Tag Archives: Elizabeth May

Roundup: Agenda-setting out of the gate

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With the proclamation signed by the Governor General to dissolve parliament, the 43rdgeneral election started, with Justin Trudeau emerging from Rideau Hall to have a ready-made human backdrop assembled for him. After a mention of the anniversary of 9/11, he launched into his election pitch about the record of economic growth because they rejected the austerity of the Conservative years, and yay Middle Class™ And Those Working Hard To Join It®. He listed accomplishments, and the choice of investing in Canadians, and the choice to move forward or go back to the “Harper years.” The questions afterward were dominated by two themes – the latest SNC-Lavalin news from the Globe and Mail, and Bill 21 in Quebec, and the linguistic duality on the two questions was quite evident. On the former, Trudeau simply said that he trusted the Clerk of the Privy Council’s judgment with regard to the cabinet confidences, and on the latter, he said that he opposed the bill but that now wasn’t the time for the federal government to interfere legally.

Jagmeet Singh held his launch minutes later in London, Ontario – one of the regions where they are looking to save the seats they have. Singh spoke about his personal connection to London, as he lived there when he attended Western, then launched into the tales of woe he heard from people there about pharmacare and healthcare costs – and lo, he has a pitch about expanding coverage around them. He then said that what his party had was the “courage” to take on lobbyists, corporations, money launderers, speculators, Big telecom, big polluters, and “fossil fuel subsidies” – a long list to be sure. He then moved on to claiming that “Trudeau charmed us with pretty words and empty promises”, and that Scheer was not the answer, then turned to the human backdrop and said “These are the people I’m in it for.” Like his slogan. In the questions, he was asked a local question about the General Dynamics plant which is building those LAVs going to Saudi Arabia, and have basically saved the local economy. Singh insisted that they could still have those jobs selling equipment to the Canadian Forces and to “non-oppressive regimes.” Err, except they have their own local suppliers, so he clearly has no idea what he’s referring to.

The Bloc’s launch in Quebec City was largely a laundry lists of exaggerated grievances and talk of a renewed Quebec nationalism, and one of the phrases that leapt out at me was talking about “people who will be like you,” which seems like a dog whistle, but perhaps it was a translation issue.

Next up was Elizabeth may in Victoria, where she brought local “climate striking” children on stage, and then launched into a speech about holding the line on climate change, decrying the Trans Mountain pipeline, and touting her “Mission: Possible” climate plan. She also demanded that parties “jettison partisanship” to solve climate change – never mind that she herself is partisan, and it’s become a Green tendency to pretend that sanctimony is non-partisanship. When faced with questions about vote splitting, she asserted that “Greens don’t split votes, Greens grow votes,” and when pressed about Pierre Nantel’s declaration of separatist sentiments, she prevaricated and assured us that “we’re all Earthlings.”

Finally we had Andrew Scheer, from Trois-Rivières, Quebec – one of those seats he’d love to gain. His 9/11 mentions included the plot of Come From Away as an example of why he loves the country. Using the Harper-esque prefacing of all statements with “friends,” his pitch was that it was time to elect a government that would elect a party that would improve peoples’ daily lives, while he claimed that Trudeau would raise their taxes (err, except that the record is the opposite). And then it was a laundry list of lies and disingenuous framing of issues, hammering on the Globe story about SNC-Lavalin – again, exaggerating what the story actually said. His message to Trudeau was that “starting today, recess is over” – part of his constant attempts to infantilising Trudeau (remember the constant claims that Trudeau is busy colouring in the House of Commons, or that he “wrote” a colouring book). For his Quebec audience, he added a few references about “open federalism” and Quebec being a nation within Canada, while slamming the Bloc as being ineffective in Ottawa.

