Tag Archives: Election 2021

Roundup: Conditions and fact-check reflections

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After 36 days, we are at the finish line of this interminable election, and I am so very tired. On the final day, with the potential for another hung parliament in the works, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh says that he plans to make his cooperation in said parliament contingent on the implementation of his wealth tax – you know, the one that is going to be extraordinarily difficult to implement because it is foreign to how our tax system operates currently, and would require an inordinate amount of work to even start defining the basic concepts at the heart of it. Or as Jennifer Robson puts it, the one item that is so difficult to achieve that any party could agree to it and spend the next two years saying that they’re “working on it,” while Singh has surrendered his leverage. Such smart politics! (Reminder, you can watch Robson explain why this will be extraordinarily difficult to implement here).

Meanwhile, the Star’s election fact-checker has written up her reflections on the work she did, and I can honestly say that I’m underwhelmed. I don’t doubt that she worked hard, and that she dealt with an enormous amount of information…but her format sucked, and she’s a newsletter producer in Toronto and doesn’t have any federal politics experience. The format – checking one leader’s statements per week – isn’t really providing a useful fact-checking exercise, because it’s letting them get away with saying blatantly untrue things, and it might show up in her report a week later, if it was that leader’s week. As for her inexperience on the federal scene, there is a boatload of context to some of these statements that she was unable to qualify as true or false, and that comes with experience and exposure. There are things that she was fact-checking that I’ve had to do entire stories about because of the way it was being both-sidesed by media and came to different conclusions because of the complexity of the file (the court challenge around First Nations children in care) and because the both-sidesing didn’t address the actual issue at hand – just competing talking points, with a lot of time being given to one side in the case with none to the other. But her read on it was facile, and so she marked it as such, which doesn’t help anyone.

Most of all, this was largely an exercise in comparing our leaders to Trump, which is the most dismaying part of all because it serves no useful purpose to Canadian politics (“Hey, our leaders don’t lie as much!” is quite the takeaway), and is just more of the kind of comparative political bullshit that lets our leaders get away with so much (“Hey, I’m not as bad as Trump!”) because it’s divorced from our reality. It’s failing the Canadian public by trying to put us in an American frame of reference when we’re not America. We need our outlets to do a better job.

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Roundup: Incendiary headlines and endorsements

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There were a couple of items on the campaign trail that I wanted to mention. One is that a reporter asked Justin Trudeau about electoral reform today, for the first time since the election began, apparently, and he said that if there was consensus he’d consider re-opening it, but he remained in favour of ranked ballots. This was put under a headline of “Trudeau says he remains ‘open’ to electoral reform if Liberals re-elected,” and Twitter had a gods damned field day over it, and lo, the issue was re-litigated yet again, even though that headline didn’t really reflect his comments. (The CBC headline for the same Canadian Press wire story was more reflective of his comments). But writing up what he said isn’t incendiary and won’t make it look like he made a promise that he really didn’t make wouldn’t drive clicks now, would it?

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1439267428786221066

The other item of note was that two former military figures endorsed Erin O’Toole yesterday – retired Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, and retired General Rick Hillier. In both cases, it’s a bit icky because we generally don’t like to have the practice of military endorsements in Canada because our Forces are a far less partisan organisation, as well they should be. There are a couple of additional wrinkles here. With Norman, it has the ability of looking petty and score-settling because of the blame to go around the investigation that led to the charges of breach-of-trust with Norman (that were ultimately stayed). Hillier is also fairly dubious – not only because he is now tainted goods after the gong show of a vaccine rollout that he was in charge of in Ontario, but as a former Chief of Defence Staff, he should remain far more scrupulous in wading into partisan politics. This is not a trend that we want to encourage.

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Roundup: The stakes on Monday may be bigger than we think

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There were a couple of columns on The Line yesterday that are food for thought as we head into the final days of the election. The first was from Matt Gurney, who states in no uncertain terms that if the Conservatives can’t pull out a strong enough showing, that they will start a death spiral as a party to the forces of right-wing populism that have consumed the Republican Party south of the border. Gurney’s thesis is essentially that if O’Toole can manage to get enough results to hold onto power, he might have enough time to get the party’s shit together to save it, but it’s going to mean hard choices and dumping the shitposters in his office and the loonies in his caucus like Cheryl Gallant, and have a firm enough hand to be the necessary bulwark. But I have my doubts that O’Toole is strong enough to do this – he’s spent his leadership winking and nodding to this crowd, given a free pass to Gallant and to Pierre Poilievre, and has basically lied his way through his entire leadership, while utterly debasing himself and his party in order to secure the favour of François Legault. I’m not confident that O’Toole is the person capable of doing the hard work of steering the ship away from Charybdis that lies ahead of it. I think Gurney is right that we need a coherent right-of-centre party for the sake of the country (and hell, we need a capable opposition party regardless of stripe to do the work of accountability), but I have less faith in O’Toole than Gurney does, and I think the party needs a complete generation change if it’s going to be truly successful in pushing back against the very populists that they’ve nurtured and coddled this whole time.

