Tag Archives: Shelly Glover

Roundup: Feeling like March 2020 all over again

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It’s definitely starting to feel like March 2020, as provinces all started increasing restrictions in advance of Christmas—some of them insufficient, and too late, but they are taking some actions nevertheless. (That, and they’re not all honest about what has been happening with rapid tests—looking most especially at the incompetent murderclown Doug Ford). Federally, the border measures are getting even tougher with negative PCR tests being required even for trips that are less than 72 hours in duration (and those PRC tests need to have been done out-of-country), while the travel ban on those ten African countries is now lifted as omicron has already achieved community spread in Canada and such a ban is now useless.

Prime minister Justin Trudeau is trying to offer some reassurances that we have the benefit of knowledge that we didn’t have during the first wave, and that Canadians know enough to do what it takes to curb the spread of the virus. I suspect that may be a bit overly optimistic considering that too many people will do what the government allows them to, so don’t take all of the precautions necessary to actually curb the spread.

Meanwhile, here’s an exploration of some of the psychological reactions that are being seen and felt to the rapid onset of omicron, where fatigue of the “new normal” is starting to overtake compliance to health measures, and the need to start thinking about what the world looks like if we have COVID forever now.

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Roundup: A headache over added and subtracted seats

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The question of seat redistribution and the allocation – and subtraction – of seats has been simmering, and the premier of Quebec is demanding that the prime minister step in and guarantee that Quebec not only retain the seat it is slated to lose, but also to guarantee that because of the notion that Quebec constitutes a nation within Canada, that they must be guaranteed that their share of seats never drops even if their population grows at a much slower pace than other provinces. The problem with that? It would require a constitutional amendment to do, using the 7/50 formula (seven provinces representing 50 percent of the population). And that could be the tricky part.

Of course, the obvious solution is to tinker with the seat distribution formula, which the Conservatives introduced (fully intending to screw over Ontario for new seats along the way). But as I stated in my column a couple of weeks ago, we would probably be better served adding far more than just four seats – something more like 40 would be better for everyone, especially because it would mean better populating committees and keeping parliamentary secretaries from voting positions on them. Mike Moffatt and I discussed this over Twitter:

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1456558821942431744

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1456560023383969796

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1456590475985571840

Furthermore, if we stay at the current redistribution formula, that sole new seat in Ontario is going to cause a lot of problems with redrawing boundaries (which will then have provincial reverberations, because Ontario provincial ridings mirror their federal counterparts, with the exception of an additional seat in Northern Ontario for better representation. Once this reality starts to sink in, perhaps the government would start considering boosting that formula to avoid these kinds of headaches.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1456593608648298498

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Roundup: Breakaway caucuses are more headaches for O’Toole

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Things in the Conservative caucus seem to be getting increasingly precarious, as a “small number” of MPs continue to remain unvaccinated, and others refuse to disclose even if they are vaccinated, which is going to be a problem for Erin O’Toole in two weeks when they need to show proof of vaccination to enter the parliamentary precinct, their offices, or reach the House of Commons.

As if this weren’t enough, you have more unofficial “breakaway” caucus groups forming – one of them calling themselves the “civil liberties caucus,” apparently headed by Marilyn Gladu, who are concerned with the loss of “medical privacy” over vaccine status; the other is allegedly rallying around fiscal and deficit issues (and I would be tremendously surprised if this isn’t a faction led by Pierre Poilievre). And for context, particular “caucus” groups are fairly normal, but they tend to be around things like friendship groups with other countries, or other soft parliamentary diplomacy. This is not it, and while Gladu insists that this isn’t about O’Toole’s leadership, but it’s hard not to see it that way – especially as he should have been clamping down on the anti-vax contingent in his caucus and party more broadly because there is still a pandemic going on, and pandering to a group that is heavily influenced by conspiracy theories is frankly insane.