This all having been said, I did want to touch on that Globe and Mail story for one other aspect, which is the fact that they deliberately published the story about “sources saying” the RCMP has been asking questions about “possible obstruction of justice” in the SNC-Lavalin case – which is not an investigation – on the eve of the election, because they are trying to set the agenda. Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t ask these questions, but agenda-setting – particularly where your stories are thinly sourced and with torqued headlines that give a misleading impression of what the story actually says – is of dubious ethical practice, and it’s something we should be cognisant of and think critically about.

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Roundup: Kenney’s McCarthy-esque quest

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Over in Alberta, Jason Kenney’s McCarthy-esque Committee on un-Albertan Activities received its terms of reference and will begin taking submissions, and just like the MacKinnon Report, it was gamed to specifically look at anything that was being mean to the oil and gas sector while studiously avoiding any falsehoods used by the oil and gas lobby to state their own case. And it’s all going into feeding their “war room” to “fight back” against those un-Albertan activities. Because this is totally normal for a democratic government in the western world.

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Roundup: Underlying concerns amidst good numbers

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It was hard to miss all of the talk about the job numbers yesterday – particularly as pretty much every Liberal minister, MP and candidate started sharing pre-generated memes about how great the economy is doing under this government (with the caveat that there’s still more work to do). This, like news of much higher than expected GDP growth, are good headlines with some underlying weakness being masked, and as economist Trevor Tombe explains, those good numbers are masking some very real problems in Alberta.

The issue of young men in that province is one that I’m not sure enough levels of government are paying sufficient attention to, as the Alberta government seems to think that all that’s needed is for the oil patch to revive and it’s problem solved, but with world oil prices depressed and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, that means the prospect for these young men – many of whom are under-educated because of the lure of high-paying oil patch jobs – are not going to be good in the shorter term. That’s additionally a problem when you have a government that feeds the people a diet of lies and snake oil to keep them angry at imaginary reasons why they’re being kept down (currently Justin Trudeau), because angry young men can be a dangerous thing if allowed to fester. And for the federal government’s part, I wonder just how much their retraining programming is penetrating given that jobs they could be retraining for couldn’t necessarily match the promised paydays of oil jobs in a boom – but that becomes a problem of waiting for the next boom (where the money will get pissed away, like it does every time no matter how often they promise that this time it will be different – really!).

Some of this will come up in the election – not just the lies that Kenney and company are pushing, but the NDP and Greens are trying to make some hay here, as both want to retrain these workers for the “green economy” in some vague way, while the Greens in particular think they could put them to work capping old orphan wells as both an environmental and job-creation measure, but it’s also one that is both expensive, and if the government just starts doing this on its own, it essentially lets the industry off the hook and demonstrates that the “polluter pays” principle is for naught. Add to that, the promises of green jobs retraining falls back to the issue of some of them waiting on the promises of the bigger paydays in a future oil boom, so there is no guarantee that green jobs will be attractive to this cohort. Nevertheless, it’s good that there are at least some ideas, and we should ensure that it’s something that does get discussed during the election.

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Roundup: New Brunswick dust-up

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The situation in New Brunswick has turned to complete melodrama as it turns out that maybe it wasn’t fourteen former provincial NDP candidates who defected to the Greens, and that maybe it was only eight. Some said they were surprised to see their names on the list, others said that they were under the impression that this was really a discussion about merging with the Greens provincially to form a more progressive alternative party (given that the NDP were wiped out provincially, and it doesn’t help that their former leader crossed over to the provincial Progressive Conservatives and is now sitting as a cabinet minister). All the while, Elizabeth May is taking swipes at Jagmeet Singh for not visiting the province, while she also alleges that the NDP engaged in strong-arm tactics to force some of those former candidates to recant their cross to the Greens (which some deny). Amidst all of this are the allegations that some of this was because these NDP candidates felt that there are people in the province – singling out the Acadiens on the North Shore – would react poorly to Singh, and the howling that this is all about racism.

