QP: Triple, triple, triple the clip-gathering

The prime minister was in Halifax to announce new support programmes for those who were affected by Hurricane Fiona, but his deputy was present. Pierre Poilievre led off in French, and he cited a faux report that half of Canadians are $200 away from insolvency, which is not actually true, and accused the government of raising taxes, returning his false “triple, triple, triple” the carbon price line. Chrystia Freeland praised their solution of the doubled GST rebate, and called on the opposition to support their other measures. There was another round of the exact same in English, and then Poilievre lamented high gas prices. Freeland again called on the rest of the House to support the rental support and dental care provisions. Poilievre pivoted to the downing of Flight PS752 1000 days ago, and insisted that it was legal for them to plan a similar plot, which is absurd and wrong. Marco Mendicino gave a pro forma condemnation of the downing before insisting that Canada is not a safe haven for terrorism. Poilievre disputed this, and demanded that the IRGC be listed a a terrorist group, to which Mendicino called on all members to stand with the families, and listed actions they have taken for those families.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and he accused the government of changing EI rules for seasonal workers, to which Carla Qualtrough said that benefits continue to remain available as the pilot project has been extended to 2023, and broader reforms are coming. Therrien insisted that seasonal workers didn’t qualify, and Qualtrough reiterated her answer.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, and in French, demanded that tax loopholes be closed for the “ultra rich” (because it’s just that simple, you see). Freeland reminded him that they have taken measures to ensure that the rich pay their fair share, particularly banks and insurance companies, and note their luxury tax. Singh repeated the question in English, and Peter Fragiskatos reminded him that $1 billion has been invested in combatting tax evasion, including audits related to the Panama Papers.

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Roundup: Independent thought alarm, Iran edition

I hear the independent thought alarm sounding as Liberal MP Ali Ehsassi, who is Iranian-Canadian, is being critical of the government’s response when it comes to sanctions on the Iranian regime, and he wants them to do more. This being said, he has stressed that the minister, Mélanie Joly, has been very receptive to talking to him about the situation, and hearing his ideas, but that wasn’t of any interest to the CBC. No, they were interested in the narrative that even Liberal MPs aren’t happy with the government’s moves to date on sanctioning the Iranian regime, and lo, they put on an “expert” who says the government should do more, in spite of the fact that the don’t have the actual capacity to enforce more sanctions, let alone monitor the entire Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

I don’t expect the party to come down on Ehsassi for this, and the Liberals have demonstrated that they are willing to put up with a certain degree of independence from their MPs (more so than pretty much any other party right now), but I always find the reaction of the media interesting in situations like this, because as much as they claim they want more independence for MPs, when it gets demonstrated, they immediately start acting like this is either an attack on the government/prime minister, and they try to wedge it as much as possible to make it sound exciting. But all this really does is crack the whip without the party Whip ever needing to do a thing, because the media is enforcing discipline more than he ever could. Some members of the media should probably reflect on that fact

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 222:

Ukrainian forces have made a major breakthrough in the south, advancing along the Dnipro River and threatening Russian supply lines in the region. In the northeast, the liberation of Lyman is providing a staging ground to press into the Donbas region.

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Roundup: Demanding LNG with someone else’s money

While the federal Conservatives continue to promote the fantasy notion that Canada can somehow supply Europe and Japan with LNG to displace Russian supply—something that was never going to happen because of the timelines for projects to be built and that they need to be in operation to make their money back—under the notion that Ottawa needs to “get out of the way,” again ignoring that there has been no market case for it, Jason Kenney is going one step further and demanding that the federal government to build LNG export infrastructure. Which is odd because the Conservatives howled with outrage when the federal government nationalized the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline in order to sufficiently de-risk it for it to complete construction. If there’s no market case, why not get the federal government to do it?

But let’s also remember that the proposed Kitimat LNG facility on the West Coast, fully permitted and approved, is not being built, because there is no market case. Hence why Andrew Leach is calling out Kenney’s nonsense below, particularly the fact that Kenney is calling on the federal government to spend their money rather than Kenney spending his province’s own money. You know, like he did with Keystone XL, and whoops, lost billions because he made a bad bet and the American administration didn’t restore its permits. Funny that.

