Thursday in the new Chamber, and neither the PM nor Andrew Scheer were present. Plus ça change… That left Candice Bergen to lead off with slams against the prime minister’s alleged lavish lifestyle before demanding to know whey they planned to raise taxes. Bill Morneau got up and noted that the first things they did was lower taxes on the Middle Class™. Bergen retorted that the Conservatives delivered a balanced budget (not really), and that today’s deficits were tomorrow’s higher taxes (not with a declining debt-to-GDP ratio), but Morneau noted that the facts didn’t match her rhetoric and that Canadians didn’t want to return to the “bad old days” of Conservative austerity. Bergen read more vitriol about Trudeau, to which Morneau listed off their tax cuts and Canada Child Benefit plans, and decried the Conservative legacy of debt. Gérard Deltell took over in French, and gave his usual demand to know when the budget would be balanced. Morneau state that their plan was clear to invest, and that the approach was working as witnessed by lowest unemployment in 40 years and people with more money in their pockets. Deltell asked a second time, and Morneau repeated his pabulum. Guy Caron was up next for the NDP, and said that the PBO reported that the government paid too much for the Trans Mountain pipeline. Morneau replied that he had it wrong — that they bought the pipeline because it was good for the economy. Caron wondered why they didn’t invest instead in transitioning to a clean economy, to which Morneau reminded him of the need to get access to international markets, which was why it was necessary to buy the pipeline. Nathan Cullen took over in English to repeat the question with added sanctimony, to which Morneau said that their purchase price of the pipeline was in the middle of the commercial range, which meant it was a good one. Cullen tried again, and got much the same response.
Tag Archives: RCMP
Roundup: Playing into Ford’s framing
While Ontario Premier Doug Ford doubles down on his assertion that a carbon tax will drive the economy into recession, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. And it’s not just Ford’s doubling down on this assertion – the Saskatchewan government is also insisting that the report it commissioned on the effect of carbon taxes is correct, despite the fact that the other experts who’ve looked it over say that the report vastly overestimates the effect by orders of magnitude. But as with Ford (and Andrew Scheer), it’s not about truth – it’s about taking any crumb of data that they think will fit with their narrative and blowing it so far out of proportion that it becomes an outright lie.
Saskatchewan's government also claimed carbon tax would bring a recession. Researchers found they badly misread the numbers. https://t.co/TZEZIF1pFX
— Jason Markusoff (@markusoff) January 22, 2019
https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1087768772436463617
Luckily, there is lots of thinking on this. For example, here are estimates from about a dozen different models in the US. Impacts of a carbon price range from slightly negative to slightly positive, depending on the model and scenario. None show substantial impacts. pic.twitter.com/RKMxYWgBdB
— Nic Rivers (@riversNic) January 21, 2019
Our analysis shows the overall economic impacts of a carbon price rising to $100/tonne + revenue recycling are very modest https://t.co/AIaiYW0Nss pic.twitter.com/DHxqaH5JSc
— Ecofiscal Commission (@EcofiscalCanada) January 21, 2019
But beyond that, the way in which this issue is being framed in the media should be questioned – something economist Mike Moffatt did over the Twitter Machine yesterday.
https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1087670357757227009
https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1087673953819287552
And he’s got a point – the CBC’s own story to debunk Ford’s claims is headlined “Economists cool to Doug Ford’s warning of ‘carbon tax recession’,” which again frames this as Ford versus economists – something that plays directly into Ford’s hands because he can turn around and claim that this is just the out-of-touch elites in their ivory towers and not “real folks,” a populist construction that is again built on a foundation of lies. And yet we in the media can’t seem to help ourselves because we don’t want to be seen as being biased, even when we are subjected to bald-faced lies, and again, we need to look like we’re being fair to the liars who are lying to our faces, which they take full advantage of. We’re hurting ourselves, but we can’t seem to help ourselves.
Those with a vested interest in misinformation have figured out that both-sidesism is the Achilles heel of the media, and they have exploited it to its fullest extent, knowing that they can lie with impunity and it will be framed as being a side in an argument. https://t.co/jWcTfAYNTZ
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) January 22, 2019
Roundup: Recession fear-mongering
At an event at the Economic Club of Canada yesterday, Ontario premier Doug Ford asserted that the federal carbon price backstop – which will affect Ontario – will plunge the country into recession. That Ford wasn’t laughed out of the room is a bit more than curious, because that kind of assertion is beyond ridiculous. BC has had a carbon tax for ten years, and not only is not in recession, but is leading the country in economic growth. Quebec has a carbon price using cap-and-trade, and is also doing quite well in terms of its own economic growth. Alberta’s carbon tax didn’t cripple its economy either, and what fiscal troubles it has are related largely to the low world price of oil that stems from a global supply glut, the temporary price differential issue having pretty much been resolved before the production cut even went into effect, now that the American refineries are back in operation. “Oh, but there’s a report that says it’ll slow the economy!” Ford says – except that report says it’ll be about by 0.02 percent at a time when the economy is growing by two percent.
