Tag Archives: Jason Kenney

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: A promise of extra-illegality

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On a day of more organized protests outside of hospitals around the country, prime minister Justin Trudeau has decided the way to deal with this is…more criminal sanctions. Which is ridiculous, because there are already criminal sanctions around nuisance, harassment, and intimidation, and creating a law specifically for healthcare workers is kind of ridiculous and merely clogs up the criminal code – and I don’t care that they think they’re sending some kind of message. There are existing laws and police should enforce them. Of course, the NDP are saying that this was their idea first, while in more technical terms, Singh says that the victims being healthcare workers should be considered an aggravating factor during sentencing, but the effect is largely the same – this is virtue signalling using the Criminal Code rather than a useful exercise in enforcing existing laws.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1437477651225133056

In Alberta, however, premier Jason Kenney has been warning that he can use the province’s recent law about critical infrastructure – designed to criminalise Indigenous protesters who blockade railways or pipelines – and how they can apply to this situation because the law is so broadly worded. That alone should be concerning about how this law was intended to be applied, but nevertheless, this does appear to be an unforeseen use for this particular piece of legislation.

Meanwhile, Althia Raj worries about Trudeau inflaming “divisions” in the country as the PPC gains more followers among these protesters and the anti-vaxx crowd, but this is a  credulous take if I ever heard one. These are not rational actors we are dealing with. They are part of an embrace of conspiracy theory that is happening across the Western world, for whatever the reason, and this is a very big problem. I’m not sure I see the utility in appealing for Trudeau to be soft-peddling to these conspiracy theorists, but I will note that there has been one party who has been winking and nodding to these conspiracy theories, and even going to far as to promulgating them in the House of Commons, and that party is not the one that Trudeau leads. There are consequences for O’Toole and company for doing so, and we are reaping what they’ve sown. It’s too bad that people in the media are not calling it out.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1437467693934854149

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Roundup: Grading the parties’ sincerity on climate

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One of the great things about the policy landscape in Canada are the number of professors out there who are willing to devote their time and energy to providing advice to political parties, or who will be willing to evaluate their proposals. We had an example of this as professor Mark Jaccard at Simon Fraser University went and checked over the parties’ environmental platforms and did the modelling on them, and then graded them – and the Liberals came out ahead by quite a margin (and in the interest of trying to look “balanced,” the CBC declared that the Conservatives were “not far behind,” though it was literally the difference between an A- and a D).

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1433770709730344962

The full study not only evaluates the targets, but the policies and costs as well – because there are economic costs to some of these plans. Interestingly, he also tests the sincerity of those plans, which is not only a sense of how feasible they are, but also their history as a party of a willingness to do the heavy lifting, and that’s a pretty important measure. “Beware of politicians who promise big but have not subjected their promises and plans to assessment by independent climate policy modellers. In this regard, the NDP and Greens are suspect,” Jaccard writes, and it’s worth reading through why he gives them the scores he does. The economic damage that the NDP plan promises to do would never be agreed to by their union base, and the fact that it would require a police state for them to set the kinds of binding carbon budgets that they propose are demonstrations about how unserious the policies are.

What is disappointing in this is that the NDP in particular started making personal attacks against Jaccard, and trying to build lame conspiracy theories that he is somehow being paid off to pump up the Liberals and talk down the NDP, which is both ridiculous and is the kinds of sore loser tactics that we’ve come to expect. (Seriously, my reply column on a daily basis is full of Dippers with hurt feelings because I have the temerity to point out the reality of things like jurisdiction or the fact that you can’t willpower things into existence). Elizabeth May was among those who took swipes at Jaccard, for the temerity of being an economist and not a climate scientist – which is also ridiculous because economics is literally the science of allocating scare resources, and the fact that climate scientists are not offering policy solutions. Science is not policy, and that’s why it’s important to understand the difference between the two and how they complement one another – providing that you’re willing to listen and not get in a huff because someone pointed out that your implementation plans don’t belong in the real world.

https://twitter.com/MarkJaccard/status/1433891783524720641

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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: What open nominations?

