Tag Archives: Federalism

Roundup: Holding the right feet to the fire

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As the pandemic rolls along, I find myself increasingly irritated with news stories that fail to mention jurisdictional issues. Case in point yesterday was a look at how the federal commercial rent subsidy is ending, but nowhere in the story did it mention that rent is actually a provincial jurisdiction. Part of why the federal programme was so problematic and underutilized is because the premiers signed off on the rules while the federal government put up funds by way of the CMHC, because that was pretty much the only lever they had at their disposal. The only time the provinces are mentioned in the story was in relation to that the moratorium on evictions in certain provinces were expiring – which is important, but the fact that this whole mess is really the provinces’ responsibility is not mentioned. The very same thing happened about a week ago around the problems related to the federal government’s disability payments, that again, because this falls under provincial jurisdiction, the only lever the federal government had at their disposal was the federal disability tax credit, which is why everything was not great and complicated.

I’m all for holding the federal government to account, as anyone who reads this blog will know, but we also need to be holding the right feet to the fire, and the provinces have been consistently getting a pass on the rent issue in the media (and the disability issue for that matter as well). Most of the premiers have ballsed up the response to this pandemic, on an epic scale in some provinces, but there seems to be very little appetite to deal with that. Instead, we get pieces (that I won’t link to) about how Doug Ford surpassed everyone’s expectations and how he’s no acting like a partisan bully any longer, and I’m sorry, but he hasn’t done his gods damned job in this pandemic, and just sounding avuncular at press conferences is not cutting it. And the federal government isn’t helping keep accountability where it belongs either because they keep retreating to this refrain that “we don’t want a fight over jurisdiction,” when no, you don’t have jurisdiction, you don’t have policy levers, so why are you being assigned the task of dealing with the issue at all? (And the first person who raises the spectre of emergency legislation as a means of the federal government asserting jurisdiction can leave right now).

So while I get that news organisations are trying to shine a light on these problematic federal programmes, omitting key pieces information like matters of proper jurisdiction, are not actually helping anyone. (And no, it’s not a conspiracy with the Conservatives, so you can stop that right now). Accountability is important, but holding the right people to account is just as important, and unless your article identifies who those right people are, and places it in that context, then you’re just confusing issues and muddying the water, which does the opposite of accountability. I also refuse to bow to this notion that “nobody cares about jurisdiction in a pandemic.” Sorry, but no, we have a federal constitution that clearly defines roles and responsibilities, and the federal government can’t invent levers of power out of thin air. Jurisdiction absolutely matters, and pretending otherwise is actively helping those who’ve ballsed up their responses evade accountability. That seems to me to be the opposite of what is trying to be achieved here.

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QP: Back in action, but feeling hollow

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The first QP of the new session is now officially a hybrid one, with a smaller number of MPs in the Chamber while the rest were on Zoom — a parliamentary abomination. Candice Bergen led off, and she demanded rapid testing options, to which Justin Trudeau took up a script to list what the federal government has done to support testing and procurement. Bergen accused a Trudeau of lacking any plans in his Throne Speech and called the last five weeks a waste of time. Trudeau asserted that the pandemic was the greatest challenge in a generation and it exposed problems in our society that they need to address. Bergen listed there people she claimed the Speech “left behind,” and Trudeau listed the measures that are helping Canadians. Gérard Deltell repeated the Québec premier’s claim that the Speech interfered in provincial jurisdiction, to which Trudeau reminded him that the premier didn’t mind when the federal government deployed the army to help Québec’s long-term care facilities. Deltell tried again, and Trudeau reminded him that they need to work together during the crisis to restart the economy. Alain Therrien was up for the NDP to carry on the accusation of interference and to demand more health transfers, to which Trudeau reminded him that they already increased transfers and more billions went out for the Safe Restart Agreement. Therrien tried again, and got the same answer. Jagmeet Singh was up next for the NDP, and in French demanded a plan for the second wave, to which Trudeau stated that they were working with the provinces to accelerate the testing process, and that they were helping seniors, families, students, and small businesses. Singh repeated his question in English, and Trudeau repeated his answer in English.

