Tag Archives: First Ministers

Roundup: Telling the premiers no

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The prime minister met with the premiers (virtually) yesterday, and while there was talk about the vaccine roll-out and that kind of good stuff, there was also a discussion about healthcare transfers – or more specifically, the premiers’ demand for some $28 billion in permanent new transfers with no strings attached. Justin Trudeau, to his credit, said no – or more specifically, he does see a role for the federal government to pay more, but now is not the time to discuss how much, and you can bet that it’s going to come with plenty of strings for new programmes that the federal government wants to launch, like pharmacare and national standards for long-term care.

There are a few things to remember about why there need to be strings attached to this money. One is that we can’t trust that provinces will actually spend this on healthcare, and lo, we have precedence for this. Prior to the Harper government capping the health transfer escalator at three percent or GDP growth (whichever was higher), healthcare spending increases by the provinces were far below what the health transfer escalator was – meaning that the provinces were not spending healthcare money on healthcare. Additionally, some of you may remember when Stephen Harper fell for Jean Charest’s bogus demands to address a “fiscal imbalance” between Ottawa and Quebec, so when Harper – desperate for Quebec votes – turned over a pile of money to Charest to address said bogus “imbalance,” Charest turned around and turned that into tax cuts, burning Harper in the process. On top of that, we have seen plenty of provinces during this pandemic alone just sitting on the money the federal government gave them to deal with it. So no, we should not trust that provinces will spend it wisely.

As well, the premiers have been misrepresenting the history of health transfers, citing the “it used to be 50-50” line, without acknowledging why it changed, which was to give the provinces tax points that they could use for healthcare or other programmes. There is a great thread here that you should all read that spells it out, and why we should take these provincial (and Bloc, NDP and now Conservative) talking points with a shaker of salt, because they’re misrepresenting history.

Last sitting day

Given that this is the last sitting day of 2020, I suspect that we may see a unanimous consent motion to pass a number of bills in one fell swoop before the Commons rises, being the UK trade deal bill, the Elections Act bill, and quite possibly the fiscal update implementation bill. Why those three? There are worries about trade disruptions if the UK trade implementation bill doesn’t get passed by December 31st, and this essentially just rolls over the existing CETA with the EU, so there would be very little that is contentious in this bill. With the elections bill, it is also relatively uncontentious, based on Elections Canada’s input that would allow for a pandemic election to have three voting days and extra advanced polling, plus some other changes for things like long-term care facilities and increased mail-in ballots – and since it needs 90 days from royal assent to come into effect, parties will want it to pass as quickly as possible. And as for the implementation bill, it contains both a fix for a flaw in the commercial rent assistance programme that they didn’t amend, plus has other pandemic supports, and again, they will want it passed as soon as possible. Of course, this means once again that there is plenty of spending that didn’t get scrutiny, and it jams the Senate by pushing a bunch of bills on them without time to give it proper study or the ability to move amendments, but this is becoming a hallmark of this parliament.

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Roundup: A reasoned amendment

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Something very usual happened in the Senate yesterday, in that Independent Senator Kim Pate decided to move a reasoned amendment to the government’s supply bill. A reasoned amendment is basically a procedural move to decline to give a bill second reading, meaning you don’t even agree with the bill in principle. This is a very rare move, and the fact that this is being used on a supply bill is a sign that this is a senator who is playing with fire.

You don’t mess around with supply bills. This is about money the government needs to operate, and if it fails, they can’t just keep funding government operations with special warrants. It’s going to be a giant headache of having to recreate the bill in a way that isn’t identical to the one that just passed (because you can’t pass two identical bills in the same session), go through the process again as the House is set to rise for the holidays (the Senate usually lags a few days later) is going to be a giant headache that is going to lose this senator any of the support she’s hoping to gain. Now, because the Senate isn’t a confidence chamber, defeating a money bill won’t make the government fall, but this is still a very bad precedent to try and set, or worse, given other newer senators ideas about how they should start operating.