And it is possible that there is an element of racism in here, and we shouldn’t deny that it does exist in Canadian politics, even if it’s not overt. To that end, Andray Domise writes in Maclean’s that leftist parties in Canada don’t critically engage with issues of race because bigotry can be useful politically and economically, and it’s the kind of thing they should be engaging with but don’t. It’s a fairly damning condemnation of the state of leftist politics in this country, and nobody comes out looking good as a result (though, it should also be noted, that the Greens are not really a leftist party in most respects, and the NDP have turned themselves into left-flavoured populists over successive elections and leaders, so perhaps that makes the point even more trenchant).

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Roundup: Equalization and Spending

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Over the long weekend, one of the best things that I read was an exploration by economist Trevor Tombe about Alberta’s misplaced anger over the so-called “unfairness” of equalization, as the real issue is the fact that they have disproportionately higher salaries (and fiscal capacity) than everyone else in the country. Meanwhile, Tombe also has a good thread on the history of federal transfers to and from Alberta, and it’s interesting to get some of that perspective.

Meanwhile in Alberta, the McKinnon Report on public expenses was released yesterday, detailing that there needs to be some $600 million in cuts if the budget is to be balanced between 2022-23, and while it notes that it the province needs more stable revenues (*cough*sales tax*cough*), though it didn’t get into their revenue problems, as it wasn’t their mandate. That means that there are going to need to be cuts to healthcare and education. Here are three surprising tidbits from the report (but also ones that I think need to be drilled down into – for example high public servant salaries are not because of cost of living, but competition with the private sector, and high college drop-out rates are likely to do with jobs in the oil patch). More in this thread from Lindsay Tedds.

In reaction, Jason Markusoff points to the fact that the report’s conclusions were predetermined, given that it was created specifically to find cuts as raising revenues was not an option they were allowed to present, and it bears reminding once again that Alberta is in deficit because it chooses to be so – they could raise their revenues and not rely solely on oil royalties anytime they wanted, but they don’t want to (so all of those pundits taking this report as proof that the province has a spending problem are being a bit too cute about it). On a broader perspective, Max Fawcett argues that if Alberta wants to send a message that if they really want to have their issues taken seriously, they need to stop voting Conservative – and then enumerates all of the ways in which the federal Conservatives have taken the province’s votes for granted as they did things that disadvantaged them.

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Roundup: A carbon reality check

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A couple of weeks ago, Paul Wells did one of his CPAC interviews with Elizabeth May, the transcript of which is now available, and she talked a lot about how she thinks Canada can transition to a cleaner economy, and said a bunch of things about the oil and gas industry as part of that. The problem, of course, was that she was wrong about pretty much all of it, as energy economist Andrew Leach demonstrates.

Leach, meanwhile, also takes Jason Kenney’s rhetoric about carbon pricing to task in this Policy Options piece, and lays out the danger of that rhetoric, which has a high probability of blowing up in Kenney’s face. And as a bonus, he proposed a tool for conservatives to check their policy instincts against.

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Roundup: Federal jurisdiction wins again

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It should have been no surprise to anyone that the BC Court of Appeal rejected the province’s attempt to dictate the content of federally-regulated pipelines in a 5-0 decision. In other words, the province could not reject the transport of diluted bitumen through the Trans Mountain expansion by stealth, and in no uncertain terms. The province quickly announced that they would appeal this to the Supreme Court of Canada (though the 5-0 decision makes it more likely that they’ll simply say no thanks, and let the BCCA decision stand).

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1131972145507164160

While Jason Kenney was quick to crow over the Twitter Machine about how this was great news for Alberta, it seems to me that it’s rather great news for the federal government, because it upholds that they continue to have jurisdiction over these pipelines, and lo, they didn’t need to do some song and dance to “declare” or “invoke” it – because Section 92(10)(c) isn’t a magic wand, and it was already federal jurisdiction in the first place because it crossed provincial boundaries. And just like with the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal decision on the carbon price reference, it again showed that yes, the federal government has jurisdiction. After all, Kenney kept saying that the federal government should invoke 92(10)(c) because there BC’s position on this case showed that there was apparently some confusion around jurisdiction. But there never was any confusion – BC was trying to be too cute by half, and it didn’t work for them.