 

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 217:

UN human rights investigators have found that Russia has been violating international law when it comes to the treatment of prisoners of war during the invasion of Ukraine, which shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also asked for Canadian help in ridding his country of mines left behind by Russian forces. Meanwhile, there are reports that Russian conscription officers are at borders trying to intercept would-be conscripts from fleeing the country.

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Roundup: Threats only matter when it’s your family

The chatter yesterday morning was that the Diagolon crew talked on their online show about raping Pierre Poilievre’s wife just to prove that they could, and lo, Poilievre got angry, referred this to the RCMP, and called the Diagolon crew dirt bags and insisted he had never heard of this group before, even though he very clearly had, and had been playing footsie with them like he has with a bunch of other far-right extremists. And yes, it’s horrifying that they would make these kinds of comments—which they insist were just “a joke” and that they meant no harm (far-right extremists are always “just joking” until they’re not), but Poilievre only seemed to care about rape threats when they were directed as his family, and not, say, the female journalists who reported on his connections with Diagolon, for whom Poilievre decried as a “smear” and sent his flying monkeys after them, who were again subjected to all manner of graphic rape and death threats, which he has never denounced. You see where this is going?

https://twitter.com/TedFriendlyGuy/status/1574412812574769152

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 215:

It is apparently the last day of Russia’s sham referendum in occupied regions of Ukraine, while their forces have conducted drone airstrikes on the port of Odessa.

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Roundup: No further comment

In the event you have been cut off from the news cycle, I became the story yesterday as MP Garnett Genuis raised a point of privilege, and said that I made him feel “unsafe.” While I won’t comment much further until the Speaker makes a ruling on this, I have selected a few tweets from the day about the incident.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1573021640413548545

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1573043603072765952

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1573056388770988032

https://twitter.com/Garossino/status/1573056918389948416

https://twitter.com/Garossino/status/1573058396278099970

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1573087699262918656

 

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 211:

While the operational pause on Ukraine’s counterattack continues, they have been engaged in recovering bodies that have been unburied for months from earlier in the invasion. It also looks like a high-profile prisoner swap has been arranged, that will include some of the defenders of Mariupol.

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Roundup: Kludging together dental care

Parliament resumed sitting yesterday, and the first thing the government did was tabled two bills related to their recently announced affordability measures. While the GST rebate is a fairly straight-forward mechanism that mostly just needs a royal recommendation to ensure that funds are available for it, they also tabled their bill on dental care, or rather the funds to be used for dental care in lieu of a full-on programme because it’s going to take a while to figure out how best to do it. And thus far, it looks like the kludge is to use the CRA as the delivery mechanism and who would eventually follow-up to see that it was properly administered and not improperly claimed. But that’s going to be a problem. And the worst part of this is the reminder that the NDP want this to be a fully federally-administered programme, when it’s an issue within provincial jurisdiction, and there is no federal system they can realistically build off of. The CRA to transfer funds to families is a kludge, and not a great one, but the NDP have demands and an inane belief that the problem just requires enough political will. This can only end in tears.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 209:

While Ukrainian forces bolster their lines with captured Russian tanks, shelling around the Enerhodar nuclear plant has resulted in damage to the facility, as they target other power plants and dams as though that would make it easier for slaves to do the work.

On the Russian side, it looks like the regime is trying to speed ahead sham referendums to justify formally annex those territories, but nobody should be fooled. As well, the Duma is considering legislation that would crack down on soldiers who disobey orders, as well as deserters, which could be indicate a real problem for Russia when it comes to maintaining their military.

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QP: Demanding to rescind tax increases for things that aren’t taxes

