Tag Archives: Pierre Poilievre

Roundup: The failed “1 Million March”

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The supposed “1 Million March 4 Children” took place yesterday in cities across Canada, and in most instances, were drowned out by counter-protesters—a welcome sign to be sure. And to be clear, these protests have nothing to do with children, or “parental rights,” but is focused largely on the moral panic around trans rights (and the falsehood that they are mutilating and sterilising children), pronoun policies in schools, and the libel that this is somehow about gays “grooming” children, or indoctrinating them to be gay. The attendees are pretty much a toxic brew of leftover “Freedom Convoy” enthusiasts, grievance tourists, far-right nationals, and some Muslim parents whom they have temporary found common cause with (and don’t expect this to last, given that much of the far-right agitation in Canada has its roots in Islamophobia, but they’re happy to let the Muslims agitate against LGBTQ+ people on their behalf). A few arrests were made at some of the demonstrations, but they were largely peaceful in that regard. (Write-up of the Ottawa event here, with photos here).

In terms of political reaction, the marchers didn’t get much support, outside of New Brunswick premier Blaine Higgs who greeted them and made common cause with them, because of course he did. In Ottawa, Jagmeet Singh led a counter-protest march, while the Conservatives were instructed to steer clear and say nothing, not even when it was raised in Question Period, as they sat stone-faced when others clapped about the denunciation of anti-trans hate. This silence is of course deliberate—it’s not because of a lack of conviction, but because they don’t want to jeopardise any ability to try and eat into the PPC’s far-right voter base, because that’s how they think they’ll edge out the Liberals in the next election. And I really have to question how MPs like Melissa Lantsman and Eric Duncan can sit there through this as though this doesn’t affect them (because remember, there is not “good parts only” version of right-wing populism. You can’t try and dog-whistle about “gender theory” and think that it’ll stop there, because it won’t).

The thing that gets me through all of this so-called movement to “protect children” is this insistence that LGBTQ+ people must be “grooming” children or indoctrinating them because there’s this belief that they’re too young to know if they’re gay or lesbian, or even trans. In most cases, that’s not true—most kids know who they are, and most of us older LGBTQ+ people have been through miserable and unsupportive youth and adolescence, and want to ensure that the next generation doesn’t have to go through what we did. That these people are masking their homophobia and transphobia as concern is one thing, but it’s the complete lack of empathy on their part that really gets me.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians conducted strikes in at least six cities, including Kyiv, Kherson, Kharkiv, Cherkasy, and Lviv. AP has a look inside a Ukrainian platoon that freed Andriivka. At the UN, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the Security Council about Russia breaking the UN Charter.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1704473607273881853

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau told a climate event at the UN General Assembly that Canada is on track to exceed its methane reduction targets (but we did expand our fossil fuels).
  • As Trudeau has been having pull-aside meetings at the UN, Australia’s foreign minister calls the allegations about Indian agents “credible.”
  • Mélanie Joly relayed Canada’s “grave concerns” about Azerbaijan escalating military action in the Nagorno-Karabakh region involving Armenians.
  • Canada will pull some of its diplomatic staff from India following recent threats.
  • The Privacy Commissioner says Canada Post broke the law by harvesting information from envelopes and packages.
  • The Ombudsman for Responsible Enterprise is investigating Levi Strauss for possible forced labour in their supply chain.
  • Indian officials have suddenly started claiming students in Canada face risks to their personal safety, undermining their own High Commissioner’s comments.
  • American politicians are warning Canada against implementing a possible digital services tax on web giants (which we won’t do if the OECD gets its act together).
  • A group of senators are calling on the government to institute stricter criteria for schools that host international students.
  • Senator Jim Quinn introduced a bill to make the isthmus between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia federal jurisdiction (but that is a money bill and illegitimate).
  • Here is a look at Senator Marilou McPhedran’s outsized Senate expenses (which includes some journalistic malpractice, like getting quotes from the CTF).
  • Liberals from Atlantic Canada are calling out Conservative opposition to a bill that would extend the Atlantic Accords to include renewable energy such as wind farms.
  • Pierre Poilievre tabled his housing bill, which I’m dubious will even be voteable.
  • The Centre Ice Conservatives/Canadians group is calling their new political party “Canadian Future” (which is almost certainly a doomed venture).
  • A second Doug Ford minister, Kaleed Rasheed, resigned from Cabinet and stepped away from caucus over a trip to Vegas with Greenbelt Developers and lying about it.
  • Paul Wells pays a visit to Hamilton East Stoney Creek after the poll numbers look to be shifting there, and talks to the putative Conservative candidate about the mood.

