Tag Archives: India

Roundup: Google signs a deal to avoid transparency

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With days to go before the Online News Act would start applying, Google has come to an agreement that sees it pay $100 million per year into a fund, rather than to have individual deals with news outlets. This is one of the things that seems to escape most of the critics of the Act—this was about ensuring that the deals that Google and Facebook were already signing with news outlets were subject to transparency and had an arbitrator—the CRTC—at the ready in the case of disputes. This was never a “link tax” or some such nonsense, it was about putting structure into the same deals that were already being made, and it was the transparency that they objected to. This deal ensures that they are not subjected to that transparency, because it’s one lump sum, which is the real takeaway from this deal.

Of course, none of this fixes the underlying problem with is the domination of the ad tech space where Google and Facebook control all aspects of it and are siphoning money at each stage, which is why they have starved news outlets of advertising revenues. Of course, nobody wants to talk about that aspect. To deal with this, there still needs to be stronger anti-trust action, particularly in the US, but this deal is a start, nevertheless.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians claimed that they launched missiles from their Black Sea fleet against “military targets,” but nothing has been verified. Ukraine’s foreign minister says that the EU has delivered about 300,000 of its promised munitions shells so far.

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Roundup: Clawing back disability benefits

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Because the provinces continue to be the absolute worst level of government in the country, we see from the briefing binder of Ontario’s social services minister that the province is looking at ways to “mitigate costs” by clawing back provincial disability support payments once the federal Canadian Disability Benefit gets underway. As you might have guessed, this is entirely the outcome that the federal government has been trying to avoid, and why Carla Qualtrough spent months trying to negotiate with provinces in the lead-up to the framework legislation being passed.

This happened a lot during the height of the pandemic, when certain provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan clawed back any kind of social supports when people accessed CERB, because of course they did. It’s kind of perverse the way that provinces are in the business of literally legislating poverty for vulnerable groups like people with disabilities who generally cannot work (which I should point out is not the same as the programme in the US, where “disability” tends to have a different connotation than in Canada). There is a kind of meanness to it that goes beyond the judgmental protestant work ethic that this seems to stem from.

We’ll see what kinds of safeguards the federal government tries to build into the system as the regulations for these payments—which they point out are intended as an income supplement and not a replacement programme—are rolled out (eventually). But because of the division of powers, there may not be any legislative or regulatory mechanism they could use to protect these payments from clawbacks, and it may rely on negotiations and signed agreements, which is probably easier said than done (particularly as many of these premiers are the absolute worst).

Ukraine Dispatch:

Five people were wounded as part of the largest attack on Kyiv since the start of the war, timed for the commemoration of the Holodomor. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told an international food security conference that Ukraine needs more air defences in order to protect its grain exports, as Russia has been targeting them in recent months.

https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1728719618317910451

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Roundup: More reactions to the economic update

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Reactions to the Fall Economic Statement continue to roll in, so I figured I would highlight a couple of them. On the subject of housing, pretty much everyone is unhappy with what was on offer, in spite of the fact that the federal government didn’t have a lot of room to manoeuvre as they try to avoid juicing economic growth too much, which would put upward pressure on inflation (and the provinces are already doing just that).

To that effect, here’s a thread from Mike Moffatt on things the federal government could have done that won’t impact the inflation situation.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1727301177833132254

Kevin Milligan delves into the debt and deficit figures in this thread, and provides a dose of perspective sauce for all of the hyperventilating that is coming from certain quarters and voices, particularly as debt servicing charges have risen. As well, I’m highlighting this one tweet about just how big the increase is in relative and historical terms, because again, perspective.

As well, Lindsay Tedds explains in this thread why she thinks the government’s plans to limit short-term rentals is going to be far easier said than actually done (and that they may not have thought it through).

