Tag Archives: GLBT

Roundup: The fallout from Freeland being accosted

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Much of the discourse this weekend was around a video of Chrystia Freeland being accosted at an elevator in Grande Prairie, Alberta, and all that it entails. While Freeland can handle herself—she ran circles around the KGB as a student in Ukraine—it’s the signal that this sends, particularly to women in public office, but most especially racialized women and those of other minorities or diverse backgrounds, who are routinely targeted in similar ways. While there were a number of denunciations of this, and Freeland called it out as wrong, the prime minister called for a united front from political leaders to call for an end to this kind of harassment and violence. Notably, however, a number of Conservative leadership candidates have not said anything, and when Poilievre in particular was asked, he quickly played the victim, that he too is harassed and threatened.

 

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 186:

There has been more shelling around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, and the cities that surround it, over the weekend, because who cares about the risk of the cooling systems being compromised and a radiation leak happening? Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces say that they beat back the Russian advance on Bakhmut in the Donestk region.

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Roundup: Premiers pleading poverty while demonstrating largesse

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Ontario premier Doug Ford met with Maritime premiers in New Brunswick yesterday, and wouldn’t you just know it, they demanded more federal healthcare dollars while simultaneously saying that throwing money at the problem wouldn’t fix things, so they want to go to more private delivery. The problem, of course, is that Ford didn’t even bother to spend his full healthcare budget last year as he continues to underpay nurses and doctors, and both he and Blaine Higgs in particular put pandemic healthcare dollars onto their bottom lines, and Higgs boasted a healthy surplus last year thanks to federal transfers. It’s hard to take premiers’ demands for cash seriously if they don’t actually spend the dollars they’re given, and that they keep boasting about their balance sheets while still steadfastly refusing to increase pay, or to reform billing systems. While François Legault wasn’t at the table today, he’s also promising a tax cut if he gets elected again, while crying poor and insisting the federal government needs to spend more. Erm, you know that the federal government can see you, right?

On that note, Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe announced that his province is so flush with money thanks to high oil and gas revenues that they’re going to give out vote-buying cheques to the whole province. But he too is going cap-in-hand to Ottawa for more health transfers, and he’s sending patients in his province to private clinics in Alberta and won’t pay for their transportation to get there either. (Oh, and giving cheques to everyone is going fuel inflation, but you knew that, right?

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 180:

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is banning public celebrations in advance of Ukraine’s independence day, citing fears that Russia will likely plan more severe attacks in line with the occasion, particularly around civilian infrastructure. Russians struck near Kharkiv and areas near Bakhmut in the Donbas, while the Ukrainan counter-attack continued to advance on Kherson in the south. There were also new claims of Russian shelling near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, as international pleas to ensure a ceasefire around the area continue to go unheeded. Russians are also, not surprisingly, blaming the car bomb that killed the daughter of one of Putin’s advisors, on Ukraine.

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Roundup: Collapsing hospital care is a crisis for premiers

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It’s on or about day one-hundred-and-forty-six of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russian forces have shelled the city of Toretsk in the Donestk region, smashing more buildings as they continue to try and take control of the area. Ukraine is also calling out Russia’s conduct when it comes to prisoners of war, citing illegal treatment.

Meanwhile, there are no assurances around weapons that Canada is sending to Ukraine that they’re being tracked so that they can ensure they won’t wind up on the black market. NATO partners are having discussion about this, but Canada is merely monitoring rather than participating. Ukrainian officials assure Canada that they are closely monitoring any movement of weapons, as are our allies, and are insisting that information to the contrary is likely Russian disinformation.

Closer to home, emergency rooms are closing in some parts of the country as hospitals are facing a severe staff shortage, particularly among nurses. And gosh, it’s quite a coincidence that Ontario gave nurses an effective pay cut that they haven’t reversed, or that Alberta tried to cut nurses’ pay because they said they were making too much relative to nurses in other provinces. No, seriously, that’s their case. This is while the premiers have mishandled COVID, refuse to do the simplest things like mask mandates at this point, and then wondering why the hospitals, which never recovered from the previous waves of the pandemic, are once again collapsing. A very cynical person might think premiers have created this situation, either to pressure the federal government to hand them more money without strings, or to set up the conditions to force more private delivery of care (which won’t actually do anything about staffing or resources other than distribute them toward those who can pay), but it looks clear that they aren’t prepared to give the necessary damn that the situation requires, and that’s a problem.