With all of this in mind, Jen Gerson lambastes the entire election as a collection of shiny talking points, with the Liberals basically a shell of a personality cult versus O’Toole amorphousness that is certainly not ready for power – and that there may be a problem with conservatism as an ideology when it comes to dealing with issues like a pandemic, as Alberta is demonstrating. Most of her points are legitimate, but I also think that if anyone thinks this election is about nothing then they’re not paying attention. I don’t disagree that the Liberals are largely a personality cult around Trudeau, but at the same time, they are the only party that has put in the homework, whether it’s on their plans for early learning and child care, inclusive growth, the environment, housing, LGBT issues – they have actual feasible plans behind them and aren’t just handwavey platitudes, or fig leaves that are designed to look like they have a plan but they really don’t. That counts for something, and Trudeau won’t be there for much longer. The cult of personality will reform as it always does, but there will be still be the actual work they’ve put in, and it has been a lot of work, even if it doesn’t look like it from the outside (and that’s partially the Liberals’ fault for not properly communicating their own successes).

And with that in mind, I am baffled by the fact that O’Toole is making his final pitch to voters that Trudeau called an “unnecessary” election – omitting the months of procedural warfare that O’Toole’s side was orchestrating, and that Trudeau needed to break that logjam one way or another. There is a lot at stake in this election, and it would be great if we could keep our eyes on some of what that actually is.

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Roundup: Bracing for election night

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With voting day just days away, we’re starting to see a few “reminder” stories about how our system works, so that we can have some reasonable expectations about what the outcomes might look like on Monday, and why it will mean things like the current government staying in place and having the first chance to test the confidence of the new Chamber once it’s been summoned. There is an interview with Emmett Macfarlane here about how any decision will unfold on Monday night and why Trudeau will remain prime minister until he chooses to resign, which is good. There is also a piece from the Canadian Press which maps out different scenarios about how the evening may play out and what these scenarios might mean.

The problem, of course, is that television news in this country is abysmal, and we’ll spend the night listening to inane banter that pretends that there is no sitting government (exacerbated by the fact that they are currently observing a convention that refers to the prime minister as the “Liberal leader” in order to have an exaggerated sense of “fairness” around his incumbent status), and they will throw around terms like “prime minister-elect” even though we don’t elect prime minister (it’s an appointed position) and the fact that if it is the incumbent – which it’s likely to be – he’s already the prime minister and won’t require an “-elect” or “-designate” title to go along with it. We’ll also no doubt hear talk about him getting a “mandate” even though that kind of thing is utterly incompatible with our system of government. And no matter how much people like me will call it out over social media, nobody will care, and they will continue to completely misinform people about our basic civics without any care in the world, because that’s the state of media in this country right now.

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Roundup: Sitting on money, waiting for ICU to collapse

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In case it had escaped you that the incompetent murderclowns who run Ontario are incompetent, we learned yesterday that Doug Ford and his merry band of murderclowns sat on the entire $2.7 billion additional health transfer from the federal government that was supposed to go toward the COVID response, and, well, didn’t. This was during the second and third waves, which didn’t need to happen, and they were explicitly warned that reopening would mean disaster, and they did it anyway. They had money to help them improve testing, tracing, and doing things like improving ventilation in schools, and they didn’t. They sat on it to pad their bottom line.

Is there a lesson here? Yes – don’t give provinces more money without strings attached. You would think that this should be obvious, given that before Jim Flaherty unilaterally changed the transfer escalator from six percent to a minimum of three or GDP growth, we know that provinces were not spending that health transfer only on health – the growth in health spending was far below the growth in the health transfer. For them to demand yet more money with no strings attached – particularly for outcomes – while we have examples like Ford here, who are using the money to reduce their deficit in spite of all the lives that could have been saved it was actually deployed meaningfully, there should be no argument. If they want the money, they need to have metrics and outcomes to ensure that it’s being spent on what it’s supposed to be.

Meanwhile in Alberta, the COVID situation has been allowed to deteriorate so badly that ICUs could be overrun in ten days, forcing doctors to triage who gets ventilators and who will be allowed to die. With this in mind, Jason Kenney finally relented and started re-imposing public health restrictions, but in a byzantine and complex manner, and has said they will allow vaccine certificates or a “restriction exemption program,” because they can’t actually call it a vaccine passport or certificate. Kenney also both apologised for the situation and then did not apologise for lifting the restrictions when he did, so that clarifies things. I’m curious to see if this ricochets through the federal campaign – some Conservatives seem to think it will. In either case, Jason Kenney, his health minister and chief medical officer of health all should be resigning for letting this foreseeable tragedy happen on their watch, but we all know that they won’t, because what does accountability matter any longer?