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1727491807834177690

Ukraine Dispatch:

The death toll from the Russian strike on the hospital in Selydove has risen to three. The Russians are reported to be sending fewer troops and less equipment to Avdiivka after failing to capture it in a major assault. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned of a “difficult defence” on the eastern front as the winter cold sets in. Ukraine’s coal industry has had to start hiring women and overturning policies that barred them from working underground because of the war.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1727376980851486836

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Roundup: A “dull as hell” House

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Jean Chrétien gave an interview yesterday to mark the 30th anniversary of his election win to form government in 1993, and there’s one part in it that sticks out for me in particular, which was about his time in politics, pre-dating his becoming prime minister, which has to do with the use of television in the Chamber:

“When I became a member of Parliament, there was no TV… In the House of Commons, we had no television. In those days in the House of Commons, we didn’t have the right to read anything. We had to get up and speak. It was fun. Today, they all come with speeches prepared by kids in the office and it is dull as hell, rather than have a real debate like we had in those days.”

This is spot on. It wasn’t just the arrival of the cameras that changed things, it was the relaxation of the rules around prepared speeches. It used to be that you weren’t allowed them, with very limited exceptions—the address in reply to the Speech from the Throne, the budget, and if you needed some particular help with specific facts or figures or translation (because simultaneous interpretation was a later arrival into Parliament). When they relaxed the rule around prepared speeches, it meant MPs started reading speeches into the record; time limits started to mean that they didn’t just speak up to that twenty-minute mark, but they were expected to fill the time entirely, which again, makes for very bad prepared speeches. There’s no actual debate either—during “debate” on a bill, the period for “questions and comments” is usually reserved for recitations of established talking points, with no actual exchange. One question, one response is not actually debate. Without relying on prepared speeches, and actually being allowed to debate, it would have made for actual tension or frisson between them, and to force them to know their material.

The other thing with the arrival of television is how it changed the nature of Question Period. It became very much about trying to a) get on TV, and b) providing clips for the evening news, which is one reason why parties started to do things like asking the same question in English and in French, so that they could get clips for both news services. With the advent of social media, however, the incentives changed again, and it was about creating content for those social feeds, which could include bad behaviour to drive up engagement. This is where we’re at now. It’s not exciting, and like Chrétien says, it’s “dull has hell” because you’re just watching badly scripted performances meant entirely for the consumption of clips. Politics should not be about this.

Ukraine Dispatch:

A civilian was killed in the Kherson region early Wednesday after Russians bombed the area. Russians are ignoring their losses and pressing on at Avdiivka, Debris from downed Russian drones downed power lines near a nuclear plan in the western part of the country, knocking out power for hundreds of people. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that Ukraine will strike back if Russia attacks their power grid again this weekend. Here is a look at some Ukrainian sappers who have returned to the job of de-mining after they lost limbs doing the work.

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Roundup: Abusing authority to summon the RCMP Commissioner

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The abuse and beclowning of House of Commons committees continues apace, as the Conservatives tried to use the Access to Information, Ethics, and Privacy Committee to re-litigate the SNC-Lavalin scandal after Astroturf group Democracy Watch floated some bullshit last week about how the RCMP said they couldn’t investigate if a crime occurred because they were denied access to Cabinet-confidential documents. Never mind that no crime was ever alleged, but this was more than enough for the Conservatives to try to resurrect this dead horse, and they did so by the committee chair abusing his position to bring the head of the RCMP to testify at committee. The other parties at committee, however, were having none of this because of the abuse of procedure, and shut down the meeting, to howls of outrage by Conservatives who wanted their dog and pony show for the cameras.

https://twitter.com/MonaFortier/status/1716549067180736827

We’ll likely see said RCMP Commissioner invited back in a proper fashion in the next week or two, because the Bloc have stated that they want to hear from him, but with proper notice and preparation, so they’ll get their dog and pony show eventually. It won’t do them much good—the Commissioner told CBC on his way out of the building that there was nothing to tell, that the RCMP was satisfied that there wasn’t anything illegal once they did their due diligence, even if they couldn’t get those documents. It won’t satisfy the Conservatives or Democracy Watch, who will continue to allege conspiracies and dark deeds, and howl at the moon about cover-ups, because that’s how they get attention. (But seriously, media outlets—stop quoting Democracy Watch. They actually have no credibility and it’s a sign of lazy reporting if you rely on their quotes as a crutch).

