Tag Archives: FINTRAC

Roundup: Audits being virtually ignored

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If the Auditor General releases a report and nobody reports on it, does it make a sound? I suspect we’re not far away from finding out, as once again, AG reports were released yesterday, and got the absolute bare minimum of coverage—two wire stories from The Canadian Press (combining two reports in one story, the third report as a standalone), that were picked up across several legacy media outlets, including major chains, and one CBC story that covered all three reports in the same piece. That was it. And in Question Period, the NDP raised one of those reports in Jagmeet Singh’s lead question, but in the most generic terms possible, and that was it.

To recap the reports:

  1. There hasn’t been a measurable change in the situation of First Nations housing in four audit cycles, and the process of devolving this responsibility to individual First Nations is not proceeding very quickly. (The government points out that there has been an 1100 percent increase in spending on First Nations housing, and that they are consulting on projects going forward).
  2. Indigenous policing agreements are not being lived up to by the RCMP or Public Safety, whether it’s with under-investment, under-spending of allocated funds, or the RCMP not being able to staff positions as they’re supposed to.
  3. The National Trade Corridors programme got off to a good start in the design phase, but the department isn’t tracking implementation or results very effectively, and that’s its own particular breed of problem.

It’s incredibly hard to hold a government to account if you’re not paying attention to the very reports designed to do just that, even if this isn’t one of the “sexy” special reports like on ArriveCan. Auditor General lock-up days used to be a packed affair, and now only two English-language outlets released stories. That’s a very bad sign about the state of journalism, and of the attention span within politics for these kinds of things when they don’t fit into the slogan of the day.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Both Ukraine and Russia each claim to have repelled numerous air attacks overnight on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Russians say that they have captured the village of Orlivka in the Donetsk region, near Avdiivka. A new head of the Navy was named in Russia following so much damage and loss of their Black Sea fleet. Ukraine is hoping to have enough ammunition by April as the Czech-brokered deal gets closer to being fulfilled..

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Roundup: More lying to cover up for the lies

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Earlier in the week, Conservative MP and justice critic Frank Caputo put out one of the party’s signature shitpost videos where he spent seven minutes talking about how he took a trip to the medium-security prison that houses notorious serial killers Paul Bernardo and Luka Magnotta, and it was replete with this theatrical outrage that the facility has a hockey rink and a tennis court. How dare they! Such “luxury”! Caputo also says he got to tour Bernardo’s cell while Bernardo was away, but that he came face-to-face with him after, and that Bernardo ask him something.

Well, it turns out that encounter didn’t actually happen. Correctional Services says that they were at opposite ends of a corridor and may have seen one another but didn’t interact. They also said that the hockey rink that Caputo was complaining about hasn’t been in service for the past couple of years, so as to dispute the notion that Bernardo is spending his days playing pick-up hockey.

Well, the Conservatives didn’t like that. Andrew Scheer accused The Canadian Press of bias for quoting the Correctional Services. Caputo claims that they denied the existence of the hockey rink, which they didn’t. And Pierre Poilievre’s press secretary accused CP of lying to cover for the government, except he was the one lying.

It’s galling just how egregious the Conservatives have lied throughout this affair—both Caputo lying on his shitpost video, and then all of the other Conservatives trying to run interference and lying about CP’s reporting. CP, the most egregious of both-sidesers in order to maintain strict neutrality in all things. But they will say and do anything to discredit the media, both to build their dystopian alternate reality, but to also condition their followers to believe absolutely anything, and to just ignore all of the cognitive dissonance. And of course, their apologists will either keep lying or keep trying to distract from the lies in order to try and whitewash the whole affair. This is the kind of thing that kills democracies, and they’re gleefully going along with it.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces say that they have sunk another Russian warship using unmanned sea drones.

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Roundup: One great backbencher

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Following his unsuccessful run to lead the Ontario Liberal Party, Liberal backbencher Nathaniel Erskine-Smith has confirmed he’s not running in the next election, which is a very big shame. Erskine-Smith has been the kind of backbencher that we need a lot more of in this country, which is to say someone who’s not afraid to rock the boat a little, and to vote against his own party from time to time on matters of principle. That’s exceedingly rare in Canadian politics, and mostly happens only among the Liberals in recent parliaments—Conservatives have a desire to show they’re in lockstep, and the NDP will quietly punish MPs who don’t show continued “solidarity” (and you’d better believe they have an internal bullying culture).

