Tag Archives: Nominations

Roundup: Bracing for election night

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With voting day just days away, we’re starting to see a few “reminder” stories about how our system works, so that we can have some reasonable expectations about what the outcomes might look like on Monday, and why it will mean things like the current government staying in place and having the first chance to test the confidence of the new Chamber once it’s been summoned. There is an interview with Emmett Macfarlane here about how any decision will unfold on Monday night and why Trudeau will remain prime minister until he chooses to resign, which is good. There is also a piece from the Canadian Press which maps out different scenarios about how the evening may play out and what these scenarios might mean.

The problem, of course, is that television news in this country is abysmal, and we’ll spend the night listening to inane banter that pretends that there is no sitting government (exacerbated by the fact that they are currently observing a convention that refers to the prime minister as the “Liberal leader” in order to have an exaggerated sense of “fairness” around his incumbent status), and they will throw around terms like “prime minister-elect” even though we don’t elect prime minister (it’s an appointed position) and the fact that if it is the incumbent – which it’s likely to be – he’s already the prime minister and won’t require an “-elect” or “-designate” title to go along with it. We’ll also no doubt hear talk about him getting a “mandate” even though that kind of thing is utterly incompatible with our system of government. And no matter how much people like me will call it out over social media, nobody will care, and they will continue to completely misinform people about our basic civics without any care in the world, because that’s the state of media in this country right now.

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Roundup: Ill-equipped to combat weaponised cynicism

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I’ve been thinking about something Trudeau said during the “debate” on Thursday night about cynicism being the enemy of progressive politics, and in this piece by Aaron Wherry, he listed some of the attacks made against Trudeau in his discussion of said cynicism. It has not gone unnoticed that this has been a tactic that Jagmeet Singh has been cultivating for years – undermining any progress the government has made on tough files, and pretending that difficult things could be accomplished with just a little more willpower, or that things under provincial jurisdiction could just be done with more applications of that willpower. The truth is that it can’t be, and that hard things are hard – which is also why the “you had six years!” talking point is hard to take too seriously. It has a built-in assumption that a government has infinite capacity to do the work, that the House of Commons has infinite time on its calendar to pass all of its legislation, and it also assumes that premiers will sign onto anything the federal government waves in front of them. But that’s not how real life works (especially when your capacity is being sapped by needing to deal with Donald Trump for four years).

But complexity and nuance don’t belong in debates, which is what Singh, Annamie Paul, and even to an extent Erin O’Toole are counting on when they list Trudeau’s so-called “failures.” He didn’t meet the 2020 climate target? If he had started in the fall of 2015, moving to meet that target was pretty much impossible without cratering the economy, and Singh knows it. You can’t lower emissions on a dime, and even bending the curve – which Trudeau has done – takes enormous work, and it’s work he had to go to the Supreme Court of Canada to defend. Boil water advisories? There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and each community has a unique issue that requires a unique solution, which each community is taking the lead on, and the federal government pays the invoices. But again, these solutions take time, even with money being thrown at the problem, which Singh and others seem incapable of recognizing because it suits their narrative. “Taking Indigenous kids to court?” Again, it’s a more nuanced issue where the government has agreed to pay the compensation, and is in the process of negotiating how much in concert with two other class action lawsuits (which went directly to settlement – the government didn’t contest them at all) – but there are very real legal issues with the precedent that the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal might set, because their award appears to contravene a previous Supreme Court of Canada decision. Again, Singh should know this because he’s a lawyer, but he has no interest in the truth because it allows him to score points (and frankly, the media has utterly dropped the ball on this file because they only talk to one party in the litigation and don’t find out just what “jurisdiction” issue the minister refers to). These are all things whose narratives have been torqued to drive a sense of cynicism in Trudeau’s government, which Trudeau is frankly ill-prepared to dispute because he keeps sticking to happy-clappy talking points rather than being frank about problems and solutions. When someone offers you platitudes and doesn’t explain their homework, it makes it all too easy to let cynicism fill in the cracks, and Trudeau really has only himself to blame here.

Meanwhile, here is the video the five leaders released encouraging people to get vaccinated.

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Roundup: Promising to take credit for work already accomplished

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Erin O’Toole released his plan yesterday to ensure that the country would reach 90 percent vaccination rates – voluntarily! The centrepiece of this campaign? A series of mail-outs that would appeal to Canadians’ patriotism in order to get vaccinated. Because appealing to “personal responsibility” has worked so well in Alberta. O’Toole’s plan has some additional tinkering around the edges, such as free Uber and Lyft rides to vaccine appointments, or reimbursing employers for the time off to get it done – things that should not be the responsibility of the federal government, quite frankly.