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces say they shot down 14 drones and a cruise missile attacking the country’s south and east, but falling debris damaged a warehouse in Odesa. Russian forces pressed their attack on Avdiivka in the east, and Kupiansk, further north.

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Roundup: Fantasy readings of court decisions

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In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court of Canada decision in the Impact Assessment Act, there has been a lot of fantasy being projected on what the decision said (hint: it’s not what most everyone says, no matter which sentence they’ve cherry-picked). There’s a lot of blame on the Act for projects not moving forward, as even though many of them had approvals in hand already and the economics for those projects didn’t make sense with current oil prices (as many were conceived of when there was a belief that we were reaching peak oil and that prices would start to skyrocket as a result—oops), or as with certain LNG projects that never got off the ground, they couldn’t get buyers to sign contracts for what they hoped to produce. That’s why the handwringing over Qatar supplying Europe with LNG is particularly funny, because we just don’t have the LNG capacity on the east coast—there is no ready supply of natural gas to liquefy, so without another massive pipeline project, it would mean importing product to liquefy and re-sell to the Europeans, which is not exactly a cost-savings for them when they can get it much cheaper from Qatar.

Meanwhile, here’s Andrew Leach calling out these kinds of fantasies, particularly when they’re coming from the Alberta government.

As a bonus, Leach also calls out the excuses for inaction on the energy transition:

Ukraine Dispatch:

No word on any fresh attacks against Ukrainian cities. Meanwhile, artefacts that were stolen from occupied territories were confiscated when they were attempted to be smuggled into the US, and have now been returned to Ukraine.

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Roundup: Another diminished Auditor General Day

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It was Auditor General Day yesterday, and she had five reports that weren’t terribly complimentary of the government and its efforts, especially as some have been in the works for years and are making progress that is far too slow for the task at hand.

  1. In spite of working to make changes to the processing, there is still a massive backlog of permanent resident applications at Citizenship and Immigration, as well as a major problem with asylum claims that are taking years to be processed.
  2. The efforts to combat racism in government departments and the RCMP are falling short (which is not a huge surprise because this government has a particular problem of saying “intersectional” and “GBA+” and assuming that it will magically fix things rather than doing the actual hard work).
  3. The work to modernise the critical IT infrastructure of the government, particularly when it comes to delivering services Canadians rely on, is getting worse and Treasury Board doesn’t have plans yet on how to replace some of it (which should be alarming).
  4. Modernising the delivery of benefits like CPP, EI, and OAS is behind schedule and facing cost overruns, because of course it is.
  5. Canadians can’t get access to critical antimicrobial drugs as drug resistant strains get worse, and while data collection is improving, there remain gaps in access, which the Pandemic made worse.

You might also note that only three of those five items had news stories attached to them, and not all five. Even more to the point, two were Canadian Press wire stories, one came from the Globe and Mail, and that was it. The National Post had their own version of the immigration story, but of the major outlets, that was all that got covered. It used to be that on Auditor General days, the lock-up room at the OAG was packed, and each outlet sent several reporters to ensure that most of the reports got adequate coverage (some of the special audits of Crown corporations excepted). What we see now is a sad indictment of just how diminished our media capacity is, and how little value we are placing on these reports, which is a problem.

Ukraine Dispatch:

New overnight attacks focused on both the north and south of Ukraine, but no casualties have been reported yet. Russian forces resumed their onslaught of the eastern city of Avdiivka, which Ukrainian forces continued to hold at bay. Russians have also stepped up their bid to re-take the city of Kupiansk, which was liberated late last year. Meanwhile, Ukraine is looking to fill 2000 judicial vacancies (and we thought it was bad in Canada), while also looking to vet the current roster of judges for malfeasance as they work toward cleaning up corruption in order to meet the conditions for acceptance into the EU.

