Tag Archives: Preston Manning

Roundup: Government land isn’t a slam dunk

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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.

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Roundup: Fire which gatekeepers?

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It sounds like Pierre Poilievre is back on his bullshit again (do the kids still say that?) with his “gatekeeper” nonsense, as in releasing another one of his cringey videos where he promises to “fire the gatekeepers” in order to build housing. Except I’m not sure exactly which gatekeepers he’s proposing to fire, because the biggest impediments to building housing are NIMBY homeowners and neighbourhood associations that oppose any kind of densification, not to mention the elected city councillors who enable said NIMBYism. How, pray tell, does Poilievre propose to “fire them”? I’m sure he’ll tell you that he’ll threaten to withhold federal transfers to municipalities that don’t comply, but then you’ve got elected councillors beholden to voters in conflict with the dictates of a federal leader, so that’s going to be fun.

Poilievre also held a press event in Vancouver yesterday where he unveiled plans to consult on a proposal that would allow First Nations to keep more federal tax revenue from projects on their lands—which sounds like a great policy! But it’s vague, has no details, and is almost certainly going to be a hell of a lot more complicated than he’s making it out to be, especially if he’s going to insist that provincial royalties and taxes won’t be affected either. Listening to the language he used, it also sounds like he hopes that this will be the kind of thing that will ensure projects get built, as though the money from this tax revenue will make concerns over environmental or social impacts evaporate, and I suspect he’ll be surprised when they don’t.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 336:

While Russian forces increase pressure around Bakhmut and Vuhledar, it is expected that Germany will announce today that it will send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, and allow other countries to transfer them as well. Meanwhile, more officials have been named and fired in relation to corruption allegations, as Zelenskyy’s government continues their pledge to clean up the graft in government so that they can attain EU membership.

https://twitter.com/cfoperations/status/1617887130625413123

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Roundup: Danielle Smith and prosecutorial independence

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Because it never ends in Danielle Smith’s Alberta, we learned last night that members of her staff were indeed calling up Crown prosecutors to totally not pressure them on cases, only it wasn’t around public health order rule-breakers—it was around those arrested as part of the blockade at the Coutts border crossing. Remember that? Where they arrested Diagolon members for their plot to murder RCMP officers, where they had a hit list? Yeah, totally normal for the premier’s office to be calling them up and totally not pressuring them by asking if those prosecutions are in the public interest, over and over.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/1616209929165213696

When news broke, Smith denied that she was in contact, or that anyone in her office was…except there are emails, and her story around totally not pressuring those very same Crown prosecutors around pandemic rule-breakers kept changing, depending on which media outlet she was talking about, so her denials are pretty hard to believe, especially since she didn’t seem to understand how pardons work in Canada until earlier this week, by which point her story had changed about six or seven times (and is probably still changing).

Of course, I don’t expect that anyone is going to resign or be fired for this, because that would mean that someone would need to possess enough self-awareness, or have a shred of humility, or even be capable of feeling shame for their actions, and that’s pretty much a foreign concept in Smith and her cadre. And all of those voices who were having meltdowns about the Double-Hyphen Affair and the alleged pressure being applied to Jody Wilson-Raybould (which my reading of the situation seems to have largely come from Bill Morneau’s office) are strangely silent about what happened here, because I’m sure it’s totally different.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 331:

Ukraine is awaiting the decision of allied governments and particularly Germany about providing them with modern tanks, especially Leopard 2 tanks (which Germany controls the export licences for) as they meet at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Meanwhile, here are some testimonials from Ukrainian soldiers who are big fans of the armoured vehicles we have sent them so far, with another 200 on the way.

