Tag Archives: Marc Miller

Roundup: Another vice-regal safeguard?

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As the security clearance discourse carries on, we remain confronted by the false notions that Pierre Poilievre is unable to receive a clearance, rather than the fact that he is unwilling, using the false claim that it’s somehow a “trap” to keep him from criticising the government. It’s not, there’s plenty of opportunity for him to criticise the government while being fully briefed, but as is the tradition with Canadian politicians, they have long preferred not to know because then they would have to be responsible in their commentary rather than bombastic, or as the Beaverton aptly put it, he would have to lie just slightly less than he already does.

Nevertheless, this turns to the question of what would happen if someone were to become prime minister, or at least win an election, where there are genuine security concerns about them? Well, Philippe Lagassé has an answer for that, and it lies in the reserve powers of the Governor General.

He makes a crucial point that it would be beyond the pale for CSIS and the RCMP to somehow have the veto over the appointment of a prime minister, but the discretion of the Governor General could conceivably be the constitutional fire extinguisher in such a case. It’s extremely unlikely to ever happen, but nevertheless, it’s a good thought exercise to consider given the times we live in.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian missile struck a residential district in Odesa on Friday, but there were no casualties. Residents in Kupiansk are fleeing ahead of a Russian advance in the area. Both Russia and Ukraine swapped 95 prisoners each in a deal brokered by the UAE. South Korean intelligence is corroborating Ukrainian intelligence’s claim that North Korea is now sending troops to right for Russia. Here’s a look at how far-right influencers openly used Russian money to make “documentary” hit-jobs on Ukraine and president Zelenskyy.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1847257217424113736

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Roundup: The sudden concern over redistributing asylum seekers

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There is a particular strain of ugly anti-immigrant rhetoric which has largely been tamped down in this country but has started to re-emerge thanks to the permission structures being formed by the Republicans in the US, and which are being laundered into Canada by blaming the Liberals for somehow “breaking the consensus” around immigration in recent years with high arrival numbers, ignoring that the vast majority of these numbers have been asked for by provincial premiers. Nevertheless, the issue with asylum seekers (which are not economic immigrants) has disproportionately landed in Quebec’s lap because of the ease of border crossing there, and Quebec has made demands of other provinces to share the load.

Well, the federal minster, Marc Miller, has had discussions with provinces about taking more of these asylum seekers—with federal supports—but that was enough to get New Brunswick premier Blaine Higgs to start lying about it over social media. (Higgs is floundering in the polls ahead of an election and has been turning to Christian Nationalists as his strategy to stay competitive). And while Miller has called out Higgs for his fictitious alarm, it has already spread to other provinces like Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia, with BC’s Conservative leader also weighing in (and talking out of his ass as he does about many, many files).

https://twitter.com/marcmillervm/status/1834359608481100045

Miller is an effective communicator, unlike most of his fellow Cabinet members, so he’s actually mounting a good defence, but we cannot forget that this particular xenophobic rhetoric has been creeping into the discourse here, enabled by certain premiers and by Pierre Poilievre who have been blowing this particular dog-whistle while the Elder Pundits shrug and insist that it’s not really happening because Canada is different (it is, but it’s not that different), but they see it being used effectively in the US, and in places like Hungary, and they want a piece of that action if it’ll get them the power that they crave. We’ll see if Miller can score enough blows, but I suspect that with the Elder Pundits dismissing the nature of these attacks, the effectiveness of his counters, even with receipts, will be blunted in broader public.

In case you missed it:

  • My Xtra column on the three upcoming provincial by-elections, and how conservative parties all moved further to the right in each of them.
  • My weekend column on the way the Public Accounts committee went from being the best, most non-partisan committee in Parliament to yet another sideshow.
  • My Loonie Politics Quick Take that explains Supply Days, and why they’re going to be a lot more weighty now that the NDP have reneged on their agreement.
  • My column on the tiff at TIFF over that Russian film, and why Conservatives blaming Trudeau are really telling on themselves about their own censorship ambitions.