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Roundup: An address to the nation following the Throne Speech

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It’s Speech from the Throne day, which is always exciting, though it’ll be a much sparser affair given the pandemic. What is stranger is the fact that prime minister Justin Trudeau plans to take to the airwaves in the evening, around 6:30 PM, apparently in a bid to talk about the urgency pandemic and the emerging second wave, because we’re back to exponential growth in new cases in four provinces. After all, last night in the UK, Boris Johnson gave a public address to announce a second lockdown was going to start, so 2020 is going really well.

Meanwhile, there still is no agreement among MPs on how voting will work once the new session begins, and it sounds like the test for the proposed remote system did not go very well. Currently the parties seem to have some kind of an accord on a rotation system, but Trudeau and the Liberals keep pushing for hybrid sittings and remote voting while the Conservatives (rightfully) remain skeptical. But nobody is talking about the most practical solution, which is sequestering MPs and creating a bubble around Parliament Hill for them. I mean, if the NHL can do it, why can’t MPs, given how much more important Parliament is than the hockey playoffs.

Speaking of the importance of Parliament, MPs from the Liberals and NDP are balking at the availability of priority testing for them and their families at that Gatineau clinic, insisting that they’ll take spots away from other people who need it in the long queues for tests. And then the Conservatives went ahead and used unapproved serological tests yesterday provided by a lobbyist who is trying to get Health Canada to approve them – never mind that these tests don’t determine current infections, but only the presence of antibodies from past infections. This while they howl for the government to approve more rapid tests, even though the truncated approval process in the US has meant that faulty tests got approved there, which Health Canada is trying to avoid.

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Roundup: Another brave demand for money without strings

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Four nominally conservative premiers convened in Ottawa yesterday to once again bravely demand that the federal government give them more money for healthcare and infrastructure, and to not attach any strings to it. In total, they demanded at least $28 billion more per year for healthcare, $10 billion for infrastructure, and retroactive reforms to fiscal stabilization that would give Alberta another $6 billion. Of course, two of those premiers – Jason Kenney and Brian Pallister – were in the Harper government when health transfers were unilaterally cut, to which we must also offer the reminder that the numbers at the time show that provincial health spending was not rising nearly as fast as the health transfer escalator, which means that the money was going to other things, no matter how much the provinces denied it. As well, most provinces have not actually been spending the current infrastructure dollars that are on the table for one reason or another (some of which have been petty and spiteful), so why demand more when they already aren’t spending what’s there.

As for Alberta’s demand for retroactive fiscal stabilization, one should also add the caveat that the current formula asserts a certain amount of moral risk for provinces who rely too heavily on resource revenues for their provincial coffers – that they should be looking at other forms of revenue (like sales taxes) so that they aren’t so exposed to the vagaries of things like world oil prices. Retroactively changing the formula means that the federal government becomes their insurance for the risks they undertook on their own balance sheets, which hardly seems fair to the other provinces in confederation, who have to pay higher provincial taxes.

And then Kenney dropped this little claim:

This is patently untrue. The province still has tremendous fiscal capacity because they still have the highest per capita incomes in the country and the lowest taxation. Sure, that fiscal capacity has diminished, but not that much. The province’s deficit is a policy choice because they refuse to implement a modest sales tax that could actually pay for the services that Kenney is now in the process of slashing, having ordered up a report to tell him that they have a spending problem instead of a revenue problem. Err, and then he spent billions on a money-losing refinery and another pipeline that will actually make said refinery an even bigger money-loser. So no, the quality of healthcare in his province isn’t being jeopardized by the state of his economy – it’s because he won’t stabilize his revenues (and because he’s launching an ill-conceived war against the doctors in his province in the middle of a global pandemic, because he’s strategic like that).

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Roundup: $2 billion unbidden

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There was a lot of reaction to the announcement that prime minister Justin Trudeau was giving an additional $2 billion to the provinces to help schools restart safely – unbidden – and those reactions were interesting. Trudeau himself made a point of saying that this was as a result of listening to his backbench Liberal MPs and parents who continued to express concerns, and that it wasn’t requested by premiers, so that’s a political marker right there. It’s also a transfer that is largely without strings – it comes in two tranches, one now, one at the end of the year, and all the provinces need to do between them is to tell Ottawa how they spent the money, so again, it’s a bit of a political test for those premiers – and it’s also giving rise to speculation that this is a sign that Trudeau is in election mode.

