’t really put a fresh face on government, and the only thing that can do that is for Trudeau to make as graceful an exit as possible, because the number of MPs who are publicly against him continues to grow, and he could very well be pushed by the next caucus meeting.

Amidst this, Jagmeet Singh decided to publish an open letter to say that he was ready to vote non-confidence in the government, but…blamed them for things that are completely within provincial jurisdiction, like healthcare and building housing. But more to the point, this is more performance art after he got called out by absolutely everyone for his “all options are on the table” equivocation, and this letter also didn’t specify that he would seek to vote them out at the first opportunity, so he has wiggle room. Trudeau may yet prorogue (but most likely if he does decide to step down), and if a new leader is chosen before Parliament comes back, Singh can always prevaricate and equivocate yet again about giving said new leader a chance, or something else like that. This is just more of the kabuki theatre that Canadian politics has descended into.

And then to top it all off (and possibly to try and call Singh’s bluff), Pierre Poilievre called a press conference to say that he wrote a letter to the Governor General so that she can “reconvene” parliament and demand a confidence vote. Erm, except we’re not prorogued, so Parliament is merely adjourned and not suspended, and it’s at the call of the Speaker to recall the House on a non-sitting week, not the Governor General. Never mind that the government just survived a series of confidence votes, this is deliberate obfuscation and confusion of our system, and no doubt he will attack the GG if she doesn’t accede to his request (which she can’t, because it’s not in her powers to do so). Poilievre is deliberately misleading people about how our system operates so that he can claim that constitutional safeguards are illegitimate if anyone tries to use them against him. Aspiring autocrats love to weaken the guardrails, and Poilievre is engaged in a very concerted effort to do that right now.

Programming Note: This is it for 2024, barring some major news happening. Loonie Politics content will continue on its usual schedule, but the blog is on holiday because the burnout is real. Thanks for sticking with me all year, and we’ll see you in 2025.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian missile struck Kyiv in the morning rush hour, killing at least one person and damaging a historic cathedral. Ukrainian forces needed to pull back from two locations in the eastern Donetsk region, lest they become encircled. Here is a look at some of the people staying in Pokrovsk, in spite of Russia’s advance.

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Roundup: Danielle Smith’s personal border patrol

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While Alberta premier Danielle Smith continues to prefer capitulation to Trump’s predations and boot-licking as her preferred course of action, she announced that she would be creating a $29 million Interdiction Patrol Team using Alberta Sheriffs, which are not actually police officers because they don’t enforce criminal laws, along with dogs and drones. Nevertheless, the plan is that they will create a two-kilometre “interdiction zone” along the entire border with Montana, and arrest people in said zone, which grossly exceeds their constitutional authority and any provincial exercise of power. This is supposed to be done in coordination with the RCMP and CBSA, but again, this is going well beyond her constitutional authority for a lot of security theatre, particularly because there is not exactly a lot of traffic across that border to begin with. This being said, she had been planning to do something like this for years now, likely as kayfabe because she relies on a lot of American narratives to feed her radicalised support base, but with the added context of Trump, it just legitimises his position unnecessarily.

Meanwhile, it looks like one option the federal government might explore is potential export taxes instead of retaliatory tariffs as a last resort, but upon hearing this, Smith and Scott Moe freaked out, and Moe began demanding a federal election, because of course he did, given that he would rather capitulate. So much for Team Canada!

Of course, this is again all for show. CBSA’s president says that US law enforcement knows that the amount of fentanyl that comes from Canada is essentially “slippage,” and that the small packages are difficult to detect. The RCMP Commissioner says that there is talk with American counterparts about joint aerial patrols along the border. We’ll see how this starts to shape up over the next few weeks, but it is diverting a great deal of resources for a relatively minor problem that isn’t really our responsibility to begin with because Americans are supposed to police their own side of the border.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian officials say that they have reclaimed three settlements in Kursk region, while Ukrainian troops have been ordered to hold the line, at least until Trump takes office. President Zelenskyy visited an artillery unit on the southeast frontline.