Nevertheless, this is where we find ourselves. O’Toole continues to try and play both sides of the fence, saying he’s encouraging vaccination but won’t enforce it when people refuse for no good reason at all. The fact that the party has made itself beholden to its social conservative and more fringe base because they’re the ones who both fundraise and volunteer is a problem for the party over the long term, as the need to keep appeasing this base isn’t going away. That makes it harder for the rational, moderate Conservatives from having influence (witness the savaging they gave to Michael Chong in 2017, and Peter MacKay last year, even though MacKay wasn’t even a real Red Tory). So long as O’Toole refuses to put his foot down in the face of a global pandemic, he’s enabling more of the decline and that bodes very poorly for the future of the party, and Canadian political discourse.

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Roundup: Glover says she’s the premier

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It was quite a day in Manitoba yesterday as Heather Stefanson was sworn-in as the province’s first female premier, but the leadership drama isn’t over. Her challenger, former federal Cabinet minister Shelly Glover has not conceded defeat, and plans to challenge the leadership election in court, citing irregularities and reports that Stefanson’s scrutineers looked defeated at one point of the counting and then something allegedly mysterious happened to a ballot box…or something. I’m having a hard time keeping track of it. Regardless, Glover insists that she’s really the premier, not Stefanson.

One could be very pedantic here and note that Stefanson has been sworn in, so she’s premier regardless. Her immediate predecessor, Kelvin Goertzen, was not chosen in a leadership election by caucus as interim leader, and he was fully and legitimately premier, even if it was only for a few weeks (and yes, he’s going to get a portrait in the legislature to reflect that status). So no, Glover is not premier, and even if by some miracle she were declared party leader (which won’t happen – the courts won’t get involved in the inner workings of a political party), Stefanson is still premier and will be until she resigns or is dismissed.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1455671852647559168

But on a broader point, Glover has always been a very problematic politician, stridently repeating talking points in the face of logic and evidence, and getting combative when challenged on her bullshit, particularly as she seemed to lack the critical reasoning skills to think through her positions. And this attempted court challenge is her combativeness and willingness to believe illogical or contrary things playing out in the very way she demonstrated during her nine years in federal politics (two of which were as a minister). And Glover had her own run-ins with Elections Canada, and at one point Elections Canada asked the Speaker to suspend her because of financial irregularities during an election (which were later resolved with revised filings that Elections Canada accepted, Glover terming them an “honest mistake.”) One has to question her fitness to lead given her history and temperament, but I’m not a member of the party.

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Roundup: Mark Holland is optimistic

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New Government House Leader Mark Holland is brimming with optimism that the things that paralyzed the previous session of Parliament will be behind them post-election. It’s a nice idea, but I wonder just how it will actually play out. Yes, the Liberals have broken some of the deadlocks that plagued them (a fact that they didn’t articulate during the election, even when pressed on the subject), and they have a bit of leverage now in that none of the other parties can even contemplate another election anytime soon – the Conservatives are consumed with internal disputes over vaccine mandates and just when they plan to put Erin O’Toole to a leadership review, and the NDP are very broke having spent record amounts of money to gain themselves a single new seat, and the Bloc have no desire to go back to the polls, particularly since their play to be François Legault’s voice in Ottawa didn’t play well for them in the election. This will allow the Liberals to play some hardball and use confidence to their advantage for the time being.

But in spite of this, I would not put it past any of the opposition parties to engage in some of the other shenanigans that got us the election, whether that is tying up the committees in interminable attempts at witch hunts, or drowning in document production requests – and that may yet still happen. The election did end some of that, but much of it could very easily be revived once the committees are back up and running (likely in the New Year).

“There was a very clear message sent to all parties that there’s an expectation that we work together, and I’m operating on the presumption that we will have all heard that message and that we all come ready to work and to collaborate in a constructive and positive way,” Holland told The Canadian Press.

I’m not sure that such a presumption is a good one to make. There was an expectation that all parties should work together during the pandemic, and while they did a bunch of backroom negotiations around emergency legislation – and kept any of the debates off-the-record – they stalled all other bills until the very end, when the NDP and Bloc realized they needed to start playing ball again. I’m not sure what the appetite for playing ball will be on most bills, or whether the political calculus will be to try and stymie the Liberals once again (which could lead to showdowns over confidence). I wish Holland all the luck in the world on this, but I suspect he may start losing the hair he has left because the current state of our parliamentary discourse is pretty toxic, and things like the Liberals’ desire to keep hybrid sittings going will only exacerbate that problem.

