Tag Archives: Marijuana

Roundup: It’s the same government and words matter

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Concern for civic literacy in this country took another blow as numerous media outlets started reporting that prime minister Justin Trudeau was meeting with Governor General Julie Payette to “signal his intention to form government.” They took this obviously wrong line directly from the PMO press release, but let me reiterate that it is wrong. Worse, Power & Politics said that Trudeau went to Payette to ask permission to form a government, which is so wrong that it should make the walls bleed with anguish. Payette doesn’t give permission. Trudeau is already the prime minister and the election doesn’t change that. Government doesn’t change – it merely carries over into a new parliament. What Trudeau was really doing was meeting about his intentions for the upcoming parliament, including when he would like her to summon it – but this was not actually or accurately communicated to Canadians. And true, he could have theatrically resigned and got sworn in again, but that would be both counterproductive and dumb, but again, this is the language that we’re using to describe this routine bit of government business.

Shortly thereafter was news that Trudeau had tapped Canadian ambassador to France, Isabel Hudon, and Anne McLellan, for his “transition” to his “second term,” at which point my head exploded because there is nothing to transition, and we don’t have “terms” in Canada. He may be shuffling his Cabinet, and there may be shakeups in PMO or in their Machinery of Government shop, but it’s the same ministry. There is nothing to actually transition to or from. It’s just a Cabinet shuffle. And again, this was not accurately communicated nor explained to Canadians.

There are clear concepts in Westminster parliaments that are not being accurately described, either by the hapless fools in Trudeau’s PMO, or by any of the media bureaux, who should know better. We are inundated with Americana politically, and there are so many people – both politicians and journalists – who want to playact American politics in Canada because it’s “fun” or “sexy,” when we’re a different country with a very different system, and “borrowing” terms or concepts (or in the case of the NDP, entire election planks that don’t make sense) that don’t actually translate here don’t help anyone. Instead, they create confusion that bad actors exploit to their own purposes, who know that they won’t be corrected when they deliberately misconstrue things. This is a problem, and would that our media outlets could see that this is a problem that they have the power to fix – but they don’t, and here we are. Do better, everyone. Seriously.

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Roundup: Judicial review and missing nuance

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There was a development regarding a First Nations court challenge, which I’ll discuss in a moment, but first up, the campaign news. Jagmeet Singh was in Saskatoon to essentially re-announce his plans to “immediately” implement dental care – again, omitting that it’s provincial jurisdiction and he has no way of forcing provinces to do the heavy lifting – before he headed to Thunder Bay.

Justin Trudeau didn’t announce anything but met with voters at a restaurant in Quebec City, followed by a media availability where he assured everyone that his views have evolved from when, in 2011, he said he was personally against abortion but was pro-choice. He says he’s now totally pro-choice because his previous stance didn’t really make any sense – something he probably felt he needed to make clear when it was remarked that his position and Scheer’s were very similar in personally opposing abortion. Later on, he was at a tree planting with a candidate in Saint-Anaclet, Quebec, where he addressed the lawsuit issue (and again, more on that in a moment).

Andrew Scheer was in Etobicoke, where he re-announced the party’s platform as regards gun control and gangs – and much like his foreign aid announcement, this one was also based on a series of lies about bail and sentencing. More to the point, Scheer pledged more mandatory minimum sentences – which the courts keep striking down – and pledging to fight for them in court tooth and nail, so he wants to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to fight for unconstitutional laws for the sake of symbolism, apparently. But this was overshowed by yet more questions about his dual-citizenship, including his need to file US taxes, and being registered for “selective service,” meaning the draft.