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Roundup: Turnabout is fair play in procedural warfare

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If you needed yet another example of how the state of the current parliament continues to degrade, yesterday was yet another example. It was the first of the allotted Supply Days (aka “opposition days”) that the Speaker had to intervene in order to schedule, and it barely happened at all. Why? The NDP used procedural shenanigans to delay the debate on the confidence motion that used Jagmeet Singh’s words as the fodder by calling for concurrence debate on a committee report that dealt with abortion access, and the Liberals played along, which meant that the Conservatives’ debate didn’t end up happening until after QP, meaning they only had a couple of hours’ worth of clip-gathering instead of a full day, and boy were they put out about it. But that’s the thing with procedural warfare—if you wage it against others, eventually they will wage it against you.

There were other shenanigans that happened after QP—Liberal MP Jaime Battiste tried to move a unanimous consent motion to get the First Nations water bill out of committee and over to the Senate, but the Conservatives refused. As they did, Battiste took his water glass and started shouting at the Conservatives, and went into the aisle, apparently planning to throw the glass at them before he thought better of it. And then Andrew Scheer tried to move a motion that would have had the same effect, but with language that denigrated the government, and of course that too was shut down, and Scheer had the audacity to play the victim after that stunt.

It’s good that there’s only one sitting week left, because my tolerance for this kind of bullshit is at its end.

Ukraine Dispatch

The Americans have been pressuring Ukraine to lower the conscription age to 18 in order to bolster their fighting force, which is creating dilemmas for those teenaged boys.

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Roundup: The worst policy for retail politics reasons

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With the smell of desperation lingering in the air, Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland announced a “GST holiday” for two months on all sorts of items—ready-made meals, children’s clothes, diapers, books, toys, beer, alcohol below a certain percentage, restaurant meals, you name it—to happen between December 15th and February 15th, to be followed by $250 cheques in April for anyone who worked in 2023 and whose household income is below $150,000 (so, not the top five percent of wage-earners).

It’s absolutely terrible economic policy, it’s poorly implemented (and is going to be an absolute nightmare all around to ensure implementation happens) it will benefit higher-income households disproportionately, and it’s not going to do any favours for the deficit situation that they insist they want to put on a downward trajectory, but it’s apparently good retail politics. (And good for the restaurant industry, particularly during their slower months, but a dog’s breakfast for retailers). Apparently, the Liberals are frustrated that all of their good work with the Canada Child Benefit, $10/day childcare, dental care and any incoming pharmacare deal with provinces (and not to mention rebounding faster from the pandemic and tacking inflation faster than any other comparator government) isn’t helping them in the polls, so they’re resorting to direct bribes, because reasons. It’s so stupid. We live in the stupidest times, and everyone is just going along with it.

Part of this was a sop to the NDP in the hopes that they would help end the filibuster in the House of Commons, but they’re not all that keen on that (as they are happy to watch the Liberals twist in the wind), and are talking about trying to push a programming motion to pass the bill with these promised tax changes in a single day, which is not terribly bright, and the government really, really needs to actually pass the capital gains changes, because they’re already being applied while the legislation has been held up by this filibuster. Can the government play hardball with the NDP to break the filibuster and send the privilege matter to committee? I guess we’ll wait and see.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia fired new hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Dnipro on Tuesday, claiming to be in retaliation for long-range strikes inside Russian territory, hitting an industrial enterprise and a rehabilitation centre. (Curiously enough, a Russian spokeswoman was giving a briefing on the missiles when she was called mid-conference and told not to talk about them). Russia’s strikes over the weekend have badly damaged Ukraine’s largest private power producer, while Russians are now claiming they have taken the village of Dalne in eastern Ukraine.

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Roundup: Boissonnault out (for now?)

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Just before Question Period yesterday, a very brief press release was issued that prime minister Justin Trudeau and Randy Boissonnault “agreed” that Boissonnault would step away from Cabinet in order for Boissonnault to clear the allegations against him. The wording was a little curious, but at this point it was probably inevitable given the sheer volume of stories coming out, never mind that most of them involved coincidences, or unproven allegations about his former business partner and not him.

