Tag Archives: Pierre Poilievre

Roundup: Trying to falsely blame CTV

Posted on by

At his media availability yesterday, Pierre Poilievre was asked if it was responsible for him to declare the explosion on the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls to be “terrorism” before anything was confirmed. And what did Poilievre do? True to form, he attacked the Canadian Press reporter asking the question (including lying about the substance of the corrections that a recent CP story made to a story about comments he had made), then lied about why he said “terrorism.” Poilievre claimed this was from CTV reports, and tried to get the CP reporter to try and denounce CTV. The problem was that CTV didn’t publish anything before Poilievre began his questions in QP. And what we do know is that Fox News was definitively calling it terrorism, as were several disinformation merchants who pose as journalists over Twitter. But rather than admit that these were his sources, Poilievre lied, continued to lie, and then post the video of him attacking the CP reporter to his followers, because right-wing populism has a huge hard-on/wide-on for putting people in their place (particularly if they’re vulnerable minorities or someone they suffer no repercussions for attacking, like media).

And then things got stupid online, as Poilievre’s fans and apologists kept trying to “prove” that CTV was still the source, really, relying on screenshots that came from a different time zone. And at least two MPs shared these screenshots before they were called out and deleted them.

I will say that between these lies, and the ones he has been telling about the Canada-Ukraine trade deal legislation, it seems to finally shaking up some legacy media outlets to actually start calling him out on them. Somewhat. Some outlets are still egregiously both-sidesing the lies, as they always do, but you had Power & Politics host David Cochrane finally interjecting in places saying “That wasn’t true,” or walking through the timeline of lies in the case of yesterday’s attempt to blame CTV. It’s not nearly enough, but it is a start, but we’ll see how long it can actually last.

Ukraine Dispatch:

A daytime cluster bomb attack in a suburb of Kherson in the south killed three people. Ukraine’s farmers are hoping that the Black Sea trade corridor will help them get exports to market so that they can survive.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1727681997076644088

Continue reading →

Roundup: Government land isn’t a slam dunk

Posted on by

You have probably heard a lot of talk from both Pierre Poilievre and Jagmeet Singh about the federal government not doing enough about housing with the lands that they own. Poilievre is making grandiose promises about all the houses they’ll build on it, and all of the office towers they’ll convert, never mind that conversions are difficult and in many cases impossible because of how those buildings are structured, while Singh is demanding that any government-built housing on public land be “affordable,” never mind that there is still a need for market-priced housing, because otherwise wealthier households are competing for the same “affordable” spaces as low-income households if your supply is constrained. (Singh also believes that the federal government can build all of this housing on their own, as if they’ll hire the planners, architects and contractors on their own—not really feasible).

Meanwhile, just building on government-owned land is actually easier said than done. Why? Mike Moffatt lays out a lot of those reasons here:

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1726577611722355121

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces have been focused on containing attempted Russian advances near Bakhmut, while two people were killed in Russian shelling on Kherson. There was also a grenade blast that killed two in Kyiv, the cause of which remains unclear. Ukraine’s two top cyber defence officials have been sacked as an investigation into alleged embezzlement is ongoing in the cybersecurity agency.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Ministers in the Upper Chamber

Posted on by

Something rather unusual happened in the UK, which I figured I would explore a little bit here for how it relates to our shared Westminster system of government. There was  Cabinet shuffle in Westminster yesterday, and prime minister Rishi Sunak appointed former prime minister David Cameron to the House of Lords, and to be his new foreign secretary. Cameron is a particularly interesting choice, given that his spineless decision to call the Brexit referendum to appease certain segments of his party blew up in his face and created much of the foreign policy chaos the government finds itself in,

One of the big questions around this kind of appointment is how MPs get to hold a minister who doesn’t sit in that chamber to account. There are mechanisms in the Lords for asking questions of the government, and while usually that’s directed to the Leader of the Government in that Chamber, this gives Lords an opportunity to ask questions of the foreign secretary directly. There was talk of creating a mechanism to use Westminster Hall, which is the “second chamber” used for debates in Westminster, to allow some sort of mechanism that’s not the Commons, but it never got off the ground the last time this was an issue. For the record, because of the way Australia’s parliament is structure, it is fairly common for several ministers to sit in their Senate, and to answer questions during their Senate Question Time, or however they term it there.