One of the more galling aspects of his “plan,” however, is around booster shots, and insisting that they will “prioritize the signing of contracts” for booster shots – erm, except that the Liberals already did that. They have a contract with Pfizer to provide additional doses through 2024 if need be, which O’Toole is either lying by omission about, or he’s making a somewhat sexist attack against Anita Anand and slighting her work on this file – while literally promising to take credit for the work that she did. Either way, it’s both misleading and a bit gross, but when has it been anything but over the course of this campaign. (Oh, and his promise to “accelerate homegrown development and production of vaccines” pretty much ignores how vaccine development and production works, but hey, this is also the election where leaders keep promising a Green Lantern Ring to solve all of their problems).

Meanwhile, I can’t help but roll my eyes as Conservatives are clutching their pearls that the Liberals are releasing “negative” ads about them. The party has spent the past number of years going on a strategy of shitposting at every opportunity, and of giving their MPs free reign to proffer conspiracy theories like saying that the Liberals want to “normalise sexual relations with children,” and they get the vapours when the Liberals put out attack ads? Girl, please.

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1434194410263220225

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Roundup: Cynicism and paid sick days

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a couple of election promises yesterday that felt a bit cynical, and one of them is federally problematic. The first promise was to implement ten employer-paid sick days in federally-regulated workplaces. This was something that he should have done some 18 months ago, but given that they had mandated three employer-paid sick days previously – the highest in the country – they felt they were in good standing, and tried to persuade provinces to do the same. They did not.

After Trudeau made the announcement, Jagmeet Singh went on a tear about how “disgusted” he was that Trudeau had made this promise when he’d been calling for it for over a year. But there are differences here, and yes, they matter. Some of you may recall that Singh wanted the federal government to give paid sick leave to everyone in the country, but the federal government can’t do that. They can only mandate employer-paid sick leave – which is the best kind because it means that there are no interruptions on pay cheques and job security is maintained – in federally-regulated workplaces, which account for six percent of jobs in the country. That’s it. The provinces have to amend their own labour codes to cover the remaining workplaces, and Singh consistently refused to acknowledge that reality. Meanwhile, the government recognized that there were people who didn’t have access to employer-paid leave because they’re self-employed or part-time, so they created the Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit, which was a kludge – you had to apply for it, and only after you missed half of the week, and it took more time for the money to arrive. Singh demanded that the federal government “fix” that programme, but there wasn’t much more they could do to it – there are limits to the federal back-end IT infrastructure used to administer the programme, so it couldn’t be seamless like employer-paid sick leave. And the premiers, for whom the other 94 percent of workplaces are under their jurisdiction? They balked, especially because business lobbies like the CFIB lobbied heavily against mandating more sick days, so they forced people to rely on the CRSB, or created their own temporary kludges to mimic the CRSB. For Singh to now claim that Trudeau is doing what he demanded is not true – yes, Trudeau should have mandated more employer-paid sick days federally, but this is not the same as CRSB, and the two should not be equated like he’s doing here (and yes, it is cynical politics for him to claim otherwise in order to drive disillusionment).

As for the promise around school ventilation, it’s too late for this school year, and at first blush it looks like a federal overreach into provincial jurisdiction. The backgrounder states that this is just extending the Safe Return to Class Fund from August 2020, and they’re basically giving money to provinces with the slenderest of strings attached, which I’m not really a fan of. Because we’re in an election, we’re back to the constant state of promises – from all parties – that rely on provincial cooperation, and there are a lot of loaded assumptions that they’ll play ball, which seems to be fairly rare (and before you raise child care, the success there is in part because there was too much money on the table for provinces to ignore, which is not how it has played out with pharmacare). The Liberals are mostly more careful in their language, citing things like “While a Liberal government will always respect provincial-territorial jurisdiction…” unlike the other two platforms, but this certainly isn’t being picked up on nearly enough by the reporting, and it creates expectations that perhaps it perhaps shouldn’t.

https://twitter.com/JenniferRobson8/status/1428860564676222981

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Roundup: Farewell, 43rd Parliament, and good riddance

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Parliament is dissolved, and the 44th General Election has begun. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau characterised the election as a chance for Canadians to weigh in on the direction they want to see the recovery, calling it the most important election since 1945 – and he didn’t go the route of pointing to just how toxic the House of Commons was all spring as his justification (though he easily could have), because this is Campaign Trudeau™, and everything needs to be upbeat and positive. He also put mandatory vaccinations (for areas under federal jurisdiction, including air travel) as one of the centre planks of his campaign and dared people to contrast it to the other parties, with both Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh spending the weekend prevaricating and talking around it, so even though it may seem that the distinctions between them are subtle, they are there.

https://twitter.com/journo_dale/status/1426929811071635458

Erin O’Toole has pretty much retreated to his studio in downtown Ottawa, and spent the first day holding telephone town halls from there, and will do so again today. His pitch has been that the election is pretty much a vanity project by Trudeau in the hopes of a majority, but the fact that he has so far stumbled out of the gate, both with a disastrous shitpost video and his waffling on mandatory vaccinations, has not been terribly auspicious.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1427054892338884611