There are plenty of objectionable aspects of this stunt of Pate’s – and yes, it is a stunt – but part of it is misunderstanding what that the supply bill is not about new pandemic aid programmes – it’s about keeping the civil service functioning. Her particular concern that 3.5 million people remain the poverty line is commendable, but Pate has been advocating for the government to implement a basic income for a while now, and a lot of people have been misled by the way in which the CERB was rolled out into thinking that this is a template for a basic income, which it’s not. And implementing a basic income – of which certain designs can be useful, but plenty which are not – is a complex affair if you talk to economists who have been working on the issue for years, not the least of which is that it’s going to require (wait for it…) negotiation with the provinces, because they deliver welfare programmes. And if Pate thinks that this kind of a stunt is going to force the government to suddenly implement one, she’s quite mistaken. I am forced to wonder who is giving her this kind of procedural advice, because she’s operating out of bounds, and asking for a world of procedural trouble. It’s fortunate that the Senate adjourned debate for the day shortly after she moved this motion so that others can regroup, but this is a worrying development for the “new” Senate.

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Roundup: The greater danger of spending too little

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Chrystia Freeland unveiled her first economic update yesterday, and much of it was predictable, from the size of the deficit (which every single news source focused on immediately, as though it were still 1995), to the lack of a fiscal anchor while we remain in the pandemic, to the promises for how to build back in a more inclusive and greener manner. One of Freeland’s major points was that there is a greater danger in not spending enough than there is in spending too much – particularly at a time of record low interest rates – and we saw this borne out in the last recession, where the Harper government withdrew stimulus too soon, and the Bank of Canada was forced to keep rates lower for longer and we had a consumer debt crisis as a result. There were “down payments” for the work of getting to national childcare, long-term care and the meeting climate targets, but those are also all areas where they need provincial buy-in, so that’s going to get interesting very fast, especially given the number of hostile premiers that are currently in office. There were also new programmes rolled out for tourism and live events, and plans to extend GST/HST to web giants.

Predictably, the opposition parties were unimpressed. Erin O’Toole spent his response speech lying about what has been done to date, set up a completely false revisionist history of the pandemic, and went on TV to moan that the government “overspent” on CERB – apparently not grasping that the point was to keep people at home so as not to spread the virus (ergo, the Conservative plan is apparently to force people back to work in unsafe conditions so that they can facilitate the spread of said virus). The NDP were also predictable in their demands for wealth and “excess profit” taxes, never mind that they are inchoate concepts that largely don’t work out in practice. This means that we get to go through yet another round of election speculation as people wonder if the opposition will gang up to bring the government down over the inevitable implementing legislation.

Meanwhile, Heather Scoffield remarks on the ambition in the fiscal update, and whether or not the government will have the ability to deliver on any of it. Kevin Carmichael bemoans the lack of a fiscal anchor, but does admit that Freeland is right in that there is a danger of spending too little, or withdrawing stimulus too early (like Stephen Harper did). Paul Wells is disquieted by the lack of details on big items in the update, as well as this government’s propensity to farm out tough decisions to people not in government – which is a problem.

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Roundup: Complaints without suggestions

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In the wake of the First Ministers’ meeting last week, we’re still seeing a lot of narratives in the media about how the prime minister hasn’t yet taken any steps to help the province in the short term – a take that is ignorant because it fails to comprehend what the situation about the price differential is. At its core, it’s a supply and demand problem, with too much supply and not enough demand, which drives prices down. Nothing the federal government can do will fix that in the short term. Buying rail cars is medium-term at best, but may simply being throwing money away given that once the Line 3 pipeline is up and running, it’ll outstrip the capacity of those trains right away – and I can’t stress enough that we are again in the midst of a global supply glut, so putting more product into a full market isn’t going to help matters.

And while this happens, we see more nonsense like this column from former Alberta MLA Donna Kennedy-Glans, which incoherently rambles about Trudeau not respecting the nation and inciting Western alienation. Which is ridiculous, because there is not a single fact in the piece, nor is there any suggestion of anything Trudeau could do about Alberta’s situation. It’s just angry flailing. Part of the problem that people – and Albertans especially – keep ignoring is that what’s happening with their prices right now is the result of decades of structuring their oil export market on the assumption that the Americans would be perpetual customers, which didn’t see the shale oil revolution that upended those assumptions, and they haven’t managed to pivot to overseas markets on a dime because obviously pipelines take a long time to build, and people don’t necessarily want them going through their backyards. It’s hard to blame Trudeau for that – any prime minister (or premier for that matter) would have a hard time dealing effectively with this state of affairs, and no, carbon taxes have nothing to do with this situation, nor does the desire to change environmental assessment legislation, because the current system isn’t working either. But Albertans – and I speak as one – both tend to be allergic to self-reflection (recall how they recoiled at Jim Prentice suggesting they take a look in the mirror, and elected Rachel Notley as a result), and a they like to blame Ottawa for their problems – especially if there’s someone named Trudeau in charge. We should be better than this.