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Roundup: Brown tries to defend himself

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It’s day one-hundred-and-thirty-four of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and it sounds like Ukrainian forces have held off any Russian advances in the north of Donetsk province, as Russians shell the city of Sloviansk and other nearby populated areas. Russians are also trying to seize control of the highway linking the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces. Meanwhile, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev is warning against trying to punish Russia for the invasion, with thinly-veiled threats about nuclear conflict, so that’s some nightmare fuel for you.

Closer to home, the day was largely consumed with Patrick Brown trying to refute the allegations against him, insisting that he wasn’t given any details he could substantively repudiate to the party brass, and that this was all the work of Poilievre loyalists on the leadership committee who were afraid that he wanted to take the party in a different direction with the help of members signed up from ethno-cultural communities (with some unspoken allegations of racism there). But beyond this, he was also contending with allegations from mismanagement from his own city council, and the memories of questionable conduct when he was Ontario Progressive Conservative Party leader around certain loans (and this is without even bringing up the even older sexual assault allegations that ended said leadership). Brown, incidentally, dismissed those city council allegations as well, citing that they are from the faction of council that opposes him, and that everything has already been cleared up.

For the party’s part, they didn’t do themselves any favours by rushing the meeting and then putting out the disqualification release close to midnight, and it really just gave ammunition to Brown to claim that this was all a conspiracy of Poilievre-loyalists against him, and the fact that it was a reputed 11-6 decision also gave him fodder to work with. But the party president was doing media rounds as well, and insisted that the allegations didn’t come from the Poilievre camp, but from inside Brown’s own tent—the call is coming from inside the house. And while the party president also said there was no route to appeal, Brown has hired a very good law firm to try and overturn this decision, so we’ll see where this goes. Nevertheless, if he remains disqualified, this could have the effect of unmotivating the members Brown signed up, and giving Poilievre a better chance of taking the race on the first ballot, which he would need, otherwise the ranked ballot starts doing unexpected things (and no, they aren’t reprinting the ballots, so Brown will still be on it, but his votes not counted and the down ballot support redistributed).

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Roundup: A lack of precognition

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We’re now on day one-hundred-and-seven of Russia’s invasion of Ukriane, and I couldn’t find any stories to link to on Canadian sites, as everything was about the January 6th committee in the US, because priorities. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s agriculture minister told the Canadian House of Commons agriculture committee that Russia has been raiding Ukraine’s grain stores, and then selling it on the world market using falsified documentation. As well, the RCMP say that they have cracked down on $400 million in Russian assets and transactions from sanctioned individuals.

https://twitter.com/Ukraine/status/1534832733637287936

https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPR/status/1534808012962947072

Closer to home, the Bank of Canada released their Financial Systems Review yesterday, and made remarks about some of the vulnerabilities in the economy, such as high consumer debt levels and variable rate mortgages rising precipitously in the next few months as interest rates continue to rise in order to get inflation under control. They are confident the economy and households can handle the higher rates because the economy needs them.

This being said, I have to take some exception to the commentary happening on Power & Politics last night, and from the host in particular, who was expounding upon how central bankers got it “wrong” about inflation. Apparently they are supposed to have the power of precognitition and could accurately predict the fact that global supply chains would take longer to untangle than previously thought because China went into some serious lockdowns under a COVID-zero policy, that fuel shortages would drive up world oil prices before the Russia invaded Ukraine, and they were supposed to have properly foreseen said invasion and could adjust their inflation expectations accordingly. There have been an increasing number of unlikely scenarios that all pretty much happened across the world over the past two or three years, and you’re ragging on central bankers for not having properly tried to head it off? You can argue that they were too late to ease off on stimulative measures, even though their actions were largely in line with the advice and the data they had at the time, but going after them because they didn’t accurately predict a pandemic and a war? Sit down.