Ukraine Dispatch

https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1834204204405039436

 

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Roundup: Nothing to opt out of

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Breaking through the endless wank-a-thon of the pundit class declaring that Justin Trudeau needs to go was a story where Danielle Smith had sent a letter to Trudeau declaring that Alberta will “opt out” of the dental care plan, and that they want to negotiate “compensation” that they would apply to their own provincial low-income dental assistance programme, but this seems to completely misunderstand how the programme works. It is very literally an insurance programme. Dental offices bill Sun Life through a portal, and the federal government then reimburses Sun Life. Yes, the rollout was poor and confused (because the whole implementation of this programme has been a bit of a gong show, thanks entirely to the NDP), but this is not a federal transfer programme. There is nothing to compensate the province for because this is a 100 percent federal insurance scheme.

The reason it’s structured this way is because the NDP demanded, as part of the Supply and Confidence Agreement, that this needed to be a fully federal programme, and not cost-shared like early learning and child care, and because dental care is ostensibly provincial jurisdiction, it had to be structured as insurance, and the model they would up choosing was to get Sun Life to do it, and they just pay Sun Life, rather than stand up a federal bureaucracy to administer this. This should have been a federal-provincial transfer so that provinces could bolster their existing dental programmes to federal guidelines, but no. As a result, I don’t see just what Smith can “opt out” of, let alone be compensated for.

Of course, federal health minister Mark Holland didn’t help matters by going on Power & Politics and not explaining how the programme works, and instead suggested that she could opt out if she could guarantee the same or better coverage, but again, opt out of what? The province isn’t billing Sun Life. They are out of the equation entirely, and Holland should have pointed this out, rather than just trying to sound conciliatory and saying he doesn’t want a fight, and repeating the same lines about how many tens of thousands of seniors have availed themselves of the programme to date. Smith doesn’t appear to understand how the programme works, and has created a strawman around it to make it look like she’s standing up to Trudeau (at the expense of her population), and claiming they already have a great dental care programme and that this is duplicative (it’s not—the Alberta programme covers very few people and is a burden to administer).

There is an added issue here with how the media have covered this. CBC, CTV, The Canadian Press, all ignore the programme structure and just retype Smith’s letter, and then get comments from the provincial dental association about either their disagreement on the federal programme or some minor pushback about Smith’s comments about the existing provincial programme, but the fact that this is an insurance company where the dentists bill Sun Life and the province has no involvement at all is a pretty crucial part of the story, which nobody mentions. This should not be rocket science, and this would show that Smith is engaging in bad theatre, but of course they don’t do that, and readers are being given a disservice as a result.

Ukraine Dispatch

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited troops on the front lines in the eastern Donetsk region. Zelenskyy is expected to sign a security agreement with the EU later today.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1805883881356186102

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Roundup: O’Toole boots Batters at his peril

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The internal strife within the Conservative ranks is getting more pointed, as word came down yesterday that Erin O’Toole had lined up enough caucus members to force out any MP who signed Senator Denise Batters’ petition – thus weaponizing the (garbage) Reform Act to protect the leader rather than curb the leader’s powers – and with that threat in the open, O’Toole then kicked Batters out of caucus.

There are a few things about how this is all going down. First of all, the use of the Reform Act provisions to threaten other caucus members is a completely hypocritical action that would be utterly galling if it were not predictable. If only someone *cough* had warned everyone that this was a garbage piece of legislation that would only be used to insulate leaders and give them freer rein to be more autocratic and to threaten the MPs who get out of line, and literally put a target on the backs of anyone who openly stood against the leader as the Act’s provisions require. Imagine it being abused in exactly the way that someone *cough* warned was likely to happen, no matter what Michael Chong and every talking head pundit in this country gushed over. Funny that.