Reaction was mixed. Doug Ford expressed gratitude (but also falsely claimed that Ontario’s restart plans were the safest in the country, which is patently absurd), but his education minister – and his opposition critic in the NDP – derided the funds as “late to the game.” Manitoba premier Brian Pallister, for example, was somewhat non-committal, and said he’d take the money, but praised his own government’s efforts. And, hilariously, Jagmeet Singh took credit for it, saying that he had called a press conference to “make an announcement” (read: demand) about more money for schools and lo and behold, the prime minister delivered before that press conference happened. Yeah, okay then.

The complicating factor in all of this is that this is an area of sole provincial jurisdiction and there should be zero expectation for federal dollars, which is why I find myself mystified by all of the people on Twitter (and the Ontario NDP education critic) bemoaning that these funds didn’t flow in June. But if you recall, in June, Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland were negotiating with the provinces for their “Safe Restart Plan,” with $14 billion on the table which included money for schools, so it’s not like it wasn’t being discussed – the provinces were recalcitrant because they didn’t want the strings attached that come with billions of dollars. Eventually, they came to an agreement and it turned into $19 billion, and this $2 billion is on top of that, so it’s not like the federal government has been completely silent. I would also suspect that there is a bit of an implicit rebuke in this new envelope of money because provinces have been dithering on their restart plans, giving confusing options to parents with no time to evaluate them, and more critically, have been unwilling to do the important work of reducing class sizes. One could easily interpret this money as Ottawa telling them – not in so many words – to get their acts together, and they’ll look fairly magnanimous while they’re at it.

https://twitter.com/StandingHannah/status/1298685195579723776

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Roundup: Feigned confusion and a filibuster

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As anticipated, the government unveiled their reforms to the wage subsidy programme yesterday, which included more of a sliding scale for revenue drops and how much support businesses could get before the subsidy phases out, which helps ensure that businesses don’t reach a “cliff” in terms of restart growth only to have that support ripped away at an arbitrary level. This has the business community both applauding the government for responding to concerns, while also moaning that it’s so complicated now, which has some economists rolling their eyes. It also looks like the government that insisted they don’t like abusive omnibus bills is rolling the legislation for these changes in with the new-and-improved disability payments, as well as the justice timelines legislation, so that’s something to look forward to when the House comes back next week for a single day.

Meanwhile, the Ethics committee met yesterday to start their own look into the WE Imbroglio (conveniently with many of the same faces who subbed in at the Finance Committee during its hearing), to which the Liberals on the committee, knowing that they don’t have sufficient votes, decided instead to filibuster things, which is not a good look. Their arguments that this undermines the work of the Ethics Commissioner ignores that his role is supposed to support them, not the other way around; the fact that they were blocking a motion to demand the receipts from Margaret and Alexandre Trudeau’s public speaking events from their Speaker’s Bureau going back to 2008 is a little more suspect, and I haven’t heard a reasonable rationale for it or how it relates to the proposed study on how well the conflict-of-interest regime is working. Suffice to say, this isn’t a good look for the Liberals, and there are better ways of beating the Conservatives at their own game than playing into their hands. It’s too bad that they can’t seem to grasp that.

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Roundup: Trudeau played chicken, and lost

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There was no presser for the prime minister yesterday, as he was instead at Carleton University delivery commencement addresses in both official languages for university graduates across the country. When the House of Commons did meet first for the usual COVID committee, it was a spectacle of Andrew Scheer making disingenuous attacks about the Auditor General’s budget, and Trudeau responding by trying to shame Scheer into supporting their bill later in the afternoon – a tactic he also tried with the attacks by the other opposition leaders.

