Tag Archives: Marc Garneau

Roundup: Refusing to enforce quarantine orders

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There were a couple of notes around the border and quarantines yesterday that I thought bear some additional note, particularly in light of the rhetoric we’re hearing. The first is that it looks like as many of a third of air travellers are able to avoid hotel quarantine and the Public Health Agency of Canada won’t provide a breakdown of figures as to why. There is a fairly obvious answer to this, which is that as part of the hotel quarantine programme, the government also allowed for a metre-long list of exemptions that are applicable to these travellers, because remember that there is ostensibly very little non-essential travel happening right now – I heard a figure that travel volumes are about five percent of what they were pre-COVID. Given how many of these hotel quarantine exemptions have to do with certain essential travel reasons, it should not be a surprise that as many as a third of these travellers are able to bypass that system. The fact that there are as many exemptions as there are should be up for debate, however, because it does undermine the whole point of quarantine, but it’s hard to have that discussion when every time you turn around, someone else is demanding another exemption – and it really doesn’t help when the party in the Commons howling that the border is too lax is at the very same time trying to get an exemption for returning snowbirds.

And then there is the question of enforcing the Quarantine Act, and we find that Alberta hasn’t signed onto the Contraventions Act, which makes it easy for their police to do the enforcement, and to issue fines for those who break it. (Saskatchewan also hasn’t signed onto the Act, but there are no airports currently open to international travel in that province). And this is completely baffling, because you would think that the provincial government would want to empower their peace officers to do the enforcement work if they are so concerned about variants coming in over the borders that they would want to ensure that they are actually enforcing quarantine orders in the province, but apparently not. This makes it all the more difficult to swallow Jason Kenney’s insistence that the federal government hasn’t done enough about the border – they have clamped down as much as they are really able to under the constitution, and they have empowered the provinces to enforce quarantines, but oh, Alberta refuses to take responsibility for doing so, while they complain.

I will also note that the fact that Ontario has signed onto the Contraventions Act means that their own complaints about quarantines and lax borders are all the more hollow. They have all the tools they need to enforce the orders, and they are also largely refusing and blaming the federal government. And worse, nobody is holding them to account for their failures to exercise their own powers in their own areas of jurisdiction to do so – especially not the media. This is a problem, but hey, keep writing stories about “finger-pointing.” That’ll help.

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Roundup: The meltdown over NACI

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There was a collective meltdown yesterday as the National Advisory Committee on Immunization delivered its most recent recommendations, saying that they recommended that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine be deployed for those over 30 (even though the current supply in the country is currently on hold pending a review of its quality control), and then cited that mRNA vaccines remained their preferred candidates – and everyone lost their minds.

This is not really unexpected if you have been paying attention, where the chair of the committee in particular has said that because of the “safety signal” attached to AstraZeneca related to the particular blood clots (which are very serious – there is a reasonably high fatality rate related to them) that it would be preferable to get mRNA vaccines, but if someone could not wait for them, then they should get the first available vaccine, even if it’s AstraZeneca. In their minds, it’s about being transparent around the risk factors associated, and they’re right. It’s just that this makes it harder for governments and public health officials to carry on with message that the best vaccine is the first one you are offered. Both are correct, and NACI has a lot of nuance in their guidance that is difficult for people to parse effectively, which is a problem, but it’s a question of whether the problem is NACI’s in how they communicate their guidance, or a problem in particular with media who are supposed to be able to take complex issues and translate them to the public, and yet are not very good at it (often walking away from these releases citing that they are “more confused than before,” which they shouldn’t be if they paid attention). It especially isn’t helped when certain journalists, talking heads, and especially certain MPs conflate the very different roles that NACI and Health Canada have, and try to assert that they should always be “on the same page” when they have different roles. Health Canada determines the safety of the vaccines, NACI offers guidance on the best way to deploy them, factoring in the current local epidemiology and vaccine supplies – guidance which provinces can accept or reject. It’s also why that guidance is always changing – they are reacting to current circumstances rather than just offering a simple recommendation once and being done with it, which most people are not grasping. And they have operated pretty much invisibly for decades, because there hasn’t been the kind of public attention on new vaccines up until now, which is why I really dislike the calls by people to “disband NACI” after yesterday’s press conference.

I get that people want clear binaries, and simple instructions, but that’s not NACI’s job, really, and expecting them to change their way of communicating after decades is a difficult ask. There is a lot of nuance to this conversation, and I will point you to a couple of threads – from professor Philippe Lagassé here and here about this kind of advice and how it’s communicated to the public; as well, here is hematologist Menaka Pai, who talks through NACI’s advice and what it means.

