Tag Archives: Russia

Roundup: Few details on the Canadian coronation

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As the coronation fast approaches, we’re still waiting for details in Canada about what we’re doing here, or what the events happening in Ottawa will be, or who is part of the delegation going to London for the event itself. The level of secrecy is a bit weird, but I have my suspicions that this is trying to be downplayed from the top, meaning PMO.

As for King Charles III himself, the early signs are that he’s looking to be a bit more involved and less removed than his mother tended to be, in part because that was the generation she came from. And what does that mean for Canada? Well, that’s dependent entirely upon the prime minister, because the King can only act on the advice of the PM. And this PM, well, doesn’t like it when the spotlight is away from him. He likes the “ceremonial” aspects of the job, and a lot of that stuff is what the Crown and the Governor General does. So while we’ve just had some incredibly important events in our country as a constitutional monarchy—the loss of the Queen who had been our sovereign for seventy years, and now the installation of the new King—it’s being downplayed in ways that are not healthy for us as a country, but our civic literacy about this is at terrible lows, and there is an organised campaign of misinformation about the role and nature of the Crown in this country, and Trudeau could do something about that, but he won’t, and it erodes the nature of our democracy even more.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian Forces are yet again claiming to have achieved more of a foothold in Bakhmut, while Ukrainian forces continue to insist they’re holding the line. There are also a bunch of denials as to whether or not the Ukrainians have established a foothold on the eastern bank of the Dnipro river in the south of the country. Russian forces are also claiming to have repelled a drone attack against their Black Sea fleet in the Crimean port of Sevastopol.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1650111231196536832

https://twitter.com/defencehq/status/1650012022371753984

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Roundup: We all got played on the Telford gambit

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Yesterday morning, we saw an exhausting series of manoeuvres that made the Liberals, the NDP and the Conservatives all pretend like they were playing 3D chess against one another, but it was none of that. First thing was that the Liberals released the final mandate of David Johnston in his role as special rapporteur on the allegations, and he has until May 23rdto make a recommendation around a public inquiry, and until October 31st for his final report (but I see the possibility for shenanigans if the recommendation for a public inquiry won’t actually be acted upon until the final report so that it can be fully informed, etc.) And if there is a recommendation for a public inquiry, Sikh organisations in this country want India to be included in any examination of foreign interference

In the meantime, Justin Trudeau said that no, the vote on the motion to send Katie Telford to committee wasn’t going to be a confidence measure (because frankly that would be stupid), and that they had decided to send Telford to the Procedure and House Affairs committee after weeks of filibustering to prevent it, just as Singh was announcing he would support the Conservative motion to bypass the filibuster by instructing the Ethics committee hear her testimony instead (which the Conservatives chair). This just blew up three weeks of trying to trying to prevent her from appearing under the principle of ministerial responsibility and not calling staffers to committee, because they didn’t have an end game for the filibuster, and we’re just going to throw centuries of Westminster parliamentary principles on the fire for the sake of scoring points—and that’s what this all is about. Scoring points, as the Liberals also used this as a test of their agreement with the NDP, which shook it.

And while all of this was taking place, Mark Holland got up in the House of Commons to apologise for misspeaking yesterday in saying that Pierre Poilievre was offered a briefing and declined it, but his confusion was that Poilievre had publicly stated he would refuse such a briefing on classified information. (Are you following?)

So while Jagmeet Singh spent the day insisting that he was the one who ended the filibuster (he wasn’t), the NDP their own procedural game they were trying to play, which was to force a concurrence debate and vote on the PROC report recommending a public inquiry into these interference allegations, but the Conservatives beat him to the punch and called for a concurrence debate on a different committee report, which just points out how nobody is actually taking this issue seriously. It’s a pissing contest and point-scoring. And at the end of this, the NDP voted against the Conservative Supply Day motion to send Telford to the Ethics committee, because it was now a moot point.

And in the end? We’ve torched more parliamentary principles and weakened our parliamentary system further, and Trudeau has spilled more blood in the water, which is only going to make things even worse because there is now a frenzy around him. The Conservatives and their bad faith politics have played all of us in this whole affair because this was never about Telford and her testimony, but merely trying to set a trap so they could claim a cover-up, and the Liberals walked right into it and flailed for weeks. We’ve set more bad precedents, and democracy is worse off than it was before, because everyone needed to score points instead of being adults over this whole situation. Everyone keeps making it worse, because they can’t help themselves. What a way to run a country.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Japan’s prime minister made an unannounced visit to Ukraine yesterday to meet with president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and to tour the massacre site at Bucha. Meanwhile, police in Avdiivka are trying to evacuate holdouts in the town, as Russian forces continue their attempts to encircle it.

