Tag Archives: Election 2019

Roundup: Secrecy and sticking with damaged goods

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It’s (English) debate day, which means that it will be a low-key day as leaders are busy with debate prep. Yesterday, Andrew Scheer took the day off, while Justin Trudeau went to Plainfield, Ontario, to plant another tree, which I suspect will be the new go-to photo-op of the campaign. There, he accused Scheer of keeping his full platform and costs secret ahead of the debates, and compared him to Doug Ford given Ford’s lack of a platform during the Ontario election. During a later media availability, he said that he was sticking with the Cape Breton candidate despite his past racist and misogynist posts because he had apologised (which is the standard that most everyone has since adopted in this election).

As for Jagmeet Singh, he was campaigning at a farmer’s market in Ottawa with Ed Broadbent.

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Roundup: Confidence and throwing money at problems

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While Justin Trudeau took the day off of campaigning, Andrew Scheer attended the grand opening of a Buddhist temple in Bethany, Ontario, before doing meet-and-greets in Peterborough and Newcastle. There, Scheer said that he was confident in the party’s vetting process, despite having to dump a candidate earlier in the week (given that her homophobic posts go well before the election period).

Jagmeet Singh visited Grassy Narrows, where the local chief is running for the NDP, and pledged more money for drinking water in First Nations communities (although it’s rarely an issue of not enough money, but other capacity challenges, which the current government is addressing – partially why it is taking as long as it is to get movement on some of these challenges, on top of the fact that they took responsibility for a number of drinking water outlets that used to be private and are addressing them as well).

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Roundup: Judicial review and missing nuance

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There was a development regarding a First Nations court challenge, which I’ll discuss in a moment, but first up, the campaign news. Jagmeet Singh was in Saskatoon to essentially re-announce his plans to “immediately” implement dental care – again, omitting that it’s provincial jurisdiction and he has no way of forcing provinces to do the heavy lifting – before he headed to Thunder Bay.

Justin Trudeau didn’t announce anything but met with voters at a restaurant in Quebec City, followed by a media availability where he assured everyone that his views have evolved from when, in 2011, he said he was personally against abortion but was pro-choice. He says he’s now totally pro-choice because his previous stance didn’t really make any sense – something he probably felt he needed to make clear when it was remarked that his position and Scheer’s were very similar in personally opposing abortion. Later on, he was at a tree planting with a candidate in Saint-Anaclet, Quebec, where he addressed the lawsuit issue (and again, more on that in a moment).

Andrew Scheer was in Etobicoke, where he re-announced the party’s platform as regards gun control and gangs – and much like his foreign aid announcement, this one was also based on a series of lies about bail and sentencing. More to the point, Scheer pledged more mandatory minimum sentences – which the courts keep striking down – and pledging to fight for them in court tooth and nail, so he wants to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to fight for unconstitutional laws for the sake of symbolism, apparently. But this was overshowed by yet more questions about his dual-citizenship, including his need to file US taxes, and being registered for “selective service,” meaning the draft.

But back to the court challenge, which was news that the government had applied to the Federal Court for judicial review of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decision that would award compensation to every First Nations child who had been apprehended by child and family services. Immediately there was a hue and cry, and plenty of outrage (some of it performative), and a lot of hot takes from journalists who failed to understand the nuances in legal stories. And while I’m not a lawyer, I have been on the law beat for several years now, and I can say that oftentimes, these kinds of appeals are made on technical grounds because in the law, precise wording matters, particularly when one is concerned about the precedents it sets. Both Seamus O’Regan and Trudeau did address this in the media saying that they agree that the government failed these children and that they are owed compensation, but they need time to determine how to do it right, but they can’t do that during a writ period (which is appropriate, given the Caretaker convention, especially as this is worth billions of dollars). Ah, but these clever reporters said, the documents say that they are opposed to the compensation award. Now, I haven’t had a chance to read the application because it’s not online, but the CBC describes it thusly:

The application says Canada acknowledges the finding of systematic discrimination and does not oppose the general principle of compensating First Nations individuals affected by a discriminatory funding model — but it argues awarding compensation to individuals in this claim is inconsistent with the nature of the complaint, the evidence, past jurisprudence and the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Now, there are clues in here as to what the government is arguing, primarily that the Tribunal exceeded its authority to make this kind of compensation order based on the kind of human rights complaint that was brought before it, including exceeding their statutory authority. So that’s not a small thing if that’s the case. And it’s a hell of a lot of nuance in the story that deserves to be explained. Any government is going to be concerned if a Tribunal exceeds its authority to make these kinds of orders, because that will impact future cases with future governments – no matter that they feel this case is deserving of compensation. But this very important detail has been completely glossed over in the search for outrage takes, which means that the reporting is doing a disservice to all parties involved.