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Roundup: More pandemic theatre

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The horror show of COVID infections continues apace in Ontario, and premier Doug Ford has decided to get really serious and issue a “stay-at-home” order, which amounts to little more than the mockdown that is currently in place already. In spite of his promises of an “iron ring” around long-term care facility, there are now outbreaks at forty percent of facilities. Ford won’t do anything about the sick days that are necessary for people to stop spreading infections at workplaces, and he won’t do anything about evictions from commercial landlords. So he’s totally handling this with aplomb.

So really, what Ford is offering is more pandemic theatre – the close cousin of security theatre. And most of the restrictions and exemptions don’t actually make sense. They’re not going to do enough to curb transmission – especially as newer variants start making their way into the community – because he won’t do the hard work of closing the large workplaces where spread is happening, because that would be harming the economy – as though rising infections and deaths won’t do worse economic damage. Ford continues to shirk his responsibilities and let this pandemic get worse, and more deaths to pile up, as he tries to shift blame and try and to get people to blame one another than acknowledge his own culpability. The “Uncle Doug” schtick isn’t working, and he keeps hoping it will, and here we are, waiting for things to get worse before he institutes more half-measures. Welcome to Ontario – yours to discover.

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Roundup: Pallister makes a gamble

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Manitoba premier Brian Pallister announced yesterday that he was going to implement a carbon price after all – sort of. In a dare to the federal government, Pallister says he’ll stick with his originally planned $25/tonne price, and not raise it like he’s supposed with the rest of the country, but he would also reduce the province’s PST to compensate. Revenue neutrality can be a very good thing, but the point of having a common carbon price across the country is to have a level playing field so that provinces don’t undercut one another – which Pallister frequently ignores as he instead battles straw men about the efficacy of the province’s environmental plans (many of those mentioned having nothing to do with reducing GHGs).

While Pallister is confident that the Supreme Court of Canada will rule against the federal government on the upcoming carbon price challenges – which is a pretty risky gable to take – he’s daring the federal government to do what they said they would, which is to continue making up the federal carbon price with a separate carbon levy on top of the provincial one, which would continue to be rebated to taxpayers by the CRA. None of this makes much sense as a strategy other than the fact that it lets him proclaim that he’s lowered the PST in order to get the plaudits for that.

Meanwhile, here’s Dylan Robertson with some additional context:

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Roundup: Middle Class™ is a state of mind

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I don’t really want to engage in a pile-on, but the fact that the new Minister of Middle Class™ Prosperity® was doing the media rounds and imploding on trying to offer a definition of just what is Middle Class™ was not a good start to her ministerial career – not to mention an indictment of the comms geniuses in the PMO who sent her out there unprepared. You would think that actually having a working definition of what is “middle class” would be an important thing to equip a minister with when you give her the portfolio – particularly when you wrap up an otherwise sober role of Associate Minister of Finance with this ridiculous title. And there are a couple of very serious points to make here – if you can’t actually define what “middle class” means, then you have no actual way of measuring your success in dealing with the perceived issues of income disparity – which this government has been using Middle Class™ as a code for without trying to sound like they’re engaging in class warfare. But as a branding exercise, when you rely on the fact that everyone thinks they’re “middle class” or about to be – particularly people who are well over what is actually middle class in this country – it’s one of those things that tends to flatter people, but becomes meaningless – essentially that Middle Class™ is a state of mind. Mona Fortier did, over the course of the day, transition from “it involves your kids being in hockey” to “there’s no one definition” because of regional variations and disparities, but it was a bit of a trial by fire, and hopefully a lesson that she – and the comms geniuses in PMO – will take to heart.

All of this talk of being Middle Class™ does bring me back to this scene from the early noughties UK sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme, where being Middle Class was a Thing.

Meanwhile, Chris Selley makes the very salient point that this government has moved the needle on poverty in this country, but the problems we’re facing aren’t with the Middle Class™, and perhaps they should put a focus on those areas instead.

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Roundup: Predictable committee stunts

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As expected, the justice committee meeting yesterday was short and went nowhere, as the Liberals on the committee (most of whom are not regular members of said committee) voted to respect the original schedule, which is to consider next steps on Tuesday, like the plan was all along. And predictably, there was much performative outrage and the pundit class all shook their fists in outrage that the Liberals would dare to shut down the inquiry (which they didn’t), and lo, why doesn’t the PMO get it right on this whole sordid affair, woe is us, woe is us. If you need any clues that this “emergency meeting” was anything other than a stunt, let’s consider the fact that despite the fact that the committee was going to deal with next steps when Parliament returned next week, they nevertheless demanded said “emergency meeting” in the middle of March Break to denote how seriousthey were about it. (Meanwhile, if any of these MPs complain about how hard parliamentary life is on their families and children, we need only remind them that they pulled stunts like this). But when most of the actual committee members are unavailable, it’s not exactly like the bodies they’re filling the seats with are in a position to do the work of the regular members of the committee for them and to evaluate what they’ve heard. Oh, and putting Pierre Poilievre in the lead seat for the Conservatives is a flashing red light with accompanying klaxon that this is a stunt. The opposition also wanted this debate on inviting Jody Wilson-Raybould back to be in public, despite the fact that committee deliberations on witnesses and timetables happen behind closed doors for a reason. I cannot stress this enough. This kind of meeting to demand a vote in public is showmanship designed for the cameras. The feigned outrage and unctuous sanctimony when the Liberals voted the way everyone expected them to is also indicative that this was entirely a stunt. And We The Media bought it all, and nobody I saw bothered to challenge them on any part of it. Well done us.