This being said, I’m was not sure that Erskine-Smith would have made a great party leader provincially. While he brought great ideas to the campaign, my concern would be whether someone like that, who wasn’t afraid of rocking the boat from a backbench position, could maintain that energy sustainably in a leadership role, particularly because of the number of compromises that leadership in politics entails. It makes it harder to maintain the kinds of principled positions that he has been able to take, particularly on areas where sitting governments can find themselves getting uncomfortable.

Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps he could have made it work in leadership and brought a fresh energy to provincial politics the way he’s managed to make a particularly necessary contribution federally. Regardless, I hope he has inspired other backbenchers to take more changes and go against the party line from time to time, because we desperately need it.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces shot down 22 out of 33 Russian drones launched overnight Thursday, which hit residential neighbourhoods in the southern city of Kherson, and the nearby community of Beryslav. Ukrainian forces also claim to have hit targets in St. Petersburg, which travelled 1250 km to get there. Russian forces claim to have taken over a settlement called Vesele in Ukraine’s east. Meanwhile, six settlements are being rebuilt under the rubric that economies win wars, but they are only building essentials like housing and hospitals, and not libraries or museums.

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Roundup: Who “axing the tax” really benefits

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Economist Trevor Tombe and the CBC have come up with some modelling of the federal carbon levy, and lo, there remains yet more proof that for most households, the price and rebate system do in fact leave people better off. And more to the point, it also proves that removing the price—the “axe the tax” that Pierre Poilievre has been touring the country to promote, would only benefit people making over $250,000/year, which is pretty much the top one percent of income earners in the country.

This should be nothing new—back when they were in government, the Conservatives kept producing boutique tax credit after boutique tax credit that they kept claiming would help “ordinary” Canadians, when in fact they were structed in such a way as to really only benefit the wealthiest households. It’s not an uncommon trick from right-wing parties, particularly as they convince people to vote against their own best interests, but once again, they have created a massive disinformation campaign to claim that the carbon price is what is driving inflation and in particular food price inflation, when it’s simply not true, and that killing it will “make life affordable,” or that people will be able to “eat and heat their homes” again, which again, are not really being made unaffordable because of the carbon price, but other factors at play. And even with this data to prove that they’re lying, they’ll insist that it’s wrong, or that Tombe and the CBC are the ones doing the disinformation (which is why they attack academics and the media), but we need to be calling out that the Conservatives have been lying to the public as a way of rage-farming to drive votes and engagement.

Meanwhile, Tombe has also collaborated on another analysis of carbon prices in BC (which is separate from the federal system, but at the same price level), and finds that lo, they contributed a whole 0.33 percent to the price of food, which is of course what the Conservatives keep claiming is driving up food costs. It’s not—climate change is. Just this week, Statistics Canada released this year’s crop production data, and thanks to drought on the Prairies, crop yields are down this year—not as bad as it was in 2021, but wheat is down 6.9%, barley yields down 10.9%, and oat yields down 49.6%. This is the kind of thing that is affecting food prices, not the carbon price, but Conservatives will keep lying to you.

https://twitter.com/trevortombe/status/1732071690480562570

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian authorities say that they downed ten of seventeen Russian drones in an overnight attack, that hit targets in both the west and east of the country. As aid for Ukraine from the US is under debate, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy had to cancel a planned virtual meeting with US lawmakers, as the Republicans are trying to tie that aid to border measures. Zelenskyy is slated to meet virtually with G7 leaders today.

https://twitter.com/kyivindependent/status/1732084917708759146

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Roundup: Speaker Fergus is in trouble

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The incident over the weekend where Speaker Greg Fergus appeared in a video at the Ontario Liberal leadership convention, in his robes, in his official office, blew up in the House of Commons today, and it wasn’t wholly unexpected. Fergus led off the day with an apology and a promise to be more careful in the future, but also an insistence that this was a personal message to outgoing interim provincial Liberal leader John Fraser, for whom he las a long-standing friendship, and non-partisan.

This didn’t mollify the Conservatives, who immediately launched into a point of privilege, led by Andrew Scheer, while the Bloc immediately decided that Fergus needs to resign over this, while the Conservatives also came around to this demand. The NDP, for their part, said that this needs to go to a committee for study, but all the while, Fergus recused himself from this discussion (as well he should have, which as something that Anthony Rota didn’t do after his particular incident), but the Deputy Speaker, Chris d’Entrement, indulged. It was quite clear that this was really more of a dilatory tactic from the Conservatives, who put up speaker after speaker to this point, for hours on end, which again, d’Entrement indulged when he shouldn’t have. But this is what they’re doing at this time of year, to run out the clock, like they do at the end of every sitting, and this was just today’s excuse rather than insisting that they really, really needed to debate a three-line committee report from eighteen months ago.