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Roundup: A backbencher breaks ranks

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There are tongues wagging because backbench Liberal MP Ken McDonald has twice now voted with the Conservatives on their performative motions to cut the carbon price. McDonald, who represents a rural riding in Newfoundland and Labrador, complains that the carbon price is making life too unaffordable for people in regions like his that have no choice but to heat their homes with heating oil and to drive trucks, but along the way he seems to have missed the rebate payments, which are enriched for rural Canadians in the provinces where the federal price is the system in place. (He also thinks that Steven Guilbeault is the wrong person to sell this policy because he’s too entrenched as an environmentalist).

I have some particular difficulty with this notion that there is a particular helplessness around rural Canadians when it comes to their fossil fuel use, because there are usually options that they simply ignore—at least there are in places like rural Alberta, where I’m from, but maybe it’s different in rural Newfoundland. In any case, the government has any number of programs to retrofit homes with better insulation, to exchange oil heaters for heat pumps, and too often, the notion that “I need a truck because I live in the country” tends to mean that people buy fuel-inefficient F-150s that are actually less useful for their needs than they like to pretend. In addition, the carbon price has a negligible effect on inflation, and McDonald was repeating some of the Conservatives’ talking points that don’t necessarily reflect reality so much as they “feel” like they could or should be true even though they’re not, and that’s a problem. Simply cutting the carbon price won’t have a real impact on prices, would mean not getting the rebates, and more to the point, would not push people to make changes to reduce their exposure to those prices where they can, and we need an all-hands-on-deck approach to emissions reduction.

As for McDonald, he doesn’t seem to have suffered any particular consequences for these votes, which is fine, and he shouldn’t because we should allow MPs to break ranks on some issues. That’s how things should work. But I do worry that the bigger issue here is an inability to communicate the programme and the solutions available to help his constituents instead of just buying into the Conservative lines.

Programming note: I will be taking the full long weekend off because oh boy do I ever need it after the past three weeks. See you Wednesday!

Ukraine Dispatch:

A Russian rocket struck a café and grocery store in Hroza, in the Kharkiv region, killing 51 people including a six-year-old, which is one of the deadliest single strikes. In addition, other strikes his grain silos in Izmail. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Granada, Spain, to meet with EU leaders and plead for more aid, now that the budget showdown in the US is endangering their contributions.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1709968477107138925

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Roundup: A new Speaker in a toxic environment

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The day began with the speeches from the prospective candidates for Speaker—unserious Liberal candidate Stephane Lauzon bowed out before things got started, and the rest began their speeches as to why they deserved to get the job. There were also a few fulsome (in the proper sense of the word) expressions of thanks to Anthony Rota and claims that he was a “good Speaker” when he absolutely was not, which is why we were here today. The notion of respect and decorum got mentioned time and again, because they always do, for what little good it does (because the Speaker can only do so much). Elizabeth May once again said she was running (even though her being a party leader should have been disqualifying automatically, except for the fact that because the Greens don’t have official party status was the technicality that allowed it), but her running was yet again less about being a serious candidate than it was about giving herself the opportunity to make a speech about the rules, and why the Speaker needs to give up the lists provided to him or her and use their own judgment as to who should be recognised. (I actually agree, but this is one of those areas where if the Speaker did this unilaterally there would likely be a revolt). May also made the point that Rota apparently broke his own rules in recognising the Nazi-aligned veteran, however the Speaker’s office says that those rules didn’t really apply because it wasn’t an official sitting of the Commons, and Speakers have wide discretion in any case.