Jagmeet Singh started his day in Montreal, as he had already committed to attending the Pride parade there – but there was the inherent contradiction in that parades and crowds are okay but elections are unsafe. It’s also worth noting that he didn’t criticise the Governor General for granting dissolution, which makes it apparent that his letter two weeks ago was a cynical ploy that undermined Mary Simon.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1426320404315004940

Of course, while the opposition leaders kept insisting that the election was unnecessary and in some cases, too costly (but seriously, if you think it’s a bad think that elections cost money, you shouldn’t be in the business of democracy), their own rhetoric belies the fact that they didn’t think that Parliament was working, or should have worked because they kept insisting that you can’t trust the prime minister. So…maybe be more consistent if you want people to believe you when you said that there was no reason for an election, because clearly, you think there is.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1426974226007867401

Otherwise, a campaign that is going to be digital and social-media focused has been off to a bad start, contrasting the Conservatives’ terrible shitpost video versus the Liberals’ hopeful and optimistic video that is a note-perfect recreation of a parody video of a feel-good corporate video employing stock footage. So…yeah. Everything is kind of awful, but at least we only have five weeks of this and not two years like the Americans do.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1426699232141004805

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Roundup: O’Toole wants intervenor status

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Yesterday morning, Erin O’Toole declared that he would seek intervenor status at the Federal Court in the dispute between the House of Commons and the Public Health Agency of Canada over the disclosure of classified documents. Apparently, he believes that he has a “distinct perspective” on the underlying issues raised by the case, which is…a bit novel considering that his press release was a partisan document that was not about legal arguments but rather about political calculus.

As a reminder, the process was triggered because under the Canada Evidence Act – which Parliament passed – says that when requests for secret or confidential documents are made to a government entity like PHAC, they must notify the Attorney General, and that triggered a process by which said Attorney General sought clarity from the Federal Court – does the Canada Evidence Act and its limitations supersede or otherwise restrict Parliament’s privileges in demanding documents and the production of papers as they see fit, given that they are ostensibly the highest court in the land. Plenty of people have tried to make this a partisan issue – O’Toole most especially among them – rather than a process where everyone is following the law, and the law conflicts with Parliamentary privilege.

I half-suspect that in this case, the Federal Court may not grant O’Toole standing, given that he has pretty much stated that this is going to be an attempt at electoral grandstanding inside of a court room, which the Court would be hesitant to do. Beyond that, his statement in the press release doesn’t actually make sense – the request to present the documents will die when Parliament is dissolved, and the special committee that demanded the documents ceases to exist. Beyond that, if he forms government, he won’t need to release the documents because he’d be able to read them in secret, thus eliminating the possibility that releasing them might compromise our Five Eyes obligations, or inadvertently compromise a foreign intelligence source (though I am not convinced this is a national security or intelligence issue, but rather more likely one of an RCMP investigation into policy breaches). Not to mention, the documents were released, both in a redacted form to the committee, and in an unredacted form to NSICOP, and the Conservatives want someone else to do the redacting who doesn’t have national security experience. I have a hard time discerning just what “distinct perspective” he has other than scoring points, given that the Speaker will be exercising his role in protecting the privileges of the Commons, and he doesn’t need O’Toole’s help for that.

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Roundup: What open nominations?

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Do you remember when the Liberals considered themselves the party of open nominations? And how they were always going to uphold the democratic right of riding associations to run fair, open and transparent processes to select the candidates that would appear on the ballot for them? Because apparently the party has put this particular bit of democracy, openness and transparency down the memory hole as they continue to acclaim candidates from across the country. In two of these cases, the acclamations came a mere day after the incumbents announced that they weren’t running again, and in one of those ridings – Kanata-Carleton – there was the making of a contested nomination as rumours swirled that Karen McCrimmon wasn’t going to run again, and the riding association was frustrated that they couldn’t get any kind of answer from the party on how and when to run said contested nomination.

Now, the party is going to defend its honour by pointing out that their rules state that they can declare a state of “electoral urgency” to bypass the nomination process, but this is more of the Liberals’ penchant of letting the ends justify the means. They created the rules that were easily gamed, and frankly, the “electoral urgency” clause is a load of bullshit because they were using it in 2019 in the months before the election when they knew they had four years to have this process ongoing because there was a fixed election date under a majority parliament, so there were no surprises. Yes, the pandemic has made nomination races tougher because of public health restrictions, and the party has come under fire for using a verification system that includes facial recognition technology (which BC’s privacy commissioner is investigating, per that province’s laws), but again, these were things that the party should have been cognisant of and dealing with rather than simply wringing their hands and pulling the “electoral urgency” alarm to fast-track their hand-picked candidates, thwarting local democracy, and accountability.

