Tag Archives: Elizabeth May

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.

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.

Has Poilievre said a truthful thing ever? Nope.Have the Liberals stretched credulity with their recent talking points. Yup. Has the Post ever freaked out about the former as they have the latter? Of course not. There are two standards being applied.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2024-11-02T02:30:49.830Z

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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Roundup: Hearings before the investigation concludes

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As we’ve been expecting the Commons public safety committee met yesterday, and held the usual performances about just how very seriously they take the situation of the two accused terror suspects, and the questions about how they made it to Canada and in one case was given Canadian citizenship. But rather than waiting for the internal investigation to complete so that they could scrutinize the results, they all decided to go ahead and start holding hearings before they have those answers, because what’s important is getting clips for their socials. To that end, they have agreed to hold six meetings starting in the last week of August, but there are competing agendas at play.

For the Conservatives, the agenda is pretty clear—outraged clips, and showcasing their MPs badgering and hectoring witnesses, most especially the ministers who will appear before them. For the Bloc and NDP, it’s quite obviously to embarrass the government at every opportunity, like they are keen to do with every single other issue that rears its head. For the Liberals, however, they believe they are being clever and want to make this into an exposé into the cost of Conservative austerity, because it would seem that the timeline would match up to a point where Conservatives had cut thousands of CBSA agents and civil servants in the immigration department, before the Liberals were able to really reinvest and reinvigorate the processes (if that ever did happen—remember, it’s incredibly difficult to recover capacity once you’ve lost it through cuts). They think they have some kind of gotcha here, but I suspect that they’re going to mishandle this so badly that it’ll blow up in their faces like it always does.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched 38 drones and two missiles overnight Monday, and while 30 of those drones were destroyed, one person was injured as a result. Russian shelling killed at least one civilian in the Sumy region, and the government has restricted civilian movement in that area. Russians have been increasing their assaults in the Pokrovsk area of Eastern Ukraine. Russians claim that they halted Ukraine’s advance in the Kursk region, while Ukraine says they actually have no interest in holding that territory (but their ultimate goals remain unclear).

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1823306864097988712

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Roundup: The usual NATO narratives

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Because the NATO summit is happening right now in Washington DC, you may have noticed that the entire media narrative in Canada is around the two-percent-of-GDP defence spending target (which is a stupid metric!) and how Canada has not managed to miraculously achieve it, and tossing around words like “free-rider” and “unserious.” The Elder Pundits have declared that this is the narrative by which the entire event must be framed by, and ignore absolutely all other context or counterfactuals.

Indeed, we shall not mention that the GDP denominator is a much bigger hurdle for Canada because of the size of our economy relative to many other NATO member countries, and that because our economy is growing, that pushes our spending requirements even higher. (Conversely, if we crashed the economy, we could reach that two percent target really quickly). We shall not mention that Canada contributes to NATO operations in a meaningful way, unlike many other NATO countries who may be meeting the two-percent spending target—holding the fort in Kandahar when no one else would, hitting moving targets in Libya, managing one of the most difficult missions in the Baltics right now (being the Latvian mission) as well as training Ukrainian troops into being effective soldiers who were able to hold off the invasion. Nor shall we mention that other countries claiming to reach their two percent targets have only done so through the accounting trickery of front-loading their capital spending (meaning future spending will drop off), or promising the spending in spite of constitutional restrictions around the size of deficit spending. None of these facts matter to the Elder Pundits and the narrative they have decided upon.