In the end, Liberal MP Greg Fergus was chosen, making him the first Black Speaker in Canadian history. The choice was a surprise to me because Fergus had never shown any interest in the role prior to this past week. In fact, he has always been a pretty notorious partisan (former leader of the Young Liberals, former national director of the party, former parliamentary secretary to the prime minister), and that raises questions for me, but that’s solely my opinion. Fergus did talk about subscribing to Hansard when he was 14, and being a House of Commons page, which puts him in good stead for his respect for the Chamber and the institution, but again, he’s coming into the position as a complete neophyte with no experience as a Chair occupant, which should be a little worrying given the particular state of Canadian democracy right now, and the rancorous mood.

That rancorous mood extended to the congratulatory speeches. Prime minister Justin Trudeau’s speech danced on the edge of being partisan in his talk about what were essentially government priorities, to which Pierre Poilievre decided to one-up him and go full-partisan, that included a bizarre false history lesson where he tried to wedge his “common sense” nonsense into “common people,” and the House of Commons, with a wrong history of the name and the institution itself, before trying to compare Trudeau to King John, who was forced to sign the Magna Carta. If the words “classless jackass” crossed your mind, you would be correct, which is all the more reason why the state of Canadian democracy is in trouble, and Fergus will be hard-pressed to do much about it.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces downed 29 out of 31 Russian drones and one cruise missile in overnight attacks, while falling debris tarted fires in Dnipro. Russia claims it downed a Ukrainian missile off the coast of occupied Crimea. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was visiting troops in the country’s northeast.

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Roundup: A cut or not a cut of the defence budget?

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Yesterday morning, the CBC had a story about the department of national defence looking to cut $1 billion from its books as part of the government’s ongoing spending review, and people lost their gods damned minds, both in Canada and in some international venues. The story was based on comments that were made at committee by the chief of defence staff and the deputy minister, and they talked about how it was going to be challenging to meet these reductions while worrying about capabilities. This was a bit of a surprise, because Anita Anand had previous said that defence was going to be exempt from her cost-cutting demands, but the comments from General Eyre and the deputy minister sounded like DND volunteered to do their share (which I always treat with suspicion—the previous Auditor General made his own pledge to do his part to make cuts as part of the Deficit Reduction Action Plan™, and lo, wound up delaying badly overdue IT upgrades that his successor needed to beg Parliament for more resources to deal with). And because this is not my first rodeo, I immediately presumed that what this likely means is the accounting game of shifting certain spending into future years or re-profiling some committed dollars that they can’t spend (because they simply don’t have the capacity to spend their current allocation), but a whole lot of people who should know better freaked all the way out.

This came up in Question Period, and Bill Blair was present, but he didn’t really answer the question—he took a swipe at the Conservatives for their record of cutting defence spending to below 1 percent of GDP (indeed, here’s a look back in history of Harper complaining to Peter MacKay that he didn’t cut the military enough) and then read some bland pabulum that didn’t even approach answering the question—because that’s what this government does. It wasn’t until nearly 4 PM that Blair posted a thread to Twitter about how they were still increasing the defence budget, and these $1 billion in savings were internal measures like cutting back on travel and consultants, but noted the spending commitments they’ve made like NORAD modernisation, and ships and planes, and so on.

It absolutely mystifies me as to how this message-obsessed government took almost eight hours to craft a response to this news story that when they could have shut down the hysterical reaction to it in mere minutes had they simply sent out a similar tweet first thing in the morning. There is nothing in there to demonstrate why it took eight hours. They could also have had Blair give a reasonable response during QP that would have simply said “This reporting is exaggerated, we are looking for some efficiencies, but overall defence spending is still increasing,” and it would have defused everything. But they didn’t, either because they’re inept, or it takes them that many hours to get sign-off from Katie Telford’s office, which is a sad sign about where this government is at. But nearly eight hours for this kind of response to the story is unacceptable, and it’s a real-time demonstration in why things need to change at the top with this government.

Ukraine Dispatch:

The first American Abrams tanks are being delivered in the eastern front, in the hopes they will make a difference. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy marked the 82nd anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre by Nazi forces.

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