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Do you remember when the Liberals considered themselves the party of open nominations? And how they were always going to uphold the democratic right of riding associations to run fair, open and transparent processes to select the candidates that would appear on the ballot for them? Because apparently the party has put this particular bit of democracy, openness and transparency down the memory hole as they continue to acclaim candidates from across the country. In two of these cases, the acclamations came a mere day after the incumbents announced that they weren’t running again, and in one of those ridings – Kanata-Carleton – there was the making of a contested nomination as rumours swirled that Karen McCrimmon wasn’t going to run again, and the riding association was frustrated that they couldn’t get any kind of answer from the party on how and when to run said contested nomination.

Now, the party is going to defend its honour by pointing out that their rules state that they can declare a state of “electoral urgency” to bypass the nomination process, but this is more of the Liberals’ penchant of letting the ends justify the means. They created the rules that were easily gamed, and frankly, the “electoral urgency” clause is a load of bullshit because they were using it in 2019 in the months before the election when they knew they had four years to have this process ongoing because there was a fixed election date under a majority parliament, so there were no surprises. Yes, the pandemic has made nomination races tougher because of public health restrictions, and the party has come under fire for using a verification system that includes facial recognition technology (which BC’s privacy commissioner is investigating, per that province’s laws), but again, these were things that the party should have been cognisant of and dealing with rather than simply wringing their hands and pulling the “electoral urgency” alarm to fast-track their hand-picked candidates, thwarting local democracy, and accountability.

Open nominations are one of the most important and fundamental building blocks of our democratic system. When parties flout those rules, it hurts the entire system – especially as it cements even more power in the leaders’ offices. That the Liberals are so blatantly ignoring their own supposed values in this crucial stage of the democratic process is a sign that the way the party rewrote their constitution to fit the Trudeau era is a very real problem that they are going to have to do a lot of soul-searching to address, especially when that age comes to its inevitable end.

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Roundup: Kenney announces his next big distraction

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By now you’ve heard that Jason Kenney has announced the referendum questions that Alberta will be voting on in October as part of Kenney’s mass distraction plans. It’s unheard of to have multiple referendum questions – in this case, daylight savings and removing equalisation from the Constitution – on top of an unconstitutional sideshow of Senate “nominee elections,” and yet Kenney is putting these all together with the upcoming municipal elections. This has the bonus for Kenney of muddying the waters of those elections, where more progressive candidates tend to do better, particularly in the cities, and he gets to claim that he saves money by holding them at the same time, but this is a lie. Municipal elections are run by the municipalities themselves, while these referenda and bogus “nominee elections” are held by Elections Alberta, and just because they happen at the same time and can co-locate spaces doesn’t change the fact that it going to cost more.

The thing is, the referendum on equalization won’t actually do anything because even if they sent a message to the rest of Canada and brought everyone to the table to negotiate, the only thing that’s in the Constitution is the principle of equalization – the formula itself is federal legislation, because the programme is paid out of federal general revenues. But Kenney is content to keep lying to the public and pretending that Alberta signs a cheque every year that Quebec cashes and pays for its child care system with (which it doesn’t – they pay for that out of their own taxes, and they reap the direct economic benefits from it as well). As well, the myth that Quebec killed Energy East is being invoked (Quebec had nothing to do with it – the proponent couldn’t fill both Energy East and Keystone XL with their contracts, so Energy East was abandoned as Keystone XL looked like the more likely to reach completion – not to mention that it wouldn’t have actually served the Eastern Canadian market), which is again about stoking a faux sense of grievance. The fact that Kenney is stoking this anti-Quebec sentiment because he thinks it’ll win him points (and hopefully distract the angry mob that is gathering outside his own door) is not lost on Quebeckers when it comes to Kenney’s good friend, Erin O’Toole, looking for votes in the federal election.

But as economist Trevor Tombe keeps saying, Alberta doesn’t need equalization in the same way that Bill Gates doesn’t need social assistance – Alberta is still making way more money than any other province, even with their harder times economically. The province’s deficit is not a result of equalization or money supposedly being siphoned east (again, equalization comes out of federal taxes) – it’s a result of a province that refuses to implement sales taxes or other stable revenue generation, and expecting everyone else to subsidize that choice (while also cutting corporate taxes under the illusion that it would create jobs, but didn’t). This is just Kenney handwaving and shouting “look over there!” because he knows he’s in trouble, and he needs to keep everyone focused on a different enemy. He shouldn’t be rewarded by people falling for it.