And so, when the committee ended for the day and there was a brief pause for the Commons to transition to an actual (abbreviated) sitting, things degenerated. The government tried to pass a motion to do their usual tactic of passing the bill at all stages with a couple of hours for speeches, and that was defeated. They tried again, this time splitting out the disability portions of the bill to pass them swiftly first before going back for the rest, and that failed. Andrew Scheer tried to move a motion to suspend and reconvene a short while later, presumably so that they could engage in further negotiations, and that didn’t pass. And then the Bloc moved their own motion to suspend until such time that the House leaders signalled that they had come to an agreement. And that too failed. Out of options, the Speaker decided that since they couldn’t agree on how to conduct the day’s business, that the House would suspend until the next scheduled sitting day – next Wednesday, when they plan to pass the Estimates in one fell swoop. It was like watching some kind of farce film, but all too real.

The government played political chicken, in their presumption that one of the opposition parties would blink because this was about disability payments (for only about 40 percent of disabled Canadians, if the figures are to be believed, because this was the only real mechanism that the federal government had access to because disability supports are largely an area of provincial jurisdiction). Pablo Rodriguez says they’re still negotiating, but the Conservatives want the House of Commons to have proper sittings (though they are reticent about remote voting – quite rightly); the NDP want more support for people with disabilities and the CERB fraud penalties taken out; the Bloc are demanding a fiscal update, a first ministers’ meeting on health transfers (without strings or conditions of course) – because the weekly teleconference with premiers isn’t enough – and a ban on political parties taking the wage subsidy. I do, however, object to this being dismissed as “partisan sniping” because six months ago everyone was falling all over themselves to rave about how great hung parliaments were because they force parties to work together, and well, this is the result – everyone has priorities they want to advance and everyone thinks they have leverage, and the government tried to play chicken rather than meaningfully engaging at least one of those groups, hoping that the banner of “helping people with disabilities” would be enough to make the opposition roll over like they have been over the course of this pandemic. So no, it’s not sniping – it’s MPs doing their jobs (well, partially anyway), and we shouldn’t be dismissive of it.

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Roundup: Acknowledging anti-Black racism

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It was not really surprising that right off the top of his daily presser, prime minister Justin Trudeau addressed the situation of the anti-Black racism protests across the country, saying that Canadians can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist in Canada, and that that he hears Black Canadians, that he’s listening to them, and says that the government knows they need to do better. From there, he announced that the federal government had accelerated the $2.2 billion allocation to municipalities via the federal gas tax fund, but this is an advance of existing funds which are earmarked for infrastructure. When pressed, Trudeau said they are willing to do more, but they can’t go ahead and do it because municipalities are the creature of the provinces, and they need provincial coordination for that to happen, again placing the onus on them. (Speaking of premiers doing things in their jurisdiction, BC banned commercial landlords from evicting tenants if they forgo the federal rent subsidy, so that’s something).

During the Q&A, Trudeau reiterated several times that when it comes to race-based data collection on the pandemic, the federal government has been working with the provinces on a data collection strategy to provide disaggregated data, and ensure that they’re all measuring the same things so that they can provide a more accurate picture of what’s happening in the country. But again, that relies on the provinces doing their part. Federalism! *jazz hands* When asked about the plans for the G7 being pushed back, but also Trump’s suggestion that Russia participate, Trudeau reminded everyone that Russia was kicked out of the G8 – returning it to the G7 – because of their illegal invasion of Crimea, and the UK later stated that they too agreed with that position.

In keeping with the messages about racism, here is Liberal MP Greg Fergus, and former Nova Scotia lieutenant governor Maryann Francis

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Roundup: Not the provinces’ cash cow

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Everything got off to an earlier start yesterday, beginning with the ministerial presser, during which Marc Miller announced another $650 million being allocated to Indigenous communities for healthcare, which would also include added income supports for those living on-reserve, as well as some $85 million to build new shelters for women on reserves. Marc Garneau also announced that the ban on cruise ship docking in Canadian waters was going to be extended to October 31st, which will impact the economies of these communities, but also limits potential vectors for the pandemic. When pressed about the issue of airline ticket refunds, Garneau reiterated the warning that the sector could fail if they were forced to refund all of the tickets, though later on, prime minister Justin Trudeau indicated that there were talks ongoing.

