Tag Archives: SNC-Lavalin

Roundup: Local media takes on Poilievre

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It was a banner day for local media yesterday, as the local news in Sudbury absolutely roasted the Conservatives for trying to send them media lines about how the Liberals’ Ontario caucus is holding their retreat in the “lavish” Sudbury Holiday Inn. No, seriously, that’s the line they’ve been trying to spin. (It’s the “Rome of the North,” remember?) Of course, Poilievre himself has held a top-dollar fundraiser at an expensive restaurant in Sudbury just a few weeks ago, and the Sudbury news did point out the cost of the Conservatives’ previous caucus retreat in Quebec City, but yeah, the attempt at outrage politics is that bad.

Meanwhile, the editor of the local paper in Niagara-on-the-Lake recently tried to ask Poilievre about government supports for local media, and then wrote a lengthy editorial dismantling the completely obvious lies that Poilievre told him in response, in part because he treats people like they’re idiots as he lies to them. It’s nice to see local media like this hold him to account, and are doing it better than some of the national outlets, who are very studiously both-sidesing everything Poilievre says and not calling him out on the clear and obvious lies, possibly because they don’t want to be on the receiving end of his vitriol the way CBC and The Canadian Press have been in recent months.

Speaking of media, I absolutely cannot believe that CTV actually posted a story trying to find a Canada Angle™ to US president Joe Biden’s pledge to impose term limits on judges in that country. Like, seriously, you do not need to Canada Angle™ every single gods damned story that comes out of the US. We’re a different country. We have a different laws and different structures, and we’re doing things better than they are in most cases as it is already. We don’t have an ideological Supreme Court, and we don’t have judges on that court hanging onto their positions literally until they die, and to even try and Canada Angle™ this is just amateurish. We have plenty of under-reported news stories in this country as is. We don’t need to import American stories while we’re at it.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine says it downed all 29 Russian drones overnight on Thursdsay, however, a guided bomb struck the Kharkiv region, killing two and injuring twelve. There has been heavy fighting in the eastern front, as Russia is advancing toward the city of Pokrovsk. Russia says it will beef up border defences as Ukraine has taken control of the town of Sudzha, the administrative centre for the Kursk region, where they plan to start delivering humanitarian aid to residents. The push into Kursk has exposed Russia’s vulnerabilities, and some analysts believe could change the course of the war. In case you were wondering, Canada has okayed any of our donated heavy equipment to be used in Russian territory.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1824012366792560682

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Roundup: Audits being virtually ignored

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If the Auditor General releases a report and nobody reports on it, does it make a sound? I suspect we’re not far away from finding out, as once again, AG reports were released yesterday, and got the absolute bare minimum of coverage—two wire stories from The Canadian Press (combining two reports in one story, the third report as a standalone), that were picked up across several legacy media outlets, including major chains, and one CBC story that covered all three reports in the same piece. That was it. And in Question Period, the NDP raised one of those reports in Jagmeet Singh’s lead question, but in the most generic terms possible, and that was it.

To recap the reports:

  1. There hasn’t been a measurable change in the situation of First Nations housing in four audit cycles, and the process of devolving this responsibility to individual First Nations is not proceeding very quickly. (The government points out that there has been an 1100 percent increase in spending on First Nations housing, and that they are consulting on projects going forward).
  2. Indigenous policing agreements are not being lived up to by the RCMP or Public Safety, whether it’s with under-investment, under-spending of allocated funds, or the RCMP not being able to staff positions as they’re supposed to.
  3. The National Trade Corridors programme got off to a good start in the design phase, but the department isn’t tracking implementation or results very effectively, and that’s its own particular breed of problem.

It’s incredibly hard to hold a government to account if you’re not paying attention to the very reports designed to do just that, even if this isn’t one of the “sexy” special reports like on ArriveCan. Auditor General lock-up days used to be a packed affair, and now only two English-language outlets released stories. That’s a very bad sign about the state of journalism, and of the attention span within politics for these kinds of things when they don’t fit into the slogan of the day.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Both Ukraine and Russia each claim to have repelled numerous air attacks overnight on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Russians say that they have captured the village of Orlivka in the Donetsk region, near Avdiivka. A new head of the Navy was named in Russia following so much damage and loss of their Black Sea fleet. Ukraine is hoping to have enough ammunition by April as the Czech-brokered deal gets closer to being fulfilled..