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Roundup: Ill-equipped to combat weaponised cynicism

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I’ve been thinking about something Trudeau said during the “debate” on Thursday night about cynicism being the enemy of progressive politics, and in this piece by Aaron Wherry, he listed some of the attacks made against Trudeau in his discussion of said cynicism. It has not gone unnoticed that this has been a tactic that Jagmeet Singh has been cultivating for years – undermining any progress the government has made on tough files, and pretending that difficult things could be accomplished with just a little more willpower, or that things under provincial jurisdiction could just be done with more applications of that willpower. The truth is that it can’t be, and that hard things are hard – which is also why the “you had six years!” talking point is hard to take too seriously. It has a built-in assumption that a government has infinite capacity to do the work, that the House of Commons has infinite time on its calendar to pass all of its legislation, and it also assumes that premiers will sign onto anything the federal government waves in front of them. But that’s not how real life works (especially when your capacity is being sapped by needing to deal with Donald Trump for four years).

But complexity and nuance don’t belong in debates, which is what Singh, Annamie Paul, and even to an extent Erin O’Toole are counting on when they list Trudeau’s so-called “failures.” He didn’t meet the 2020 climate target? If he had started in the fall of 2015, moving to meet that target was pretty much impossible without cratering the economy, and Singh knows it. You can’t lower emissions on a dime, and even bending the curve – which Trudeau has done – takes enormous work, and it’s work he had to go to the Supreme Court of Canada to defend. Boil water advisories? There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and each community has a unique issue that requires a unique solution, which each community is taking the lead on, and the federal government pays the invoices. But again, these solutions take time, even with money being thrown at the problem, which Singh and others seem incapable of recognizing because it suits their narrative. “Taking Indigenous kids to court?” Again, it’s a more nuanced issue where the government has agreed to pay the compensation, and is in the process of negotiating how much in concert with two other class action lawsuits (which went directly to settlement – the government didn’t contest them at all) – but there are very real legal issues with the precedent that the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal might set, because their award appears to contravene a previous Supreme Court of Canada decision. Again, Singh should know this because he’s a lawyer, but he has no interest in the truth because it allows him to score points (and frankly, the media has utterly dropped the ball on this file because they only talk to one party in the litigation and don’t find out just what “jurisdiction” issue the minister refers to). These are all things whose narratives have been torqued to drive a sense of cynicism in Trudeau’s government, which Trudeau is frankly ill-prepared to dispute because he keeps sticking to happy-clappy talking points rather than being frank about problems and solutions. When someone offers you platitudes and doesn’t explain their homework, it makes it all too easy to let cynicism fill in the cracks, and Trudeau really has only himself to blame here.

Meanwhile, here is the video the five leaders released encouraging people to get vaccinated.

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Roundup: The “brother” meltdown

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Because we’re in an election and it ramps up the absolute stupidity across the board, we had another so-called “gaffe” that made a bunch of people performatively lose their minds, and I can’t even, you guys.

In a press conference about the situation in Afghanistan, Maryam Monsef, the minister responsible for the status of women and gender equality and a former refugee from Afghanistan, who fled when she was a child, made a direct address to the Taliban about letting people out of the country, and used the term “brothers.” And people lost their gods damned minds. She was asked about it and said that the context was cultural and she absolutely considers them to be terrorists, and yet the insinuation persists that, somehow, she was using the term as being sympathetic to a group that is diametrically opposed to everything she is about. WTF.

https://twitter.com/ChrisGNardi/status/1430565362265907205

And I don’t think it’s beyond the pale to suggest that there was a racist or Islamophobic undercurrent in the media even questioning that she was somehow trying to be sympathetic to the Taliban. Because seriously, you think that somehow Monsef personally, or the Trudeau government, is going to be “soft on terror,” or some other bullshit like this? Are these the tropes by which we will repeatedly fall back into, because we have learned nothing over the past twenty years? Apparently not, especially when it’s all being done to put on a show. It’s pretty gross, you guys. Do better.

