Tag Archives: Sean Fraser

Roundup: Economists endorse carbon pricing, not the Liberal plan

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Yesterday, a group of leading Canadian economists published an open letter about the facts about carbon pricing and the rebates, and debunked several claims that conservatives around the country have been making. It was a good and necessary corrective, but of course, legacy media headlined it as them defending the Liberal plan, which they weren’t doing, particularly because while the Liberal plan includes the carbon levy and rebates, it also is full of regulation and subsidies, which these economics are explicitly not in favour of. But legacy media loves to make this a partisan fight where they have to be on one side or the other. Liberal Party comms didn’t do themselves any favours either on this one.

To that end, here is energy economist Andrew Leach on carbon pricing, and throwing some shade at the PBO’s rather shite report once more.

Meanwhile, a number of premiers demanded to be heard at the House of Commons’ finance committee about the carbon levy, because they think that’ll do them any good, but instead, the Conservative chair of the Government Operations Committee invited them to testify today. The Government Operations Committee has fuck all to do with this file, but apparently, we no longer care about things like committee mandates anymore, so long as you can put on a dog and pony show, and gather clips for social media shitpost videos, that’s all that matters. This shouldn’t be allowed, but this is the state to which our Parliament has now debased itself. Ours is no longer a serious institution for doing serious work. It’s only about content creation, and I cannot stress enough about how absolutely terrifying this is for the future of democracy.

Ukraine Dispatch:

A Ukrainian missile attack struck a Russian naval reconnaissance vessel as well as a large landing warship. Ukraine’s navy says that they have destroyed or disabled a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet over the past two years. Here’s a look at how Ukraine’s burgeoning domestic defence industry is ramping up to provide necessary ammunition for the war. Here’s a great explanation of Ukraine’s use of drone warfare with some excellent infographics.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1772541600591147503

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Roundup: A new tone in communications? Maybe?

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After some two years of the Conservatives rolling out three-to-five-minute disinformation videos on the regular, the Liberals have finally responded in kind, with something that has reasonable production values, snappy pace, and delivers messages to counter the Conservatives’ message with a bit of a punch at the end. One has to wonder why it took them so long, but they didn’t spare any effort in getting every single one of their MPs and proxies to blast it over their socials over the weekend.

What I will add that was fairly notable was that they didn’t rely on slogans in the video, or on entirely happy-clappy pabulum as they normally do. I’m hoping that perhaps this will finally—finally!—mark a turning point in how they approach their communications, but I’m not going to get my hopes up there either. Until proven otherwise, I suspect this may be a one-off, or Sean Fraser in particular, rather than an overall trend in how this party communicates.

Ukraine Dispatch:

A Russian missile struck Mykolaiv on Sunday, killing one and wounding at least eight. Ukrainian drones damaged another oil refinery in Russia, and disrupted electricity supplies in order areas.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1768642103968485561

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Roundup: A failed vote, a policy pretzel

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It was not unexpected that the Conservatives’ non-binding Supply Day motion on removing the carbon price from all forms of home heating failed, because the Bloc had no interest in supporting it, and lo, none of the Liberals broke ranks and voted for it either. (Liberal MP Ken McDonald, who had voted for such motions previously, “scratched his head” with two fingers as he voted, which the Conservatives took to be giving them the finger, and lo, cried victim about it). And once the vote was over, Conservatives took to social media to call out all of those Liberal MPs they had been targeting in advance of it, because this is the bullshit state of where Canadian politics have degenerated to.

In advance of the vote, Jagmeet Singh was in the Foyer, twisting himself into a pretzel to say that he didn’t really agree with the Conservative motion, but he was going to vote for it anyway to send a message to the Liberals that he disagrees with them, but he also wants to push his boneheaded “cut GST on all home heating” policy, which is as dumb as a bag of hammers. (No, seriously—it would be impossible to disentangle the heating portion of certain sources of heating, such as electric heating, or what natural gas goes to heating and what goes to hot water tanks, or natural gas barbecues; plus, the policy disproportionately benefits the wealthy, who have bigger houses). There is no policy coherence, because this is all about posturing and performance, and Canadians are ill-served as a result.

While this was going on, the premiers met in Halifax, ostensibly to talk healthcare but it would up being another gang-up session where they all demanded that the federal government remove the carbon price on all home heating out of “fairness” (never mind the problems of energy poverty, that heating oil is four times as expensive as natural gas, and that some of those premiers should have been doing more about this problem years ago). They also groused that the federal Housing Accelerator Fund was being negotiated directly with municipalities and not them, which, again, forgets that they have studiously ignored the housing problem in their own provinces for decades and now they’re getting put out that the federal government has had to step up after they refused to. But that’s the state of our federation, and it’s a

https://twitter.com/aballinga/status/1721622048345149688

https://twitter.com/aballinga/status/1721628581921509676

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian air strikes on Odessa late Sunday night struck the city’s principal art gallery and wounded eight. A criminal investigation has been launched into the decision to hold a troop-honouring ceremony in Zaporizhzhia which was easily detected by surveillance drones, allowing the Russians to target it; around the same time, the top aid to Ukraine’s commander-in-chief was killed when a grenade was hidden inside a birthday present.

https://twitter.com/kyivindependent/status/1721649238642245908

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Roundup: The premiers think we’re all stupid

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It is now day one-hundred-and-forty of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Ukrainian forces are claiming to have hit a Russian ammunition depot near the captured city of Nova Kakhovka in the south. At the same time, Russians continue their attacks on the cities of Sloviansk and Toetsk in the Donetsk province, killing at least nine civilians. Here is a look at efforts to train Ukrainian soldiers and civilians in combat first aid. Over in Russia, the government is poised to enact legislation that can force companies to supply the military, including making employees work overtime, as the country tries to replenish its supplies after depleting them in the invasion thus far.