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Meanwhile, the Globe posted a nonsense story about equalisation – again – in that Quebec still gets it while Alberta is in a deficit, and I can’t even. You would think that a national newspaper could get the basics of equalisation right, but apparently not. To remind the rest of us: Equalisation is about fiscal capacity, not your province’s budget balance. Provinces don’t sign cheques over to have-not provinces, but rather, this is all money that comes from income taxes. The reason Alberta pays more is because they have the highest incomes in the country. Grievance politics, along with lazy reporting that confirms narratives rather than challenges them is largely what keeps this myth alive, and it should be stamped down.

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Roundup: Unfulfilled drama

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After days of building expectation that there was going to be drama at the First Ministers’ meeting, virtually none was had. Doug Ford was going to storm out, and then he didn’t, and his people started recanting the threats. And, well, other stories started emerging as well. And some other premiers claimed progress on their files, like François Legault saying he got closer to his demands for $300 million in repayment for irregular border crossers and dairy compensation; Rachel Notley could claim some progress on getting Ottawa to consider helping pay for her plan to buy more rail cars. That sort of thing. 

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Where there was some minor drama was Doug Ford and Scott Moe coming out at the end, complaining that the federal government was trying to “move the goal posts” on them when it comes to their climate action – which was immediately denounced by other premiers’ officials, and which also demonstrates that they don’t actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to the federal climate framework – in particular that Ford was walking back on some of the province’s earlier commitments to the tune of a 30-megatonne reduction in GHGs, which was not going to fly with anyone else. (Oh, and the federal government says that Ontario won’t get the $420 million promised as part of the Low Carbon Economy Fund after they pulled out of cap-and-trade).

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne questions the point of these meetings, even from the standpoint of political theatre, while Chantal Hébert calls out Doug Ford’s marked inexperience and partisan petulance, and that he made threats with no reason to back them up. Paul Wells takes the opportunity to explore what these kinds of meetings mean for Trudeau’s style and his vision of federalism – before throwing some well-deserved shade at the final communiqué.

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Good reads:

  • In case you missed it, Statistics Canada reported record job numbers and the lowest unemployment rate since the current tracking began in 1976.
  • Here’s a look into the arrest of Huawei’s CFO, and the extradition process that she will now be subject to. She didn’t get bail; our ambassador in China is on the case.
  • The Canadian Institute of Health Research is doing away with virtual meetings citing lack of preparedness and distraction, but the trade-offs are travel costs.
  • Some BC First Nations are looking to renegotiate their benefit agreements with Trans Mountain on the pipeline expansion.
  • Crown attorneys will stop prosecuting some HIV non-disclosure cases as new prosecutorial guidelines come into effect.
  • Here’s a good look at how Doug Ford and Jason Kenney are sowing distrust with the media for their own ends.
  • Murray Brewster delves into the Crown’s filings on Mark Norman as part of their court case alleging he leaked shipyard information.
  • Kevin Carmichael looks into the darker undersides of the good job numbers that came out yesterday.
  • My weekend column calls out Andrew Scheer’s use of conspiracy theories as part of his war on truth that he hopes will give him an edge, but only feeds Russian trolls.

Odds and ends:

It looks like we’re seeing a renewed bout of really dumb takes on “Alberta separatism,” which seems to forget some pretty basic facts about their exports.