For his presser, Trudeau started off by talking about his teleconference with the premiers and spoke about sick leave being one of the items on the agenda, and it was later in the Q&A that he said that he was offering for the federal government to assume most of the responsibility for the costs, rather than putting it on business owners, but it sounds like some premiers remain rather cool to the idea. After reiterating the earlier Miller/Garneau announcement, Trudeau took questions, which included mention that he was trying to get premiers to agree to some modified orders at the Canada-US border that would allow family reunification, such as cases like the Canadian woman who was trying to get the American father of her unborn child into the country before she gave birth – but again, there are premiers who are not keen. After the questions, Trudeau then gave an unprompted statement on anti-Black racism as a result of what’s going on in the US – that there is a need to stand up as a society, that there needs to be more respect, and that we have work to do as well in Canada. He called on all Canadians to stand together in solidarity, as they know how deeply people are being affected by what we are seeing on the news.

Something else raised in Trudeau’s Q&A was a letter sent to him by five of his Toronto-area backbenchers, calling on him to lead the country in national standards on long-term care, and to press Ontario for a full public inquiry into what happened with the breakdown in care (which I maintain won’t tell us anything we don’t already know). Trudeau praised them for their efforts, and talked about the ongoing talks with provinces, but two of those MPs were on Power & Politics later in the day, and something that I was also glad to hear was Judy Sgro saying that while they wanted federal leadership, they both were respecting that this is provincial jurisdiction and they also didn’t want the provinces treating the federal government like a “cash cow” when you have premiers like Ford demanding more federal funds to fix their own long-term care mess. My own patience for provinces crying out for federal funds to fix the problems in their own jurisdiction is wearing mighty thin, particularly as most of those provinces have broad taxation powers at their disposal (though some of those provinces have less tax room available to them – Ontario, however, is not one of them). Premiers don’t want to have anything on their books and would rather it come from Ottawa’s, so that they don’t have to look like the bad guy when it comes to paying for their own programmes – never mind that there’s really only one taxpayer in the end.

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Roundup: Manufacturing allegations of inaction

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For his daily presser, prime minister Justin Trudeau led off with the fact that the Canadian Forces’ report on the conditions in Quebec long-term care facilities would be released later in the day (and it was), before moving onto the news that some 45,000 postings were up on the federal Job Bank for students, along with a renewed plea for employers to access the wage subsidy. During the Q&A, there were constant questions about what the federal government was going to do about long-term care, to which Trudeau kept reiterating that it was provincial jurisdiction but that the federal government was going to be at the table for the discussion on long-term solutions, which generally means the provinces will want federal dollars to pay for it. When asked about the upcoming G7 meeting and Donald Trump’s insistence it be held in-person, Trudeau said that in-person meetings are preferable to virtual ones, but it remained to be seen if this meeting would meet safety concerns – which is also a bit ironic considering that he insisted on carrying on fairly useless “virtual” committee meetings and pretending it’s parliamentary work, even though Parliament as a whole works best in-person.

As for the long-term care discussion, Jagmeet Singh started off the day by railing that Trudeau was using jurisdiction as an excuse for “not showing leadership,” which is either grossly ignorant for a someone with a law degree, or it’s a deeply cynical political tactic to mislead the public into believing that Trudeau is simply choosing not to act when in fact his hands are tied. Singh also went off on his spiel about how the federal government should shut down privatized long-term care delivery, which again ignores jurisdictional issues, and more to the point, conveniently ignores that many of these same problems are also found in the publicly run facilities, which belies that it’s a broader cultural problem than simply just cutting care for the sake of profit margins. And as for his reasons for going along with the government’s plans to keep the Commons in a neutered capacity, well, it seems he also doesn’t have any grasp about what his own job as an MP is.

Speaking of those neutered committee hearings, the first “hybrid” special meeting was held yesterday, where big video screens were installed in the Commons chamber so that MPs could participate there by Zoom while a handful of MPs were still in the Chamber. The problem with this is that it adds a gloss of “legitimacy” to the farcical nature of these committee meetings, and Trudeau will disingenuously talk about how they’re carrying on the “important work of Parliament” by letting MPs ask all these questions, while committing the lie of omission that the crucial work of studying the Estimates isn’t getting done. Oops. But everyone is instead wrapped up in the novelty of it all and the pretense that there is parliamentary business being done – which there really isn’t – and the Liberals have apparently judged correctly that only the appearance of accountability matters.

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