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Roundup: Preparing for another rally, this time of bikers

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It is now approximately day sixty-five of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russians fired two missiles at Kyiv while UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was visiting, which is not a good thing. There are also concerns that Russia will attempt sham referendums in the southern and eastern parts of the country that they have captured as an attempt to legitimise their occupations. Elsewhere in Europe, Russia’s decision to cut off Poland and Bulgaria off from natural gas as a form of blackmail was met with condemnation from the rest of Europe, and given that Putin sees a united Europe as a threat, his attempts to divide the community is not working very well.

https://twitter.com/Podolyak_M/status/1519734914018590726

Closer to home, Ottawa is bracing for a different kind of convoy this weekend, this time led by motorcycles instead of trucks, and they claim to be veterans concerned about freedoms, and much like the previous occupation, while there were a handful of truckers involved, I’m not sure how many legitimate veterans will be in this rally, or that it won’t have the same group of far-right extremists, grifters, conspiracy theorists, and grievance tourists tagging along. There don’t seem to be as many links in organisers between this rally and the previous occupation, given that many of them are either in jail or on bail, but that’s not necessarily indicative of the others that tag along. This time, the police seem much more alert to the situation—and to the fact that they are on thin ice with the people of Ottawa (seriously, the whole force needs to be disbanded), and they have set up exclusion zones and barred the rally from stopping at the War Memorial as they had planned, which is just as well because it shouldn’t be used as a symbol for these kinds of events. RCMP and OPP are already in the city in preparation, and the city has announced a bylaw crackdown during the rally.

As for the previous occupation, the added security around Parliament Hill cost $6.3 million in parliamentary security alone, with another $4.5 million being racked up in overtime for Parliamentary Protection Services officers. And then there are the $36.3 million the city is demanding that the federal government foot the bill for (though frankly the city should swallow some of this out of their police budget considering how useless the Ottawa Police were and that they allowed the occupation to take hold). One wonders how much this upcoming rally is going to add to that total.

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Roundup: Higher inflation than expected

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It is now day fifty-seven (or so) of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and hope is waning for the remaining defenders of Mariupol, and the civilians still sheltering there. As the fighting intensifies in the eastern part of the country, there are also concerns that it will devolve into a war of attrition, which Russia has historically been more able to withstand. We have also learned more about what happened when Russian troops occupied Chernobyl, where staff were working at gunpoint, and sleeping three hours a night in order to safeguard the site and ensure that Russians didn’t tamper with any of the equipment there.

Closer to home, the inflation numbers were released yesterday, and they were much higher than expected, as conflict inflation brought on by the aforementioned invasion of Ukraine is hitting. And of course, most media outlets were useless in explaining the causes of it, while the parties were equally useless in their own reactions. The government keeps focusing on their talking points about things like child care and dental care, and the fact that they indexed benefits, rather than actually explaining the drivers. The Conservatives are railing about “printing money” (which, to be clear, nobody is actually doing) and insisting that the government should declare a GST holiday, which would a) do nothing for grocery prices as most groceries are GST-exempt; and b) would have a stimulative effect and just fuel even more inflation, especially as people would be likely to use said GST holiday to buy big-ticket items. And the NDP, predictably, chalk this up to greed and want higher wealth taxes, which again, do very little about the drivers of inflation.

And then there’s the Bank of Canada, who will be forced to respond with higher rate hikes, but the question becomes whether they’ll keep the increases more gradual—another 50 basis points at the next meeting in June—of if they’ll go even higher as a way of demonstrating that they are really taking this seriously and that the system of inflation control that they’ve been responsible for since the 1990s will prevail. It doesn’t directly address the drives, but it could be that the signals are more important than the actual policy at this point, because the bigger worry is the expectation that inflation will continue, which will turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy—something they are very, very keen to avoid.

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Roundup: Chalk up another Conservative disinformation campaign

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We’re now on or about day fifty-one of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and has been confirmed that Russia’s Black Sea flagship, the Moskva, has sunk, which is a huge loss for Russia (particularly as Turkey is blockading the entrance to the Black Sea to military vessels, so there will be no replacement for it anytime soon), and it will no longer be able to support Russian ground forces, or to shell cities from afar. In the meantime, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy continues to show that he is a master communicator for his country and his cause.

https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1514681561412780035

Closer to home, yet another pernicious bit of disinformation has started circulating, courtesy of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, who read the Emissions Reduction Plan (which was prepared by an arm’s-length advisory panel), found a reference to a proposal to add a surtax to certain kinds of gas-guzzling vehicles, and then wrote an op-ed in the Toronto Sun that declared this was the government’s plan. Jason Kenney picked up on this and decried it, as has the Conservative Party writ-large and several of its leadership contenders. Of course, there are no actual plans for such a tax, but why does the truth matter? This was the tactic they’ve been using on the supposed plans for a capital gains tax on primary residents, which doesn’t exist and never will exist (even if it’s actually decent public policy). This also compounds with the selective quotes they’ve been using from the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s recent report on carbon pricing, which has been torqued into more disinformation.