The other aspect of this is the fact that O’Toole kicking Batters out puts a stake in the party’s self-righteous moralising that they respect strong women and that Justin Trudeau hates them (citing Jody Wilson-Raybould, Jane Philpott and Celina Caesar-Chavannes – but curiously omitting Chrystia Freeland from consideration). It’s even more curious that Senator Michael McDonald said virtually the same things about O’Toole that Batters did, and he didn’t face any sanction. In fact, this has clearly shown that O’Toole will tolerate the anti-vaxxers in his caucus but not someone who wanted the party’s grassroots membership to have a say in his leadership before August 2023 (at which time they would warn that there could be an election at any time so they couldn’t possibly change leaders then). And by kicking Batters out of caucus, she has nothing left to lose. She can join up with the Canadian Senators Group later today (the likeliest place for her to land) and carry on criticising O’Toole and calling on Conservative grassroots members to have their say about his leadership, and O’Toole can’t do anything about it. All of his leverage over her is now gone. If O’Toole thinks that this move solved any of his problems, he’s mistaken.

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Roundup: Admission that deadlines will be missed

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The federal government announced yesterday that they weren’t going to be able to meet their deadline for fixing all of the boil-water advisories on First Nations reserves, in part because of delays caused by the pandemic. And while they should get some points for at least owning this rather than sending it down the memory hole like their predecessors did, this is yet one more file where they need to do a much better job of communicating what is going on with the file. And Marc Miller is better than many of his fellow ministers, but there needs to be a hell of a lot more candour that about these boil-water advisories, such as each case is unique so you can’t fit the same solution to all of them; it is a huge challenge to build major infrastructure in remote and fly-in communities, and that takes a lot more time to complete a project as a result; that in some communities, the bigger problem is capacity to maintain systems – and in some communities, the problem is that as soon as they train someone to maintain the system, they get a better offer and get poached. Miller did note that in some cases, the state of decay in some of these systems was not adequately appreciated, and that climate change and shorter winters make getting materials up to some communities on ice roads more difficult. The other aspect of note is that there is yet more funding attached to finish the job, as well as better ongoing maintenance and prevention of future advisories, which is all good, but again, they need to communicate what the challenges are, lest we get another round of people who live in cities not being able to appreciate that you can’t throw money at a problem like this and hope it gets fixed overnight.

This being said, there is already talk about broken promises, and the dangers of setting deadlines, and so on. I would note that there should be nothing wrong with setting ambitious targets, and there should also be nothing wrong with adjusting them, but that should be accompanied by candour that lays out why plans need to be adjusted. I think this government underestimates how much goodwill can be gained by frank and honest discussions of projects rather than just sticking to the happy-clappy talking points and other pabulum that they spout, but what do I know?

In pandemic news, the Alberta government has requested field hospitals from the federal government and the Red Cross, but they claim that this is just about contingency planning, and that they haven’t requested personnel for them. Given that infections are out of control in the province, and its hospitals are already at the point of being overwhelmed, you can be pretty sure that this line about it being for a “contingency” is bogus, that they know they need to do this because they refuse to lockdown, and this is just softening the ground.

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Roundup: Poilievre attacks the central bank

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I am generally tolerant of MPs taking on ministerial or critic portfolios without first requiring a background knowledge in the subject matter, because for ministers, what matters is your ability to manage the department and act on advice that you’re given (as well as being accountable for those actions), while critics are playing an accountability role, and don’t exactly need subject matter expertise in order to do that. This having been said, sometimes ignorance is damaging, and we saw a very real example of that yesterday, where the Conservative finance critic, Pierre Poilievre, started taking shots at the Bank of Canada, saying that their quantitative easing programme is a “pyramid scheme” that is enabling the Liberals’ deficit spending (because we’re in a global pandemic!), and in doing so, is threatening the independence of the central bank. Poilievre also raised the spectre of runaway inflation if the Bank keeps printing money, err, except that we are currently facing deflationary pressure – not inflationary.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1316702304867946497

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1316703965585833984

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1316854251826683904

There are plenty of economists who can explain these concepts to Poilievre, except we know that he’s not interested. He was given the portfolio in order to be a shit-disturber, to knock Bill Morneau off his game (and Morneau was fairly easily rattled by this kind of partisan buffoonery), and presumably kept in the role because Erin O’Toole thought he was doing a good job of it. Mind you, Chrystia Freeland is not Bill Morneau, and she’s not affected by Poilievre’s antics, and frequently puts him in his place in QP. But the fact that this is the state of the discourse on the economic recovery is both disappointing and dispiriting. We should be having reasonably conversations about what is happening with the economic recovery, not this kind of performative baboon jeering and hooting that we’re getting from a party that claims to be the better economic managers.