Ford’s environment minister later took to TV to try and falsely insist that the federal Parliamentary Budget Officer projected a hit to the economy from a carbon tax (he actually said that it would only have an impact if revenues weren’t recycled in an efficient manner), and that BC’s carbon tax didn’t stop its emissions from growing (also false, because the emissions are far lower than they would have been without the price, while their economy continued to grow). So Ford is relying on lies to feed his false narrative that is trying to get the population angry so that they’ll vote out Trudeau. And what was Catherine McKenna’s response? Her same line about Conservatives wanting to make pollution free, and that they have no plan for the environment. So, the lies stand on the official record. Slow clap, everyone.
"When asked if Mr. Ford has any experts to back up his claim, his office pointed to a 2018 report from the Conference Board of Canada that said a federal carbon tax could shrink Canada’s GDP by as much as $3-billion."
That's 0.1% of GDP ($2.2tr). https://t.co/pzBsnxURkL
— Stephen Gordon (@stephenfgordon) January 22, 2019
1) Life always gets more expensive. It’s called inflation. We consider 2% to be a good thing.
2) Data have proven that carbon taxes have not had an adverse effect on inflation.
3) Carbon taxes do mitigate the growth of GHGs. This is proven. Saying otherwise is just lying. https://t.co/z7YW6RCd1t— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) January 22, 2019
Roundup: A few notes on the state of the Brexit drama
Given the state of the drama in Westminster right now, I thought I’d make a couple of points about why we’re here now. It’s pretty unprecedented for a government to lose a vote – badly – on a major foreign policy plank without automatically losing confidence, and yet, thanks to the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, that’s exactly the case. And because Theresa May squeaked out a confidence vote, that leaves her in something of a precarious situation about not really having a mandate to continue on the path she was on, while not being able to take anything to the people in a general election, as might ordinarily be the case under our share Westminster system. The FTPA has made Parliament untenable, and enables bad actors to game the system, which would ordinarily have been avoided by the sheer fact that they would have been keen to avoid shenanigans that the Queen would need to be involved in.
https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1085530081768857600
https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1085531738971897858
https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1085270260498886656
It seems to me that if the Westminster parliament were functioning normally, then May could have taken the question of proceeding with Brexit to the people in an election, given that she lost the vote of confidence. Of course that would necessitate Labour to come up with a coherent position (and perhaps a more coherent leader, which their current bastardised leadership selection process also gave them). That would have given the winning government a popular mandate to overtake the referendum if need be, but again, that’s now off the table because of the way the FTPA has distorted the Westminster system. With the practice of Responsible Government being blunted by this statute, it’s clear that it must go.
Meanwhile, Chantal Hébert looks at the Brexit omnishambles and compares it to the plans for Quebec sovereignty back in the day, and how this seems to be dampening any sovereigntist sentiment in the province even further (while getting in a few jabs about Andrew Scheer’s Brexit boosterism along the way). Andrew Coyne likewise looks to the Brexit drama as an object lesson in how seccession from any union is far from painless.
Roundup: A subdued oil price shock
The Bank of Canada decided to hold on raising interest rates yesterday, but there were some very interesting things in the accompanying Monetary Policy Report that haven’t been widely reported on, and much of that was the whole section in the report on the state of the oil industry in Canada. (It’s pages 9 and 10 of the report – PDF here). Essentially, for all of the talk about economic doom for the current state of oil prices and the price differential, this current price shock is affecting the Canadian economy at a quarter of what it did in the 2014-2016 price shock, and there are a couple of reasons for that. One of them is that the oil sector is no longer as big of a part of the Canadian economy as it was then – it’s currently worth 3.5 percent of our GDP, while it was six percent just a few years ago. That’s fairly significant. As well, after the previous price shock, most energy firms are better equipped to handle the low-price environment thanks to innovation, improved efficiency and the fact that they already cut overhead costs. Add to that, our low dollar is providing a buffer effect because it supports non-energy exports and employment. In other words, while it’s softened the economy a little over the past quarter and the current one, this is projected to be shrugged off as the rest of the economy continues to pick up steam, and we’re likely to continue growing at a greater pace, because the rest of the economy continues to be running close to capacity. Even some of the areas of potential slack that have been identified, such as lower-than-expected wage growth, are mostly because the situation in Alberta is dragging down the national average. So perhaps it’s not all doom after all.