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Roundup: The jobs numbers are in

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It was jobs day at Statistics Canada yesterday, and the June figures showed that there was a big recovery in part-time employment, largely in accommodation and food services, as well as retail trade – signs that the economy is starting to open back up across the country, and this was before we had any re-opening in Ontario, showing that there is still definitely room to grow. There were also more people looking for work, which meant the unemployment rate was a little higher than it might have been otherwise.

Of course, this was entirely being spun in entirely disingenuous ways by Pierre Poilievre, who has made an artform of lying with statistics. He called a press conference to decry that there was still a loss in full-time employment (never mind that full-time employment has held far steadier during the pandemic than part-time work, particularly because a lot of that part-time works is in the service industry that couldn’t operate during the mockdown/lockdowns). He decried the unemployment figure, but deliberately ignored that every country calculates their rate differently, and didn’t mention that if we calculated our rate the way the Americans do, there is a marginal difference between them.

But more to the point, he has spent the past couple of months trying to build this narrative that a job recovery projection in the budget was a promise to have fully restored the million jobs lost from the start of the pandemic by this point. Never mind that we had a third wave that was far deeper and longer than could have been anticipated when those projections were made (and you can thank murderclown premiers for reopening too soon before the second wave had subsided, and then waited too long to impose new measures once again), or that projections are not really promises. Yes, there is still more work to do in order to recover the employment we had pre-pandemic and to do the work of removing barriers so that women and minorities can better participate. But there’s no need to lie with statistics to make a point or as a means of trying to hold the government to account for its actions (or inaction) during this pandemic.

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Roundup: Trudeau’s feeling punchy in Calgary

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continues his tour of the country as the pandemic wanes, and yesterday stopped in Calgary to meet with both Jason Kenney and Naheed Nenshi, and there were some particular notes that Trudeau’s tone had changed, and that he was more combative than he has been in the past – in particular, taking shots at Kenney’s government over their resistance to dealing with climate change and the economic opportunities that come with the green economy, and that Kenney had endorsed banning niqabs in the country as an example of how the previous government didn’t take systemic racism seriously. (And if anyone wants to point out that Kenney was the party’s “ethnic outreach” minister, remember that his particular focus was on communities where they felt they could target social conservative votes, citing their mutual dislike of the gays, marijuana, and so on).

There was in particular some politics being played about the announcement over funding for Calgary’s Green Line LRT project, where the province – which has been apparently slow-walking it for a year now – approved the funding in a press release shortly before Trudeau’s announcement, and weren’t at the announcement themselves, which sounds about typical.

Trudeau, meanwhile, pushed back against the notion that there is some kind of unfairness in equalisation, and that Alberta is being somehow disadvantaged. While he pointed out that the current formula was negotiated with Kenney at the Cabinet table, it bears repeating that equalisation is not the province writing cheques to one another – it comes out of general revenues from federal taxes, and Alberta pays the highest federal taxes because they have the highest incomes in the country by far – even during these tougher economic times for the province as a result of the downturn in the oil market. Not that Kenney is going to tell the truth of how it works when he’s trying to nurse a faux grievance in order to score political points (much as he’s doing with his bullshit “senate nominee elections”). Part of this newfound punchiness on Trudeau’s part has to do with the narrative of election speculation, but also that Kenney has been weakened, and the Conservatives nationally are losing ground, and Trudeau likely sees an opening. There is talk that they could take several seats in Edmonton and Calgary thanks to both softer Conservative numbers and the fact that they could lose ground on their right flank to the swivel-eyed loons in the “separatist” Maverick Party, which gives the Liberals more of an opening. Trudeau also made the point that they want Alberta to have representation in the government, and perhaps people learned their lesson after shutting them out in the province out of spite, only to realize they made a big mistake afterward. We’ll see where it goes, but the shift in tone is notable.

