Tag Archives: Liberal Leadership

Roundup: A new tariff threat?

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Surprising nobody except the most credulous, Donald Trump’s “thirty-day reprieve” has ended early with the announcement that he’s launching steel and aluminium tariffs today—allegedly—and that includes on Canada. Maybe. We’ll see. But he insists he’s serious about annexing Canada (while his national security advisor, being too cute by half, insists there are no plans to “invade” Canada, which is not what Trump has threatened). When asked about the comments in Paris, Justin Trudeau didn’t say anything, but senior officials (correctly) said they are waiting to see something in writing first, because they know that Trump says a lot of things.

Of course, since the start of the tariff threats, we have a bunch of people talking about west-east pipelines again, which has yet again led to a bunch of media outlets credulously retyping complete mythology about what happened with the pipeline in the first place, and taking Poilievre’s word for what happened, even though he’s once again bullshitting.

And of course, we’re also repeating the complete nonsense about the Liberals trying to “kill” the energy sector over the past nine years. But given that oil and gas production are at record levels, and royalties are churning out, it really doesn’t look like they succeeded (never mind that they bought a pipeline to ensure its competition, championed Keystone XL, and got a major LNG project on the west coast over the finish line). Yeah, they were really trying to kill the industry by doing all that. Can we have some adults in the conversation, please?

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine downed 67 out of 139 Russian drones overnight Friday, and 70 out of 151 drones overnight Saturday. Further drone attacks overnight Sunday started a fire in Kyiv and damaged houses in Sumy.

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Roundup: The threat of annexation is serious

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Well, things got real again today, as Justin Trudeau told the audience at his Canada-US Economic Summit that Trump isn’t joking around with his talk of annexation, and that part of the reason why is access to our critical minerals. Trudeau apparently also talked about the need to mend fences with Mexico as well, which was apparently an oblique shot at Doug Ford, who has been trying to throw them under the bus rather than working with them to counter Trump. (Ford, meanwhile, disparaged the whole summit while on the campaign trail, because apparently, it’s stealing his thunder). There was also talk at the summit about pipelines, nuclear energy (and conservative shills who claim Trudeau is anti-nuclear are straight-up lying), and removing some of the federal-situated trade barriers around financial services regulations and procurement.

As the day went on, more details came out about those two calls that Trudeau had with Trump on Monday about the tariffs and the “reprieve” that was granted. Comments included that Trump was musing about breaking a 1908 boundary treaty, was dismissive of our contributions to NORAD, and listed off a litany of complaints. (Because “it’s all about fentanyl,” right?) It was also on this call that Trudeau apparently deduced that Trump hadn’t been briefed on the $1.3 billion border plan, but maybe that’s what you get when Trump refuses your calls for weeks while he plays gangster. (And he was also refusing the Mexican president’s calls as well, so this was not a Trudeau-specific snub).

So this is where things are at—the stakes are higher than we may want to admit (and certainly the head of the Canadian American Business Council doesn’t want to admit it and still believes this is just an offensive joke), but maybe this existential threat will help shake off the normalcy bias that has perpetuated a certain status quo. Nevertheless, the political landscape is shifting drastically right now, and it’s going to make for a very different election campaign than what everyone was counting on.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian guided bomb attack on Sumy region in the northeast killed three. Russians claim to have taken the settlement of Toretsk, but the Ukrainian brigade in the outskirts says they haven’t moved. International nuclear monitors are concerned that the number of attacks on the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant have increased.

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Roundup: Baylis brings back boneheaded ideas

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Yesterday, no-hope Liberal leadership candidate Frank Baylis offered his ideas about how to make politics better, and…*sighs, pinches bridge of nose* It’s so bad, you guys. Back when he was an MP, Baylis had proposed a motion to change the Standing Orders to do a bunch of dumb things that he felt would improve things for MPs, but then didn’t show up for the debate on his own motion, so it died on the Order Paper, fortunately. But I see that he’s back at it again.

I cannot stress enough how stupid of an idea term limits are in a system like ours, because you actually need to have institutional memory in politics, and you can’t build that up in ten-year increments. You just can’t. That’s one of the reasons why the Senate tends to be more valuable in that capacity (which has been curtailed thanks to Trudeau kicking Liberal senators from his own caucus and only appointing independents), but you need experienced MPs in your caucus. Term limits make that impossible, especially for ten years. Canada already has a problem with a higher-than-normal rate of turnover for MPs as compared to other similar democracies, and making the churn worse doesn’t help. Baylis kept justifying this by saying “I’m a professional engineer” when questioned about this on Power & Politics, which doesn’t actually give him any special insight.