Speaking of Kenney, he was apparently in Toronto having a meeting with the Globe and Mail’s editorial board yesterday, and said that investors looking at climate risk was “flavour of the month” and they should instead focus on all of those “ethical oil” considerations instead. The problem there is that climate risk isn’t flavour of the month – it’s an existential threat to our economy. The Bank of Canada realized this and now lists it as a major risk to the country’s economy. The insurance industry really knows it’s responsible for billions of additional dollars in their spending over the past couple of years alone, thanks to flash floods, major forest fires, and so on. And have those “ethical oil” lines ever worked on anyone? I didn’t think so. But expect more of them to be bombarded at us in the near future as his “war room” gets underway to wage their propaganda campaign in “defence” of the industry.

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Roundup: Green wins, and the AG’s report

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After the Green Party won their second seat in Monday night’s by-election in Nanaimo–Ladysmith, it was inevitable that we would be subjected to a litany of hot takes about what this means for the upcoming federal election, most of which I’m not going to bother reading because frankly, I’m not sure it means anything at all. The Greens have been doing well provincially on Vancouver Island, where this riding is, and more than that, this particular candidate was once an NDP candidate who was booted from the party (apparently for views about Israel), and when the Greens picked him up, he won for them, while the NDP vote collapsed. Add to that, Green wins in BC, New Brunswick and PEI were also predicated by incumbent governments who had been in place for a long time (well, in New Brunswick, it was a constant PC/Liberal swap), and that’s not necessarily the case federally. While Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh tried to spin this as “proof” that Canadians care about the environment (for which both will try to tout their party policies on the same) we can’t forget that Canadians want to do something about the environment in the same way that they want a pony – it’s a nice idea that nobody has any intention of following up on because it’s a lot of effort and mess. This has been proven time and again. I would also caution against the notion that this means that “progressive” votes are up for grabs, because the Greens, well, aren’t all that progressive. If you read their platform, it’s really quite socially conservative, and they had whole sections essentially written by “Men’s Rights Activists” because they have little to no adult supervision in their policy development process. So any hot takes you’re going to read about the by-election are probably going to be full of hot air (quite possibly this one as well).

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1125798043905818624

Auditor General’s Report

The big news out of the Auditor General’s report was of course the backlog that the Immigration and Refugee Board faces regarding asylum claimants in Canada. The Conservatives, naturally, have jumped on this to “prove” that the current government has somehow broken the system, but every single expert that was cited over the day yesterday said that the Liberals inherited a system that was already broken (some went so far as to say that the Conservatives deliberately broke it in order to force a crisis that would allow them to adopt more draconian measures – though those backfired in a spectacular way, worsening the backlog), and that they have taken steps to increase the IRB’s resources. I wrote about some of these issues a while ago, and the IRB was starting to streamline some of their processes and start making use of technology like email (no, seriously) that cut down on some of the bureaucracy they were mired in – but as with anything, these kinds of changes take time to implement and have an effect. But expect the narrative of the “broken” system to continue in the run up to the election. Meanwhile, here are the other reports:

  • Half of Canadians who call a government call centre can’t get through, which is blamed on technology that was allowed to go obsolete
  • The RCMP are still not adequately prepared to deal with active shooter situations.
  • Our tax system hasn’t kept up with e-commerce and needs modernization
  • The mechanism to prevent governments from doing partisan advertising has little documentation and rigour.

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Roundup: Cluelessly demanding reforms

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Over the long weekend, Independent Senator Tony Dean posted an op-ed over on iPolitics to decry the supposed partisan attempts to block reform in the Senate – but it’s a dog’s breakfast that betrays a complete lack of understanding about the institution. It’s indicative of the attitude of a cohort of the new senators who think that they know best, despite not having a working knowledge of Parliament as a whole, or the Senate in particular, and yet they feel as though they know definitively how it needs to change. And more dangerously, Dean brings up that recent poll to show how Canadians apparently love the “new” Senate as a means of bashing Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives, who have no intention to continue the new appointment process – in effect campaigning for the Liberals, which should be uncomfortable for “independent” senators.