Odds and ends:

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Roundup: Some long-awaited policy announcements

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The Liberals finally came out yesterday with a suite of policy announcements at the end of their caucus retreat, with a bunch of measures that some have been calling on for a while. Removing the GST on purpose-built rentals was actually an idea they ran on in 2015 then didn’t implement after further study (credit to Rachel Aiello for finding that), but have now gone ahead with in light of all of the calls to do so. As well, a number of people were treating the warnings to municipalities about not getting Housing Accelerator Fund dollars if they continued exclusionary zoning as though it were new, when it was part of the policy design in the 2021 platform all along.

One of the more interesting announcements was around upcoming changes to the Competition Act, but while Jagmeet Singh will take credit for it, the government has been consulting on this for over a year. The big news is the proposed elimination of the “efficiencies defence,” which would be a sea change in Canadian competition law.

There were also warnings to the grocery oligopolies that they have until Thanksgiving to stabilise prices (meaning return them to the headline rate of inflation), but I have a hard time seeing how this is going to work considering that the bulk of price increases are because of supply issue, such as yields being reduced for climate-related droughts or floods. Margins have been consistent throughout, so this policy is going to need a lot more finessing, and the price issues related to a lack of competition in the sector is going to be as difficult to fix as the supply issues. They also said they would extend the loan repayment period for CEBA loans after an outcry, btu extending the deadline for most means forgoing the partial forgiveness portion, meaning they will have more to repay.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian shelling killed a six-year-old boy in the village of Novodmytrivka in the southern Kherson region. Ukrainian forces have retaken the village of Andriivka in the east, as they continue to press on toward Bakhmut.

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Roundup: Credulously repeating the 20-year line

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The big story that everyone was credulously repeating yesterday was the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report on the Stellantis-LG Energy Solutions electric vehicle battery plant, and what he termed to be the “break-even” for the subsidies provided by the federal government and Ontario. To hear the two governments tell the tale, it would have earned back the subsidies within about five years, provided you factor in all of the indirect benefits from it. The PBO says that break-even would take twenty-years, but that didn’t take into account indirect benefits, just the revenues from the plant’s output. While I don’t trust the government’s five-year figure because it’s based on a lot of optimism and fuzzy math, I also don’t trust the PBO’s figures, because he and his office have a demonstrated history of just pulling methodologies out of their collective asses, and calling it a day, no matter how puzzling the results or the presentation.

Legacy media, however, takes the PBO at face-value, every time. “Oh, but he’s politically neutral so he’s credible!” is usually the cry, even though credible economists will tell you that his numbers don’t make sense much of the time (to say nothing of the fact that many of his reports are well outside of his legislated mandate). And if you look at the reporting, The Canadian Press, The Star, and the National Post all just quote from the report in full credulity, with some quotes from MPs or the minister in reaction. Not one of them appeared to try to get a second opinion. The CBC, however, decided to take things one step further and engage in actual journalistic malpractice by getting a quote from Ian Lee—a business studies professor with no expertise or credibility other than the fact that he answers his phone and provides bullshit answers about every topic under the sun—and the gods damned Canadian Taxpayers Federation, an Astroturf organization that exists solely to provide outraged quotes to the media. That’s what passes for getting a second opinion at the national public broadcaster.

Officers of Parliament are not infallible, and this PBO is especially a problem. In fact, one economist I was chatting with yesterday referred to him as the “Ian Lee of PBOs,” which pretty much says it all. It would be great if legacy media would actually take his utterances with a grain of salt, but they won’t, because nobody dares to challenge Officers of Parliament, and that is a problem that has a corrosive effect on our democratic institutions.

Ukraine Dispatch:

No news on the wires about any Russian strikes or the progress of the counter-offensive, but there was talk of Sweden considering donating some of its Gripen fighters to Ukraine. As well, Ukraine’s Antonov, which primarily has been in the business of building cargo planes, has been shifting their focus to building drones as the war carries on.

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Roundup: Losing faith in the justice system because of provincial choices

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The CBC has a story out about how a retired corporal from the military has lost faith in the justice system because court delays stayed the trial of her alleged attacker, and you can bet that pretty much everyone is going to take absolutely the wrong lessons from this, most especially legacy media.