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Roundup: Crossing the line with a golf shirt

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The official date of the new child benefit cheques going out saw the Conservative government at its most ham-handed yesterday, starting with a “leaked” letter to caucus about just how historic this event was as the “single biggest one-time direct payment in Canadian history.” Funny, it seems to me that an actual conservative government would rather just lower taxes across the board rather than bribe people with their own money, but oh, wait – this is a right-flavoured populist government and not a real Conservative one. As ministers and MPs went around the country to tout the benefit, and social media sites were bombarded with blaring ads, some of which were branded as “Christmas in July,” Pierre Poilievre was the most egregious of all, hosting a press event in Halifax that was arranged by his department, and yet featured him wearing a Conservative-branded golf shirt, as though this were a partisan event, or that it was somehow the Conservatives doling out this largesse rather than the Government of Canada. It was utterly crass, and yet the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner decreed that no, it wasn’t actually in contravention of the rules, though one cannot deny that it was in poor taste and poor judgement. Mind you, this bit of vote-buying is going to blow a big hole in the government’s budget, given that growth projections are down and we are pretty much certainly back into a deficit position (not that the budget was actually balanced – simply papered over by raiding the contingency reserve and the EI fund). But then again, the NDP have declared that the child benefit would remain under their plan on top of their plans to have this universal childcare programme (well, years down the road at a great cost to the provinces) and the Liberals planning to revamp the whole system that will also cost at least an extra couple of billion more than this programme does. Watching this play out in the election while each touts fiscal responsibility will be an interesting exercise.

https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/623101132664127488

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/623280296646057984

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/623280700016472064

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Roundup: Exeunt Glover and Paradis

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Another two are down, and one wonders how many more are still contemplating the plunge. It was announced on Friday that both Shelly Glover and Christian Paradis, middling cabinet ministers such as they are, weren’t going to run again. Glover indicated she was going to return to her policing career, while Paradis cited “personal reasons.” Both, as it happens, have had a number of brushes with the Ethics Commissioner, and it does make one wonder if that really was a common denominator in their rather abrupt decisions – that all of the attention being paid to the Duffy trial is forcing some of the players with in Conservative Party headquarters to try and scrub away as many of the potentially embarrassing messes as they can before the election happens, so that it can’t be used against them in the race to be purer than pure. The late date of these announcements is also a bit of a puzzle, given the ultimatums that Harper had previously given, so that he had an election-ready cabinet in place, and we saw a number of ministers make their departures then. Baird later dropped out entirely, but Glover and Paradis plan to finish out their terms, and thus the question remains as to whether or not their announcements mean yet another mini-shuffle, with just eight sitting weeks left? It also makes one wonder if there are any other ministers considering their futures now, and wondering if the time isn’t right to get out while the going is good – or if they are seeing writing on the wall, and would rather leave on their own terms rather than face defeat in what could be a brutal slog of an election. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

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Roundup: Frosty relations

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Jennifer Ditchburn remarks on the frosty state of relations between the Liberals and the NDP on the Hill these days, with each side accusing the other of playing dirty politics around the harassment allegations, and from what I’ve heard behind the scenes, even dirtier politics were being attempted but got blunted along the way. The NDP have tended to always have a particular loathing for Liberals, and recent events seem to have made everything worse. That said, I’ve also noticed a certain intensification of enmity toward the Liberals from both the Conservatives and the NDP in venues like Question Period of late. While Harper will respond to NDP questions by chiding them about something or being simply dismissive, with the Liberals he throws out accusations and dredges up irrelevant history. The NDP have increasingly tried to tie the Liberals into questions that are supposed to be directed toward the government, or to invent credit for the good things the Liberals are doing. It’s almost as if both see where the real threat to their fortunes lies.

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