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Roundup: Manning says to ride that tiger

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It is now approximately day seventy-three of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and United Nations efforts to evacuate civilians from under the steel plant in Mariupol continue apace. Tales from the survivors who have been rescued and have made it to safety are pretty harrowing about life in the tunnels under the plant. Ukrainian forces are preparing a counteroffensive to push Russian forces away from Kharkiv and Izyum in the Donbas region. Amnesty International has been collecting evidence of Russian war crimes around the Kyiv region, including in Bucha. Meanwhile, it sounds like the Canadian “Norman Brigade” of fighters in Ukraine is being poorly led and under-equipped, and gosh, who could have seen this happening?

Closer to home, the conference formerly known as the Manning Conference is happening this weekend, and we’ve already seen the nastiness of the unofficial leadership debate that took place, and now we have Preston Manning himself insisting that their party can capture the “energy” and “enthusiasm” of the extremists, grifters, conspiracy theorists and grievance tourists who made up the occupation in Ottawa, and that they can be “properly managed.”

No. Just no.

Manning has long held that you can ride the tiger of a populist mob and gain from it. Never mind that absolutely everyone who has tried has wound up being mauled by it, but golly, Manning still insists that you can do it. Gods know that Jason Kenney is certainly trying in Alberta, and has been trying to do what Manning has famously suggested about “tapping a relief well” and trying to direct that anger toward something that they can try and be productive with, but that’s not really working either, and all of those face-eating leopards that Kenney invited into the house, because he thought he could turn them on his perceived enemies, have realized that his face is right there and they want to eat it. You don’t try and work the mob up because you think you can use it to your advantage, and Manning keeps making this mistake over again, and encouraging his followers to do the same. What it’s doing is encouraging more extremism instead, and you can be damn sure that there will be repercussions for that.

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Roundup: Preparing for another rally, this time of bikers

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It is now approximately day sixty-five of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russians fired two missiles at Kyiv while UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was visiting, which is not a good thing. There are also concerns that Russia will attempt sham referendums in the southern and eastern parts of the country that they have captured as an attempt to legitimise their occupations. Elsewhere in Europe, Russia’s decision to cut off Poland and Bulgaria off from natural gas as a form of blackmail was met with condemnation from the rest of Europe, and given that Putin sees a united Europe as a threat, his attempts to divide the community is not working very well.

https://twitter.com/Podolyak_M/status/1519734914018590726

Closer to home, Ottawa is bracing for a different kind of convoy this weekend, this time led by motorcycles instead of trucks, and they claim to be veterans concerned about freedoms, and much like the previous occupation, while there were a handful of truckers involved, I’m not sure how many legitimate veterans will be in this rally, or that it won’t have the same group of far-right extremists, grifters, conspiracy theorists, and grievance tourists tagging along. There don’t seem to be as many links in organisers between this rally and the previous occupation, given that many of them are either in jail or on bail, but that’s not necessarily indicative of the others that tag along. This time, the police seem much more alert to the situation—and to the fact that they are on thin ice with the people of Ottawa (seriously, the whole force needs to be disbanded), and they have set up exclusion zones and barred the rally from stopping at the War Memorial as they had planned, which is just as well because it shouldn’t be used as a symbol for these kinds of events. RCMP and OPP are already in the city in preparation, and the city has announced a bylaw crackdown during the rally.

As for the previous occupation, the added security around Parliament Hill cost $6.3 million in parliamentary security alone, with another $4.5 million being racked up in overtime for Parliamentary Protection Services officers. And then there are the $36.3 million the city is demanding that the federal government foot the bill for (though frankly the city should swallow some of this out of their police budget considering how useless the Ottawa Police were and that they allowed the occupation to take hold). One wonders how much this upcoming rally is going to add to that total.