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QP: Trying to make “quadruple” happen

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While the prime minister was in town and due to make an announcement shortly after QP, neither he nor any other leader were present today. Melissa Lantsman led off, and laid out a network of supposedly shady dealings around the ArriveCan app development. Arif Virani said that they were aware of the allegations and there was an RCMP investigation underway, so they would not comment. Lantsman tried to equate this scandal with people using food banks, and Virani repeated his same response. Lantsman repeated the same assertion, and this time Sean Fraser stood up and pointed out that the Conservatives’ record doesn’t stand up to their rhetoric. Pierre Paul-Hus took over in French, and he gave Quebec-specific food bank figures to tie it to the ArriveCan app development. Virani got up to give the French version of his statement. Paul-Hus cited a survey about Quebeckers being worried about their mortgage renewals, which they blamed on government spending. Rodriguez stood up to say that Quebeckers are afraid of Conservatives because all they care about is cuts.

Alain Therrien led off for the Bloc, and wanted the government to cut immigration numbers because of housing supply issues. Fraser said that it is possible to welcome arrivals and build new housing at the same time, and that they signed a housing agreement with Quebec. Therrien repeated the same demand, and this time Marc Miller said that as a Quebecker, he recognises the need for higher immigration.

Heather McPherson rose for the NDP, and she demanded immediate action for homelessness in Edmonton. Fraser for back up to say that they have been working to build more homes and doubled support for homelessness. Bonita Zarrillo said that those solutions would not help this winter, and demanded immediate action (because they have a magic wand?) Fraser repeated his same points about the support they have been provided.

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QP: The worst kind of reading of scripts

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The prime minister and all other leaders were present today, and if anything, it promised to be a sour note all around. Pierre Poilievre led off in French, and he cited a “devastating” report about food bank use, blaming carbon prices. Justin Trudeau took the opportunity to mark the passing for Senator Ian Shugart, the former Clerk of the Privy Council. Poilievre said that Shuguart was his deputy minister and was a great public servant. He then returned to French to quote from the same report on food bank use. Trudeau cited the assistance they have delivered to Canadians, such as the Canada Child Benefit, child care and dental care, while the Conservatives would only those supports. Poilievre switched to English to reiterate his first question about the carbon price. Trudeau praised his government’s record in reducing poverty and reiterated the threat that the Conservatives would only cut supports. Poilievre cited a Nova Scotia quoted in the report and again blamed the carbon price, and Trudeau noted that Poilievre was part of a government that raised the age of retirement, and that it was about time he finally defended the CPP. Poilievre again quoted from the report on housing pressures and demanded more homes. Trudeau said that Poilievre has put forward no plan on housing and he lacks credibility on the file, while the housing minster was currently in BC signing new agreements. 

Yves-François Blanchet led off for the Bloc, and wanted the prime minster to acknowledge that Quebec would be financially viable on their own. Trudeau dismissed this as trying to reopen old fights that have long been settled, and listed off investments the federal government has made in the province. Blanchet again tried to get Trudeau to “admit” the province’s fiscal viability, and Trudeau again talked around the issue about growing the economy in the province together. 

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, and blamed food prices on greedy CEOs, and Trudeau listed more programmes they have rolled out to help Canadians. Singh repeated the question in French, to which Trudeau listed off those programmes en français. 

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Roundup: Abusing authority to summon the RCMP Commissioner

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The abuse and beclowning of House of Commons committees continues apace, as the Conservatives tried to use the Access to Information, Ethics, and Privacy Committee to re-litigate the SNC-Lavalin scandal after Astroturf group Democracy Watch floated some bullshit last week about how the RCMP said they couldn’t investigate if a crime occurred because they were denied access to Cabinet-confidential documents. Never mind that no crime was ever alleged, but this was more than enough for the Conservatives to try to resurrect this dead horse, and they did so by the committee chair abusing his position to bring the head of the RCMP to testify at committee. The other parties at committee, however, were having none of this because of the abuse of procedure, and shut down the meeting, to howls of outrage by Conservatives who wanted their dog and pony show for the cameras.

https://twitter.com/MonaFortier/status/1716549067180736827

We’ll likely see said RCMP Commissioner invited back in a proper fashion in the next week or two, because the Bloc have stated that they want to hear from him, but with proper notice and preparation, so they’ll get their dog and pony show eventually. It won’t do them much good—the Commissioner told CBC on his way out of the building that there was nothing to tell, that the RCMP was satisfied that there wasn’t anything illegal once they did their due diligence, even if they couldn’t get those documents. It won’t satisfy the Conservatives or Democracy Watch, who will continue to allege conspiracies and dark deeds, and howl at the moon about cover-ups, because that’s how they get attention. (But seriously, media outlets—stop quoting Democracy Watch. They actually have no credibility and it’s a sign of lazy reporting if you rely on their quotes as a crutch).