https://twitter.com/gerashchenko_en/status/1638100893856944128

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1638272233054392327

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Roundup: The allegations reach Queen’s Park

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Another day, another Global news story about supposed foreign interference allegations, this time naming Ontario PC MPP Vincent Ke as someone who has been working on behalf of the Chinese government, and who was given funds to disperse for election influence. Ke denies this, but Doug Ford swiftly demoted him from parliamentary assistant to committee chair, and then hours later, Ke “voluntarily” stepped out of caucus for the time being. But there are a lot of problems with the reporting in the piece, as both Stephanie Carvin and Jessica Davis—both of whom are former CSIS analysts—point out in separate Twitter threads that are absolutely essential reading to understand why this reporting is so suspect.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1634268769697640449

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1634272246817607682

Meanwhile, former Senator Vern White is calling out the Conservatives’ characterisation of NSICOP to be the bullshit that it is, and says that it would be faster and cheaper for that committee to do the review into interference allegations than a public inquiry. He also doesn’t believe an NSICOP member leaked an unredacted report to Global news considering how strict the security is. I previously wrote a piece about the legislation empowering NSICOP and how it compares to other Westminster parliaments’ own parliamentary national security committees, and they too face redactions from their political executives—NSICOP is not out of line in that regard, not to mention that we don’t have secure places for a secret-cleared parliamentary committee to meet on Parliament Hill (which should be part of the renovations to Centre Block).

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1634335994525757440

Ukraine Dispatch:

An aide to president Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that the decision to stick out the battle in Bakhmut has to do with the ability to pin down and degrade Russia’s best forces ahead of the planned spring Ukrainian counter-offensive. Meanwhile, most of the power in Kyiv has been restored after Thursday’s missile barrage from Russia.

https://twitter.com/gerashchenko_en/status/1634182540868108290

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Roundup: A smear to precede the report

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The day began with the Globe and Mail dropping another “big scoop” of CSIS uncovering that China tried to somehow influence the prime minister by donating to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation…after Trudeau had already stepped away from its board because he was Liberal leader. And more to the point, this story is old—2016 old—with the new CSIS headline, and further down was a smear at Morris Rosenberg, who used to head the Foundation, whom the Privy Council Office chose to write the report coming out on attempts at interference in the last election. And it was absolutely a smear, and the Globe was simply parroting a Conservative attack. It’s also worth noting that Stephen Harper had appointed Rosenberg to be the deputy minister of foreign affairs, so these attacks are all the more unseemly. (For more on these leaks, check these threads from Jessica Davis and Stephanie Carvin, which provide a lot of context to these stories and why they’re not treating intelligence properly.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1630578153277071366

Much later in the day, Rosenberg’s report was released, and in it, he relayed that the task force monitoring the election found that while there were attempts at influence, including the misinformation around Conservative incumbent Kenny Chiu, but nothing rose to the level of actual concern in the panel’s estimation. Rosenberg makes sixteen recommendations, some of them around increasing transparency including providing unclassified briefings, and extending some monitoring to the pre-writ period (which can be tricky because so-called “fixed” election dates are rarely that, nor should they be). It’s also worth noting that there were also concerns raised about domestic disinformation (much of it around COVID) and rising threats of anti-government violence, which the task force made note of and could require adjustments to the protocols in order to better deal with it.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Things in Bakhumut are getting bad, as Russians are destroying anything that can be used for cover or defensive positions, and president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has admitted that they may have no choice but to pull back so as not to simply cost lives for the sake of it. Ukrainian aircraft did launch three strikes on areas of concentration of Russian forces. Meanwhile, Russian television stations and radio were hacked as a string of drone attacks hit near St. Petersburg. (Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the incident).

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Roundup: An upcoming vacancy that will be impossible to fill

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The report was expected after the complaint had been made, but yesterday, the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner released a report that confirmed that Liberal MP Greg Fergus did break the rules by writing a letter of support to the CRTC for a constituent, given that he is a parliamentary secretary and that position could be construed as trying to exert pressure on a quasi-judicial body. Fergus owned up to the mistake and apologised, and the Commissioner suggested that perhaps ministers and parliamentary secretaries would benefit from additional training from his office.