One other particular note from the morning was that Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz made a couple of remarks around his hometown of Oshawa, and how it’s managed to weather previous plant closures and how its resilience means it will likely weather the pending closure of the GM plant as well as it did previously.
Meanwhile, Kevin Carmichael walks us through the morning’s decision, and some of the reaction to it.
Roundup: Bernier goes full tinfoil hat
Maxime Bernier appears to be going full tinfoil hat, with a Twitter thread about a supposed move to create some kind of UN parliament that will erase borders, and that Canada will be absorbed into, and I can’t even. I literally cannot.
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1082829073922093057
As Carvin points out, this is a campaign that is orchestrated by Neo-Nazi sympathizers in Europe, and it’s the very same thing that Andrew Scheer was also have been touting this very same conspiracy theory as part of their attempt to push back against the UN global compact on migration. But then again, Scheer and company also gave succour to racists in order to try and paint Trudeau as some kind of bully, so it shouldn’t be a surprise, and they’re being wilfully blind and deaf to the white nationalists and xenophobes that are infiltrating the “yellow vest” protests that they like to promote, so there’s that.
“A coordinated online campaign by far-right activists pressured mainstream European parties to drop support for a UN migration pact that was years in the making.”
Highlighting work by @ISDglobal. https://t.co/E7Cuk5gyVb
— Amarnath Amarasingam (@AmarAmarasingam) January 7, 2019
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1082252207234473985
Meanwhile, Bernier has tapped an anti-abortion, anti-trans “Christian pundit” as his party’s candidate in Burnaby South. And he’s being accused of running a campaign in that riding that is trying to depict Jagmeet Singh’s efforts as being one that is running only for the Indo-Canadian community, so, you know, the xenophobia tuba instead of the dogwhistle.
A look at her "hero in the faith": https://t.co/KEKuJkuZ9k + https://t.co/eo0U0zFIYI
Plus, who she turns to for facts re: trans issues: https://t.co/7HNhhHUfir + https://t.co/axPWwgpP4h + https://t.co/hzfGVhlAfW #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/acJDbGChw3
— Alheli Picazo (@a_picazo) January 9, 2019
Roundup: On those marginal tax rates
Given the debate that his happening south of the border when it comes to agitation for a 70 percent marginal tax rate on high earners, it’s only a matter of time before the left-leaning contingent of Twitter starts agitating for the same here. The problem, of course, is that you can’t simply import the same concepts between the US and Canada and expect it to be analogous, or at the very least analogous at one tenth the figures in the US. To demonstrate, economist Kevin Milligan took the Canadian data and mapped out what that would mean here. And lo, it’s not an analogous situation (though I suspect it won’t stop left-leaning Twitter from repeating these American talking points one bit).
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1082383660857225217
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1082385072718635008
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1082386430175862784
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1082387490319683584
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1082411856315084805
Roundup: Foreign policy complacency
There has been some musing of late about Canada’s place in the world, and a couple of things jumped out at me. First is Paul Wells’ most recent column, which responds to a Globe and Mailop-ed from a former trade negotiator that wrings its hands at the way the current government is handling China. As Wells points out, said former negotiator is all over the map in terms of contradictory advice, but most gallingly, suggests that we break our extradition treaty with our largest and closest ally in order to appease China. And Wells quite properly boggles at this suggestion we break our treaty, while at the same time taking a moment to reflect on how there is a different way in which Ottawa seems to operate when it comes to these matters, particularly in an era where major corporations with investments in China are no longer calling the shots by way of political financing.
At the same time, Stephanie Carvin makes some particularly poignant observations about Canada’s foreign policy complacency in this era of the Americans retreating from their obligations on the world stage (never mind the Brexit-mired UK). We talk a good game, but have no follow-through, and in the past, she has quite rightly pointed to the fact that we won’t invest in the kinds of things we talk about the importance of globally (most especially “feminist” foreign aid). The government’s actions in Mali are another decent example – putting on a big song and dance about how important it is we go there, spend a few months there doing low-risk medevac, and then refuse to extend the mission for a few extra months so that our replacements can get properly established, meaning there will be a gap in services there.
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1080853935328497665
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1080854398052564992
I do have to wonder about some of the crossover between what Wells and Carvin are talking about – that Wells points to the rise of crowd-pleasing populism freeing governments from the go-along-to-get-along complacency, but Carvin points to the fact that we are not actually free of that complacency, though perhaps there are different sorts of complacency that we are grappling with when it comes to our place on the world stage. Something to think about in any case.