Now, the Liberals have a choice next week, and if they don’t invite Wilson-Raybould back, it’ll be a black eye for them, deservedly. I suspect they know this. As for Wilson-Raybould, I’m not sure that anyone believes she can’t speak to her resignation, because it has nothing to do with solicitor-client privilege, Michael Wernick stated that none of this was discussed at Cabinet (hence essentially waiving any Cabinet confidence on the matter), and Gerald Butts has also spoken about this time period. If she insists she can’t, the credibility of that assertion needs to be questioned. But until the Liberals on the justice committee actually vote to shut it down and write their report, can we hold off on the pearl-clutching until then? Otherwise, we’re playing into stunts.

Speaking of predictable pundit outrage, here’s Andrew Coyne decrying that prime ministers can get away with anything in this country. Well, except for the resignations, the committee study, the Ethics Commissioner investigation, strongly worded letter from the OECD and intense media scrutiny. As for his shaking his fist at “our system,” I don’t exactly see the system south of the border any better at dealing with the blatant corruption of their president, so…yay?

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1106007982209294336

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1106012461910581255

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Roundup: The Republic of the Northwest wank-off

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With an election soon to be called in Alberta, we’re going to start seeing all manner of ludicrous stories related to it, and lo, Maclean’s brings us an imagining of the future history of the “Republic of the Northwest,” which is apparently what a would become of a future Alberta-Saskatchewan-Manitoba-parts-of-BC-and-the-North seccession from Canada. The piece should have instead come with a mature content warning, as it’s basically the two authors jerking one another off to the masturbatory fantasy of a “more prosperous, freer, and more patriotic” future that is never going to be. Why? Because they simply glossed over all of the hard things that such a future would entail, the biggest and most obvious obstacle being the fate of the Indigenous populations. Sure, all of their environmental concerns are just “Laurentian Canadian” bureaucratic meddling. Apparently once Ottawa was out of the way, this new Republic (and curious that such a “patriotic” imagined country would not retain the Crown, if this is supposed to be some kind of small-c conservative fantasy that doesn’t involve being immediately swallowed up by the US), all kinds of pipelines could get built in mere months, with no obstacles whatsoever! Sure, the tidewater is all in Northern BC because the southern coast wouldn’t separate with them, but that won’t affect things! There weren’t any domestic environmentalists in this new country – they were apparently either all figments of Ottawa that were rained upon them, or they were all subject to mass arrest in this “freer” country. There were no Indigenous protests. There were no concerns about actual economic viability of these pipelines with relation to future capacity, or the fact that there is an ongoing global supply glut of oil and dumping more Alberta crude into the world economy wouldn’t be subject to yet more price declines because of basic laws of supply and demand. Nope – it’s all just freedom and prosperity!

And that’s not even to talk about how much they glossed over in terms of what separation would actually mean for the country, from fiscal arrangements, armed forces (do you think they’d just let them take half of the fighter fleet and a chunk of the Navy for their strip of Northern BC Coast line?), and again, the reality of treaties with Indigenous peoples with the Crown of Canada. Honest to Hermes, my eyes could not stop rolling the entirety of this piece. And the worst part is that there is a cohort of Albertans who think this is a plausible vision of the future. They all need to give their heads a shake, and the pair who wrote this piece need to wake up to reality.

On a related note, Jen Gerson digs into the looming problem of Alberta not really preparing for a future with a decreased oil demand, as they prefer instead to keep waiting on the next oil boom. (As the bumper sticker says, “Please God, give us another boom, and I promise not to piss it away this time.”) Yes, the province’s economy has diversified somewhat, but it’s still very dependent on oil revenues. That said, the Bank of Canada did note that the share of GDP that the oil sector is responsible for has diminished a fair amount since the 2015 oil shock, and it’s now less than IT services. The big problem the province is going to have is what to do with all of its under-educated young men, who either quit school or barely got their high school diploma while counting on lucrative oil sector employment. Those days are dwindling, and there will need to be plans to help them transition, sooner than later.