As for Canada, the last time we had a fairly major minister in that Chamber was Michael Fortier, starting in 2006 when Harper formed government and felt he needed a minister from the Montreal area, but didn’t have any MPs from there. So, he chose Fortier, his campaign co-chair, and made him minister of Public Works, which was a bitter twist of irony considering this was just post-Sponsorship scandal, and the complaint was there wasn’t enough accountability for that department. Fortier was later appointed minister of international trade, and faced questions from the Liberals in the Senate, but there were complaints the Bloc and NDP couldn’t use the same avenue, though they could ask questions of his parliamentary secretaries in the Chamber, or question him at committee. Previously, Joe Clark had appointed his minister of justice from the Senate, as he had no Quebec seats at all, while two of our prime ministers—John Abbott and Mackenzie Bowell—were senators and not MPs, so we do have that bit of history to draw on as well.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces say that Russians have intensified the bombardment around Avdiivka, as well as tried to make a push around Bakhmut again. In Romania, the F-16 pilot training hub for Ukraine and NATO allies has now opened, but training Ukrainian pilots likely won’t start until next year. Here’s a look at how the information warfare happening has created confusion with legitimate news sources, particularly when they can’t get independent verification.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Law and order for thee but not for me

Posted on by

Because everything is stupid, it would seem that Pierre Poilievre is endorsing Scott Moe’s plan to break federal law and not collect the federal carbon price on natural gas. Or, well, instruct his Crown corporation to break the law and not collect or remit it, which puts them in legal jeopardy, which they’re frankly not going to do. But this is what happens when politics has been reduced to performative nonsense and doing stupid things to “own the Libs.” If only we still had grown-ups involved…

Oh, and for those of you asking, the “pause” on the carbon price on home heating oil doesn’t invalidate the whole scheme, as there were already carve-outs when it came into existence. Try again.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian intelligence says that three Russian officers were killed in a blast by local resistance groups in occupied Melitopol. Russians targeted Kyiv overnight on Saturday, and killed four people in strikes on Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhzhia, while pro-Ukrainian saboteurs derailed a train in Russia with an improvised explosive device.

Continue reading →

Roundup: No, that’s not how inflation works

Posted on by

Because some of you at the back still don’t get it, no, carbon pricing does not contribute 16 percent of inflation. It contributes 0.15 percent, because inflation is a year-over-year measure, and when the increase is steady and holding, the actual impact on inflation is negligible, because that’s how inflation works. But several of you you keep insisting that your math is correct when it’s not, and so here’s economist Trevor Tombe to try and get it through to you:

https://twitter.com/trevortombe/status/1720919364172697678

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian missiles struck a shipyard in occupied Crimea, damaging a Russian warship there. There are conflicting reports about the state of the counter-offensive in the Zaporizhzhia region, where Russia claims they have halted any advance, while Ukrainians say that they continue to advance, albeit slowly. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pushes back against the notion that they have entered into a stalemate, and says they need more air defences so that Russia can no longer dominate the skies. Here’s a look at Ukrainian soldiers who have turned to jiu-jitsu after losing limbs in the war.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Alberta is run by children, example eleventy-four

Posted on by

If you needed any more proof that Alberta is run by a group of petulant children, look no further than finance minister Nate Horner’s appearance on Power & Politics yesterday. While in the midst of grousing that during the (virtual) meeting with Chrystia Freeland earlier in the day on the subject of Alberta’s threats to pull out of the CPP (threats which are fairly transparently a pressure tactic to try and get out of other environmental obligations), and that Freeland was not entertaining any other carbon price exemptions, Horner said that he was going to launch a programme to subsidise anyone who wants to convert to heating oil in order to get the same break on carbon prices.