A couple of observations here:

  1. This wasn’t necessarily a breach of non-partisanship because this was at a provincial and not a federal event. Scheer tried to use the analogy of an NHL referee giving a pep talk in on team’s dressing room while in uniform, but that doesn’t hold—this would be an NHL referee giving a note of congratulations to someone in the OHL. But Scheer is a serial liar, so of course he’s going to turn out a work of fiction on this.
  2. Fergus should have known better, and while Fraser is trying to take the blame for this, Fergus should have had better judgment than to appear in his robes, in his official office, regardless of the circumstances. As a friend of mine noted, the Liberals can’t seem to help themselves with this kind of thing, and Fergus has been a little too proud of his new post and to be showing off his robes at every opportunity, and that’s going to get him in trouble. Well, more than he already is. Did he learn nothing from the fact that Rota was a genial idiot using his position to pose for photos in his uniform at every opportunity, and it led to his downfall? Seriously.
  3. If people want to get precious about what is and isn’t non-partisan for a Speaker, Rota would be making government funding announcement in his riding all the time, which he shouldn’t have done because he’s not a minister, and he’s the Speaker and shouldn’t have been there for them. And yet, nobody said boo about this practice, which they really should have.

Bottom line is I don’t think Fergus should have to resign over this, but man oh man, what terrible judgment so early in his time in that office.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces say they have successfully attacked oil depots in Russian-occupied Luhansk, while the deputy commander of Russia’s 14th Army Corps was killed in fighting in Ukraine. The death toll from the strike on the eastern town of Novohrodivka has risen after more bodies were found in the rubble of a residential building.

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Roundup: A bad report and a bad debate

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The Parliamentary Budget Officer released another one of his highly dubious reports yesterday, this time on the incoming clean fuel regulations. Why is it dubious? Because it’s entirely one-sided and assumes no costs to climate change, and no adaptation on the part of industry in order to bring costs down to meet their obligations under the regulations, which is the whole gods damned point of these kinds of mechanisms. Oh, and this isn’t fiscal policy, so it’s not clear why he’s even doing this kind of report in the first place.

As you may have noticed during Question Period, the Conservatives jumped all over this report and its findings, and when they were questioned, their media staff were over social media accusing people of calling the PBO a liar. Well, it’s not that he’s a liar—it’s bad data, a bad report, and the numbers taken from it were used dishonestly and entirely in bad faith. And the PBO gets the attention he’s looking for, and around and around we go.

Rachel Notley vs Danielle Smith

For the purposes of researching my column last night, I subjected myself to the leaders’ debate in the Alberta election and it was…not great. Yes, lots of people gushed at how nice it was just to have two leaders going head-to-head and not four or five, but we don’t have a two-party system federally (and it’s a bad sign that Alberta has a de facto one provincially).

My not-too-original observations were that Notley was weirdly on the defensive most of the night, while Smith was pretending to be the upstart challenger rather than the incumbent, attacking Notley on her record at every turn when Notley wasn’t effectively throwing many punches herself. Yes, she did well on the healthcare and education portions, but was not effectively countering Smith’s confident bullshit throughout, and that’s a real problem in a lower voter-information environment, where that confidence plays well regardless of the fact that Smith lied constantly with a straight face. On the very day that Smith was found to have broken the province’s Conflict of Interest Act, Notley had a hard time effectively making this point, while Smith claimed vindication because it showed she didn’t directly call Crown prosecutors, while it full-out warned that Smith’s behaviour was a threat to democracy, and Notley could barely say the words.

Programming Note: I am taking the full long weekend off, so expect the next post to be on Wednesday.

Ukraine Dispatch:

There are reports of more air raids in Ukraine early Friday morning. Russians fired 30 cruise missiles against Ukrainian targets in the early morning hours on Thursday, and Ukraine shot down 29 of them, with the one that got through striking an industrial building in Odessa, killing one and wounding two. There were also further gains made around Bakhmut, and even the Wagner Group’s leader says that they have bene in retreat. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy set up a reintegration council in order to provide advice for the restoration of Ukrainian rule when they liberate Crimean.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1659213321927794693

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