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Roundup: Courting the tinfoil hat crowd

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Over the past few days, the Conservatives have been delving into tinfoil hat territory in their attempts to stir up panic and anger toward the UN compact on global migration, which Canada plans to sign next week in Morocco. According to the Conservatives, this non-binding political declaration will somehow erode Canadian sovereignty and be tantamount to “border erasure,” and that if you listen to the Twitter trolls picking up on Andrew Scheer and Michelle Rempel’s posts about this, it will make criticizing immigration a “hate crime.” All of which is complete and utter bullshit, and even Chris Alexander, one-time Harper-era immigration minister, calls this out as factually incorrect. And yet, the Conservatives plan to use their Supply Day today to force a vote on this very issue so that they can express performative shock and dismay when the Liberals vote it down.

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While Justin Trudeau and Ahmed Hussen have quite rightly called the Conservatives out on this issue as repeating Rebel Media talking points, I have to see this as yet another example of Conservatives not only shamelessly lying to score points, but trying to dip their toe into extremist territory, and the belief that they can just “just enough” extremist language and talking points to try and stir up enough anger and paranoia that they think it will move their poll numbers, but no white supremacists or xenophobes please, “we believe in orderly immigration.” And of course, real life doesn’t work that way, and they wind up stirring up elements that they say they disavow, but continue to wink at because they think it’ll get some kind of benefit out of it.

The other theory raised about why the Conservatives are going full steam on this issue is because they’re trying to head off Maxime Bernier, who is also trolling on this particular bit of lunacy. Why they think this would be a good strategy, I’m not entirely sure, but it’s not as harmless as they might think it is, and that should be concerning to everyone.

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Roundup: A summer stunt

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With the new Cabinet in place and a new trade minister now in the portfolio, Andrew Scheer decided that yesterday was the day to engage in a political stunt and demand that Parliament be recalled in the middle of summer in order to pass the enabling legislation for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Astute observers may recall that the Conservatives made a couple of attempts before the Commons rose for the summer to pass the bill at all stages with zero debate or committee study, but were rebuffed both times. Now they want Parliament to sit over the summer in order to pass it expeditiously.

There are, of course, a few problems with this demand. First of all, Ottawa is a virtual ghost town at this time of year, as a sizeable portion of the population (and most especially the civil service) is off at some cottage somewhere, and very little is getting done. You want to ensure there’s a revolt, then cancel everyone’s vacations. A number of workers on Parliament Hill, such as those who work in the Parliamentary Restaurant, get laid off over the summer, so rehiring them for a few days or a week would be a giant logistical nightmare. Not to mention, you’re going to have a tonne of cranky MPs who are hot and sticky in humid Ottawa, who are will spend the time grousing that they have work to do in their consitutencies (especially with an election a little over a year away). This especially includes Scheer’s own MPs. Add to that, Scheer says that the Commons needs to move now because there’s no guarantee how long the Senate will take with this – err, except if his own senators offer to play ball with the other senators and come to an agreement on a timeline for the bill, then it’s more of an empty threat.

The government, mind you, shot down this proposal because it’s a blatant stunt, but that left the Conservatives the day to start tweeting sanctimoniously over Twitter about how they’re willing to get to work but the Liberals aren’t. (Seriously guys, this game will bite you in the ass before you know it). And then there’s the kicker – Scheer made this demand, then rebuffed the media requests and said he’s off for holidays for the next two weeks, thus cementing the fact that this was all a stunt. Slow clap, guys. But I guess it’s a way to try and capture the news cycle for the day.

Meanwhile, here’s Philippe Lagassé to school you on how most people don’t it right when they talk about treaty ratification in our parliamentary system.

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Roundup: An involuntary nomination

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The outcome at the Status of Women committee was not unexpected, had as much sulking and grousing as was to be expected. In a public and not secret vote, the Liberals and NDP members of the committee rejected the Conservatives’ choice of Rachael Harder to chair the committee, and when the Liberals nominated Karen Vecchio in her place, Vecchio tried to back out but was overruled, and those same Liberal and Conservative members voted her in.

And then the bellyaching began. A sour press release was issued about how this was somehow about “bullying and intimidation” of some poor young woman (which is a ridiculous characterisation), but that they would accept the democratic will of the committee. And the pundit class took to Twitter to decry how bizarre it was that a woman was being forced to take the chair of a committee that she didn’t want. I’m not exactly sympathetic to these cries, because this is what happens when you try to pull a stunt for the sake of being a provocateur, as Scheer is trying to do, but you don’t have the votes to back it up. Oh, and then they tried to wedge this into the frame of it being a distraction from the tax proposals, when it shouldn’t need to be said that this was a distraction of the Conservatives’ own making, owing to their particular tactical ineptitude.