Good reads:

  • The Chinese ambassador has implicitly threatened Canadians in Hong Kong if Canada grants asylum to Hong Kong protesters. So that’s going well.
  • The new commercial rent subsidy will be retroactive to October 1st, but will require legislation to pass before those funds can roll out.
  • Indigenous Services minister Marc Miller says the raid on the Nova Scotia lobster pound on Tuesday was an attack on all Mi’kmaw people.
  • The Mi’kmaq chief involved in the fishery dispute says that the RCMP inaction on the scene as their property was destroyed in the raid is systemic racism in action.
  • The federal government is investing $20 million in helping bring small modular reactors to market as part of the goal of reaching net zero emissions.
  • The RCMP’s union is back in talks around salary increases, after they were delayed for the pandemic.
  • The government’s COVID Alert app has a bit of a glitch on Apple phones running older iOS, where it’s telling them they have potential conflicts when the app doesn’t.
  • The Bank of Canada is preparing to have a digital currency at the ready in the event it’s needed should Facebook’s planned Libra get blocked by regulators.
  • Pharmaceutical companies are threatening not to launch new medicines in Canada if new regulations come to force that would lower some prices.
  • Liberals on the finance and ethics committees are continuing their filibusters to avoid resuming the investigations into the WE Imbroglio.
  • Economists Andrew Leach and Blake Shaffer consider Alberta’s shift away from coal-fired electricity to be a success story for tools like carbon pricing.
  • Susan Delacourt recounts a political scientist’s attempts to interview women MPs about their experiences, and how that translates into changing the political culture.

Odds and ends:

Colin Horgan gives a wake-up call that the end of 2020 won’t bring relief, but will probably make things worse because we’ve exposed the problems in society.

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Roundup: An admission of systemic racism in Canada

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau’s daily presser was held away from Rideau Cottage yesterday, at a local business that benefitted from the wage subsidy, and it was remarked that it looked to be suspiciously like a campaign stop. Trudeau did his best to try and deflect blame for losing at political chicken – err, Wednesday’s inability to get the government’s latest emergency omnibus bill passed, outlining all of the places where items in the bill matched the demands of opposition parties, while dismissing some of the criticisms – primarily that of the Conservatives in their insistence on having full parliamentary sittings restored. The more memorable moment, however, was when he was asked about RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki’s comments that seem to dismiss systemic racism in the RCMP (though she did cop to unconscious bias), where Trudeau said that of course there is systemic racism in the RCMP, just like there is in all of our institutions, and that systems are not broken, but were in fact built that way. He went on to say that part of why it’s difficult to address is because it’s in the building blocks of these institutions, which should serve as a reminder to everyone that there are no quick fixes to any of this. He also went on to say that Canadian exceptionalism isn’t just that we do well, but that we know we need to do better and are willing to address it. This is probably the first time that a head of government has made this kind of an admission, and an acknowledgment of concepts that many Canadians are still coming to terms with – but he also did say that he had faith in Lucki to do the job of reforming the RCMP, so there’s that.

On the subject of the RCMP, Indigenous services minister Marc Miller is not having any of Commissioner Lucki’s excuses about not understanding systemic racism, and is critical that not enough has been done to combat it over the past two years. AFN National Chief Perry Bellegarde says that the federal government’s complacency allows police violence against Black and Indigenous people, and he’s right. And lo and behold, the dashcam footage of Chief Allan Adam’s arrest has been made public, and it is hard to see how senior RCMP officials could have concluded that the actions were “appropriate,” which is a big flashing indicator of a problem in the ranks.

Meanwhile, as the debate on bringing back Parliament properly progresses with Trudeau’s disingenuous excuses, Conservative House leader Candice Bergen has put forward a number of suggestions for how MPs could safely vote in-person in a returned Parliament – some of which I’m not in favour of, but at least it’s a better solution than the Pandora’s Box of remote or electronic votes, which the government favours – and make no mistake, they are an evil that will be unleashed and there will be no going back. (I have more on this in my weekend column, out later today).

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