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Roundup: The ugliness is home-grown

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There was a fairly terrifying incident over the past couple of days where Liberal incumbent Marc Serré was assaulted in his campaign headquarters by a woman, who was later charged, but this seems to be yet another escalation of the kinds of ugliness we’ve seen in this campaign, whether it’s with the rise in graffiti, to the mob protests with signs advocating lynching, to the gravel being thrown.

Amidst this, we get John Ibbitson at the Globe and Mail actually advocating that the People’s Party “deserves” representation in Parliament, for some unfathomable reason. I mean seriously – this is a party that fight-right and white nationalist groups are advocating people join, and Ibbitson thinks that they deserve seats?

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1437866596987514885

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/1437873572706492422

https://twitter.com/kateheartfield/status/1437882514350252043

https://twitter.com/kateheartfield/status/1437883654169051141

With this in mind, Supriya Dwivedi cautions against saying that this is all just imported American divisiveness and rhetoric, pointing out that this is as home-grown as it gets. I largely agree, but we can’t ignore that the purveyors of this rhetoric in Canada have been inspired by the right-wing populist ecosystem in the US and have imported parts of it here, thinking that they can control the beast. They can’t. And while they may have found the inspiration, it found fertile soil here, and now we’re paying the price.

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Roundup: A promise of extra-illegality

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On a day of more organized protests outside of hospitals around the country, prime minister Justin Trudeau has decided the way to deal with this is…more criminal sanctions. Which is ridiculous, because there are already criminal sanctions around nuisance, harassment, and intimidation, and creating a law specifically for healthcare workers is kind of ridiculous and merely clogs up the criminal code – and I don’t care that they think they’re sending some kind of message. There are existing laws and police should enforce them. Of course, the NDP are saying that this was their idea first, while in more technical terms, Singh says that the victims being healthcare workers should be considered an aggravating factor during sentencing, but the effect is largely the same – this is virtue signalling using the Criminal Code rather than a useful exercise in enforcing existing laws.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1437477651225133056

In Alberta, however, premier Jason Kenney has been warning that he can use the province’s recent law about critical infrastructure – designed to criminalise Indigenous protesters who blockade railways or pipelines – and how they can apply to this situation because the law is so broadly worded. That alone should be concerning about how this law was intended to be applied, but nevertheless, this does appear to be an unforeseen use for this particular piece of legislation.

Meanwhile, Althia Raj worries about Trudeau inflaming “divisions” in the country as the PPC gains more followers among these protesters and the anti-vaxx crowd, but this is a  credulous take if I ever heard one. These are not rational actors we are dealing with. They are part of an embrace of conspiracy theory that is happening across the Western world, for whatever the reason, and this is a very big problem. I’m not sure I see the utility in appealing for Trudeau to be soft-peddling to these conspiracy theorists, but I will note that there has been one party who has been winking and nodding to these conspiracy theories, and even going to far as to promulgating them in the House of Commons, and that party is not the one that Trudeau leads. There are consequences for O’Toole and company for doing so, and we are reaping what they’ve sown. It’s too bad that people in the media are not calling it out.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1437467693934854149

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Roundup: A costing document with too-rosy projections

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The NDP released their platform costing document at 4:30 PM on a Saturday – the second day of advanced polls – a time of day where most of the population will have tuned out already. This was a choice, much like the Conservatives releasing theirs right before the debates – so that attention would be elsewhere. Why? Because as much as they might dress it up, there’s not a lot in there that is credible.

There is some $215 billion in proposed new spending, some of which is difficult to see is feasible, such as their plans for a basic income for the disabled – they have no costing details for it from the PBO, and that is largely intersecting with provincial benefits programmes, and one economist who looked at the number said it’s way too low. Their revenue projections in particular are very, very rosy, and an expert I reached out to said it’s impossible to get that money, especially in the first two years, because of the amount of administration necessary to capture it. So that blows their projections out of the water. But wait, they will say – we got the PBO to cost it and got his stamp of approval! But he was working with their inputs and assumptions, and implementation matters (which is why he shouldn’t be costing platforms in the first place, because implementation involves political decisions). If they tell him that revenues can start in the next year, he has to operate on that assumption, even though it’s not possible, so they get figures that won’t bear out in reality, but they can wave them around and say they have a stamp of approval. It’s a problem, and it’s another example of how parties play games with promises that they don’t spell out how they’ll implement, which increasingly means that those promises are hollow (and yes, all parties are guilty of this).