Heating oil generally costs about three-to-four times the price of natural gas for the same output. That’s the whole reason the “pause” was put into place as a stopgap to get more people switched over to heat pumps, along with a bunch of incentives to do so. If Horner actually thinks that people will pay more for heat in order to avoid paying the carbon price, and coming out at a net loss, for the simple thrill of “owning the libs,” well, that’s pretty much him telling on himself. And it’s so stupid because as the government has belatedly explained, there are actually more people who use heating oil outside of the Atlantic provinces than inside (mostly in northern communities), and they too get the “pause” in order to facilitate the switch over to heat pumps. The problem there, however, is that most of those provinces haven’t come to an agreement with the federal government in order to give the heat pumps for free to low-income households. So that may yet come, but right now, they’re still in full-on tantrum territory.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russians launched a new wave of overnight attacks across ten of Ukraine’s regions, and the Ukrainian air defences were able to intercept 24 of 38 drones plus a cruise missile. Here is a snapshot of the counter-offensive on various fronts, while Ukrainian troops battle exhaustion as winter approaches.

https://twitter.com/defensiemin/status/1720176662942253228

Continue reading →

Roundup: Fantasy readings of court decisions

Posted on by

In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court of Canada decision in the Impact Assessment Act, there has been a lot of fantasy being projected on what the decision said (hint: it’s not what most everyone says, no matter which sentence they’ve cherry-picked). There’s a lot of blame on the Act for projects not moving forward, as even though many of them had approvals in hand already and the economics for those projects didn’t make sense with current oil prices (as many were conceived of when there was a belief that we were reaching peak oil and that prices would start to skyrocket as a result—oops), or as with certain LNG projects that never got off the ground, they couldn’t get buyers to sign contracts for what they hoped to produce. That’s why the handwringing over Qatar supplying Europe with LNG is particularly funny, because we just don’t have the LNG capacity on the east coast—there is no ready supply of natural gas to liquefy, so without another massive pipeline project, it would mean importing product to liquefy and re-sell to the Europeans, which is not exactly a cost-savings for them when they can get it much cheaper from Qatar.

Meanwhile, here’s Andrew Leach calling out these kinds of fantasies, particularly when they’re coming from the Alberta government.

As a bonus, Leach also calls out the excuses for inaction on the energy transition:

Ukraine Dispatch:

No word on any fresh attacks against Ukrainian cities. Meanwhile, artefacts that were stolen from occupied territories were confiscated when they were attempted to be smuggled into the US, and have now been returned to Ukraine.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Scoring cheap points in a tragedy

Posted on by

The past few days have been preoccupied by the Hamas attack on Israel, which has killed as many as a thousand, including attacking villages and killing the elderly and infants. We know that so far, two Canadians have been confirmed killed, while others have been kidnapped and taken hostage. After refuting claims that the embassy in Tel Aviv was closed for Thanksgiving, the federal government is preparing airlifts for Canadian citizens and permanent residents out of Tel Aviv, likely using military aircraft. Ahmed Hussen has also stated that humanitarian aid will continue to flow to the Palestinian people, particularly in light of the humanitarian crisis that is to come as the Gaza strip is under siege, with assurances that there are robust controls to ensure that Hamas doesn’t see any of this funding (as they are listed as a terrorist organisation under Canadian law).

Back home, there has been pretty universal condemnation of Hamas from political leaders, but that doesn’t mean that politics haven’t been played. After Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre were at the same event over the weekend to show solidarity with the Jewish community, Poilievre decided to immediately return to his dickish self and try and score points on the non-scandal that Canada was not included in a communiqué between the Americans, the UK, France, Germany and Italy. A number of pundits and talking heads clutched their pearls and cried that we were excluded, some news reporters incorrectly framing this as the G7 (which was also minus Japan), when it turned out that this was a meeting of the Quint, which is a separate, nuclear-armed organisation that Canada is not a part of. While most reporters and outlets quickly clarified this, Poilievre decided to use it to rage-farm and claim that Trudeau has “side-lined Canada,” which is bullshit, but you’ve got a bunch of pundits on their fainting couches over this when they should know better, and Poilievre couldn’t resist the urge to score points over this, which should be unconscionable, but he likes to keep proving that there is no bottom with him.