But that wasn’t all—the commissioner, Mario Dion, announced that he would be retiring in a few days because of persistent health issues. While Dion has not been a great Commissioner (some of his rulings have been highly dubious because he over-interpreted his mandate or his enabling statute), the real problem is going to be in finding a replacement, because the legislation about who can apply for the job is, well, nearly impossible to meet. The previous Commissioner, Mary Dawson, needed to keep extending her tenure because they couldn’t find anyone to replace her, and now Dion is leaving without a replacement in the wings. And like I said, the criteria are nigh-impossible, because there are vanishingly few retired judges in this country who want the aggravation of this job with its modest pay, and the other option is the head of an administrative tribunal (which is how Dion got the job), and again, there are only so many of those. So good luck, MPs—you’re really, really going to need it.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 357:

Russian forces were concentrating their artillery on Bakhmut and the surrounding settlements. Meanwhile, NATO defence ministers met in Brussels to discuss getting more firepower to Ukraine as quickly as possible, now that Russia’s new offensive has begun. Germany has signed a deal to produce more ammunition for the anti-aircraft guns provided to Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/lyla_lilas/status/1625525076182310912

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Roundup: Concerns divorced from reality in C-11

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The continuing discourse around Bill C-11—the online streaming bill—continues to plumb new depths of utter idiocy, and this weekend, the Globe and Mail dragged Margaret Atwood into it, where she said some things that have absolutely nothing to do with the bill at hand. Why? Because Senator David Richards, a novelist who has been little more than a crank during his time in the Senate, gave a speech last week (around 1530 in the Hansard) that was pretty much complete and utter nonsense in which he accused the government and the CRTC of being Goebbels-like propagandists because of this bill, and people have glommed onto the debate without knowing anything about it.

If anything, the Globe story was complete journalistic malpractice, because it didn’t give sufficient context to the bill or what it actually says, and Atwood admitted she hadn’t read the bill, and they ran the story about her comments regardless.

I have done several stories on this bill and its predecessor in the previous Parliament (here and here). In spite of the Conservative narrative that this was “Orwellian” and that an “Internet czar” was going to censor your tweets, the bill is nothing about that. It’s about ensuring that streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ play by similar rules as other conventional broadcasters, particularly in using part of their revenues to continue to Canadian content media funds. YouTube was included for that reason—as the largest music streaming service, it should also disclose its Canadian revenues and submit the same proportion to media funds for artists that radio does. That’s it. The CRTC has been determining what counts as “Canadian Content” for those purposes, as well as for tax credits, for decades. The current point system has been in place since 1984. None of this is new or novel, and none of this is the Minister of Heritage telling people what to produce, and absolutely none of this is “government censorship,” and if people believe that, then they don’t understand the meaning of the word. And yet, these narratives have been allowed to perpetuate in the mainstream media, either because the journalists in question are too lazy to actually read the bill, or they are content to both-sides the debate, and when one of those sides are outright lying, or are free speech zealots who object to CanCon regulations on principle, and on the other side you get ministerial pabulum, you’re not exactly cutting through any of the bullshit. We have been so let down by the media over the course of this interminable debate, and we are all the worse off for it because people aren’t doing the jobs.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 348:

Russian missiles struck Kharkiv over the weekend, destroying residential buildings, while a fire caused a blackout in Odessa. Russia and Ukraine also traded almost 200 prisoners of war in a prisoner exchange on Saturday. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s defence minister is being shuffled to a new portfolio as part of the government shake-up in light of combatting corruption allegations.

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Roundup: The first Sovereignty Act lawsuit

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The first legal challenge to Danielle Smith’s risible “Sovereignty Act” has been filed, and it’s from the Onion Lake Cree Nation, citing that the Act tramples on their treaty rights, that it’s ultra vires the province’s authorities, and that they were not consulted on it when it impacts their rights. This shouldn’t be a surprise—they warned her that she didn’t consult them and that this was going to be a problem, and she not only didn’t listen, she made the utterly offensive comparisons, claiming that the federal government oppresses Alberta like it did First Nations. This is who she is. I can’t wait for the courts to smack this legislation down for the unconstitutional mess that it is.

 

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 300:

Russian drones struck Kyiv’s power grid for the third time in a week, as 18 out of 23 drones were shot down over the city, and those successful drones are said to have caused fairly serious damage. There were also reports of kamikaze drones flying over a nuclear power plant in the Mykolaiv region.

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Roundup: End of the 2022 fall sitting

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Yesterday was the last sitting day of 2022 for the House of Commons, and as is common at this time of year, everyone is cranky and ready to go home and have a nap, and this year is no different. This being said, Question Period has been pretty sedate overall the past few weeks, and there have been pre-Xmas QPs in years past that were rancorous, and we haven’t had that. Nevertheless, the government is in definite need of time to go regroup after the way they utterly ballsed-up their own gun control legislation, as well as some of the other problems with bills like their broadcasting and online news legislation. Hopefully some time away will help them get their priorities straight, and to fix the mistakes they made by either being too clever by half, or by sheer incompetence (and sometimes it’s a tossup as to what the problem was indeed).

