Tag Archives: Jason Kenney

Roundup: Telling the premiers no

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

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

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

Last sitting day

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

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Roundup: A tough case for Beyak’s expulsion

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As the end of the fall sitting in Parliament approaches, the drama in the Senate is not abating as Independent senator Mary Jane McCallum has introduced a motion to have Senator Lynn Beyak expelled from the Chamber for her ongoing racism. There is a bit of procedural legitimacy to this: there hadn’t been a formal determination on whether or not to fully reinstate Beyak after her suspension order expired, and the debate on that was not concluded when prorogation happened. What is at play, however, is that the Senate’s ethics and conflict of interest committee had recommended that Beyak’s suspension be lifted because she did finally complete proper anti-racism training, removed the offending racist letters from her website and offered a more sincere apology to the institution. Senator Murray Sinclair publicly stated that he was willing to give her another chance at redemption. McCallum, it seems, is not.

This is going to be a very tricky to pull off, however – and would be a historic first. Normally when a senator gets into a lot of ethical trouble, they will resign so that they can preserve some sense of honour (along with their pension). Beyak, however, is unlikely to do the honourable thing, and will more than likely turn herself into some kind of free speech martyr, which is where much of the danger in McCallum’s approach lies. If this is handled ham-fistedly – as in “she’s a racist and shouldn’t be a senator” – then she is likely going to find a lot of defenders coming out of the woodwork from all sides, because they will feel that she has been a) denied procedural fairness, and b) will set a terrible precedent because as soon as one person can be expelled for their beliefs, then what belief will be on the chopping block next? Yes, racism is bad – but this is where people will start to look at slippery slopes, especially in this era of “cancel culture.” More to the point, the Ethics Officer said that she did everything that was asked of her, and the committee agreed, so trying to now argue for her suspension without an iron-clad case that she has breached the rules is going to be an uphill battle.

It’s important to remember why Senators have these kinds of protections, which is to preserve institutional independence. The Senate is one line of defence in parliament against a government with a majority of seats in the Commons who can ram through unconstitutional legislation by sheer numbers. The Senate has not only an absolute veto on everything short of constitutional amendments (for which they only have a six-month suspensive veto), but they have security of tenure so that they can’t be replaced should they stand in the way of a government trying to do something like pass an unconstitutional bill. The flip-side is that it makes problematic senators much harder to get rid of, which is generally why prime ministers should be very careful about who they appoint (which Stephen Harper very obviously was not). Yes, they can discipline their own – that comes with parliamentary privilege – but I have my doubts about McCallum’s case here. She is going to have do more than just call this institutional racism.

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Roundup: Cutting the expected doses in half

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It was another big day for vaccine news, starting with a technical briefing by federal public health officials that gave a bit more clarity on what is happening. Health Canada says we could see approval of the Pfizer vaccine within seven to ten days, while we also got some more information about the roll-out plan, including how the Pfizer and Moderna roll-outs are different, that they have concluded tabletop exercises and found gaps to plug, and that a dry run is scheduled for December 14th, after which they say they will be ready to start receiving vaccines, depending of course on approvals and availability from the manufacturer. But then came the bombshell – raw materials shortages are going to mean that Pfizer has had to cut their expected 2020 production by nearly half, which will mean fewer early vaccine doses to get to healthcare workers and the most vulnerable.

And then there are the provinces. In Quebec, François Legault had to say that his attempted “moral contract” for Christmas was off the table because cases won’t go down, but he also insisted that he wouldn’t have meaningfully done anything different in handling the pandemic, which is bananas. The continued climb of cases in Ontario means that we are likely facing more lockdowns before too long. In Manitoba, Brian Pallister gave a tearful speech about needing to cancel Christmas – but then also stated that it was “unfair” that early doses were being reserved for First Nations (who are especially vulnerable), which is mind-boggling. As for Alberta, where new cases keep breaking records, we got more details on the planned field hospitals (which are not really going just “contingency planning”), and in spite of yesterday’s insistence to the contrary, they are looking at possible military assistance to staff these field hospitals.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1334611584824446978

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1334561390640701441

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Roundup: Setting up the failure narrative

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The Conservatives spent Sunday trying to pre-position the narratives for today’s fiscal update by setting it up to fail, saying it needs a testing and vaccine roll-out plan to be effective – which are both areas of provincial jurisdiction and he knows it. The provinces have been given millions of rapid tests, and it’s up to them to roll them out (which most haven’t been, preferring to sit on them and wait instead) – and no, rapid at-home testing is still pretty much a figment of the imagination because the technology to make them like a pregnancy test still doesn’t exist. Likewise, we are still at a point where there are too many unknown variables with vaccines to make any definitive plans, which again, O’Toole knows but is pretending otherwise. O’Toole also tried to make the case that the government put “all their eggs” in the CanSino vaccine candidate basket, which was never able to leave China for testing, but absolutely nothing bears that out, given the massive investments in other local vaccine candidates, and ensuring that Canada would be positioned for access for other vaccine candidates that we couldn’t produce domestically.

