Tag Archives: GLBT

Roundup: The admiral needs to take the hint

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Things are looking pretty dire for Admiral Art McDonald, the former-ish Chief of Defence Staff, whose little tantrum last week in writing a letter to the general and flag officers to demand his job back (not that they could do anything about it) is looking more and more impolitic. Why? Because the military police are now pushing back to say that he wasn’t “exonerated” as McDonald claimed in his letter, but rather that there was insufficient evidence to lay charges, which is not the same thing as the allegation being unfounded. And McDonald’s accuser is speaking out publicly and pointing to witnesses to the incident, which the military won’t say whether they were interviewed or not as part of their investigation. Nevertheless, the incident makes it even clearer that McDonald doesn’t understand civilian control and doesn’t have the character and temperament necessary to guide the Forces through this particular period of culture change, and it’s better for him – and everyone else – that he get the hint and retire before consequences follow from that letter.

Meanwhile, it seems that the former commandant of the Canadian Forces School of Military Intelligence is serving as a staff officer in Ottawa after being relieved of his command following an investigation into allegations of inappropriate conduct, which signals that there aren’t consequences if people simply get moved around.

Interested observers are wondering what is taking the government so long to take more action on what is going on with the senior ranks in the military, or to formally make General Wayne Eyre the permanent Chief of Defence Staff, formally taking McDonald’s reinstatement off the table (though he should have taken the hint when Eyre got promoted to full general). There is speculation that they are waiting for the Cabinet shuffle, but one would think that they’d want to make changes now, so that a fresh minister won’t have to come in and do the cleaning out on his or her first day rather than letting Sajjan do it now, and let his successor come in fresh. But that might require this minister and this government to have a modicum of self-awareness, and which would be your answer as to why they haven’t.

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Roundup: A surplus thanks to federal funds

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Something jumped out at me yesterday while doomscrolling, which was New Brunswick crowing that they have a bigger-than-expected surplus thanks to all of the additional federal dollars that were sent to the province because of the pandemic. And it stuck in my craw a bit – provinces have been crying poor when it comes to healthcare dollars and around doing things like improving long-term care, and then they turn around and pat themselves on the back for running surpluses as a result of federal dollars. It doesn’t quite add up.

The fact that certain provinces have been using federal pandemic dollars to pad their bottom lines is a problem for Confederation, particularly as these very same provinces are demanding that the federal government turn over even higher healthcare transfers, and justifying it with historically inaccurate talking points about the original share of healthcare spending without also recognizing the other agreements made in the late 1970s. The current federal government is certainly willing to spend the money, but they have also learned that they don’t want to get burned by it like previous governments have. Recall that when the health transfer escalator was at an unsustainable six percent per year, provincial healthcare spending growth was in the low two-percent range, meaning those additional dollars were spent on other things that did not improve the healthcare system. Similarly, when Stephen Harper tried to buy peace with Quebec and sign a huge cheque to correct a fictional “fiscal imbalance,” the provincial government turned around and cut taxes, which wasn’t the intent of said funding, and yet it happened.

It’s with this in mind that Trudeau has promised that there will be strings attached to future health transfers, and he laid out what many of those strings will be in the campaign, whether it’s hiring targets for doctors and nurses, or minimum salaries for long-term care workers. And yes, premiers will bellyache about it, and the opposition parties will take up those cries in the House of Commons, but we have seen repeatedly over this pandemic that the provinces will demand money and then not spend the money they do get. Time for some accountability for dollars – because it’s all coming from the same taxpayer in the end, regardless of which level of government is trying to make their bottom line look better.

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Roundup: Return of the two Michaels

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Friday was very much an exercise in life coming at one fast, as Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with American authorities, and hours later, the extradition order she was under was dropped and she was free to return to China. A few hours after that, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were on their way back to Canada, the fig leaf that their arrests were not hostage diplomacy in retaliation for Meng’s arrest completely gone, and they arrived on Canadian soil in the early hours of Saturday morning, with prime minister Justin Trudeau and foreign affairs minister Marc Garneau greeting them on the tarmac in Calgary. Spavor debarked there, Kovrig then continued onto Toronto, where he was met by his estranged wife and his sister.