The core of Dean’s argument is that the Senate needs a business committee in order to get things done – which is both wrong, and wrong-headed. He complains that individual senators can delay bills, which he fails to grasp is the whole point. The Senate does not exist to rubber-stamp government bills, and yet Dean seems to miss that point. It’s not just that the Conservatives are partisan and therefore Bad – it’s because the Senate has a constitutional role to fill, and a business committee won’t stop delays. All it does is institute time allocation on all legislation before the Chamber – and it’s ironic that he’s pushing for that notion because in the very same piece he complains that the Conservatives were draconian about time allocation when they were in charge. He complains that there is no “TV Guide” for the Senate because debates aren’t organised, which is another wrong notion because the whole point about the way in which the Chamber has operated, where there are days between speeches between proponents and critics on bills is because it allows for thoughtful responses rather than the canned speechifying that happens in the House of Commons. And “organising” debates for the sake of TV is just time allocation in disguise. Which he fails to grasp.

Pointing to the programming motions on the assisted dying or cannabis legislation are not necessarily good examples of programmed debate in the Senate, because those were extraordinary bills, which the majority of Senate business is not. Dean was also known for insisting that the Conservatives would refuse to let those bills go to a vote when the Conservatives were proposing timetables for negotiation (and we all know that neither the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Peter Harder, nor the Independent Senators Group, seem to believe in negotiation or horse-trading to get things done in the Senate, because they mistakenly believe it to be “partisan,” which it’s not – it’s how stuff gets done). A business committee is a bad move for the Senate, and Dean needs to get a clue about that. It won’t stop the Conservatives from being partisan, and simply time allocating all business could set a bad precedent for when the Conservatives get back into power – which they will one day – and the impulse to return to some of the “draconian” measures of the Harper era come back, and suddenly they may feel differently about time allocating everything. But this cohort of new senators doesn’t get that because they’re not familiar with how parliament works, and they need to get on that because change for the sake of change may sound like a good idea in the moment, but can have lasting, damaging consequences for the institution as a whole.

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Roundup: Refusing to learn their lessons

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A former PQ minister wants to run for leadership of the Bloc, and I just cannot. Can. Not. The challenger this time is Yves-François Blanchet, who served in Pauline Marois’ short-lived Cabinet, and has since taken on a political pundit career since being defeated in 2014. He apparently met with the caucus yesterday, and the majority of them – including their past and current interim leaders – all seem to like him, but I keep having to circle back to this simple question: did you learn nothing from your last disastrous leader?

I can’t emphasise this enough. Since their demise in 2011, the Bloc have had a succession of seatless leaders, including Mario Beaulieu (who now has a seat, incidentally, and is the current interim leader), and while he stepped aside so that Gilles Duceppe could return (unsuccessfully), they keep going for leaders who aren’t in caucus, and time after time, it goes poorly for them. Every single time, I have to wonder why they don’t simply do as our system was built to do, and select a member from caucus. Constantly bringing in an outsider does nothing for their profile (ask Jagmeet Singh how that’s going), and their leaders keep being divorced from the realities of parliament. And time and again, they keep choosing another outsider. Why do you keep doing this to yourselves? Why do you refuse to learn the lessons that experience has to teach you?

There is one current MP who is considering a run, Michel Boudrias, and if the Bloc was smart, they would choose him by virtue of the fact that he’s in the caucus, he’s in the Commons, and he knows how Parliament works. Of course, if they interested in ensuring he’s accountable (especially given just how big of a gong show their last leader was), then it would be the caucus that selects him so that the caucus can then fire him if he becomes a problem (again, if history is anything to go by). But that would take some actual political courage by the party, and given their apparent reluctance to learn the lessons from their mistakes, that may be too much to ask for.

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