His idea of letting the Speaker choose who gets to speak and not party leaders is partially sound, but only in particular circumstances. I get that he wants to eliminate speaking lists, which I do agree with, particularly for Question Period, but it’s not as much of a problem as the rules around speaking times, and how we structure debates. Of course, he then screws up that decent idea with the boneheaded notion of petitions to trigger debates. Parliament is not supposed to be about empty take-note debates. Debates should have a purpose—speaking to motions or legislation that actually do something, rather than speaking for speaking’s sake. That’s all that this idea does.

Finally, Baylis wants a second chamber like they have in Westminster and Canberra, but again, this is ill-thought-out. We already don’t have enough MPs to fully staff all committees (particularly without having parliamentary secretaries as voting members), and to keep debate going in the Chamber, and now you want to add a second chamber? He says this would “speed up decision-making and end legislative gridlock,” but it absolutely wouldn’t because that’s not what those chambers do in the UK or Australia. They are largely used for non-votable debates, and giving speeches or statements. That kind of thing may be of more use in the UK where there are 650 MPs who can’t make members’ statements with much frequency, but it doesn’t affect the pace of legislation at all. It’s so stupid that he didn’t even bother to read up on his own gods damned proposals, but hey, he’s a “businessman” and an “engineer,” so why bother to actually learn how politics works? Honestly.

Meanwhile, speaking of his other no-hope candidate…

Ukraine Dispatch

Russians claim to have repelled an offensive in the Kursk region. Ukraine received some more F-16 fighters from the Netherlands, and Mirage jets from France. Eight Ukrainian children who had been seized from their families were returned home.

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Roundup: Cautious optimism on trade barriers

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Anita Anand told reporters yesterday that she is making progress with provinces when it comes to eliminating interprovincial trade barriers, which sounds great. In fact, she claims that some of those barriers could be “wiped away” in the next thirty days. It would be great news if that’s true, but I have my doubts because these barriers are incredibly difficult to harmonise around the country, and they’re mostly differing regulations, which are perfectly valid exercise of provincial powers. They’re extremely difficult to harmonize because sometimes they differ for a reason. Kevin Milligan explains in this thread if you click through. (He also throws cold water on the notion that we could or should join the EU).

I have to say that I am very curious regarding the method by which Anand is securing these changes, because I have heard no chatter about provinces being willing to surrender some of their provincial sovereignty in order to eliminate some of these barriers. I have also heard nothing about any kind of common regulatory body that could make determinations and that the provinces would adhere to, because they’ve all eschewed a common securities regulator, which should be low-hanging fruit for regulatory harmonisation, and yet… That would seem to imply that they have been establishing some sort of framework around mutual recognition of standards or credentials, but as of yet we have no real details.

The other note of caution I would make is that even if these barriers were reduced or eliminated, it would take time to reorient supply chains east-to-west rather than north-to-south, so there would be no immediate cushioning effect from any Trump tariffs. People will need to have realistic expectations about what this will achieve, particularly in the short-to-medium term.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine is blaming an explosion at a draft office in Khmelnytskyi region that killed one person and wounded several others as a series of Russian spies orchestrating attacks. 150 Ukrainian POWs were returned in a prisoner swap with Russia. Here are some of the details about how Ukrainians captured two North Korean soldiers fighting in Kursk region. Ukrainians are also noting a marked improvement in the accuracy of North Korean missiles fired at Ukraine.

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Roundup: Touching off a trade war

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On Saturday afternoon, it happened—under false pretenses, Donald Trump signed the executive order to put tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China (25 percent on all imports except oil and gas, which is at ten percent) coming into effect on Tuesday, with the likelihood it will rise later, and threatening that it will go up further if we retaliate. Because how dare we exercise our sovereignty.

By late evening, prime minister Justin Trudeau gave a speech, spent part of it “speaking directly to Americans” (which was not covered live on any US news stations, but did get play on Sunday), and outlined the first tranche of retaliatory tariffs, with further non-tariff measures to come into place in about twenty-one days. (The Logic has a roundup of Canadian reaction here).