With all of this in mind, there are questions as to where our relationship with China goes next. Garneau says that they are “eyes wide open,” and that they are now following a four-fold approach to China: “coexist,” “compete,” “co-operate,” and “challenge” – which seems to be a more articulate policy direction than the “tough but smart” that Garneau’s predecessor, François-Philippe Champagne stated several months ago. This certainly came up during the election, but the Liberals didn’t articulate much of a foreign policy in their platform, and we got very little in the way of debate on the subject. It is not insignificant, however, that Canada did lead a group of Western allies in a pact against the use of hostage diplomacy, whether practice by China or others (and there are others), so it’s not like the government sat on their hands the whole time either. It will also be exceedingly difficult to disentangle our trade from China – particularly in our agricultural sector – so it will be very interesting to see what this process looks like going forward over the next couple of years.

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Roundup: Misleading to the point of misinformation

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As they tend to do after every election concludes, Power & Politics had David Meslin on to talk about electoral reform, because apparently, we are going to re-litigate it once again. (The saving grace is that this time they didn’t have Meslin using his LEGO to show different PR results). The problem? The graphic that the show produced as an example of how the results of this election would be under PR was essentially misinformation.

https://twitter.com/Catelli2Oh/status/1440818668217135110

The assumptions made to produce said chart is that Canada would employ a system of pure proportional representation, and then allocate seats in that regard. But this would be a PR system that nobody is actually asking for, and which would be unconstitutional because seats are allocated on a provincial basis, while such a system would be unable to take that into account under the current 338 seat model. That’s a pretty big deal. Most people advocate for some form of mixed-member proportional, where you vote for a local MP, and then vote a second time for a party, which will then allocate someone from a list into a number of seats designed as “top-ups” to make the seats more closely resemble the “popular vote” (even though such a thing is a logical fallacy under our current vote construction). Furthermore, it would assume that we’d have the same parties, which is unlikely (and Meslin went at great length about how great it would be for the big tent parties to break up), and even more to the point, under a different voting system, voting behaviours would be different. With all of this in mind, the fact that the gods damned CBC produced an infographic with a misleading characterisation of what Monday’s vote might have looked like under PR is not just irresponsible – it’s downright misinformation.

It’s also concerning that Meslin thinks that as many as 21 seats for the People’s Party under such a system is no big deal, and he thinks we should have more radical parties for the sake of “innovation.” The notion of a far-right party getting 21 seats and putting them in the potential position to be kingmakers in a coalition government is frightening to say the least, but we’ve also seen in other countries that use PR, such as Germany and the Netherlands, that when far-right parties breach the threshold to attain seats, they grow in popularity because they are given respectability and a platform to espouse their views. One of the great strengths of big-tent parties, that Meslin completely ignored, is that they moderate extremes, which is actually a good thing in politics. Big tent parties build coalitions of regions and factions within themselves, rather than having smaller parties building the coalitions externally post-election. It’s one reason why radical parties are short-lived, and why disruptive parties tend to “self-correct” within a couple of election cycles, because they can’t maintain the necessary organisation that Canada requires. These are features of our system – not bugs, and it would be great if CBC didn’t turn to the same guy every election to make the same misleading points, time and again.

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Roundup: Sitting on money, waiting for ICU to collapse

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In case it had escaped you that the incompetent murderclowns who run Ontario are incompetent, we learned yesterday that Doug Ford and his merry band of murderclowns sat on the entire $2.7 billion additional health transfer from the federal government that was supposed to go toward the COVID response, and, well, didn’t. This was during the second and third waves, which didn’t need to happen, and they were explicitly warned that reopening would mean disaster, and they did it anyway. They had money to help them improve testing, tracing, and doing things like improving ventilation in schools, and they didn’t. They sat on it to pad their bottom line.