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Roundup: The OECD is watching

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Because the Double-Hyphen Affair continues to roll along, the news yesterday was that the OECD is keeping an eye on the proceedings around the SNC-Lavalin prosecution, given that our anti-bribery rules are part of a concerted OECD effort to stamp out the practice, and much of the language in our laws – including the Criminal Code provisions around deferred prosecutions – contain OECD language. And lo, suddenly everyone was bemoaning this international attention, and it was a sign that we were all the more suspect, and so on. Err, except the OECD doesn’t have any regulatory jurisdiction over Canada, and they’re monitoring the processes ongoing already in Canada. You know, the ones that are examining the very issue. Almost as though the system is working.

On a related note, it was revealed that SNC-Lavalin signed a confidential deal with the government days after the Throne Speech in 2015, that allowed them to keep bidding on federal contracts while they would subject themselves to compliance monitoring for their ethical obligations, at their own expense. I’m not sure that we can consider this something nefarious, but certainly an acknowledgment that they were aware of their issues and were taking steps to deal with them in advance of any prosecution.

In today’s punditry on the matter, Matt Gurney suspects that the international attention will be harder for this government to shake off. Chantal Hébert details the coming crunch time for the main players in this whole Affair. Vicky Mochama writes that if we try to treat Jody Wilson-Raybould, Jane Philpott, and Celina Caesar-Chavannes as paragons of virtue out of a sense of gender essentialism, that we diminish the action and rhetoric of women politicians.

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Roundup: Deleting the message

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The Conservatives decided to delete their tweet yesterday that depicted a black migrant crossing to Canada – over a bridge made of Trudeau’s #WelcomeToCanada tweet, and through a broken chain-link fence. There was backlash that the tweet was racist, and it certainly was intended to stoke the xenophobic tendencies that they have been flirting with. I will point out once again that their continued reliance on the talking point that this is about the “orderly” asylum system would probably make most of Europe laugh and pat them on the head condescendingly, because it’s pretty precious that they think Canada should get the special status of an “orderly” system that no other country gets.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/1019323971274248193

Meanwhile, Maclean’shas a look at the history of the Safe Third Country Agreement, and how it’s basically just waiting for Donald Trump to blow it up if he actually learns about what it is and what it does. Chris Selley, on the other hand, points out the ways in which both the federal government and the new Ontario government are mishandling the whole file, which is fair criticism. But I do think we can’t take our eye off the fact that the Conservatives are flirting with xenophobic populism for partisan gain, and playing cute with it, pitting one group of newcomers against another, and patting themselves on the back for their “compassion” for certain groups of refugees that they use solely as props to hammer away at the regime they’re fleeing. This has been their modus operandi since Jason Kenney was immigration minister, but they’ve poured it on a little thicker since they saw that this kind of populist rhetoric worked for Trump and Brexit (never mind the fact that we have solid proof of election interference in both, and definitive proof of broken rules in the Brexit referendum). This is worrying for our democracy, and we should be very wary of their adopting these techniques.

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Roundup: Harder seeks sympathy

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I have to wonder if Government Leader in the Senate – err, “Government Representative” – Senator Peter Harder is starting to get a bit nervous about the viability of his proposal to reform the Senate rules, as he has started reaching out to sympathetic voices in order to give him some attention on the pages of the newspaper. We’ve seen two such examples in recent days, with a wholly problematic column from John Ibbitson over the weekend in the Globe and Mail, and now some unwarranted praise from Harder’s old friend from their mutual days in the Mulroney government, retired senator Hugh Segal. While Ibbitson’s column was a complete head-scratcher if you know the first thing about the Senate – they don’t need to “prove their value” because they do so constantly (hell, the very first bill of this parliament they needed to send back because the Commons didn’t do their jobs properly and sent over a bill missing a crucial financial schedule, but hey, they passed it in 20 minutes with zero scrutiny). And it was full of praise for the process of Bill C-14 (assisted dying), which is Harder’s go-to example of how things “should” work, which is a problem. And Segal’s offering was pretty much a wholesale endorsement of Harder’s pleading for a “business committee” to do the job he’s apparently unable to do through simple negotiation, so that’s not a real surprise either. But as I’ve written before, the Senate has managed to get bills passed in a relatively timely manner for 150 years without a “Business committee” because its leadership knew how to negotiate with one another, and just because Harder is apparently not up to that task, doesn’t mean we should change the rules to accommodate him.

Meanwhile, there is some definite shenanigans being played by the Conservatives in the Senate in their quest to have an inquiry into the Bombardier loan, and their crying foul when it wasn’t immediately adopted, and wouldn’t you know it, they had a press release ready to go. Conservative Senator Leo Housakos was called out about this over the weekend by Independent Senator Francis Lankin, and while Housakos continues on his quest to try and “prove” that the new appointees are all just Trudeau lackeys in all-but-name, Housakos’ motion may find its match in Senator André Pratte, who wants to expand it to examine other loans so as not to play politics over Bombardier. No doubt we’ll see some added fireworks on this as over the week as the Senate continues its debate.

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