The first day back, and the prime minister was off at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, while his deputy was in Toronto for the the funeral of former Cabinet minister Bill Graham, leaving the rest of his front bench to deal with Pierre Poilievre’s leadership debut. When he began, Poilievre started in French, complaining that EI and CPP premiums increased, as did the carbon price, and demanded that these “tax increases” be rescinded for “senior and workers.” Randy Boissonnault was chosen to respond, congratulating Poilievre on his victory, before he said that Canadians were about to see two competing visions—the Liberals who care about people and the the Conservatives who tell them that they’re on their own, and raised their affordability package that was just tabled. Poilievre took exception to this, and said the Liberals didn’t care because the share of average Canadians’ paycheques that go to housing going from 32 percent to 50 percent. Boissonnault repeated his points about their affordability measures. Poilievre switched to English to remix both of his previous questions into one, and Karina Gould stood up to assure him they had measures going to families who need them. Poilievre trotted out his talking points about people who can’t leave their parents’ basements, and Ahmed Hussen praised their housing measures, which Poilievre and his party voted against. Poilievre listed the supposed tax increases the government made (which were not actually taxes), and Boissonnault got back up to repeat his lines about the “two competing visions” in English.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and he raised the spectre of gun violence in Montreal, demanding federal action. Marco Mendicino have his boilerplate response of his thoughts being with the victims, and said that they have a plan with legislation and more resources for security at the border. Therrien was not mollified and demanded more action, and Mendicino hoped for support for their gun control bill, as it has more resources for police to deal with organised crime.

Jagmeet Singh stood up to pat himself on the back for “forcing” the help more people deal with inflation (as though this government wouldn’t have done most if not all of those measures on their own, with the possible exception of the stopgap measure for dental care to meet the deadline) and rhetorically wondered what took them so long. Boissonnault recited his praise for the government’s affordability measures. Singh switched to French to decry the greed of grocery CEOs and demanded the government force them to “pay their fair share,” to which Boissonnault assured him they were making them pay, and listed the increase to corporate taxes and their “dividends” from the pandemic (which I’m sure is just for banks and insurance companies).

https://twitter.com/mattgurney/status/1572292824028319746

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Roundup: The Convoy Party of Canada

The CBC did the work of comparing the names on the leaked GiveSendGo data around donations to the occupation of Ottawa from back in February and compared it to the publicly available donor database from the Conservative leadership campaign, and lo, there was a lot of overlap, to the tune of $460,000 from 3,100 donors to both (a likely underestimate as they ignored close names and postal codes), and most of that went to Pierre Poilievre’s campaign. A lot of these names had never donated federally before, which shows that the occupation has galvanised a political movement. Now, this was only 4.2 percent of the donors to the leadership overall, but this gives you a sense of why Poilievre has decided to give up on the political centre and focus his hopes on these fringe elements who had previously been disaffected, hoping that they will be what is able to push him over the edge in the next election.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1570804839663415296

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1570805416250187776

This was something that I discussed with Stephanie Carvin in a previous video we did, and wrote a column about—this kind of political movement is catnip to parties, and they will try and ride this tiger in order to benefit from it, either in votes or donations. But that’s the thing about riding the tiger, is that almost all of the time, you can’t actually do it, and it will turn around eat you, and that’s exactly what Poilievre has risked his entire political party to do. And rest assured, a fringe group who are not rational actors will be very hard to control, and they risk easily turning on him when they find out that he can’t do most of the things he promised them he would, or that his economic theories are based on utter nonsense, and that his entire platform is built on a foundation of sand. We watched this happen when the Republicans in the US embraced the Tea Party, and it drove them further to extremism and to Donald Trump. Justin Ling details that, and other examples, in this op-ed, and the fact that Poilievre and his camp believe they’re cleverer than all of those other parties who tried to embrace the fringe and were consumed by it. That’s probably the most chilling part, because Poilievre is certainly not cleverer, and he has a higher opinion of himself and his abilities than anyone who has watched him for any length of period would see. Jason Kenney also suffers from the same affliction, and look where it got him. We are entering into dangerous territory.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 205:

Attention in the conflict remains on the discovery of the mass graves in Izium, where more have been discovered, and many with hands tied behind their backs and showing signs of mistreatment before they were killed. Meanwhile, it has been decided that president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s wife, Olena Zelenska, will travel to London for the Queen’s funeral.

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Roundup: Poilievre on the first ballot

Not unexpectedly, Pierre Poilievre won the Conservative leadership race quite handily on the first ballot, with some sixty-eight percent of the vote, and winning the point share in about 300 of the 338 ridings around the country. This is going to be declared “decisive,” and that it will force the caucus to rally around him, but I have some doubts, particularly as you had MPs who were openly questioning their future in the party under a Poilievre win. We’ll see where they go in the coming weeks, but Poilievre is already making some backroom changes, including replacing the board of the party’s fundraising arm—because replacing the entire party machinery with loyalists is one way to ensure that the membership is stymied from holding you to account in the future (and yes, the Liberals are most especially guilty of this after Trudeau oversaw the party’s constitution be replaced with one dedicated to total control by the leader’s office). We’ll also see who he picks for his front-bench.