Some Americans seemed confused by the response, including the New York Times, which pretty much brings us back to that Onion headline.

More troubling were the Vichy Canadians, who continue to blame Justin Trudeau for this state of affairs, including tech bros in this country, such as Canada’s Specialest Tech Bro, Tobi Lütke, who not only blamed Canada for fighting back, but bought all of Trump’s bullshit excuses. It was never about the border, or fentanyl, or NATO spending, or even trade deficits. This is about Trump wanting to use tariffs to give more billionaire tax cuts (which the tech bros in the US are all salivating over), and to assert his dominance, no matter how much it costs him internationally.

And then there was Pierre Poilievre, and while he was not explicitly being a Vichy Canadian, it didn’t help that he was still incapable of articulating an actual response other than yet another slogan (“Canada First!”), demanding things that won’t actually help (a tax cut will only help the rich, and the killing the carbon levy early will do absolutely nothing about the shocks from the tariffs, and the capital gains stopping changes only allow the wealthy to continue to engage in tax arbitrage), that require magic (internal trade barriers cannot be brought down with the snap of a finger—they’re differing regulatory standards that can’t be harmonized with the stroke of a pen), and he’s continuing to give credence to Trump’s lie that the border is a problem, because he’s been trying to claim that Trudeau “weakened” them, which has always been a lie. And while he and Conservatives cry that Parliament needs to be summoned immediately, the only reason to do so is for performance art (gotta get those clips for their socials), and for him to bring down the government at his first opportunity, because he refuses to say he will actually let any package the government brings forward, whenever that happens, pass.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1886158003272925684

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/1886172330394636539

And then, of course, a gods damned CBC journalist made it all the worse in Poilievre’s press conference by phrasing “supporting government measures” as “stepping aside,” and Poilievre and company used that to play victim, and demand the CBC be defunded, yet again. What an absolutely stupid own-goal, and so many journalists keep making them with Poilievre.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian drone and missile attacks on Saturday killed fifteen, mostly in Poltava. Ukrainian drone attacks targeted more Russian energy facilities, and sparked fires at an oil refinery in Volgograd. And Ukrainian officials are unimpressed with the American “negotiation” position of ensuring that elections are held in Ukraine after a ceasefire, given that it does nothing to deter Putin.

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Roundup: Carney’s boneheaded “green incentives”

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Liberal leadership hopeful Mark Carney revealed his plan to replace the consumer carbon levy yesterday, and it’s a handwavey bunch of “green incentives” for things like improving your home insulation, furnace, appliances, or buying an electric vehicle. This would be offset by maintaining or increasing the industrial carbon pricing system, along with carbon border adjustments. Carney claimed that the current system isn’t working, which is false, because emissions have been driven down, and then shrugs and says it’s “too divisive,” which is the Liberals’ own gods damned faults for being such incompetent communicators about how the levy works, the rebates (remember when they thought that calling them “climate action incentives” was a genius idea?), and how reducing one’s own carbon footprint maximises those rebates. The government was absolutely incapable of communicating any of it, and Pierre Poilievre swooped in and filled the space with lies and disinformation.

I find Carney’s plan absolutely infuriating for a number of reasons. One of them is that this imparts a false narrative that carbon emissions reductions can happen for free for consumers. Even if there is no consumer-facing price, industrial emitters will pass along costs, and people won’t get a rebate for those higher costs, which hurts lower-income households harder. Everyone fawning over Carney’s economic credentials should be smacking themselves upside the head because of this fiction he is trying to perpetrate and just how economically illiterate it actually is.

Meanwhile, how much of an “incentive” can it really be for one-time purchases? You can only really re-insulate your house once, or buy a new furnace once every twenty years. There is no price disincentive to increased carbon use, and there is no ongoing reward for a low-carbon lifestyle, which the rebates provide. Again, very few people actually understand this because the government steadfastly refused to actually communicate how the levy and rebates actually work, how to maximise them, and how it rewards ongoing low-carbon behaviour. They hoped that legacy media and would communicate that (they absolutely will not), and it was basically up to five economists on Twitter, which is useless to ninety-five percent of the population. So now the people who have done the work to reduce their carbon footprint will now be punished, and people will take advantage of those one-time purchases for what? The pat on the back that they can give themselves? Everyone involved here needs to take a long, hard look at some of their life choices, but then again, if they had any modicum of self-reflection, they likely wouldn’t be in politics. What an absolute disaster.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian drones injured four in Odessa, damaging a hospital and grain warehouse, while a missile attack seriously damaged a historic centre in the same city. Russian forces are also tightening their approach to Pokrovsk, which is a key logistics hub in the region. Ukrainian forces destroyed a Russian command post in the Kursk region, and are also reporting that they haven’t seen any North Korean troops in the area for three weeks. Ukrainian drones also damaged an oil refinery in Russia’s Volgograd region.