Open nominations are one of the most important and fundamental building blocks of our democratic system. When parties flout those rules, it hurts the entire system – especially as it cements even more power in the leaders’ offices. That the Liberals are so blatantly ignoring their own supposed values in this crucial stage of the democratic process is a sign that the way the party rewrote their constitution to fit the Trudeau era is a very real problem that they are going to have to do a lot of soul-searching to address, especially when that age comes to its inevitable end.

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Roundup: Nova Scotia makes two for child care

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau and Iain Rankin, premier of Nova Scotia, announced yesterday that Nova Scotia was now the second province to sign a new childcare agreement with the federal government under the dollars allocated in Budget 2021, and that it would transition the province to halving current fees by next year, and reducing them to the goal of $10/day by 2026, with commitments along the way for those five years. And crucially, there are federal funds going toward training new early childhood educators, as well as to improve the post-secondary programming around ECE, which are important considerations for expanding the system, especially as one of the federal government’s criteria for that expansion is quality of care.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1414960548735721473

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1415130851755511808

This makes it two provinces down, both of them with non-conservative premiers, and it’s speculated that Newfoundland and Labrador will be next. Alberta claims to be “negotiating” around things like flexibility, but there is a bit of a red herring in there – nothing precludes the province from creating additional, more flexible spaces outside of the federal parameters if they feel they need it, but trying to insist this is about “choice” is a false dichotomy – there can be no actual choice if there is only constrained choice available. In other words, it’s not a real choice if there are no spaces available, and the federal government has long recognized that we have a supply-side problem, which is what they are trying to address. Opposing the federal plan because you claim it’s not flexible enough is, frankly, an abdication of responsibility.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, put out an extremely bizarre “backgrounder” yesterday to claim that the Liberals never meet their promises on childcare, and it was both strange and dishonest. Strange in that this is the kind of thing you’d expect to have an NDP header on it and not a Conservative one, but dishonest because they killed the gods damned system that was in place in 2006. Seriously – Paul Martin’s government had signed agreements with all of the provinces in 2006, and money for the first year was starting to flow when the NDP teamed up with the Conservatives and brought the government down, killing the childcare system that had just been established, because the Conservatives preferred to send $100/month to families instead – because “choice.” Oh, and they created tax credits for new childcare spaces, which created approximately zero of them. They vehemently opposed childcare, and still do, so for them to try and say the Liberals haven’t kept their promises when they actively worked against them and killed the programme that was created is just galling.

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Roundup: Exit Jody Wilson-Raybould

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Jody Wilson-Raybould announced yesterday that she wasn’t going to be running again in the next election, but wasn’t leaving to “spend more time with family.” Rather, she planned to continue her work in other venues, but noticed that the House of Commons had become more toxic and ineffective, which is very true.

https://twitter.com/Puglaas/status/1413128438592933898

While I don’t think that Wilson-Raybould was a particularly great minister (and she has yet to answer for her pushing blatantly unconstitutional legislation through), she nevertheless had a particularly valuable viewpoint that made the House of Commons better for having her in it. Her singularly pushing back against the Bloc’s attempts to play politics around Quebec’s Bill 96 and the proposed constitutional changes and nationhood declarations was something we could certainly have used more of, not less.

This having been said, I think Wilson-Raybould, like Jane Philpott, were somewhat naïve about the nature of federal politics, and were sold some particularly bad advice about life as an independent MP, and more broadly about hung parliaments in general. There is a particular romance around them, particularly from a segment of the political science crowd, which has rosy visions of the 1960s and inter-party cooperation to get things done, when hung parliaments in recent decades have simply been nasty and highly partisan, and that contributed a lot to the toxicity and ineffectiveness of this parliamentary session. On top of that, Wilson-Raybould had broken the trust of her fellow MPs, and that no doubt further isolated her in an already fractious situation in the Chamber. It’s too bad that she couldn’t have contributed more, but her no longer being there is a diminution to the kinds of voices that we should be hearing more of.

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Roundup: Parliament versus itself

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Not unexpectedly, the Speaker of the House of Commons has declared that he’s going to fight “tooth and nail” for Parliament’s right to demand whatever documents they want – as well he should. But this is a very complex issue that becomes parliament fighting against itself, because of the obligations in places like the Canada Evidence Actthat triggered the process that the Attorney General had to undertake around those Public Health Agency documents related to the National Microbiology Lab firings.

With that in mind, here is some context as to what the Canada Evidence Act demands, and why this is not Justin Trudeau personally defying the will of parliament, but the government following its own laws.

For a further breakdown of the legal balancing act involved, and what the court process for this will look like, read through this thread (which was a little too long to simply post, but a couple of highlights are below).

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