Is there a lesson here? Yes – don’t give provinces more money without strings attached. You would think that this should be obvious, given that before Jim Flaherty unilaterally changed the transfer escalator from six percent to a minimum of three or GDP growth, we know that provinces were not spending that health transfer only on health – the growth in health spending was far below the growth in the health transfer. For them to demand yet more money with no strings attached – particularly for outcomes – while we have examples like Ford here, who are using the money to reduce their deficit in spite of all the lives that could have been saved it was actually deployed meaningfully, there should be no argument. If they want the money, they need to have metrics and outcomes to ensure that it’s being spent on what it’s supposed to be.

Meanwhile in Alberta, the COVID situation has been allowed to deteriorate so badly that ICUs could be overrun in ten days, forcing doctors to triage who gets ventilators and who will be allowed to die. With this in mind, Jason Kenney finally relented and started re-imposing public health restrictions, but in a byzantine and complex manner, and has said they will allow vaccine certificates or a “restriction exemption program,” because they can’t actually call it a vaccine passport or certificate. Kenney also both apologised for the situation and then did not apologise for lifting the restrictions when he did, so that clarifies things. I’m curious to see if this ricochets through the federal campaign – some Conservatives seem to think it will. In either case, Jason Kenney, his health minister and chief medical officer of health all should be resigning for letting this foreseeable tragedy happen on their watch, but we all know that they won’t, because what does accountability matter any longer?

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Roundup: Substance-free gong show, English debate edition

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The English debate, with its much higher stakes, was no better than the French. It too lacked substance or any meaningful exchanges because they had a schedule of topics to get through, and wouldn’t you know it, they weren’t going to let exchanges get interesting or involved – they just wanted to move on. Justin Trudeau tried to paint Erin O’Toole as weak, Singh tried to paint Trudeau as unable to fulfil promises. Trudeau warned that Singh was trying to instil cynicism among progressives because he refused to acknowledge any work done. Annamie Paul kept insisting that the key to everything was to work together. And Yves-François Blanchet and moderator Shachi Kurl started getting into it, and that gave Blanchet the victim card he was looking for in the Quebec media, particularly around Bill 21.

https://twitter.com/ChrisGNardi/status/1436172199430328323

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1436142521118334983

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1436154327169581083

The fact that they are still moaning the fact that we’re in an election is getting really tiresome – but not quite as tiresome as the fact that Trudeau still can’t make a convincing case for it. He keeps trying to go hard on insisting there are huge and sharp divisions between the different parties, which is why he needs the electoral support to carry on making tough choices about the pandemic. What he won’t spell out is that he needs that support because the spring session was a toxic swamp that stalled virtually all bills for months, including the budget implementation bill for the fall economic update and all of the pandemic supports therein. The fact that he refuses to say that, for whatever “happy warrior” shtick he thinks is going to win him points, just gives the other parties a pass for their petty bullshit in the spring, and the campaign of dishonesty that accompanied it, and it just keeps him from making an actual case. I don’t get it, but clearly this hasn’t blown over.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1436137253504536581

If you need lists of takeaways, you have plenty to choose from – CTV, Maclean’s, the Star, and CBC. The CBC also has a half-assed fact-check of things mentioned during the debate.

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Roundup: A lack of self-awareness in the face of a violent mob

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The cancellation of Justin Trudeau’s planned rally on Friday evening because of the growing number of angry protesters has given some pause to members of the media about how things got so bad, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of self-reflection on too many people out there. While both Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh have denounced the violent protesters, and O’Toole and local candidate Kyle Seeback kicking their volunteers who were part of the mob off of their campaigns, there remains a complete lack of self-awareness on their part. O’Toole not only endorses the kinds of shitposters that fuel this toxic outrage, but he has gone so far as to hire them, both for his leadership and for the campaign. The actively contributes to this discourse through winking and nodding to them, repeating their conspiracy theories in the House of Commons either directly or indirectly, and he directly contributes to this kind of poisoned discourse. Likewise, Conservative Michelle Rempel Garner is speaking out about being accosted and harassed on her campaign, but there is nary a word of acknowledgement about how she has fed this crowd, or the fact that she sends her own army of trolls and flying monkeys against those she disagrees with (and I know people who have been on the receiving end of this).