Matt Gurney points out that this conflict has given us a pogrom in realtime over social media, but that most people aren’t seeing it because of how news outlets sanitize the graphic elements that would inevitably galvanize them.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russia’s latest drone attack targeted the Odesa, Mykolaiv and Kherson regions, with Ukraine’s air defences downing 27 drones. The counter-offensive continues to make gains in the east and the south. Ukrainian officials are investigating 260 instances of abuses at military recruitment offices, much of it related to bribery. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy replaced the country’s territorial defence forces commander, before he left to visit neighbouring Romania to strengthen ties and talk regional security.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A new Speaker in a toxic environment

Posted on by

The day began with the speeches from the prospective candidates for Speaker—unserious Liberal candidate Stephane Lauzon bowed out before things got started, and the rest began their speeches as to why they deserved to get the job. There were also a few fulsome (in the proper sense of the word) expressions of thanks to Anthony Rota and claims that he was a “good Speaker” when he absolutely was not, which is why we were here today. The notion of respect and decorum got mentioned time and again, because they always do, for what little good it does (because the Speaker can only do so much). Elizabeth May once again said she was running (even though her being a party leader should have been disqualifying automatically, except for the fact that because the Greens don’t have official party status was the technicality that allowed it), but her running was yet again less about being a serious candidate than it was about giving herself the opportunity to make a speech about the rules, and why the Speaker needs to give up the lists provided to him or her and use their own judgment as to who should be recognised. (I actually agree, but this is one of those areas where if the Speaker did this unilaterally there would likely be a revolt). May also made the point that Rota apparently broke his own rules in recognising the Nazi-aligned veteran, however the Speaker’s office says that those rules didn’t really apply because it wasn’t an official sitting of the Commons, and Speakers have wide discretion in any case.

In the end, Liberal MP Greg Fergus was chosen, making him the first Black Speaker in Canadian history. The choice was a surprise to me because Fergus had never shown any interest in the role prior to this past week. In fact, he has always been a pretty notorious partisan (former leader of the Young Liberals, former national director of the party, former parliamentary secretary to the prime minister), and that raises questions for me, but that’s solely my opinion. Fergus did talk about subscribing to Hansard when he was 14, and being a House of Commons page, which puts him in good stead for his respect for the Chamber and the institution, but again, he’s coming into the position as a complete neophyte with no experience as a Chair occupant, which should be a little worrying given the particular state of Canadian democracy right now, and the rancorous mood.

That rancorous mood extended to the congratulatory speeches. Prime minister Justin Trudeau’s speech danced on the edge of being partisan in his talk about what were essentially government priorities, to which Pierre Poilievre decided to one-up him and go full-partisan, that included a bizarre false history lesson where he tried to wedge his “common sense” nonsense into “common people,” and the House of Commons, with a wrong history of the name and the institution itself, before trying to compare Trudeau to King John, who was forced to sign the Magna Carta. If the words “classless jackass” crossed your mind, you would be correct, which is all the more reason why the state of Canadian democracy is in trouble, and Fergus will be hard-pressed to do much about it.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces downed 29 out of 31 Russian drones and one cruise missile in overnight attacks, while falling debris tarted fires in Dnipro. Russia claims it downed a Ukrainian missile off the coast of occupied Crimea. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was visiting troops in the country’s northeast.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Notes on the Alberta pension proposal

Posted on by

There was a brief return to the discourse over the proposed Alberta Pension Plan over the weekend after a Colby Cosh column managed to get the criticisms of the plan right. So, I’ll let Trevor Tombe to the talking.

As always, try to remember how the CPP actually works:

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukraine says that they shot down 30 out of 40 drones in an overnight attack on Saturday, and 16 out of 30 dronesovernight on Sunday, when a grain storage warehouse in Uman was hit. In turn, Russia claims to have shot down six Ukrainian drones and two missiles over occupied Crimea on Sunday. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that the country will be partnering with western arms manufacturers to start localising production in Ukraine, with a focus on air defence and de-mining.

Continue reading →