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Roundup: Gould’s stumble of a first proposal

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Liberal leadership candidate Karina Gould made a policy announcement in Ottawa yesterday, and it was…not great. Gould says she’s serious about tackling cost-of-living challenges, so she wants to give a one-year GST cut, and to pay for it by increasing the corporate tax rate for businesses making over $500 million in profit in one year. That sound you’re hearing is every economist in this country crying out in anguish.

It’s just so needlessly dumb, and you would have thought that Gould might have paid attention to what an absolute fiasco the HST “holiday” has been, and how her fellow Cabinet ministers debased themselves to sell it to the public. It’s also giving shades of Stephen Harper circa 2006, and how that government increased income taxes to pay for the first GST cut, and then spent through the surplus they inherited to give a second cut, which permanently hampered the fiscal capacity of the federal government (which was Harper’s plan). And reducing it for one year? So that you face the blowback of the tax going back up? Seriously? I get that Gould is trying to break through the noise around Mark Carney, but come on. There are plenty of economists whom she could consult with, who would gladly give her the time of day and to explain these things to her, but she decided to go with the same kinds of populist stunts that the Conservatives and NDP run on, while ignoring the notion that the Liberals have been the party doing the sensible policies in spite of them being less popular (such as the carbon levy) because it’s the right thing to do. It’s a disappointing first move by Gould out of the gate.

In a related note, Jaime Battiste has dropped out of the race, and will be backing Carney instead. Battiste was a marginal candidate to begin with, so this move isn’t really a surprise, as much as he wanted to be a First Nations candidate in the race, there just wasn’t a viable path forward for it.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian drone hit an apartment building in Sumy overnight Wednesday, killing at least six people. Aid groups in Ukraine are scrambling to compensate after the Americans suddenly cut funding to their programming.

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Roundup: Freeland’s smaller Cabinet promise

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Chrystia Freeland released another policy statement/promise yesterday which says that she will cut the size of Cabinet and the PMO in half—both to make Cabinet more efficient, and to give ministers more control over their files, rather than PMO dictating everything for them. While on the one hand, every incoming prime minister has promised to cut the size of Cabinet and then it starts to grow over time, I also suspect this is a bit of a screw you to Katie Telford, who runs Trudeau’s PMO, and who selects the chief of staff for all ministers with her own loyalists, and who has been a bottleneck for so much of this government’s business as it flows through her office. Caucus has been calling on Trudeau to get rid of Telford for a while now, correctly identifying her as the source of some of their problems (including the fact that she is in the caucus room taking notes, which was never the case under previous leaders), and Freeland appears to be heeding those concerns as endorsements pile up (mostly for Carney).

I do think it’s a fairly bold plan, and it reminds me of Trudeau’s initial attempt to have a “government by Cabinet” in the early days, but all ministers are not created equal, and gradually PMO started to exert more control for many of those ministers who were having trouble managing their files. It also looks like Freeland would be reverting to an older model of having the hard cap of twenty ministers, while additional responsibilities would be filled by ministers of state, which is also essentially how the UK operates, where there is a hard cap on Cabinet, but there are numerous junior ministers. Trudeau did away with this and made everyone a full minister as part of the gender parity promise, given that it would be likely that there would be an imbalance between how many women were in senior versus junior portfolios, and by making everyone a full minister, they also got a full minister’s salary. It seems clear in Freeland’s promise that she feels this was bloating Cabinet, particularly as Trudeau made it the practice that all appointments and Orders in Council needed to be presented to the full Cabinet, which took up a lot of time and focus. Does that mean that a lot will change if junior positions are restored? I guess it will depend on her leadership style if she’s successful, but it is an interesting signal nevertheless.

I will also note that Freeland has been consistently putting out these kinds of statements, unlike Carney. Meanwhile, Ruby Dhalla is turning out to be a clown show of braggadocious claims that the online right is amplifying.