Yes, Canada needs to spend more, but you can’t just throw money at National Defence—they haven’t had the capacity to spend their full budget, which is why the spending lapses (which the PBO did get right in his report). It is taking time to build the capacity back up to spend the money, and part of that is fixing the recruitment and retention crisis (which has gone very, very slowly). But they are recapitalising the Forces in a significant way, and once we get to the submarine procurement, those numbers are going climb precipitously, but again, we want to do that cautiously to avoid the procurement problems of the past. Minister have been saying that we need there to be something to show for the increased spending, which media and the Elder Pundits have had a hard time comprehending. So, when you hear the usual “free rider” nonsense, remember that we are actually contributing, unlike a lot of other member countries.

https://twitter.com/journo_dale/status/1810866983534997849

Ukraine Dispatch

Here are more accounts from the bombing of the children’s hospital in Kyiv on Monday. Russia claims that the hospital was hit by Ukrainian fire, but offers no evidence, while the UN assessment is pretty sure it was the Russian missile that was observed. From the NATO Summit in Washington, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on Americans to keep funding Ukraine’s war effort rather than waiting for the election results in November.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1810640148444709169

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Roundup: Trudeau weighs in—sort of

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It was another big day on the foreign interference/NSICOP file today, with Elizabeth May holding another press conference to clarify her previous remarks and to assure everyone that she doesn’t think there’s nothing to see here, and that like Jagmeet Singh, she’s alarmed by what she read, but no, there is nothing to indicate that any sitting MP has committed treason (the only possible exception of course being the one former MP), but a few MPs may have compromised themselves by accepting favours from certain embassies in order to secure their nominations, which was stupid and possibly unethical, but certainly not treason (which has a strict Criminal Code definition).

Shortly after this, Justice Marie-Josée Hogue sent a letter saying that her commission can look into these issues, that she has access to all of the documents that went into the NSICOP report, and that she’s going to try to include this assessment as part of the final report by the end of the year, which isn’t the October 1st that MPs wanted when they voted on this stupid motion in the first place, but hey, she didn’t tell them to go drop on their heads (like she should have), and this pushes the ability for the party leaders to put on their grown-up pants and actually deal with this political problem even further into the future, which is a problem. This should not have happened, she should have told them to deal with their political problems on their own and not fob them off onto a judge, but she didn’t, and so nothing gets solved.

But then, Justin Trudeau himself appeared on Power & Politics, and kept up his evasive talking points on the issue and the report, wouldn’t really clarify what exactly it is that he disagrees with NSICOP about, and kept pointing to how great it was that we have an independent commission that’s looking into all of this, so people can rest assured. Which doesn’t actually help, especially when the biggest accusation is that he has done nothing with this information for months. About the biggest thing to come from that interview was Trudeau saying that there are a range of issues with foreign interference in all parties, and that false accusations may well be a goal of some foreign regimes. He also threw a bit of a bomb at Singh by implying that maybe the NDP isn’t as clean as Singh insisted after he read the classified report, so this is going to extend the media circus tomorrow, particularly when Singh has his usual media availability tomorrow before Question Period.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian missile struck dwellings and power lines in the Poltava region, injuring twenty-two and knocking out electricity in the area. Ukrainian troops have been massing in the Kharkiv region, pushing out the Russian incursions. Ukraine is having difficulty restructuring their bonds, and might fall into default.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau and Mélanie Joly are expected to meet with the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Ottawa today.
  • Bill Blair, being far too diplomatic, suggests his critics were “confused” about the purpose of Canada sending a warship to Havana (when they spread disinformation).
  • Blair also made it clear that he is not contemplating sending trainers back to Ukrainian soil. (Current training is happening in the UK, Poland and Latvia).
  • Patty Hajdu committed $1.2 billion for a hospital near James Bay, which will flow to the province, who is doing the actual construction (as it’s their jurisdiction).
  • The government is prevaricating on the question of whether Canadian news outlets should be compensated when “AI” chatbots train on them as copyrighted sources.
  • Here is an explainer of the stupid fight happening at the Canadian heritage committee over the CBC not airing certain hockey games.
  • At committee, the Parliamentary Budget Officer now says the government hasn’t gagged him, it was all a misunderstanding of translation. Convenient!
  • Liberal MP Rachel Bendayan talks about her severe concussion and how that has sparked advocacy for how concussions affect women differently.
  • Liberal MP Andy Fillmore is resigning his seat in order to make a run for the mayor of Halifax.
  • While former Supreme Court chief justice says she’s stepping down from the Hong Kong court to spend time with family, she renewed her tenure on Singapore’s court.
  • New Brunswick’s government site about the carbon levy overestimates the costs and doesn’t mention the rebates, because why tell the truth?
  • Paul Wells spent a day on the Hill to see the current state of the place, and well, it’s not great. (And thanks for the shoutout!)