Closer to home, the Council of the Federation meeting ended, and lo, the premiers were unanimous in demanding that the federal government come to the table with them to, well, accept their demands to give them more money with no strings attached. Only they had both a wounded tone, which quickly switched to sanctimony when they were challenged, particularly about the pandemic spending that couldn’t be tracked. Some premiers, Tim Houston most especially, seem to think that we all have amnesia about 2004 to 2014, when the bulk of those six percent health transfer escalators were spent on other things. Saying that they all want improved outcomes is one thing, but the federal government isn’t stupid—they are well aware that provinces would be just fine with status quo that the federal government paid more for, and that they spent less on. That’s why they want conditions—so that provinces don’t pull this kind of thing once again. Premiers were also pretending that they had no idea what kinds of outcomes the federal government is looking to achieve, because most of the is in last year’s election platform. It’s not hard to find. And frankly, federal health minister Jean-Yves Duclos is right when he says that these outcomes should be agreed to at the ministerial level before the first ministers sit down to talk dollars, because you want to have a plan in place before you attach dollars to it, rather than the opposite, which John Horgan seems to think is how government should function. (You can find my thread as I was live-tweeting the closing press conference here).

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1546912224148688897

On a related note, The Canadian Press devoted several hundred words of wire copy yesterday to the fact that the promised $2 billion to clear up surgical backlogs hasn’t flowed yet…because the budget only received royal assent a couple of weeks ago. And that premiers are complaining they haven’t received the money yet. I mean, premiers know how a budget cycle works. This is not a news story—it’s not even a real process story. It’s complaining for the sake of complaining. The only piece of interest in the story was that the government tabled a bill about the spending commitment, then abandoned it in order to wrap the spending in their budget bill a couple of weeks later. This isn’t the first time they’ve done so, and it’s a really annoying habit that they have, but again, not actually a news story.

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Roundup: Accountability for transfers is not micro-management

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We are now in day thirty-one of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and things are going badly enough for Russia that the Ukrainians are starting to counter-attack, not only pushing Russian forces further away from Kyiv, but also other areas, which has the possibility of making Russia pay a high enough price that they could be willing to accept some kind of negotiated settlement and withdraw. Maybe. We’ll see, but it’s a good sign nevertheless that Ukraine is able to take these measures. Elsewhere, it sounds like about 300 people were killed when the Russians bombed the theatre in Mariupol, and the city is digging mass graves, while some 100,000 people remain trapped there as the Russians turn the city to rubble.

Closer to home, the federal government announced a one-time special transfer of $2 billion to provinces to help them with their surgical backlogs as a result of COVID, but they want some conditions of a sort, and cited five areas of focus for upcoming healthcare talks: backlogs and recruitment and retention of health-care workers; access to primary care; long-term care and home care; mental health and addictions; and digital health and virtual care. And some provinces, predictably, are balking at this because they think this is federal “micromanagement” of healthcare when it’s nothing of the sort. They simply need assurances that provinces are going to spend this where they say they’re going to, because we just saw Doug Ford put some $5.5 billion in federal pandemic aid onto his bottom line, and giving out rebates for licences plate stickers in a blatant exercise in populist vote-buying rather than using that money where it was intended—the healthcare system.

https://twitter.com/journo_dale/status/1507478370300628996

More to the point, provinces are insisting that they are unanimous that hey want unconditional health transfers that will bring the federal share of health spending up to 35 percent, but that’s actually a trap. They are deliberately not mentioning that in 1977, provinces agreed to forego certain health transfers in exchange for tax points, which are more flexible, and that increasing to 35 percent will really be a stealth increase to something like 60 percent, because they’re deliberately pretending that they don’t have those tax points. On top of that, provinces were getting higher health transfers for over a decade—remember when the escalator was six percent per year, and what was health spending increasing at? Somewhere around 2.2 percent, meaning that they spent that money on other things. They should have used it to transform their healthcare systems, but they chose not to, and now they cry poor and want the federal government to bail them out from problems they created, and are blaming the federal government for. It’s a slick little game that doesn’t get called out because the vast majority of the media just credulously repeats their demands without pointing to the tax points, or the fact that they spent their higher transfers elsewhere, or that Doug Ford sat on that pandemic spending, as other provinces did to balance their budgets (Alberta and New Brunswick to name a couple). So no, they do not need these transfers to be unconditional, and the federal government would be foolish if they acceded to that kind of demand.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1507418761912983561

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