Most galling, however, are the media figures like John Ivison, who have essentially blamed Trudeau himself for this state of affairs.

There are others who have been bringing up the testimony of former Clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Wernick, during the hearings into the Double-Hyphen Affair, when he sounded the alarm about the rising incitements to violence that were happening on social media – statements that were roundly ridiculed by members of the media. I’d say that perhaps we should be looking for some self-awareness out of this, but I have serious doubts that it’s even possible among the majority of them. But maybe I’m just getting cynical.

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Roundup: Singh needs to start giving details

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We have seen plenty of coverage thus far in the election about how popular Jagmeet Singh is, and how authentic he seems to his audience, and plenty about his personal likeability, but I am not seeing a lot that is pushing back against the things he is proposing. We have a couple of such examples yesterday, first with his pharmacare proposal. Essentially, the current government has put in the work, and established the Canada Drug Agency transition office, and thus far has signed up one province – Prince Edward Island. The other premiers have all balked at this, including the NDP premier of British Columbia, John Horgan, which I find mighty interesting in the current context. So, just what would Singh do differently? Well, he won’t say. Per the CBC:

When pressed by reporters on how he would get the provinces to sign onto his plan, Singh was light on details but committed to partnering with provincial and territorial governments. “We’d work with provinces and territories, I know it’s going to be hard work, but it’s going to save families money,” he said.

Great. He’ll “partner” with provinces that have thus far said no, and lo, he’ll do it by next year when it’s going to take years to negotiate a national formulary for said programme – something that seems to be a surprise to Singh, if you go by their stunt of a private members’ bill in the previous parliament, where they essentially proposed a framework where the provinces pay for prescription drugs and the federal government will then sign over a cheque. Yeah, it doesn’t really work like that. But I haven’t seen this being hammered home – you can’t just keep handwaving promises, particularly promises in areas of provincial jurisdiction, and not provide details on how you’ll accomplish it, and no, just promising to “work with” those provinces is not good enough. The current government has been doing that, and if you’re going to complain that they haven’t moved fast enough, then you need to explain how you’re going to do it differently. And no, the fact that you’re not Justin Trudeau is not an answer.

But he didn’t stop there. No, he also opined on vaccine passports, saying that the federal government should just go ahead and implement it federally – but again, didn’t say how they should, given that they don’t control the vaccination data because the delivery of healthcare is a provincial jurisdiction. These particular details matter, and you can’t just handwave them away. We need to start pressing Singh for details, because his answers aren’t good enough, and if he’s going to present himself as a serious contender for government, he needs to be asked the implementation questions so that he can answer them – and be made to answer them.

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Roundup: Let’s just ignore the toxic spring

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We are coming out of the first week of the campaign, and we still see a bunch of pundits and talking heads questioning why the Liberals called it in the first place, and I have to wonder just how much they paid attention to what went on during the last session of Parliament. It was a toxic environment – the most toxic I have seen in over a decade. Non-money bills didn’t advance for months because of procedural warfare, and at least one pandemic support bill was months late in being able to deliver for people who needed it. Committees were holding witch-hunts and the civil service was busy sending millions of pages to committees on wild goose chases. But did anyone bother to explain this? Not really, because then it would become a “process story,” which we are supposed to be allergic to. Putting the events of the spring into context, along with some of the considerations about timing (there are municipal elections in Quebec and Alberta in October) should be part of the media’s job, so that we’re not just being stenographers to what the parties are telling us (so we can then both-sides it). But that might be too much effort.