To that end, the chairman of Moderna says that Canada is actually near the front of the line with their vaccine – which doesn’t require the same cold-storage chain that the Pfizer drug does – because we pre-ordered early. Of course, they can only produce so many vaccines so fast, so of course early doses are going to be lower than everyone would like, but they’re getting there (once they get approval). But then comes along Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe, who demands that the federal government get more doses faster – somehow. Apparently, they can wave a magic wand, or send bribes, or something. In reality, this is just Moe’s rather transparent attempt at making the federal government’s efforts look insufficient, so that it can distract from his own poor attempt to control the spread of the virus in his own province (and expect to see more of this from other premiers, particularly conservative ones).

In other pandemic news, the Alberta government has started listed co-morbidities with their death counts, as a rhetorical way of trying to lessen the actual impact of COVID deaths, trying instead to show that the people died of other complications and not COVID itself – which is bullshit, and a way for Jason Kenney to absolve himself of responsibility for his lack of action. And make no mistake, this is classic Kenney behaviour – and there is no small amount of irony that the man who keeps preaching “personal responsibility” in this pandemic is the one who refuses to take any measure of responsibility for his decisions.

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Roundup: Kenney’s dereliction of duty

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I find myself increasingly concerned for my native Alberta as COVID cases continue to skyrocket, to the point where the province is now recording more cases than Ontario, despite having a third of the population. As this is happening, the premier and health minister have been nowhere to be seen, not showing up at press briefings, and leaving the Chief Medical Officer of Health to deal with this herself – likely as a first step in shifting blame to her once the death rate starts to follow infections. Because nothing is ever Jason Kenney’s fault.

One of Kenney’s junior Cabinet ministers apparently let slip that they’re waiting for hospitals to reach capacity before they take any additional measures, but he quickly backtracked and said that wasn’t what he meant at all, and so on. But considering the trajectory of things, and the fact that the provincial government refuses to consider an actual lockdown and instead just tut-tuts at people and tells them to knock it off – while simultaneously telling them to go socialize in restaurants and bars because they’re a “structured setting,” is it any wonder that the trajectory hasn’t altered. Albertans like to think that the rules don’t apply to them at the best of times (and yes, once again, I am from there, and this is the mindset that we are taught from childhood), so the fact that the most the government can do is give them vague guidelines and tell them to exercise their “personal responsibility” means that they plan to do as little as possible. And seriously – this is the province that is so into “personal responsibility” that they brought back tertiary syphilis. It’s a dereliction of duty, but I despair that nobody will wind up punishing Kenney and company for it when the next election comes around, because they are all indoctrinated into believing that the province is a one-party state, and that anything less is treasonous.

Meanwhile, here’s Susan Delacourt on the fact that Justin Trudeau is still trying to keep measures voluntary across the country, and attempting to use the art of persuasion, even though that’s getting increasingly difficult in the current climate.

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Roundup: A promise to fight back against federal action

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Another day, more record-breaking COVID cases in this country. In Ontario, new modelling suggests that if we don’t get this under control that we’ll be seeing 6,500 new cases a day by mid-December, which should terrify everyone. And Doug Ford? Well, he called the reports that he ignored public health advice “inaccurate,” and “one doctor’s opinion,” and insisted that he’s trying to find a “balance.” Because the needs of businesses outweigh human lives.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1326965295941099521

In Alberta, where the pandemic is starting to overwhelm a couple of hospitals, Jason Kenney was back in isolation for the second time after another close-call with a positive COVID case (which he tested negative for) – because he’s totally taking it seriously. Kenney decided to “toughen” measures, which means that he…reduced hours in restaurants and bars, stopped indoor sports, and limited weddings and funerals. Because he still refuses to do a proper lockdown to get infections under control, and he refuses to do anything to inconvenience businesses. Hell, he’s still telling people to go out to restaurants and bars – just not as late, which also has the added effect of ensuring more people will be in these establishments during the compressed hours, which would seem to increase the chances of infection rather than decrease it. After all, Alberta’s public health insisted that people should socialize in a “structured setting” (i.e. restaurant or bar) instead of at home, so they’re really taking it seriously.