Roundup: A victory for the status quo
Christmas came a few days early, courtesy of British Columbia, which rejected the referendum to change their voting system. A decisive 61.3 percent of British Columbians voted to keep First Past the Post, which one hopes would shut up the proportional representation Kool-Aid drinkers for some time – not that it will. They’ve already begun the ritual grousing over Twitter about how a) the referendum was the problem and people rejected it and not PR; and b) that voters are just too stupid to get that “PR is lit,” to coin a phrase. The provincial Green Party leader, Andrew Weaver, says that he gets the message and that they won’t be raising it “anytime soon” – but he also didn’t want a referendum in the first place and wanted it imposed, so we’ll see how long before he starts agitating for that option.
Next up for attempts at electoral reform are Quebec – where François Legault promised it sans-referendum with the support of other party leaders – and PEI, where PR narrowly “won” a poorly attended plebiscite, on the late round of a ranked ballot, hence the government plans to run another referendum during the next provincial election.
But seriously, guys. We need to stop this mythmaking about the current system, and this belief that PR is the only “good” system. Most of the gripes about the current system stem from ignorance and disengagement with the process that has allowed bad actors to co-opt the system to their own ends (and this is especially because of the bastardised leadership selection system that we have gravitated toward despite is demonstrated toxic effect on our system). PR doesn’t solve these problems – if anything, most PR systems simply exacerbate them and create whole new problems. Time to focus our efforts toward civic literacy and using grassroots engagement to fix the problems that we’ve allowed to creep into our system. And hey, I wrote a book on this as a primer for you.
https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1075903388187910145
https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1075906692880068608
https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1075956069082386432
Meanwhile, Shachi Kurl of the Angus Reid institute breaks down the polling around the referendum, and should put to bed a few of the myths.
2) Majorities of past @bcndp and @BCGreens, in turn, chose #prorep, but there these blocks were less overwhelming in in their support for change: pic.twitter.com/qdZDBLlitq
— Shachi Kurl (@ShachiKurl) December 21, 2018
4) So what were some of the other motivations? #proprep voters really believed their vote would matter more: pic.twitter.com/8tK0P4pwNn
— Shachi Kurl (@ShachiKurl) December 21, 2018
6) There was a lot of polarization among #PropRep and #FPTP voters over whether the vote was even needed: pic.twitter.com/4wKTeVjfsu
— Shachi Kurl (@ShachiKurl) December 21, 2018
8) the #FPTP folks OTOH, were under no illusions that sticking with the status quo would be amazing… but they did see it as the best system we have: pic.twitter.com/atwJvzwUJc
— Shachi Kurl (@ShachiKurl) December 21, 2018
10) A lot of @bcliberals folks I've talked to seem to think the referendum result will mean an election soon for BC. I could be wrong, but I don't.
— Shachi Kurl (@ShachiKurl) December 21, 2018
12) Yes, the @bcliberals will take a victory lap on this. They delivered their vote. The @bcndp looks sheepish for not doing the same, but also, I don't think they really care & feel decent about their chances IF an election were called.
— Shachi Kurl (@ShachiKurl) December 21, 2018
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1075928443865292800
Roundup: Courting the tinfoil hat crowd
Over the past few days, the Conservatives have been delving into tinfoil hat territory in their attempts to stir up panic and anger toward the UN compact on global migration, which Canada plans to sign next week in Morocco. According to the Conservatives, this non-binding political declaration will somehow erode Canadian sovereignty and be tantamount to “border erasure,” and that if you listen to the Twitter trolls picking up on Andrew Scheer and Michelle Rempel’s posts about this, it will make criticizing immigration a “hate crime.” All of which is complete and utter bullshit, and even Chris Alexander, one-time Harper-era immigration minister, calls this out as factually incorrect. And yet, the Conservatives plan to use their Supply Day today to force a vote on this very issue so that they can express performative shock and dismay when the Liberals vote it down.
https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1070071215384080389
While Justin Trudeau and Ahmed Hussen have quite rightly called the Conservatives out on this issue as repeating Rebel Media talking points, I have to see this as yet another example of Conservatives not only shamelessly lying to score points, but trying to dip their toe into extremist territory, and the belief that they can just “just enough” extremist language and talking points to try and stir up enough anger and paranoia that they think it will move their poll numbers, but no white supremacists or xenophobes please, “we believe in orderly immigration.” And of course, real life doesn’t work that way, and they wind up stirring up elements that they say they disavow, but continue to wink at because they think it’ll get some kind of benefit out of it.
The other theory raised about why the Conservatives are going full steam on this issue is because they’re trying to head off Maxime Bernier, who is also trolling on this particular bit of lunacy. Why they think this would be a good strategy, I’m not entirely sure, but it’s not as harmless as they might think it is, and that should be concerning to everyone.