But back to the court challenge, which was news that the government had applied to the Federal Court for judicial review of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decision that would award compensation to every First Nations child who had been apprehended by child and family services. Immediately there was a hue and cry, and plenty of outrage (some of it performative), and a lot of hot takes from journalists who failed to understand the nuances in legal stories. And while I’m not a lawyer, I have been on the law beat for several years now, and I can say that oftentimes, these kinds of appeals are made on technical grounds because in the law, precise wording matters, particularly when one is concerned about the precedents it sets. Both Seamus O’Regan and Trudeau did address this in the media saying that they agree that the government failed these children and that they are owed compensation, but they need time to determine how to do it right, but they can’t do that during a writ period (which is appropriate, given the Caretaker convention, especially as this is worth billions of dollars). Ah, but these clever reporters said, the documents say that they are opposed to the compensation award. Now, I haven’t had a chance to read the application because it’s not online, but the CBC describes it thusly:

The application says Canada acknowledges the finding of systematic discrimination and does not oppose the general principle of compensating First Nations individuals affected by a discriminatory funding model — but it argues awarding compensation to individuals in this claim is inconsistent with the nature of the complaint, the evidence, past jurisprudence and the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Now, there are clues in here as to what the government is arguing, primarily that the Tribunal exceeded its authority to make this kind of compensation order based on the kind of human rights complaint that was brought before it, including exceeding their statutory authority. So that’s not a small thing if that’s the case. And it’s a hell of a lot of nuance in the story that deserves to be explained. Any government is going to be concerned if a Tribunal exceeds its authority to make these kinds of orders, because that will impact future cases with future governments – no matter that they feel this case is deserving of compensation. But this very important detail has been completely glossed over in the search for outrage takes, which means that the reporting is doing a disservice to all parties involved.

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Roundup: Cuts and capacity

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Andrew Scheer made a defensive manoeuvre yesterday by sending letters to each of the premiers promising that he wouldn’t cut health or social transfers if he formed government – his way of heading off attacks from Justin Trudeau that are trying to paint Scheer with the same brush as Doug Ford, as Ford continues to make ill-considered cuts across Ontario without regard for logic or reason (while, oddly enough, his government’s spending continues to increase). There is an added bit of significance to this in that Ford has spent the past year trying to sell the message that Ontario’s books are such a basket case that the province is in the road to bankruptcy – which is a complete and total fabrication. While yes, Ontario does have a high debt-to-GDP ratio, we also have to remember that the previous government was borrowing money where interest rates are below the rate of inflation – essentially they are getting free money that they could use to invest in the province.

Enter Kevin Carmichael at the Financial Post, who wrote a must-read contemplation of the state of the federal books yesterday. It’s an adult conversation about the actual state of our finances – contrary to Scheer, our books are in great shape and the deficit is miniscule, and contrary to Trudeau and Bill Morneau, the deficits are coming in smaller than projected and growth is greater than projected and with no new increases in spending, we could be back in surplus before the 2023 election (thought that is always this government’s problem). And with that in mind, he poses the question – do we need to sock away surpluses in anticipation of a future recession even though we already have the capacity to deal with it, or do we spend our current capacity on something that would have lasting changes for our economy, like national childcare? It’s the kind of grown-up conversation that we should be having, but we’re not as parties snipe at one another over who is more “divisive.”

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1157119930434609153

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Roundup: Frivolously calling in CSIS

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Because there is nothing that the current strategic geniuses in the Conservative leader’s office won’t do to turn an issue into some kind of cartoonish conspiracy or a theatrical production, they decided yesterday to write an open letter to CSIS to demand that they open an investigation into John McCallum, citing that he was trying to direct the Chinese into interfering in the Canadian election. No, seriously.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1149729121230045185

To not put too fine of a point on this, calling in national security agencies over a partisan issue is not only highly unserious, it’s dangerous because it not only politicises CSIS, but it also fuels the current rage by those on engaging in illiberal populism of accusing those who engage in legitimate political disagreement of being treasonous. And while Lisa Raitt would take to Twitter to try and defend this with overly cute legalistic justifications, the broader point stands. Leave CSIS out of your political theatre. This should be a no-brainer. And yet…

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1149745283825315840

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1149748705395904517

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1149819453124894721

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1149819454878035968

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Roundup: Weasel words on conversion therapy

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In the wake of the Liberals announcing that they were looking at what measures they could take at a federal level to ban “conversion therapy,” the question was put to Andrew Scheer if he opposed it. Scheer responded that while he opposes “forced” conversion therapy, he will wait to see what the government proposes around banning it before if he’ll support it. The Conservatives quickly cried foul that the Global news headline was that “Andrew Scheer will ‘wait and see’ before taking a stance on conversion therapy ban” was just clickbait that didn’t reflect his actual quotes (and Global did update their headline), but not one of them pointed out the fact that Scheer’s own words were, to be frank, weaselly.