As for what this means moving to the next election, there is a lot of doubt that Poilievre is going to “pivot to the centre,” because he doesn’t think he can win there. He is likely to try and get more votes from the far-right, and access votes from there by appealing to them in various ways, as he has explicitly done so far, whether it was supporting the occupation in Ottawa, or playing along with conspiracy theories like those around the World Economic Forum. You’re going to have a lot of talking heads bring up that “300 ridings!” figure to show that he somehow has support across the country, when that is a massive sample selection bias, which shows that he knows how to organize small numbers nationally, but says nothing about the broader public. And while this thread from Justin Ling is good to read, I will echo his caution that calling Poilievre a “white supremacist” plays into his hands—his wife is from Venezuela, his children are mixed-race, and if the media tries the narrative on him, he will eviscerate them for it, while reminding everyone yet again about Trudeau’s history of Blackface. His opponents can’t play the game he wants them to play, but we’ll see if they have the capacity or ability. As for media, well, I suspect they will continue to keep both-sidesing his lies, and he’ll keep beating up on them, and on and on it goes.

For pundit reaction, Aaron Wherry remarks on Poilievre’s vow to remain as loud and antagonistic a populist as possible, and how he has been willing to undermine the institutions of democracy his whole careers. Jen Gerson considers Poilievre’s win the death knell of moderate conservatism in Canada, but it’s less a question of policy than of temperament. Althia Raj buys into the notion that Poilievre’s caucus will be more united, which frees up energy to fight the Liberals. Chantal Hébert believes that Poilievre’s victory will convince Trudeau to stay on for the next election, believing that he can’t let Poilievre win.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 200:

The counter-offensive, particularly in the north-eastern part of Ukraine, has been advancing at a rapid pace, and Russians are fleeing with minimal resistance, leaving a lot of weapons and ammunition behind. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy put out a video mocking the Russian retreat, saying that it’s showing their best side. Further south, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has now been completely shut down in order to prevent a nuclear catastrophe as shelling continues in the region. Meanwhile, in Sloviansk, in Donetsk province, continues to see artillery attacks as Russian forces try to take the entire Donbas region. While the counter-attack is a positive sign, it is likely that the conflict will continue for some time, with the added complication that Western allies are starting to run out of inventory to donate to the effort, and everyone needs to beware of what Putin may do when he feels like he’s been backed into a corner.

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Roundup: Charles III’s first address

King Charles III made his first public address in his new role, and like his mother before him, pledged to serve for as long as he lives (sorry fantasists who think he’ll abdicate in favour of William). And this was addressed not only to the UK, but also to all of the realms where he is also King, and to the rest of the Commonwealth as well, even if he is not their head of state.

More of the ceremonial aspects of the transition takes place today, from the Accession Council in the UK, to the meeting of the Privy Council at Rideau Hall, where the Canadian Cabinet will make the accession declaration for the King of Canada.

https://twitter.com/Gray_Mackenzie/status/1568435618304098305

Meanwhile, I cannot get over the fact that Canadian media outlets cannot get the basic civics straight in the fact that Elizabeth II was the Queen of Canada, and Charles III is the King of Canada. The CBC in particular continues to treat the monarchy as a foreign curiosity rather than the very centre of our constitutional order. Occasionally they will cite that the Queen was Canada’s head of state, which is only true on a technicality, and outlets like The Canadian Press are making similar declarations. We’re a constitutional monarchy. I don’t know why this seems to be so difficult for mainstream media outlets to process and relay correctly. There should be no excuse for it, and yet when it matters, they are simply unable—or unwilling—to present the facts as they exist. It’s no wonder we’re in such trouble.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 198:

The Ukrainian counter-offensive continues to make slow and steady progress on various fronts, but that hasn’t stopped Russians from shelling cities like Bakhmut in the east, or Kharkiv in the north. Shelling also continues around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which continues to be on emergency power to run its cooling systems because repairs cannot be made to the power lines connecting it to the grid so long as the shelling continues. The International Atomic Energy Agency continues to call for a “safety zone” around the plant, but we know how well Russia abides by agreements.

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