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Roundup: Concern trolling and dual citizenship

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It was a quieter day on the campaign, and Justin Trudeau remained in Montreal to just hold a media availability rather than make any new announcements, and he reiterated the point from the debate on Wednesday that if his government would look to improve the medical assistance in dying legislation per the Quebec court decision. He also again defended using two campaign planes by pointing to the use of carbon offsets (never mind that this is a clear case of concern trolling by those who don’t actually care about climate change).

Andrew Scheer was in Kingsclear, New Brunswick, to promise an expansion of the volunteer firefighters tax credit (or “volunteer heroes,” as their press release stated because it was apparently written by a nine-year-old). He also finally stopped dancing around the abortion question to state – again – that he is personally “pro-life” but wouldn’t re-open the debate. Shortly thereafter, the story broke that Scheer holds dual-citizenship with the US, and within an hour stated that he had already started the process of revocation, but it remains exceedingly curious given that Scheer personally questioned Michëlle Jean’s dual-citizenship before she became Governor General, and the Conservative attacks on Stéphane Dion and Thomas Mulcair about their own dual-citizenships. Scheer also stated that he had never been asked about it which was why he never talked about it, which is unconvincing at best.

Jagmeet Singh headed to Toronto to hold another media availability to reiterate his same platform proposals.

And just to put another giant bomb in the election, a potential strike by school support workers could shutter schools in major school districts in Ontario by Monday, which could send the Ford government scrambling, and further cause blowback against Scheer as the lines between federal and provincial governments continue to blur.

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Roundup: No real winner, except TVA itself

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The morning was full of Montreal photo-ops in advance of the TVA debate, with Justin Trudeau going to a famous boxing gym, and Jagmeet Singh going to Atwater Market to “pick up snacks” for debate prep – only to be greeted by a racist incident. While Scheer was not to be seen, he dispatched Alain Rayes to make a reannouncement about the red herring of raw sewage that gets dumped into waterways.

And then the TVA debate. If there was a winner of the night, it was the debate format itself, which offered a lot more substantial exchanges between leaders than other formats, and there was significantly less cross-talk or interruption. That said, the night got off to an early start with the three other leaders ganging up on Scheer to demand answers about his personal feelings on abortion, same-sex marriage and medical assistance in dying (one of the few bits of news out of this whole exercise being that Trudeau said they wouldn’t appeal a Quebec court decision that said that the current guidelines are too restrictive – something that Trudeau initially stood behind Jody Wilson-Raybould over). Most of the lines of attack against one another were well-worn, and Scheer kept insisting that his “national energy corridor” project would be a win-win for everyone, while Singh praised himself as the only leader on the stage with an excess of courage. Trudeau held his own and wasn’t the subject of nearly as many attacks as I might have thought, and the host even tossed him something of a gimme toward the end where Trudeau got the chance to declare that he was standing up for SNC-Lavalin jobs, which is a position that gets better play in Quebec, while Scheer in particular was buttonholed as to whether he would have protected those jobs. In terms of the quality of French, Scheer’s was the shakiest, while Singh largely held his own, but as he did in the Maclean’s debate, Singh hewed to well-worn talking points, including the “I was just talking to someone about…” whatever the issue was. The Bloc leader, Yves-François Blanchet was naturally the commanding presence in the French debate, as any Bloc leader tends to be, and Blachet was the first non-Gilles Duceppe Bloc leader on the stage for the first time in about 17 years – and his calm and polished demeanour didn’t even give way to his reputation in the province as being Pauline Marois’ thug from his time in her Cabinet. (More from Paul Wells on the debate here).