Scheer said that he opposed “forced” conversion therapy, and that he’s opposed to “any type of practice that would forcibly attempt to change someone’s sexual orientation against their will or things like that.” And you note the weasel words in there – about only being opposed to “forced” therapy, or to change it “against their will.” The giant implication that not one conservative rushing to defend Scheer is that there are types of “voluntary” conversion therapy that he is okay with, and that is alarming because any kind of so-called “conversion therapy” is torture, whether entered into voluntarily or not – and it ignores that when people enter into it voluntarily, it’s because they have such a degree of self-loathing that they have deluded themselves into believing that they can change their sexual orientation in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and a lot of that self-loathing comes from the sorts of violence, whether physical, mental or spiritual, that has been inflicted upon them. And it does look entirely like Scheer is being too cute by leaving a giant loophole in the window for his religious, social conservative flank to not feel threatened by his position, because it lets them carry on with the mythology that there is such a thing as “voluntary” conversion therapy, and that this is all about their “love the sinner, hate the sin” bullshit that asserts that homosexuality is just a learned behaviour and not an intrinsic characteristic. So no, I don’t think Scheer has been at all unequivocal.

Meanwhile, Scheer’s apologists will demand to know why the government refused to act on a “conversion therapy” ban when presented with a petition about it in March, but again, this is an issue where there is a great deal of nuance that should be applied. The government response was that these practices tend to fall under healthcare or be practiced by health professionals, which makes it provincial jurisdiction, and that while there can be some applications of the Criminal Code with some practices, it required coordination with the provinces to address, which they have been doing. What the Liberals announced this week was that they were seeing if there were any other measures they could take federally, which might involve the Criminal Code. Again, it’s an issue where it’s hard for them to take a particular line, so they’re trying to see what it is possible to do – that’s not a refusal, it’s an acknowledgement that it’s a complicated issue.

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Roundup: Intelligence and context

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There was a lot of flurry yesterday about supposed revelations made in Federal Court that CSIS has been spying on peaceful environmental groups. Except, people who used to be at CSIS, will tell you that’s exactly not the case. And the reporting on this hasn’t exactly helped either because it’s in a very defined frame with tropes that somewhat credulously take what these groups are saying and putting it with the redacted documents and drawing conclusions, that again, people who used to work there, will dispute, and those voices aren’t in the reporting. So here’s Stephanie Carvin and Jessica Davis, both of who used to work at CSIS, offering some proper context for what those documents say.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148217645986131969

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148217647852642304

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1148233105825812480

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1148235622529818625

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1148235624580833283

https://twitter.com/JessMarinDavis/status/1148235626380181505

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148301752770408448

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148222236832215040

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1148230145968418817

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Roundup: More trouble in Rideau Hall

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The news out of Rideau Hall is rarely good these days, and yesterday, it was about high levels of harassment and job dissatisfaction being reported by the staff there. I’m not entirely surprised by this, given that most of the established and long-time staff abandoned it shortly after Julie Payette was named governor general, because she and her hand-picked secretary (who had no government or Crown-related experience) essentially made everyone’s lives miserable. This after it was revealed that Payette still refuses to move into Rideau Hall because she’s unhappy with the lack of privacy there, while she has decided to decamp to the Citadelle in Québec City – her other official residence – for the summer. (On that note, it’s probably the most use the Citadelle has had continuously in quite a while). All of this makes one wonder if she wasn’t told when she was offered the position that it’s a very public role and that living in an official residence would come with issues like staff being in the building at all hours. It seems odd that she wouldn’t have known this going into the job (and possibly a sign that Justin Trudeau and his office did a terrible job in either selecting her or preparing her).