As for those who still insist on calling on the federal government to enact emergency legislation, Ford stated yesterday in no uncertain terms that he would not stand for it, and warned that other premiers would also fight back because they want to guard their own jurisdiction. So yeah, unilateral federal action would not fly (not that it really could under the terms of the Emergencies Act anyway), and we’d simply wind up in court over it. In other words, stop waiting for Trudeau to act (because he can’t) and pressure the premiers instead to quit worrying about businesses – especially since they have the power to help them out – and worry instead about the hundreds of deaths that are happening every week.

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Roundup: Exasperation over provincial inaction

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You can almost see the exasperation creeping into prime minister Justin Trudeau’s weekday press conferences, as yesterday, he implored the premiers to do more to fight the pandemic and to stop trying to keep businesses open, because they will still fail without healthy populations. He also obliquely asked mayors and public health officials to use what powers they can if their premiers won’t. Because this is a matter of provincial jurisdiction, and the federal government has almost no levers. And the numbers are getting very serious in this country.

In Ontario and Manitoba, there are record high numbers, and Manitoba is going into a province-wide lockdown, while in Ontario, Toronto’s chief medical officer of health is imposing more restrictions on that region after Peel Region did the same earlier in the week. In Alberta, doctors are imploring the government to institute a “circuit-breaker” lockdown for at least a couple of weeks so that they can get infections under control before they completely overwhelm the healthcare system, but Jason Kenney says no, because he’s concerned about “civil liberties.” And you can tell just how seriously Alberta is taking this – their chief medical officer of health retweeted advice telling people to only socialise in “structured settings,” which means bars and restaurants. There are no words.

As for Doug Ford, he made his own swipe at Trudeau’s remarks, insisting that if Trudeau is talking about him, that they need more financial support for businesses, which is ridiculous at this point. The federal government has been shovelling money out the door – not always in the most effective manners, mind you, because they have very limited levers, whereas provinces have more direct levers that they refuse to use. And Ford here, playing the victim, is just engaged in buck-passing so that he doesn’t have to look like the bad guy when things go into lockdown, and they’re going to have to sooner than later. He keeps saying he’ll act when things get “out of control,” but by then it’ll be too late. Positive tests are a lagging indicator. Hospitalisations are a lagging indicator. Deaths are a lagging indicator. If you’re waiting for things to get “out of control” rather than stopping the exponential growth when it presents itself, that’s negligence. But then again, Ford’s apologists seem to think that there is greater political cost for him to closing businesses than there is in preventing hundreds, if not thousands of deaths, and if that’s the calculation, I can’t even with these people.

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Roundup: Mischief with a reasonable goal

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It may be a bit of mischief, but it’s certainly well-deserved, as the Alberta NDP are moving a motion in the legislature to have the government condemn separatism. The ostensible goal for the denunciation is because talk of separatism is bad for the economy – it drives away investment, no matter how low corporate taxes are (and you only have to look to Canadian history to see how the two referendums in Quebec saw the country’s financial capital move from Montreal to Toronto, even though Montreal was a more tax-advantageous environment). If Alberta hopes to diversify their economy, they need to ensure that they aren’t driving away investment in a similar way.

It’s also about jamming Jason Kenney to an extent, because while he has stated in the past that he’s not a separatist, he’s also winked and nodded to them in a fairly constant fashion, and used his own rhetoric to fuel their arguments, up to and including his ridiculous “Fair Deal Panel.” But with the rise of separatist parties, both federally and provincially in the prairie provinces, there are concerns about them gaining political traction – particularly as the so-called “Buffalo Party” gained a fair number of votes in last week’s Saskatchewan election, and it may have some people in Alberta worried. Granted, the Conservatives in the province should likely be more worried because they’re likely to peel voters away from the Conservatives, which may allow the NDP to come up the middle provincially, but there should also be no doubt that letting these separatists get any kind of political traction – even a handful of seats – would be sending the wrong signals to markets. Having Kenney denounce them in a way that they can’t spin as winking or nodded to them may be a way to take some of the wind out of their sails – but it could also expose divisions in Kenney’s own caucus (which is partly where the mischief comes in). Nevertheless, even if the movement is headed by a bunch of swivel-eyed loons who have no chance of success, they can cause a lot of damage along the way, and should be taken down at every chance.

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Roundup: Confidence maintained, control wrested

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It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the government survived the confidence vote – it was very much an example of Wells’ First Rule – and the NDP and Greens voted to keep parliament going. Of course, the narrative that both the Conservatives and NDP adopted was that the Liberals were pushing for an election – the Conservatives (and Bloc) claiming it was because the Liberals really wanted to cover something up, and the NDP self-righteously declared that they weren’t going to give Trudeau the election that he wanted, but would keep parliament going to get things done for Canadians. Of course, if Trudeau really wanted an election (which he doesn’t), he could just head next door to Rideau Hall on any given morning and ask Julie Payette to dissolve Parliament, but he won’t, because that’s not what today was about.