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1179615170944856065

Scheer did try to get one new line of attack in the debate, which was to accuse Trudeau of having two campaign planes – which is actually true in the sense that they have a second, cargo plane that goes in advance to locations with audio-visual equipment to get things set up before the rest of the team and the media arrives. Scheer snidely said this plane was for Trudeau’s “costumes and canoe” (which makes no sense as Trudeau has appeared in a shirt and tie at every single campaign event), and while Trudeau quickly stated that they purchase carbon offsets for both planes, the Conservatives were in full shitpost mode over social media to insist this was climate hypocrisy. [insert wanking motion here]

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Roundup: Foreign aid announcement a house of lies

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On what was supposed to have been the date of the Munk debate, Andrew Scheer was in Toronto to have a big press conference about his foreign policy plans, which were conveniently leaked to the Globe and Mail Monday night so that they could dominate the news cycle first thing in the morning – much to the ire of everyone on the campaign bus who pay for the privilege of being there. Scheer’s big headline was his plan to slash foreign aid spending – a blatant pander to the nativist sentiment that falsely has people claiming we should take care of our own before sending “so much money” abroad. After a lengthy diatribe that distorted, misconstrued and outright lied about the Liberal record on foreign policy, Scheer then laid out his four priorities – the slashing of legal aid (allegedly to focus on children in war-torn and poor countries while using more of the money to spend on their other domestic programmes); strengthening our alliances with our “traditional allies” (I’m guessing that means the UK, Australia, and New Zealand) and sending more military aid to Ukraine; targeting regimes like Iran with Magnitsky legislation; and “depoliticizing” military procurement. (Oh, and securing a UN Security Council seat isn’t going to be a priority for him either). But as it turns out, Scheer’s figures about what we are spending on foreign aid right now was one giant lie (and more context in this thread), and one notable example where Scheer couldn’t get a handle on his facts was that money that was sent to Italy was for relief after an earthquake there. His whole part about “depoliticizing” military procurement was just a wholly fictional accounting of the Mark Norman affair and the procurement at the heart of that situation (which was initially a highly political sole-source contract that was designed to save Steven Blaney’s seat). And to top it off, it was clear from this press conference that Scheer has an adolescent’s understanding of foreign aid – and foreign policy in general. But it should be alarming to everyone that someone who is running on “trust” went to the microphones and lied his way through an entire press conference on a policy platform that is in itself a house of lies. This election is getting worse with every passing day.

In Richmond Hill, Justin Trudeau met with some suburban mayors in the GTA to talk about gun control, but just reiterated their existing platform promises around banning assault rifles and finding a way to let cities further restrict handguns (even though these very same mayors all wanted a national handgun ban – so, own-goal there, Liberals).

Jagmeet Singh, meanwhile, remained in Vancouver to talk childcare some more, and this time pledged to let new parents retain full benefits if they take less time for parental leave than is usually allotted.

It’s the TVA debate tonight, so expect a quiet day on the campaign trail in advace of that.

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Roundup: Scheer answers about his past

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Justin Trudeau was out first in Toronto, meeting with healthcare workers to discuss the problem of gun violence, but there were no announcements to come out of it.

Andrew Scheer was up next in nearby Whitby, Ontario, to announce promises to make changes to the disability tax credit that would make more people eligible for it. He also promised that his full platform would be released before advanced polls open on October 11th. In response to questions, Scheer insists he would “support and introduce” legislation to protect LGBT people, and thinks that would support “treating homosexual blood donors on the same level as heterosexual blood donors” provided the science was there – which is basically the Liberal position (given that the government can’t actually legislate away the “blood ban” as blood services are independent of government post-tainted blood scandal, but the Liberals have poured resources into the science behind it and have reduced the “ban” to a few months instead of it being indefinite). The issue of his actual work in the insurance industry in Regina also remains a live question, and he is now more or less admitting that he wasn’t actually a broker and he was doing “preparatory work” that the brokers in the office finished off, and yet his biographies haven’t changed.

From Vancouver, where Jagmeet Singh has spent nearly a week so far on the campaign (which is starting to look like an attempt to save the furniture while he snubs other provinces), Singh promised more funding for childcare and a promise to have universal childcare by 2030 – yet another promise contingent upon negotiation with the provinces and not any mention of how exactly he hopes to implement it.