Meanwhile, Liberals took to tweeting about how this would have made Harder Andrew Scheer’s “spokesperson” on the committee, which is bizarre and wrong – the chair is the committee’s spokesperson. It’s baffling that they would try to spin it in this fashion. Then again, one shouldn’t be surpised given how badly this whole affair has been for people describing how things work in Parliament. And it shouldn’t surprise me, and yet here we are, that not one journalist writing about this story, nor any pundit commenting on it, remarked about the fact that it makes no sense to put your critic forward as committee chair. None. The chair’s role is to be neutral, to run the meeting, arbitrate rules disputes and to ensure that witnesses and questioners stay within their timelines. They’re not supposed to vote unless it’s to break a tie, which shouldn’t happen very often given the numbers at play. Why would you want your critic – your point person in holding the government and in particular that associated minister, to account – to be hobbled in this way on committee, is baffling. It’s utterly incomprehensible if you follow the basics of how parliament is supposed to work. And yet nobody saw fit to call Scheer out on this fact. These details matter.

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Roundup: Presenting Her Excellency

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Yesterday was the big day, and Her Excellency, the Right Honourable Julie Payette was installed as the Canada’s 29th Governor General in a ceremony that involved more than a few nods to the Indigenous people, and a lot of music – numbers and artists that surprised many.

As for Payette herself, her installation speech was twenty minutes “from the heart” no script, no notes, and in a dynamic storytelling style about her personal journey, and what she hopes to accomplish in her time as the Vice Regal representative in Canada, drawn from her perspective of seeing a borderless planet from orbit. It also gave a hint about what she may see as her priorities as GG, which will involve promoting STEM (especially for girls), and about helping people unlock their potential by having the right support systems behind them. Personally, I would say that this speech was far beyond anything we’ve seen from the post in more than the past seven years of Payette’s predecessor, and that I believe will serve us well.

Meanwhile, the National Post looked into just what a Governor General does all day, in true Tristin Hopper style.

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Roundup: All abuzz about Netflix

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It’s probably not a big surprise that the story for which the most ink (physical or digital, take your pick) was spilled yesterday were the culture policy changes that Mélanie Joly announced, punctuated by the grand announcement that Netflix had committed to spending half a billion dollars over five years on Canadian productions. But in there was also news that there would be no big bailout for the news media in this country, and there would be some funding boosts for the Canada Media Fund, the Canada Music Fund and the Canada Book Fund, and a creative export strategy, along with previously announced reforms of the Copyright Board.

Suffice to say, there’s a fair amount of grumbling from traditional broadcasters that Neflix is essentially getting away with murder, not bound by the same CanCon obligations of traditional broadcasters, nor are other Internet giants like Google and Facebook being asked to contribute to the same content creation funds that traditional media are. And there is some pretty legitimate concerns about this announced Netflix deal because it’s pretty opaque – Netflix will continue to be able to operate as a black box when it comes to their subscriber data, and while Sean Casey went on Power & Politics to insist that the $500 million was new money (given that Netflix had previously told Parliament that they were already spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” in Canada), it really doesn’t seem like that’s anything new given that previous statement. Netflix also says that the money isn’t coming from the recent rate-hike in Canada, but that’s not washing with a number of people. The Financial Post has a fairly comprehensive look at the announcement here, including the fact that the announcement seems to leave a lot of the heavy lifting into the future, which probably shouldn’t be a surprise.

I do think it should be incumbent upon us to remember that Netflix has not been a net benefit to the cultural sector in Canada. The late Denis McGrath used to refer to them as a “parasite” on the Canadian broadcast sector because they put no money into the production of shows that they streamed, encouraging the cord-cutting that starved the very platforms who produced those shows that they later streamed of funding. It’s a complex problem, and a handful of Netflix originals aren’t going to be the panacea for the Canadian film and television industry. If anything, it may hasten the decline.

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