The administration of justice—courts, Crown prosecutors, support staff—are all firmly within provincial jurisdiction. And for decades, provinces have been under-funding their systems while whinging that the federal government isn’t doing things like making bail harder to get (which is, frankly, unconstitutional). There is a story out of Toronto on the very same day about how staffing shortages—because of the province—have caused closures in courtrooms which led to a different sexual assault trial being tossed because they can’t get a trial within a reasonable time for the rights of the accused. And in the case of the corporal, it was because the Crown prosecutors (again, provincial responsibility) couldn’t get their shit together to push the case forward. And no, this has nothing to do with the federal government not filling judicial vacancies fast enough (which I have condemned this government for). These are all problems that are squarely within the provinces’ responsibilities.

And you can bet that people are going to try to both-sides this military issue because the provinces have been whinging that the military turning over cases to the civilian system is leaving them under-resources, even though it’s a handful of cases and the provinces have consistently made the policy choice over decades to under-fund their system. Trying to shift the blame to the federal government or whine that they’re not getting enough money is a well-worn pattern that we shouldn’t let them get away with. Unfortunately, that’s not in legacy media’s playbook, and you can bet that we’ll get more rounds of angry accusations that the federal government “let this happen” when clearly the failure was provincial the whole time.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces say they have reclaimed even more territory in the east and south parts of the country, as well as off-shore drilling platforms near occupied Crimea. Ukrainian forces have also been collecting Russian bodies along the “road of death” that they retook in June, so that they can exchange them for their own comrades, living and dead. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is calling on his country to remain focused on the war, with warnings that a “wartime budget” is coming, meaning this could go on for longer than many have hoped.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1701223223440928994

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Roundup: Long on speeches and imported culture wars

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The Conservative convention this weekend was long on speeches—Poilievre’s speech very much needing an editor as it went on for well over an hour—and was full of praise for the so-called convoy occupiers (from Poilievre’s wife as well as the wife of the “anti-woke general”). Said “anti-woke general” proved himself to be so fragile that he thinks that things like racial equality and gender equality are “destroying” Canada. There was also the Brexiteer from the House of Lords who also showered Poilievre with praise, so some real talent on display there.

Policy resolutions were not focused on things like housing or affordability, but instead prioritised things like vaccines, and culture war bullshit that extended to two separate resolutions attacking trans people (which the party could have used mechanisms to de-prioritise but didn’t, meaning they wanted them to come up for a vote). The Canadian Press has compiled five take-aways from the convention.

https://twitter.com/dalybeauty/status/1700974631468052754

In pundit reaction, Althia Raj looks at how the Conservatives used their convention to woo Quebeckers, and how they are going after the Bloc along the way. Aaron Wherry notes that claims of “common sense” are easier said than done, particularly as Poilievre painted an idyllic 1950s picture of the future he wants. Shannon Proudfoot hones in on the feeling of “enough” that permeated the convention, and the swinging of the pendulum, but also cautioned about who limiting that can be.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian forces staged early-morning drone attacks against Kyiv on Sunday. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that the counter-offensive has made more advances along the southern front, as well as near Bakhmut in the east.

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Roundup: A rate hold and inappropriate reactions

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The big news of the day was that the Bank of Canada opted to maintain their headline rate at five percent, but warned that future rate hikes are still possible, depending on how the data look with future decision dates. This was a decision based entirely on the data—and the very mild contraction in the second quarter are certainly pointing to the fact that the economy is finally starting to slow so that maybe it can start to take the air out of excess demand. Nevertheless, I’m still expecting those three premiers who sent open letters to do a victory lap as though they had any say in the matter.

The bigger problem was Chrystia Freeland putting out an official statement saying that she was pleased with the decision, and while she respects the Bank’s independence, the government will use all of its tools to help bring inflation down (though one is a bit more dubious about that part). Why Freeland’s statement is a bigger problem is because she has a much bigger stick to wield with the Bank, and she has the tools that could force the governor to resign, which we haven’t seen since the Coyne Affair in the fifties, which led to the Bank shoring up its institutional independence. Freeland should know better, but I suspect that with all of the attention being paid to those premiers and their boneheaded open letters that she felt she needed to say something, and to offer some kind of reassurance to the public about the slowly improving state—because this government loves nothing more than reassuring pabulum. To compound that, every gods damned talking head over the past few days has been saying how great it was that the premiers were grandstanding like they way they are, because messaging politics just corrodes and rots our system.