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Roundup: Tracking the dissenters

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The CBC’s Éric Grenier has posted an analysis of free votes in the Commons in the current parliament, determining which party’s MPs dissent the most often. Part of this kind of analysis bothers me in part because it’s quantitative rather than qualitative, in part with how it was carried out. Rather than actually going through each vote to see a) what kind of vote it was, and b) the substance of the vote, he relied on the measure of how the cabinet voted to determine if it was a whipped vote or not, which is a poor measure, seeing as this would capture all manner of procedural votes (albeit, there haven’t been nearly as many in the current parliament as there were in the previous one). I’m not sure that there are any particular surprises in here in that the Liberals have been given a freer hand with their free votes, which was largely the case with the Conservatives in the previous parliament as well – having a majority usually lets a give their backbenchers a little added room to blow off a bit of steam when necessary. It’s also not unexpected in the fact that the Liberals are a party that doesn’t have a core ideology that they feel compelled to adhere to in the way that most Conservatives and the NDP most certainly do. It also shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that leadership candidates in the Conservatives are breaking ranks more often, given that they’re trying to put their own stamp on the party, so this is their latitude to start doing that. And as for the top “dissenting” voters, the top two are Liberals Nathaniel Erskine-Smith and Robert-Falcon Ouellette, who have a history of being a bit…naïve, if I may be blunt, in some of the positions they’ve taken to date. Erskine-Smith, if you recall, recently got pulled from a committee because his attempts to do more consensus-building wound up getting him manipulated by Tony Clement into voting against his own party’s interests when it came to amendments to a government bill, and Ouellette is often seen saying…not terribly thought-out things in the media. So, does it surprise me that they’re the two who voted against their party the most? No, not really. But Grenier doesn’t have any kind of context around this numbers, and that’s all he does – post numbers because he’s the numbers guy, which can be interesting in reporting, but it also only tells a fraction of the actual story, which is why stories like these do rub me the wrong way.

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Roundup: Petty politics over Ukraine

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Cheap partisan point scoring ruled the day on the issue of Ukraine here in the Nation’s Capital as the government decided not to include any opposition MPs in their delegation to meet the country’s interim government. Most galling was the response sent out to media by the PMO – that the NDP “could pick a side” during the protests, and that Justin Trudeau’s comments about Russia “were not helpful” and thus his party had no role on the delegation. Not only that, but James Bezan, one of the two MPs accompanying Baird and Senator Andreychuk as part of the delegation, went on TV to proclaim that it was a “government delegation” – err, except that he and Ted Opitz are backbenchers, and thus not actually part of the government, so that excuse doesn’t fly either. All of which leads to conclude that this is little more than an excuse to play domestic politics with a serious international issue. Well done, guys. Well done.

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Roundup: Eight years later

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Today marks eight years since Stephen Harper and his Conservatives gained power. How the time flies. Chris Hall writes that those years have honed Harper’s survival instincts (which makes all of those articles about Harper stepping down this year, which are still being published, all the more absurd).

Preston Manning launched a new website to promulgate constitutionally unsound and fairytale notions of Senate reform, coupled with an online poll of which “reform” method Canadians would prefer, with the option of abolition also in there. He plans to give the results to Democratic Reform Minister Pierre Poilievre, who will use the unscientific data to make a number of ridiculous Question Period talking points, and our debate on the health of our institutions will be poorer for it.

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Roundup: Preston Manning’s misdirected concerns

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In a frankly bizarre op-ed, Preston Manning tries to accuse the Press Gallery for lacking proper ethics because the Parliamentary Press Gallery guidelines don’t have a section on ethical guidelines in their handbook – err, except that each member is subject to their own employer’s code of ethics. Also, the Press Gallery is not a monolith, but simply a means of organising ourselves in order to have proper access to do our jobs on the Hill. That Manning tries to somehow equate this to the Senate scandals and Mike Duffy’s role therein lacks any cohesive logic and makes one wonder how this passed the comment editor’s gaze at the Globe and Mail. Does he think that the Gallery could have somehow stopped him before he was appointed? That his constant lobbying for a Senate seat should have been dealt with – as though anyone took it seriously and not as a kind of sad and frankly pathetic long-running joke? Susan Delacourt gives Manning a respectful reply and cautions him that what he’s demanding of the media will mean more access by the government – something the current government is not a big fan of.

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