Odds and ends:

My Loonie Politics Quick Take looks at the PBO’s big mess, and the spin over the “secret report” which wasn’t a secret or a report.

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Roundup: Elizabeth May to the rescue (again)

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The House of Commons has once again embarrassed itself in voting to send the NSICOP report to Justice Hogue for her to review, and its documents, to see if she can do or say something about the potentially “disloyal” parliamentarians therein. She can’t, and won’t, because this is a political problem and MPs have just voted to kick this down the road until October because certain of the leaders can’t arse themselves to be adults and take their responsibilities seriously, preferring instead to remain ignorant so that they can shout increasingly lurid and baseless accusations from the rooftops, because that gets them clicks and engagement on social media, and that is the cart that is driving politics in these debased times. Hopefully Justice Hogue will get this request and tell MPs to go drop on their heads because she has enough work to do and not enough time to do it in, thank you very much, and this is their political problem to solve, not hers. But we’ll see.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth May was the adult in the room, who took the opportunity to avail herself of the security clearance she acquired over the course of these months of foreign interference handwringing, and did read the full, classified report, and then took to a microphone in the press theatre in the West Block to discuss what she could about the report, and then went on Power & Politics later and refined those remarks even further. And what did she find? No list of treasonous or disloyal MPs, a handful of cases of MPs who are no longer serving who may have been compromised in some manner, and the one incident of a former MP who should be investigated and charged. And even more to the point, she just proved that reading the report wouldn’t tie Pierre Poilievre’s hands, that he could still talk about the conclusions of the report without any specifics, and that Michael Chong has indeed spouting bullshit when he claimed that he knew more than a former CSIS director about this.

Hopefully this means that the hot air has been drained from this, particularly since Jagmeet Singh will read the classified version today, and Yves-François Blanchet seems to have finally been convinced to get the proper clearance so that he too can read it for himself. That leaves Poilievre as the odd man out, insisting on remaining ignorant, but hopefully with the other leaders offering similar reassurances as May, this could deflate the issue and turn to the real issues about how to better combat this sort of interference, letting parties put in necessary internal reforms to prevent nomination races from being coopted, and so on. That relies on them being grown-ups, and if one party decides to remain off-side and not among the adults in the room, that will be pretty telling. There should also be questions asked of the members of NSICOP for not providing reassurance from the start, and for letting this issue blow up unnecessarily, because that should have an impact on their credibility, or would if the Elder Pundits of this country hadn’t decided on a particular narrative that they are going to relentlessly pursue, regardless of what has transpired.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Kharkiv’s mayor says that the ability to strike missile launch sites across the border in Russia has helped calm the number of attacks his city has been facing. At the recovery conference in Berlin, Ukraine has been attracting pledges to help modernise its air defences to help prevent the need for even further rebuilding.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1800249418949841359

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Roundup: May sees some, but not all, of the documents

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Green Party leader Elizabeth May held a press conference yesterday to talk about the unredacted documents she saw related to foreign interference, and in particular what David Johnston had written during his brief tenure as Special Rapporteur. It wasn’t, however, quite what she had hoped and stated that she was disappointed that she could only read David Johnston’s unredacted report, rather than the documents that supported his conclusions, which were all footnoted, but not actually there to read.

It is worth noting that May was quite generous and believes this to be something of a mistake on PCO’s part, and if not a mistake, it’s part of their usual pattern of being overly secretive and disclosing the bare minimum, even if May had been properly vetted and given clearance to read the documents. And she makes an extremely valid point that if the point is to be reassured in the quality of Johnston’s work, then you also need to see the documents that he was seeing in order to determine if he had arrived at the right conclusion or not. And I suspect that she will be able to see those documents before too long, because someone at PCO must know just how bad it will look if she can’t see the supporting evidence, and that it will look like they have something to hide, which is counter to the entire point of this whole exercise.