Ukraine Dispatch

The Russians claim to have taken control of Novoielyzavetivka in the Donetsk region, near Pokrovsk. An overnight Ukrainian drone attack hit an oil pumping station and a missile storage facility, while a drone attack has hit Russia’s fourth-largest oil refinery in Kstovo. Ukraine’s corruption watchdog has opened an investigation into the defence minister over a procurement dispute.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1884525942229364847

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Roundup: Maligning legitimate Senate appointments

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One of CBC’s worst reporters is back again with the “scandalous” news that the prime minister is preparing to fill all ten vacant Senate seats before he resigns, and the original title of the article was “Trudeau plans on stacking Senate before retiring: source” before it was toned down in an update. The framing that the prime minister—who is still the prime minister—is doing his job and filling these vacancies as he is constitutionally mandated to do, is somehow inappropriate or unfair, is wrong, and frankly, is well into the category of misinformation (which is probably why the headline got changed).

The story then quotes a single Conservative senator to claim that this is somehow illegitimate, which it’s not, and there is no counter voice from an expert. For the TV version of this story, said reporter got video of Andrew Scheer claiming it’s inappropriate and that the vacancies should be left until after an election, which is again false, and there was no counter. There was no proper acknowledgment that Trudeau won a series of confidence votes in December, and that gives him the constitutional right to make these appointments, but hey, then he couldn’t frame the story as this being somehow wrong or inappropriate, and the fact that he gets away with this is infuriating.

This particular reporter has a pattern when it comes to trying to gin up scandals around any appointments. When it’s with judges, he resorts to histrionics about appointees who made political donations in the past, as though the low campaign contribution limits in Canada allows one to buy influence or access, or that they somehow bribed their way into these appointments. With recent Senate appointments, he’s now judging what is and is not a partisan appointment given past history, ignoring that a) there is no Liberal caucus in the Senate for them to be a part of, and b) past legislative experience is actually a good thing to have in that Chamber, and that the lack of it with so many appointees has been a problem. But hey, the CBC editors let him get away with these self-imposed purity tests, so he’s going to keep on doing them. It’s a disservice to the country, and the gods damned public broadcaster shouldn’t be letting their reporters personal bugaboos dictate their coverage, particularly when it taints the reporting.

Ukraine Dispatch

An overnight air attack injured four in Kharkiv after houses were hit. Other critical infrastructure was damaged during overnight drone attacks on Sunday night, where 57 out of 104 drones were downed. Russia’s Ryazan oil refinery suspended operations after a Ukrainian drone attack last week. President Zelenskyy says that the realities of the current war means that they can’t change mobilisation rules as soldiers leaving for home en masse would mean Russians would “kill us all.”

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Roundup: Piercing Lantsman’s kayfabe

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Because everything is so stupid, Conservative Twitter got itself all hot and bothered over the weekend because Nathaniel Erskine-Smith had the temerity to break the kayfabe when the Melissa Lantsman was engaging in performative outrage.

Context: This was an event Erskine-Smith held in his riding for Mark Carney, and Lantsman stood outside to say ludicrously stupid things, and Erskine-Smith, who was standing right there, made a good-natured objection, and did so in a way where Lantsman broke—her performative outrage cracked, she smiled and basically admitted it was all bullshit, and then tried to carry on to finish the performance, got her talking points backwards, but she finished the scene. Conservatives, however, were incensed that the fakery was exposed, so they edited the clip, invented the charge that Erskine-Smith was a creep because he touched her shoulder and shook her hand—the most regular things in politics—and *gasp!* suggested they get a drink like a good-natured colleague would. This would not stand.

What’s particularly hilarious about this is that this is just more Conservative cry-bullying (which I have been on the receiving end of), where they pretend to be the wronged party in order to have someone “cancelled,” while they bemoan and wail about so-called “cancel culture” (which has never actually cancelled anyone, especially in a country where the National Post gives them column inches the very next day). Meanwhile, if they think that women like Lantsman are that fragile, perhaps they should start insisting that women not be accompanied outdoors without a male relative escorting them, or that they should start wearing burkas so as not to attract unwanted attention—you know, like the Taliban would say.

It’s all so fake, and this is what they want our political discourse to be.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine downed 50 out of 72 Russian drones launched overnight Saturday. President Zelenskyy replaced the commander of the eastern forces for the third time in a year, as Russia continues to encroach on strategic settlements.

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