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Roundup: The Liberal platform and a changing economic narrative

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While Andrew Scheer took the day off of campaigning, and Jagmeet Sing was in Surrey to promise $100 million in new federal funding for gang prevention, Justin Trudeau was in Mississauga to unveil both the full platform (including costing) as well as a specific announcement around enriching student grants and deferring student loan repayments for longer, and from those who don’t make enough money or who have just had babies.

But the platform is the big news, and it’s probably unsurprising that most of the media questions involved the fact that it has given up promising a balanced budget in favour of the new fiscal anchor of a declining debt-to-GDP ratio, which the new plans continue to show, albeit at a slightly flatter trajectory than we have seen in recent years. That said, I think it bears pointing out that much of the rhetoric and narratives from media remain those stuck in the frames of the mid-1990s (see: headlines here, here, and here) when the debt situation was far more dire than it is today. We should be having a more robust conversation around current fiscal realities, and what the opportunity costs are for slavishly getting toward a balanced budget when there are way to invest with the fiscal room that the government has now – something they have pointed out (in their irritating way of not being able to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag). And it also means that we’re not calling bullshit when Scheer says things like today’s deficits are tomorrow’s tax increases (they’re not). While there are certain parts of the platform that I’ll elaborate more on in the coming days over other venues, here are some economists with some very good insight, plus threads from Lindsay Tedds and Jennifer Robson.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1178385323975270400

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Roundup: A corridor to nowhere

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While the Liberals took the day off of the campaign, Andrew Scheer headed to Edmonton to campaign alongside Jason Kenney in Amarjeet Sohi’s riding, where Scheer reiterated his previously announced vision for a “trans-national energy corridor” which he imagines would create a right-of-way for all manner of pipelines across the country and they wouldn’t need to do additional environmental assessments on those projects or have jurisdictional challenges, or anything of the sort. Erm, except it’s going to involve expropriating a lot of land from private landowners (which is expensive and contrary to what Conservatives claim to stand for), and it will be long, complex, and expensive negotiations with the various First Nations and Inuit along those lands, because you can be assured that they will be asserting rights title over that territory. (For more, I wrote a column on this when the subject was first broached in May). It’s nice in theory, but practically has little chance of getting anywhere off the ground.

On the topic of Scheer, the Globe and Mail found that while he says that he was an “insurance broker” for six months in Saskatchewan as his private sector experience, he was never licenced and didn’t actually work as a broker. So that’s something.

Jagmeet Singh, meanwhile, was in Burnaby, BC, to promise $30 million in federal funds to reduce the cost of BC ferries. It’s worth noting that this was five days straight of campaigning in the vicinity of his riding, which could easily be interpreted as a sign that he’s worried about saving the seats he has in the area.

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Roundup: Capitalizing on the climate strikes – or not

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It was a slightly less ridiculous day on the election campaign for a change, and first up of the day was Jagmeet Singh was in Ladysmith, BC, to announce that he would spend $40 million to protect the coast line, which includes protecting salmon stocks and clearing derelict vessels, as well as cancelling Trans Mountain and stopping that tanker traffic. He then went to the climate strike march in Victoria.

In Montreal, in advance of the Climate Strike, Justin Trudeau met with Greta Thunberg before announcing that he would ensure that two billion trees would be planted over the next decade, which would also create 3500 seasonal jobs (and it includes urban forests), and it would be paid for by the profits of the Trans Mountain pipeline.

Andrew Scheer went to Coquitlam, BC, to announce more infrastructure plans for roads and bridges, cancelling the Infrastructure Bank calling it a “boondoggle” (reminder: These kinds of things take time to get up and running, and they did more than the Conservatives’ P3 Canada in its entire existence). Of course, on a day where everyone else was focused on climate change because of the strikes and protests, Scheer was pushing for more traffic infrastructure, and had the utter gall to say that it would help reduce pollution because people wouldn’t be in traffic as long. This of course is completely wrong, because traffic fills the available volume – it would create more traffic, and higher emissions (and congestion would be just as bad within a short period of time).

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1177669904566292480

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