Part of what has irked me in this is the way in which the Conservatives’ motion was being described, which is innocuously. One writer went so far as to call it a “pedestrian motion,” which it was anything but, and I highly suspect that nobody actually read through it except for the two other procedural wonks in the Gallery. Aside from the inflammatory title of “anti-corruption,” or the proposed alternative whose four-letter abbreviation would have been SCAM (both instances that demonstrate that it’s a group of juvenile shitposters running O’Toole’s office who are treating the Order Paper as a game of who can be the most outrageous), the proposed committee’s terms of reference would have put the government at a structural disadvantage with three fewer members (generally committees in the current parliamentary composition are split, and on committees where the government chairs it, the opposition has the votes to outweigh the government), but it would have given the committee first priority for all parliamentary resources, and compelled production of all documents they wanted and witnesses to appear, no matter who. This essentially means that both ministers and the civil service would be at the committee’s beck and call, and that they would have to drop everything to attend it – which is what Pablo Rodriguez meant by the committee being meant to “paralyze” government. They could go on unlimited fishing expeditions with little to no ability to push back, and given the fact that there aren’t any smoking guns here, it would be constant wild goose chases while Parliament was unable to get anything else accomplished. More than that, it would also have enshrined that the prime minister’s extended family – meaning his mother and brother – would be considered legitimate targets, and have their financial information put into the open for no good reason. And funnily enough, not one story from yesterday mentioned these facts – not the Star, not the National Post, not CBC, nor The Canadian Press. Yet this seems like some pretty vital context for why the government would so strenuously object to this “pedestrian” motion.

There was another consideration, that former Paul Martin-era staffer Scott Reid expounded upon, which is control of the agenda. That’s a pretty important thing in a hung parliament, and under the current circumstances. Trudeau hasn’t been able to make much progress on any file (admittedly, much of this is his own fault for refusing to bring parliament back in a sensible way, followed by his decision to prorogue), but being hamstrung by that motion was going to make things moving forward near impossible. Now that he’s stared down O’Toole, I suspect he has some breathing room again.

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Roundup: A spineless premier in the centre of a dispute

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The suspicious fire of a lobster pound used by the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia is the latest escalation in the fisheries dispute in that province, which prompted a number of calls over the weekend for the federal government to do something. But when you ask for specifics, people tend to come up with a bunch of hand-waving and not a lot of answers. As a reminder, policing is a provincial responsibility, and in Nova Scotia, the RCMP are contracted to the province. This means that it’s the province’s responsibility to ensure that the RCMP are doing their jobs and protecting the Mi’kmaq people from the mobs of angry commercial fishers that are threatening them, and not just standing there and watching it happen like they did during the swarming of a lobster pound last week.

Of course, the premier keeps trying to insist that he can’t solve the problem and demands that the federal government define what a “moderate livelihood” for the Mi’kmaq people is under their treaty rights (which, to be clear, the government has been at the negotiation table about for weeks now), which is a cynical exercise in buck-passing from a premier who make a big song and dance about admitting that the province was mired in systemic racism. Funny that when it’s in his face, he doesn’t want to do anything about it. On Saturday, the province’s attorney general finally requested additional support for the RCMP from the federal government, which Bill Blair immediately granted, days after he publicly stated that there were resources waiting to be deployed to the province upon request, which they had not done up until that point. A bunch of people (including Jagmeet Singh) also started chirping over Twitter that this attack was “terrorism,” except that it’s not – the Criminal Code has a very specific definition, and a mob is not it. One of the Indigenous chiefs at the centre of the dispute also mused over social media that the military should be called in, but again, this can’t be done without the request of the provincial government, and I cannot stress this enough, but you do not want the military to conduct law enforcement. It’s a VERY, VERY BAD THING.

Meanwhile, both the fisheries minister and the NDP are now calling for an emergency debate in Parliament over this, which seems to me to be the most useless thing imaginable, but what can you do? Erin O’Toole is also trying to pin the blame on the federal government, insisting that they should have had the negotiations over by now (how? By imposing a solution?) and blaming the federal government for not properly resourcing the RCMP in the province (who are under provincial contract and jurisdiction), but then again, truth hasn’t exactly been his strong suit of late. But this shouldn’t be an issue about the treaty – the government has signalled that they will protect those rights, and are just figuring out the details. Protection of the Mi’kmaq fishers and their property should be a police matter, which is provincial jurisdiction, but so long as the premier is too afraid of the white voters, I don’t see him exactly taking a strong stand on this issue anytime soon, and while all eyes turn back to Justin Trudeau to do something, anything, he doesn’t exactly have the levers at his disposal.

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