There’s so much disinformation and lies floating about, as though there weren’t enough actual things that you could absolutely excoriate this government for, and yet they resort to fiction. Utterly boggling.

Programming Note: I will be taking a long weekend off from the blog, because I am exhausted after the past few weeks. See you Tuesday!

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Roundup: Trudeau confirms that there are to be strings attached

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It’s around day forty-eight of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and it appeared to be a fairly quiet day. Well, as quiet as can be in a country where two-thirds of its children have been forced to flee their homes in the past six weeks, which creates plenty of problems for their safety and security as they may be exploited in the confusion. Meanwhile, Russia has tapped a new general to lead its forces in Ukraine, and he’s one with a reputation of particular brutality in leading the Russian troops that acted in support of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, leaving a trail of civilian deaths and human rights violations in his wake. As well, Austria’s chancellor met with Putin, the first European leader to do so since the invasion, and tried to convince him to end the invasion, but he walked away from the meeting without any optimism that the war will end anytime soon.

Closer to home, prime minister Justin Trudeau has confirmed that he’s looking to have strings attached to future health care funds from the federal government, because he’s well aware of the history of provinces that have taken more federal dollars and used them on other things, including tax cuts, and the healthcare system has been left to suffer. Which is the way it should be—if the federal government is giving you money for healthcare, it should be used for just that, and no, that doesn’t mean they’re micro-managing, it means they want accountability for the money they send.

We also got confirmation that provinces are dishonestly ignoring the fact that the agreement in the 1970s to transfer tax points to the provinces in lieu of health transfers. They continue to insist that the federal government only funds 22 percent of their health care systems, but with the tax points, it’s over 33 percent, which is not insignificant considering that provinces are demanding the federal government fund the systems to at least 35 percent—a 35 percent that they don’t count the tax points under. They need to count those tax points, and government and media need to make that clear, rather than media just repeating the premiers’ talking points and both-sidesing it.

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Roundup: The emergency measures votes were a test

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I believe we are now in day thirty-three of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and there are fears in the northern city of Chernihiv that they may become the next Mariupol, as the city undergoes shelling from Russian forces. Meanwhile, those Russian forces seem to be shifting away from trying to encircle Kyiv, and are instead moving toward the eastern Donbas region to try and consolidate gains there, leading to fears that Russia may be trying to split the country. Elsewhere, the International Committee of the Red Cross is asking Canada not to lump its humanitarian promises in with sanctions and military aid, as it threatens the neutrality of their organisation. Here is a look at some more actions the West could be taking to help Ukraine that aren’t a no-fly zone. It has also been announced that Justin Trudeau and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will co-host an international pledging event for “Stand Up For Ukraine” on April 9th.

Closer to home, the weekend saw a couple of different versions of the “inside story” of the Liberal and NDP supply and confidence agreement, from both Susan Delacourt and Aaron Wherry. The two recounting largely align, talking about how initial talks post-election quickly ended as everyone was still too raw from the vote, how Trudeau reached out to Singh after the birth of Singh’s daughter, that most of the talks happened virtually and close to the vest to avoid leaks, and that their face-to-face meeting was at Rideau Gate, which usually hosts dignitaries (but was where Julie Payette lived when she was GG rather than in Rideau Hall, along with her Secretary, Assunta DiLorenzo). What was particularly interesting was how the vote on the Emergencies Act became the test for the NDP that they could be trusted in this agreement, and how the Liberals were willing to provide security briefings to secure that support, and that when the NDP proved themselves, the deal could go ahead.

On that note, it’s interesting (but perhaps unsurprising) that Elections Canada said that they got no prior notice about the portions of the agreement that call for the exploration of three days of elections, allowing people to vote at any polling place in the riding, or improving the process of mail-in ballots. Some of those may be unwieldy or impossible, but the agreement’s language does specify that they would “work with Elections Canada to explore ways to expand the ability for people to vote,” so these ideas are not iron-clad. On the reconciliation front, there are hopes that the promise of stability that the agreement provides will help accelerate some timelines toward progress.

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