With this in mind, it bears mentioning that Jagmeet Singh is planning on seeing the documents as well as soon as he can schedule the time in Ottawa (as he’s busy on the summer barbecue circuit), while both Pierre Poilievre and Yves-François Blanchet have refused, insisting that this is some kind of “trap” where they wouldn’t be able to talk about what they’ve seen and be unable to criticise the government. That’s not true, and there is plenty they could say about the documents without revealing specifics, but they would rather play the game of insisting the government is hiding something nefarious when the truth is so much more mundane than that.

Ukraine Dispatch:

American sources are saying that the number of casualties in the war are reaching nearly 500,000, but that number needs to be taken with a shaker’s worth of salt because Russia routinely undercounts its killed and wounded, while Ukraine doesn’t publicly disclose their official casualty figures (though I do note that they do very much use tributes to dead soldiers for propagandistic purposes). Russians are claiming that a Ukrainian drone smashed into a downtown Moscow office building, while Ukraine denies it targeted a civilians or civilian infrastructure.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1692492507878224375

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Roundup: The ugly discourse that won’t be disavowed

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As the housing debate rages on, there is a particularly ugly strain of the discourse that is revealing itself throughout, which has to do with the rapid immigration increases in relation to the housing crunch/crisis, and that there is no real way for there to keep pace. This has led to some people lamenting that it’s too bad that the decades long, multi-party consensus on immigration is unravelling because governments haven’t been serious about housing. I’m not really buying it, though. My sense is that a lot of this is just dog-whistling and concern trolling—that these are largely the people who opposed immigration to begin with and who are taking the opportunity of the housing crisis to have a “legitimate” reason to blame immigrants for something.

Mark Miller is pushing back on this narrative, at least somewhat, pointing out that demographically and economically we can’t really cut back on immigration levels, adding that “The wave of populist, opportunist sentiment that does at times want to put all of society’s woes on the backs of immigrants—I think we need to call that out when we see it.” And he’s right. But he also needs to be far more vocal on the kick in the ass to provinces and municipalities about building more housing (which is their jurisdiction), because they also need these immigrants and have the responsibility of ensuring they have places to live.

What I think has been particularly telling is that Pierre Poilievre has been hinting at this, saying that the immigration system is “broken,” but he also won’t say what he would do differently, or what he would adjust the levels to. It’s the same kind of stupid game he’s trying to play on all of his files—saying just enough about a particular issue that the loudmouths and far-right extremists can read into it the awful things they think, and Poilievre will do almost nothing to dissuade them, so as to get them to think he’s on their side (even though, deep down, he’s not really, and some of them have already figured that out) and to hopefully cash in on their votes. And when you try to corner him on these issues, he will fight straw men or make the attacks personal instead of answering. It’s some of the most cynical of ploys, it’s absolutely corrosive to democracy, but he seems to think the ends justify the means, so he’s going to go for it, consequences be damned.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian drones have pounded grain storage and facilities at the Danube river ports in western Ukraine, which puts further grain shipments in jeopardy. Ukrainian forces say that they have reclaimed the village of Urozhaine in the southeast, but are admitting that the front in the north eastern region near Kupiansk is becoming more difficult.

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Roundup: No sympathy over late night sittings

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In today’s edition of my ongoing exasperation with MPs, I present to you NDP mental health critic Gord Johns, who wants changes made to the parliamentary calendar in order to ensure that there aren’t midnight sittings toward the end of the fall and spring sittings, and he cited Elizabeth May’s hospitalisation as proof about how these twelve-hour days are bad. But there are a few things the matter with his concerns, not the least of which was that May wasn’t hospitalised for exhaustion but rather that she had a stroke, which was caught in time.

First of all, no MP is sitting in the Chamber for twelve hours a day. Even with committee commitments, MPs are only “on duty” for a few of those hours, and they have plenty of opportunity to take shifts during these late-night sittings. And thanks to remote voting (which is an abomination in our system), they don’t have to rush to the Chamber if there are late-night votes for whatever reason, so that’s not even an excuse. Elizabeth May does like to spend as much time in the Chamber as she can, but that is also a choice.