Meanwhile, I remain concerned that we’ve heard nothing from the PMO about how they’re planning to replace the lieutenant governor of Saskatchewan following his untimely death this week, because the provincial government will be paralyzed until that is filled. If we had a functioning vice-regal appointments commission, there would have been more names from a short-list on record that could be drawn from fairly easily for a replacement, but now it’s an opaque box, and if there is another Judy Foote-like appointment in the works, that could be yet another self-inflicted wound for this government.

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Roundup: A queen and her prime minister

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It was Pride weekend in Toronto, and Justin Trudeau was in attendance once again this year, with several Cabinet ministers and his Toronto-area MPs. The only Conservative MP in attendance appears to have been Lisa Raitt, while Jagemeet Singh and Elizabeth May were also present.

But most importantly? This years RuPaul’s Drag Race runner-up from Toronto, the Queen of the North, Brooke Lynn Hytes was also in attendance, and got to meet her prime minister, as any good queen would.

https://twitter.com/AdamScotti/status/1142852635780927488

https://twitter.com/Bhytes1/status/1142870645673484294

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Roundup: The report and its “legal imperatives”

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As expected, the MMIW Inquiry report was delivered in a ceremony yesterday morning, and the prime minister accepted the report at the ceremony and promised that a national action plan would be developed in concert with Indigenous people – but the fact that he didn’t echo the use of the word “Canadian genocide” from the report had everyone trying to make an Issue out of it (though he made a qualified use of the term at a speech later in the day in Vancouver). The overall theme of the report is that there needs to be a “decolonization” in order for things to get better – which is easier said than done. The report’s 231 recommendations are phrased as “legal imperatives,” but some of them are tremendously problematic or impractical. Some of it is useful – suggestions around policing (which the RCMP promises to review carefully), some specific recommendations about the “man camps” that accompany resource development projects in Indigenous territory, more Indigenous prosecutors and judges (but less helpful is the suggestion that they may require a separate judicial system). But far less practical “imperatives” included things like demanding that the government create jobs in Indigenous communities (because we have a command-and-control economy?), or the creation of a basic income for all Canadians (erm, you know how much that would actually cost, right? Right?). How those kinds of recommendations can be phrased as “legal imperatives” is in and of itself a problem.

And then we’re back to the “genocide” issue, which has sucked up a lot of the oxygen. The Commissioners asserted that it’s a different kind of genocide than the Holocaust or what happened in Rwanda (which had Roméo Dallaire objecting), but wanted to remove the qualification of “cultural” genocide that was previously used in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, and which was accepted by pretty much all facets of Canadian society. Expect this particular polarizing language to continue to dominate the discussion in the weeks ahead.

In hot takes, Chantal Hébert worries that the report’s fairly hardline, all-or-nothing approach will be an excuse for people to tune out rather than engage with its findings (much like the apocalyptic language around climate change has not had the desired effect of spurring action). Chris Selley, meanwhile, points out some of the glaring omissions in the report, the lack of some context when it comes to rates of murders of Indigenous men, for example, and some of the contradictory recommendations such as being against mandatory minimum sentences because they disproportionately affect Indigenous people – while calling for mandatory minimums that are punitive if victims are Indigenous women, never mind that most of the perpetrators will be Indigenous men.

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Roundup: A blow to the tanker ban bill

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The Senate’s transport committee voted last night to not proceed with Bill C-48, which bans tankers on BC’s northwest coast, but before anyone gets too excited, I would caution that it’s not the bill’s end. We just saw the Senate’s national security committee recommend changes to the gun control bill that would gut it, and those got overturned by the Senate as a whole, and I suspect we’ll see a repeat performance of that with this bill – but the Conservatives will put up a fight, and because this was one of the bills that they did not offer a final vote timeline in their agreement with the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, they will dare him to invoke time allocation on this. (I plan to write more about this in column form later).

In the meantime, Independent Senator Paula Simons was one of the deciding votes on this, and she explains it all over Twitter.

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