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Roundup: Lies about inflation and the central bank

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For weeks, the Conservatives (and Pierre Poilievre in particular) have been making a bunch of bogus and nonsensical attacks against the government and what they term the “inflation tax,” which makes absolutely no sense, but is predicated on the wild notion that the Bank of Canada is allegedly printing money to finance the government’s “out of control” deficits, and that this is going to drive up inflation and turn us into Venezuela. It’s bullshit – the Bank of Canada is independent from government (and it should be shocking that the Conservatives are suggesting otherwise given the history of the independence of the central bank in this country), quantitative easing is not “printing money,” and given that a year ago, in the early days of the pandemic, we were facing deflation as a country, an expansionary monetary policy was the right move to make. We’re still in need of stimulus, because the recovery has been so uneven, but the Bank of Canada knows this, because it’s their job.

https://twitter.com/trevortombe/status/1405250437838610432

With this in mind, it was no surprise yesterday that when the inflation figures were reported, the fact that it clocked in at an annualized 3.6% had the Conservatives, and Erin O’Toole in particular, trying to make hay of this – and media outlets didn’t help with their headlines that this was the highest rate in a decade, without putting that in proper context. Now, part of that is the base effect of last year’s massive drop, which is going to take time to work itself out in the data; but it’s also in part based on factors from right now, the most important of which is housing prices, which have skyrocketed as demand has outstripped supply. None of this is a surprise, and none of this has anything to do with the size of the federal deficit or the Bank of Canada’s quantitative easing, and yet that is the narrative being painted. It didn’t help that O’Toole’s examples lacked any logical consistency, such as blaming increases in post-secondary education on the federal government, when that’s a provincial jurisdiction. Not that truth matters.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1405152487821168642

Compounding this, however, is the completely irresponsible way in which this was being spun by shows like Power & Politics, where the framing was “the cost of everything is going up!” followed by asking panellists if the government should do something about it. And to their credit, most of those panellists said no, leave it for the Bank of Canada, but the fact that the host kept torqueing this notion about “prices are rising!” and trying to constantly get people to say something – anything – inflammatory about inflation, was not only irresponsible, but shows actual contempt for proper economics reporting by the gods damned CBC. They don’t care about actual information or reasonable discussion, they want the false balance of opposed partisans battling it out, and the “drama” that creates. It does such a disservice to everyone that it amazes me that they can get away with it.

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Roundup: Chalk up another moral victory

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The NDP did what they are very good at yesterday, which is to get a non-binding motion passed in the House of Commons, and declare a moral victory in spite of the fact that it does little more than make a statement. In this case, it was their Supply Day motion on calling on the government to drop their litigation on both the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decision around First Nations children taken into foster care, while the second is round survivors of the St. Anne’s residential school. The Cabinet abstained from the vote, while most Liberal backbenchers voted for it – agreeing in principle to parts of the motion, and making a statement, but not binding the government to do anything. And while the NDP pats themselves on the back and says that they are “forcing” the government to drop the litigation, it does no such thing. It was merely the House of Commons voicing an opinion.

Part of the problem is that there is very little ability for people to discuss what the litigation is actually about in a meaningful way. According to Singh and company, this is about “taking First Nations kids to court,” which isn’t it. As a lawyer, Singh very well knows that there are complex issues that governments are obligated to sort out, especially if there is a bad precedent that it can set. In the case of the Tribunal decision, the government says they will pay compensation – and they are negotiating with two other class action lawsuits on similar matters to do just that – but the Tribunal ordered individual remedies for a systemic claim, which it should not be able to do, if the logic holds from previous Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence that said that they could not offer systemic remedies for individual claims. The government, however, mumbles about the jurisdiction of the Tribunal rather than explaining this, and it means they look like the bad guys. With the St. Anne’s case, I’m less familiar but the government’s line has been that they are seeking clarity on some five percent of survivors who have not yet been compensated, and in some of those cases could be getting more compensation for some of those five percent – because complex issues can require complex litigation to solve.

Unfortunately, that’s not what most journalists will sort out. Instead, we get the usual both-sidesing of this, where you get the advocates insisting the government is being “incomprehensible,” and the government gives some pat talking points, and they leave it at that. It’s why, for the Tribunal litigation, I went and talked to law professors and got some outside perspective on what the issues actually are, and why they matter for a government to bother litigating them. We’re being failed because most journalists are too incurious to sort the issues out, and that’s a problem. Legal stories are complex, but they deserve some attention paid to them so that we’re not left with the misleading narratives that are now being allowed to circulate unchallenged. Media needs to do better.

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