The bigger issue here, however, is that the biggest reason there are late nights late in each sitting is because there is work to get done, and it didn’t get done earlier because of procedural games or dilatory motions, or bullshit filibusters, or what have you. The parliamentary calendar is pretty finite, and there isn’t much wiggle room in there, so if you start playing games (and over the past few years now, this kind of procedural warfare has been fairly constant because they simply oppose the government as opposed to pulling out the big guns for major points of principle), then you have to make up that time somewhere, and that tends to mean late nights late in each sitting. I would have to say that there were actually fewer of them this spring than usual, possibly because the NDP agreed to play ball with more instances of time allocation to head off the procedural games, but it wasn’t that long ago that they were gleeful participants in said procedural warfare, and this is the result. Nevertheless, I’m not terribly sympathetic here, and this is firmly within the fuck around/find out principle, where the fucking around is the procedural warfare, and the finding out is the late nights in June and December.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Another overnight Russian air attack, this time hitting the port city of Mykolaiv, while defences around Odessa have been engaged. Russia has pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal, which could impact world grain prices and cause more problems for the food insecure regions that rely on Ukrainian grain, though Ukraine and Turkey say they will try to keep shipments flowing in spite of Russia. There are more details about the blast on the bridge linking Russia to occupied Crimea, where two people were killed, while damage to the bridge could cut off supply lines to Russian troops in occupied regions.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1680983350692007937

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Roundup: A pathway for Ukraine but no obvious timeline

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From the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, we saw some movement on the question of Ukraine’s membership, but with no timeline attached. And while Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy railed that this was “absurd,” that’s pretty much entirely for show because everyone knows that it’s baked into the rules that you can’t join so long as you’ve got an active war taking place in your territory, because as a mutual defence pact, it would draw in the other members, and we don’t want this to turn in to World War III. The other conditions are all largely being waived, because Ukraine is largely becoming interoperable with NATO countries thanks to the training they’ve been receiving from countries like Canada and the UK, and because they’re getting and being trained on more western equipment as it displaces old Soviet equipment; there is also the issue of combatting corruption in their government and ranks, which are also conditions for entry into the European Union, so again, there’s a lot of progress on fast-tracking Ukraine’s membership, but there can’t be a timeline because there’s no timeline as to when the war will be over.

Meanwhile, member countries pledged to boost their spending to at least two percent of GDP (which, we’ve explained previously, is a really dumb metric), and yes, we’ll re-litigate Canada not spending enough yet again, even though we don’t have the capacity to spend more. We can’t spend the current budget allocation, and even if the budget allocated the requisite two percent, a lot of that would lapse and roll over into the next year because we don’t have the capacity to spend it. And this is also the part where I remind you that when Stephen Harper committed to the two percent target, he then cut defence spending and it fell below one percent of GDP, so whatever bellyaching James Bezan and Michael Chong get up to over this, they need to have a good hard look in the mirror about their own record.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1678933048346263552

As well, the cluster munitions issue came up again. While the US, Ukraine and Russia are not signatories to the international convention banning them, the excuse is that they are running out of other munitions, so the Americans are going to send these instead, which seems…problematic in reasoning considering the reason why they’re largely banned. There doesn’t seem to be any particular move to sanction the US or Ukraine for using them, but or an appetite to prosecute any war crimes for their use, but it’s still not a great sign.

Meanwhile, here is some good analysis from Queen’s University’s Stéfanie von Hlatky that is worth your time to watch.

Ukraine Dispatch:

There was a second night of drone attacks on Kyiv in a row as the NATO summit is underway. As the counter-offensive continues, helmet cam footage is being selectively released, but can’t really provide proper context for what we’re seeing from it. The F-16 pilot training coalition is now firmed up, and training is due to begin in August. Meanwhile, survival skills training is taking off in Ukraine, as the war drags on.

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Roundup: The usual NATO meeting tropes

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

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

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

Ukraine Dispatch:

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

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

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

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