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1436825763806957574

Meanwhile, on the subject of the Conservatives’ “carbon savings plan” and the points they claim you’ll accumulate in lieu of a tax rebate, here’s energy economist Andrew Leach on how impossible that will be to implement. It’s a long thread, but a worthwhile one, because once again, implementation matters. And this is clearly a plan that there is no intention to actually implement (especially considering that their costing document claimed its costs would be negligible – another fiction).

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Roundup: Ill-equipped to combat weaponised cynicism

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I’ve been thinking about something Trudeau said during the “debate” on Thursday night about cynicism being the enemy of progressive politics, and in this piece by Aaron Wherry, he listed some of the attacks made against Trudeau in his discussion of said cynicism. It has not gone unnoticed that this has been a tactic that Jagmeet Singh has been cultivating for years – undermining any progress the government has made on tough files, and pretending that difficult things could be accomplished with just a little more willpower, or that things under provincial jurisdiction could just be done with more applications of that willpower. The truth is that it can’t be, and that hard things are hard – which is also why the “you had six years!” talking point is hard to take too seriously. It has a built-in assumption that a government has infinite capacity to do the work, that the House of Commons has infinite time on its calendar to pass all of its legislation, and it also assumes that premiers will sign onto anything the federal government waves in front of them. But that’s not how real life works (especially when your capacity is being sapped by needing to deal with Donald Trump for four years).

But complexity and nuance don’t belong in debates, which is what Singh, Annamie Paul, and even to an extent Erin O’Toole are counting on when they list Trudeau’s so-called “failures.” He didn’t meet the 2020 climate target? If he had started in the fall of 2015, moving to meet that target was pretty much impossible without cratering the economy, and Singh knows it. You can’t lower emissions on a dime, and even bending the curve – which Trudeau has done – takes enormous work, and it’s work he had to go to the Supreme Court of Canada to defend. Boil water advisories? There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and each community has a unique issue that requires a unique solution, which each community is taking the lead on, and the federal government pays the invoices. But again, these solutions take time, even with money being thrown at the problem, which Singh and others seem incapable of recognizing because it suits their narrative. “Taking Indigenous kids to court?” Again, it’s a more nuanced issue where the government has agreed to pay the compensation, and is in the process of negotiating how much in concert with two other class action lawsuits (which went directly to settlement – the government didn’t contest them at all) – but there are very real legal issues with the precedent that the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal might set, because their award appears to contravene a previous Supreme Court of Canada decision. Again, Singh should know this because he’s a lawyer, but he has no interest in the truth because it allows him to score points (and frankly, the media has utterly dropped the ball on this file because they only talk to one party in the litigation and don’t find out just what “jurisdiction” issue the minister refers to). These are all things whose narratives have been torqued to drive a sense of cynicism in Trudeau’s government, which Trudeau is frankly ill-prepared to dispute because he keeps sticking to happy-clappy talking points rather than being frank about problems and solutions. When someone offers you platitudes and doesn’t explain their homework, it makes it all too easy to let cynicism fill in the cracks, and Trudeau really has only himself to blame here.

Meanwhile, here is the video the five leaders released encouraging people to get vaccinated.

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Roundup: Substance-free gong show, English debate edition

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The English debate, with its much higher stakes, was no better than the French. It too lacked substance or any meaningful exchanges because they had a schedule of topics to get through, and wouldn’t you know it, they weren’t going to let exchanges get interesting or involved – they just wanted to move on. Justin Trudeau tried to paint Erin O’Toole as weak, Singh tried to paint Trudeau as unable to fulfil promises. Trudeau warned that Singh was trying to instil cynicism among progressives because he refused to acknowledge any work done. Annamie Paul kept insisting that the key to everything was to work together. And Yves-François Blanchet and moderator Shachi Kurl started getting into it, and that gave Blanchet the victim card he was looking for in the Quebec media, particularly around Bill 21.

https://twitter.com/ChrisGNardi/status/1436172199430328323

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1436142521118334983

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1436154327169581083

The fact that they are still moaning the fact that we’re in an election is getting really tiresome – but not quite as tiresome as the fact that Trudeau still can’t make a convincing case for it. He keeps trying to go hard on insisting there are huge and sharp divisions between the different parties, which is why he needs the electoral support to carry on making tough choices about the pandemic. What he won’t spell out is that he needs that support because the spring session was a toxic swamp that stalled virtually all bills for months, including the budget implementation bill for the fall economic update and all of the pandemic supports therein. The fact that he refuses to say that, for whatever “happy warrior” shtick he thinks is going to win him points, just gives the other parties a pass for their petty bullshit in the spring, and the campaign of dishonesty that accompanied it, and it just keeps him from making an actual case. I don’t get it, but clearly this hasn’t blown over.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1436137253504536581

If you need lists of takeaways, you have plenty to choose from – CTV, Maclean’s, the Star, and CBC. The CBC also has a half-assed fact-check of things mentioned during the debate.

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