I’m not going to remark much about any of the allegations, including those of “race-shifting” because Boissonnault has been issuing corrections to media outlets for more than five years that he didn’t say he was Indigenous even if the party said he was (which seems to never get mentioned in these stories), and the Ethics Commissioner keeps looking at each new allegation and saying there’s nothing to investigate. However, what I will note is that we are back to the situation where there is no longer anyone around the Cabinet table from Alberta or Saskatchewan. Now, Freeland did grow up in Alberta and can claim some credibility there, and Jonathan Wilkinson used to work for the Saskatchewan government, so he has some credibility there too, but Trudeau doesn’t have many options when it comes to replacing an Alberta seat because his only other alternative is George Chahal, who pretty much burned his future prospects when he got caught removing a rivals flyers during the campaign, and he has recently been vocal about looking to see Trudeau resign as leader.

I will also note that it remains particularly curious that for as much as media outlets and the National Post most especially have been pouring time and resources into these Boissonnault allegations, and every time they call up another Indigenous leader to denounce Boissonnault and call for his resignation, there is a particular silence around Danielle Smith and previously claims she has made about Indigenous ancestry, which have definitively been proven false. If the Conservatives are so offended by claims Boissonnault may or may not have made, or have been made about him, I have yet to see a single Conservative or pundit in this country call Smith a “fake” or a “fraud,” or a “phoney,” and demand that she resigns for the very same offences they are accusing Boissonnault of having made, when Smith’s has been plainly on the record for a couple of years now. As far as I can determine, the Post ran a single story about it, and not three weeks of constant, breathless reporting about it. It’s incredibly funny how that happens, no?

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine has now fired UK-provided cruise missiles into Russian territory, striking targets in Kursk. Ukraine also says it successfully struck a command post in the Belgorod region, likely in a drone attack. Here is a look at the Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy system.

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Roundup: The capacity to spend

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One of the constant refrains since the Trump election is that Canada needs to get serious about increasing out defence spending faster, or he’ll be mean to us in NATO, or something like that. While I would note that he’ll be mean to us regardless because that’s who he is, and that he’s never understood how NATO actually works, so whether or not our spending is above 2 percent of GDP or not is almost a moot question. But the biggest consideration is actually whether we actually have the capacity to spend more.

The thing is, defence spending has gone up significantly, but the military lapses some of that spending on a yearly basis because they just can’t get that spending out of the door, for various reasons, including the fact that they simply don’t have the personnel to do everything that needs to be done, and you can’t just hire someone off the street in most of these cases—military personnel is just that, and they take time to train and rise up through the ranks appropriately. Add in the recruitment and retention crisis (thanks to sexual misconduct and abuse of power in the General Officer and Flag Officer ranks), and it makes it even harder.

Nevertheless, here’s Philippe Lagassé with some thoughts on building the capacity to spend more.

Ukraine Dispatch

It appears that Russia has fired cruise missiles against Kyiv for the first time in two months, not just drones. The US confirms that North Korean troops are now fighting alongside Russian forces.

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Roundup: Lies about Brookfield to own the Libs

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For the past couple of days, the Conservatives have been trotting out new talking points about Mark Carney, and the fact that Brookfield Asset Management plans to move their head office to New York, but absolutely everything the Conservatives say about the move is false. The move is because they want easier access to New York stock indexes, but it remains incorporated in Canada, it’s not changing its operations, strategic plans, or tax treatment. Everything that Poilievre and his MPs have said about this is a lie, and they are utterly brazen about it.

https://twitter.com/maxfawcett/status/1852429076470083823

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Meanwhile, the Conservatives keep trotting out claims of the Liberals’ so-called “economic vandalism,” particularly in the resource sector. But again, this is utter bunkum.

It’s lies all the way down. But does legacy media say absolutely anything? Nope. The Elder Pundits? Are you kidding? They just keep shrugging it off, but when the Liberals stretch credulity with their own talking points? Well, that’s a scandal. Honest to Zeus, you don’t need to recreate what’s happening in the US. There is no “good parts only” version. Stop pretending there is.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian missile attack on Kharkiv killed a police officer and injured 40 others. Over the course of October, Russia attacked Ukraine with 2,023 drones. Ukraine’s ability to produce more mortar shells is being stymied by a global shortage of explosives. President Zelenskyy is calling on allies to take action to tackle the presence of North Korean troops in Russia before they engage in combat. From Ottawa, South Korea’s foreign minister said that all scenarios are under consideration for aiding Ukraine because the North Koreans have entered the field.

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