Of course, this is Justin Trudeau, and while he was perfectly happy to point out the obstruction on the days leading up to dissolution, once the campaign started, he was all about his upbeat, positive narratives, and talking about people being given a say in the “most important election since 1945,” because that’s his campaign persona and style – upbeat, upbeat, upbeat. Happy-clappy at all times. That doesn’t mean that those of us who follow Parliament can’t look past it and point out what was going on.

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Roundup: A debasing “debate” on inflation

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Because sometimes this is a media criticism blog, I find myself outraged at the hack job that Power & Politics has been doing on this bullshit story about inflation, and it’s turned to being completely irresponsible. Yesterday was a perfect example of how shows like this are more interested in horserace bullshit than they are in economics, and lo, for an MP panel, the host wanted each party to give a single example of how their party would tackle inflation, even if it’s a complex issue, and lo, each MP gave a pitch to their party’s platform. Nothing about monetary policy and the Bank of Canada and its mandate – nothing. Just parties serving up their talking points to one another. So enlightening! Later, during the “Power Panel,” said host kept saying “we’re not going to talk about monetary policy” when talking about inflation, and that makes about as much sense as talking about climate change while declaring you’re not going to talk about GHG emissions. It’s kind of central to the point.

More to the point, the show – and several other outlets – used a truncated quote from Justin Trudeau to frame his response in a misleading way. To wit, the question he was asked by Bloomberg:

 You mentioned the Bank of Canada’s mandate, that mandate is expiring at the end of this year. If re-elected, the review, or the extension of the mandate is probably the first big economic policy decision you will make after the election. There is some talk of allowing the Bank of Canada to make some tweaks to its mandate to give it the flexibility to tolerate higher inflation and help the economy a little bit more at this difficult time. Do you have a position on the mandate? Would you support a slightly higher tolerance for inflation?

And Trudeau’s answer:

I don’t know. When I think about the biggest, most important economic policy that this government, if re-elected, would move forward, you’ll forgive me if I don’t think about monetary policy. You’ll understand that I think about families. When we first got elected in 2015, the very first thing we did was raise taxes on the wealthiest one per cent so we could lower them for the middle class. Similarly, if re-elected, the Liberal government will continue to invest in supports for families, for students, for seniors. Investing in housing, because we know that it is not right that so many people right here in the Lower Mainland and indeed across the country can’t afford their first home. We know that these are the policies that make a difference in the growth of our country, in the jobs people get, and the opportunities people have to grow and prosper. That is what we will stay focused on.

The clear implication is that he’s not focused on the Bank of Canada’s mandate, but on his own affordability agenda. But all anyone picked up on was “I don’t think about monetary policy,” and turning that into him being flip, and the host of P&P went so far as to compare it to Trudeau saying that budgets balance themselves – itself a truncated quote, where the original line, when asked about a commitment to balancing the budget, was: “The commitment needs to be a commitment to grow the economy and the budget will balance itself.” Which is true. Erin O’Toole is making the same pledge in his platform.

While I yelled at the TV over Twitter, my reply column filled up with assertions that the show was in the tank for the Conservatives, or that they were out to get Trudeau, but that’s not really the case. They’re not really in the tank for anyone – they want to get clips that will generate headlines and simplistic narratives, and that’s why they ask inflammatory questions designed to give explosive answers, and why they truncate quotes to be as sensational as possible. Part of this is the current host’s fault – she’s a reporter who is geared toward getting a “gold quote” out of people rather than a nuanced understanding of the situation. A bigger problem is the people who produce the show, who are more concerned with partisan talking heads giving simplistic and facile responses than actually understanding what is going on, and they’ve chosen the laziest, least-effort format to fill air time and generate some kind of spark of interest, which is usually partisans sniping at one another. Yes, it’s a big problem for our civic literacy, and it hurts our media literacy as well. Nobody was served by the “debate” on inflation, particularly as there was no context to what it was about, or what monetary policy means, and all it did was make everyone dumber. This kind of “journalism” has become a scourge.

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