Meanwhile, Jagmeet Singh decided he wasn’t getting enough attention, so he decided to embarrass himself and insist that the federal government can order the Bank to stop raising rates, because he thinks that interfering with an independent institution and forcing the resignation of the governor (which would be the outcome of such a move) are somehow winners for the economy. Singh would also apparently rather see inflation continuing to rip through our economy rather than the short-term pain in wresting it back down, because that is the counterfactual here. His “greedflation” insistence doesn’t bear out in the data, and a windfall tax won’t solve inflation. His suggestion here is beyond amateur hour, and shows that he remains unprepared for prime time.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians attacked a market in the eastern city of Kostiantynika yesterday, killing at least 17 people. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has recorded 26,717 civilian casualties in Ukraine so far, including 9,511 deaths. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Kyiv, and praised the progress in the counteroffensive to date.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1699405764983415077

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Roundup: The torqued six attendees

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The National Post’s series on judicial appointments continued apace yesterday, with the torqued and misleading headline that “High-level judges may have paid to meet Trudeau before their appointments,” and members of the pundit class and commentariat swooned with disbelief, and social media was blanketed with caterwauling about “corruption” and “bribery” and so on. Some of the excitable far-right fanboys started ranting about the whole judiciary being corrupted and needing to be bulldozed (because how better to enable fascism?)

But if you read the piece, and put it into context with the previous work, it says that as many as six out of 1308 lawyers who later got judicial appointments may have attended Liberal fundraisers that the prime minister or other Cabinet ministers attended. Which is…nothing. And yet, the framing and the headline suggests that they paid for access and that said meeting resulted in their appointment to the bench, in absence of any evidence to the contrary—just innuendo and correlation that has no relation to causation. This kind of journalism tends to be bullshit.

I have made this case before, and I’ll re-up it again—we absolutely do not want or need purity tests to be applied to applicants to the bench, and we should not bar anyone who has ever donated to a party from receiving an appointment. Donation is a necessary form of civic engagement, and lawyers tend to be more engaged in their communities, and often have the means to donate. This is important—we need people engaged in the system, and if we bar them from promotion because they have donated at one point in time or another, we are losing talent from the judiciary. The process as it stands is working (albeit slow for other reasons), and we don’t need concern trolls dismantling it for the sake of purity tests.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Three Ukrainians were killed in an overnight Russian attack on Poltava, and two others were killed in shelling later in the day in the Kherson region. Ukrainian officials have confirmed that they have liberated the strategic settlement of Robotyne in the country’s south, as they are pushing further in the area as part of the counteroffensive. Russians are claiming that they scrambled jets in response to two US drones flying near occupied Crimea.

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Roundup: The Capital Pride 2023 observations

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It was Capital Pride this weekend, and the government once again took the opportunity to pat themselves on the back for the first anniversary of their 2SLGBTQIA+ Action Plan™, and to offer some grants to local organisations from the Action Plan’s budget—so money is flowing, at least.

This having been said, it was a pretty poor turnout from federal politicians for the parade itself. The PM was absent, but he had only just returned from touring wildfire sites and evacuation centres out west, and he did just visit Edmonton’s Pride on Saturday, so I will give him that. But the Liberal contingent was smaller than usual this year, and local MP Yasir Naqvi was absent (which is unusual for him), whether that was because he was on a provincial leadership tour somewhere, or for some other reason. Marci Ien was present, having just made the announcement hours before, and new minister Jenna Sudds was present, as were Mona Fortier, Greg Fergus, Marie-France Lalonde and Francis Drouin, but while I saw photos of many of them early on in the parade, I didn’t see most of them along the route.

https://twitter.com/JennaSudds/status/1695944518036509165

This having been said, I didn’t see a single NDP MP, though I think I spotted a couple of MPPs (and I didn’t see the one whose seat the riding is in), and the Conservatives didn’t march at all, federal or provincial PC party. Make of that what you will.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian authorities are investigating a mid-air collision between two training aircraft in the western part of the country, which killed there pilots. Russians have meanwhile been targeting the central and northern regions of the country with cruise missiles overnight. They have also been shelling the north-eastern city of Kupiansk, in what may be a push to recapture the area, after it was already liberated by Ukrainian forces. Ukrainian forces have broken through one of the most difficult lines in the south and appear to have momentum in the region. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is telling American critics that Ukraine could hold wartime elections next year, but they’ll need financial assistance from the US and Europe, particularly for reaching electors abroad, and to send election observers to the front lines.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1695803020947165468