I will note that there was an outcry over Twitter from members of the disability community that the Canada Disability Benefit legislation didn’t pass before they rose, and an NDP MP tried to pass a motion to give emergency funds in the interim, as though that were remotely feasibly and wouldn’t result in provinces clawing back their own meagre benefits. (Seriously, CERB was not magic.) The thing that needs to be remembered is that the CDB bill is just a framework—even if it passed yesterday, it wouldn’t pass the Senate in time, and when it does pass, it needs to go through a massive regulatory process to fill in the benefits, which also needs to be done with provincial negotiations so that we don’t wind up in a situation where provinces either claw-back benefits or funding so that these people are worse off than they were before, or where things wind up in a situation where other supports are withdrawn because they were means-tested and the federal benefit moves them out of reach of those thresholds, which again, will disadvantage those who need it. None of this is happening overnight, and it’s a process. So frankly, the fact that the bill didn’t pass before Xmas this year is not surprising, and wouldn’t have an immediate impact in any case.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 295:

Ukrainian authorities say that they intercepted and destroyed thirteen explosive-laden drones headed for Kyiv yesterday, but the wreckage still damaged five buildings. Meanwhile, Russia has said there will be no Christmas ceasefire in Ukraine, which isn’t surprising (though the only thing even less surprising would be them agreeing to it and then reneging). In the meantime, they have shelled the regional administrative centre in Kherson, because.

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Roundup: A couple of not-that-scathing reports

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The Auditor General released two reports yesterday on pandemic befits programmes and vaccine procurement, and they were…not explosive. Really. There were weak spots from the government, in large part because of the haste in which these programmes were designed because of the pandemic, and some inefficiency, but on the report about vaccines, part of the problem with wastage is because of a lack of provincial data, because the federal government hasn’t been able to sign agreements with the provinces. And as we’ve seen all too often, this is the fault of the provinces.

Nevertheless, the Conservatives were salivating over this release and put on a whole dog and pony show to decry that this was a sign that this government’s “wasteful spending” is what is fuelling inflation, which isn’t true, but this is the narrative they have been trying to push, and these numbers were ripe for the plucking. And as they do with every other officer of Parliament, they misconstrued the report, cherry-picked figures, and cranked up the hyperbole, and lo, this was scandalous. But that’s not what the report found. And it also ignores that they voted unanimously to design the benefit programmes this way because it was more important to get the money out the door.

Anyway, here’s Jennifer Robson’s read of the report, and it’s worth your time.

 

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 287:

Another drone strike within Russia set a third airfield ablaze, though the Ukrainians have not claimed responsibility for the attack. (Video here) More Russian missiles did strike civilian targets in Ukraine, but they were said to be less severe than other attacks in recent weeks. The strikes against Russian airfields have Russian bloggers questioning the competence of their government’s defences.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1600135762179018752

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Roundup: Danielle Smith will threaten your funding

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Danielle Smith’s Alberta is a place where Smith and her ministers will phone you up and threaten your funding if you have mask or vaccine mandates, it was revealed yesterday. Smith threatened funding for the Arctic Winter Games, and has been phoning film productions to threaten them if they have mandates, because of course she is. It’s an abusive, arbitrary exercise of power that is imposing conditions on these groups or productions that don’t have these obligations in their written agreements, but it’s not like she cares about things like legalities.

It was also revealed that she isn’t moving ahead with her plan to add protection for the unvaccinated in the province’s human rights legislation, and is instead going to focus on her so-called “Sovereignty Act,” but rumour is that it’s going to be something like “Sovereignty Within a United Canada” or some other similar bullshit to make it look like it’s not a full-on separatist movement that will spook investment, not that doing arbitrary things like phoning you up and threatening your funding will make anyone feel like they want to continue doing business in the province. I’m almost surprised that her caucus isn’t revolting already considering the absolute abuse of power on display.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 279:

Ongoing Russian strikes and power disruptions as a result are making it difficult for hospitals in Ukraine to carry out their work, and at times, surgeries are being performed with headlamps and flashlights. The US is expected to announce aid that will help with the restoration of electricity around the country. Meanwhile, 30 settlements in the Kherson region have been shelled 258 times in the past week, and Russia has kept up shelling at Bakhmut and Avdiivka in Donetsk province as they try to make gains there.

https://twitter.com/DavidLametti/status/1597320883441319936

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