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Roundup: Projecting demagoguery

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Pierre Poilievre held a press conference on Parliament Hill yesterday, and said a number of bizarre things such as personally blaming Justin Trudeau for the housing crisis and as the reason why prices have doubled, but then used an example of how a permit was being held up at Ottawa City Hall by a planner who was on holiday for two weeks. The federal government has precisely zero levers when it comes to the human resources practices of Ottawa City Hall and the vacation days of its planners. Furthermore, he insisted that Canada is the only place in the OECD where this kind of thing happens, as though the whole of Europe doesn’t exist, and most especially France where nothing gets done in the entire month of August. But remember, this is entirely Justin Trudeau’s fault.

What as perhaps more telling was when he was asked about immigration levels and if he would make any changes if he were to form government. Poilievre said that Trudeau—whom he has just personally blamed for the housing crisis—“wants Canadians to forget all that and blame immigrants; he wants to divide people to distract from his failings,” and then said that “this is what demagogues do.”

Apparently, irony died, because Poilievre has been behaving like a demagogue this entire time, and has raised immigration before as part of the crisis—and has refused to elaborate or give any targets, nor will he denounce any of his followers who have been treating the immigration issue as a dog whistle and excuse to concern troll about immigration. He has done absolutely nothing to curtail that, except to project it onto Trudeau, and then on top of that, claim that it’s the Liberals who are “nasty” and “mean” on issues like climate change and gender identity. No looking at his own followers, who spend their days online taunting Catherine McKenna as “climate Barbie,” or calling gay people “groomers” or “paedophiles.” Nope, that’s all the Liberals and their supporters. It’s projection, and it’s bullshit, because that’s what the discourse has degraded to.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian authorities say that they have repelled Russian attacks in the East around Kharkiv, and reclaimed some ground as well this week. As Russian missiles have been falling on the northeast region of Kupiansk, there are orders to evacuate civilians but many don’t want to leave. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Denmark to thank them personally for their support, and for the future transfer of F-16 fighter jets. He then headed to Greece to thank their government, and will attend a summit of Balkan leaders. Meanwhile, the head of Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau says that ending corruption is no longer just a crime, but a matter of national security, especially because Western partners need assurances around military aid and reconstruction dollars. Kyiv is filling up with destroyed Russian tanks as the city prepares to celebrate their second wartime Independence Day this week.

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Roundup: Trying to use guilt on Meta

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As the wildfire situation intensifies, and more states of emergency are declared, Canadian heritage minister Pascale St-Onge has decided to try doubling down on using guilt to try and get Meta/Facebook back to the table to talk about the Online News Act, insisting that blocking news links puts lives in danger. I’m not sure I buy that—you can still directly access news sites, and they are easy to find, particularly the CBC and its local affiliates.

This, of course, led to yet another vapid re-litigation of the Act, and repeating many of the dumb arguments that don’t actually hit on the heart of the matter. There was the hand-wringing about “we trained people to go to Facebook for news,” which makes me wonder why we just don’t then retrain people to go directly to news sites or apps, while the discussion in the piece returns to the red herring about compensating for links. It’s not about compensating for links. It’s about compensating for Google and Facebook monopolizing the ad tech space and siphoning revenues from all links along the chain, and the Act providing transparency and fairness to the deals and negotiations that were already taking place. Which is also why stories about local media demanding the government capitulate to Meta’s bullying are particularly troublesome, because not only are they getting the narrative wrong (and the government needs to take a LOT of the blame for that one), but they’re saying that we should let web giants threaten sovereign governments if they don’t like what they’re seeing, and that’s especially troubling because these companies operate monopolistically and with impunity.

In the meantime, mendacious narratives about the legislation are also growing and becoming utterly grotesque, but between Poilievre and his Conservatives outright lying about the law, referring to it as government censorship and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the government’s own false narratives about the bill and the supposed theft of content (not true), we’re sinking into a morass that is seeing disinformation players taking the already distorted narratives and turning it into a funhouse mirror. This is all very, very bad, but none of the players in this want to describe things with a modicum of accuracy and reality, and that’s a very big problem.

Ukraine Dispatch:

A Russian missile struck Chernihiv in the north on Saturday, killing seven and wounding at least 129 people. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy went to the Netherlands for talks, and for confirmation that the Netherlands and Denmark would be turning over F-16 fighters to Ukraine at the appropriate time. Zelenskyy has also been talking to Sweden about acquiring Gripen jets as well.

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