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukrainian forces say they shot down 14 drones and a cruise missile attacking the country’s south and east, but falling debris damaged a warehouse in Odesa. Russian forces pressed their attack on Avdiivka in the east, and Kupiansk, further north.

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Roundup: More dynamics at play with the story of the Clerk

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The CBC story earlier in the week regarding the Clerk of the House of Commons has its critics, and there were elements of the story that felt “off” while reading it – such as how it described Charles Robert’s relationship with a senator (omitting that the senator was male, and the actual dynamics of what happened with the former Liberal-appointed senators when Justin Trudeau expelled them from the party), or the way in which Robert allegedly consulted the Liberals over the timing of releasing a privilege ruling to the Speaker. I did know that his appointment ruffled feathers, which was in part over the poor process that the government ran for it, and how they essentially pushed out the other contender, Marc Bosc, by forcing him to re-apply for his deputy clerk position when he didn’t get the full clerk job. But it sounds like there were other dynamics at play there as well – and this thread by a former procedural clerk in the House of Commons illuminates some of those. It may not absolve Robert entirely, but it certainly colours the story that CBC published, and reminds us that we may not be seeing the full picture.

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Roundup: Animating the Double-Hyphen Affair zombie

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Because Jody Wilson-Raybould and the corpse of the Double-Hyphen Affair is getting a fresh attempt at necromancy now that her book is being released, we’re going to see a renewed round of questions about what happened. The Conservatives are sending out a bunch of press releases intimating that RCMP is still considering investigating the matter, and Wilson-Raybould herself is calling on the prime minister to allow them to investigate obstruction of justice – because they really want this zombie to wake up and start trying to eat the brain of this campaign.

In response to questions yesterday, Justin Trudeau said he has not been contacted by the RCMP regarding SNC-Lavalin, which…is not actually surprising. I’m not sure what there would be to investigate, really, and why it would be Trudeau they would be investigating. Her own testimony seemed to indicate that the pressure was largely coming from the jackasses who were in Bill Morneau’s office at the time (and it was those same jackasses in Morneau’s office who were letting SNC-Lavalin pull their puppet strings in pushing through the deferred prosecution agreement legislation into the budget implementation bill), and if you actually listen to the whole call with Michael Wernick and not the carefully curated clips that Wilson-Raybould set up in how she steered the conversation, he was looking for information that she had previously sent to PCO, but didn’t reach his desk. There is no actual obstruction of justice happening. The ultimate irony in all of this, however, is that if they had gone ahead and given SNC the deferred prosecution agreement – which it sounds like they wouldn’t have qualified for anyway – the company would have actually faced some consequences. As it was, SNC-Lavalin settled while the case around an executive collapsed and the company got away with a lesser penalty and few, if any, compliance measures, without any interference on anyone’s end.

The worst part of this, however, is that you have columnists who are writing things like “Wilson-Raybould offers a ballot question in an election about nothing,” which is ludicrous. This is not an election about nothing – no election is about nothing. There is plenty at stake in this campaign, but because it’s less so for straight white guys, whom these columnists are, they are blind to it.

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Roundup: SNC-Lavalin gets a plea bargain

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In an unexpected development yesterday, we learned that SNC-Lavalin took a plea deal from the courts – that one of their divisions would plead guilty for fraud over $5000 in connection to their dubious activities in Libya, pay a fairly hefty $280 million fine over five years, and all of the rest of the charges they were facing were withdrawn, and they wouldn’t face debarment from future contract work for governments. In other words, they largely got what they wanted with the Deferred Prosecution Agreement/Remediation Agreement that they had been agitating and lobbying for, and which spun off the whole Double-Hyphen Affair in the first place.

Could of things – first of all, DPAs are not “get out of jail free” cards like they have often been described as. Had SNC-Lavalin been granted the DPA, they would have had to agreed that they committed wrongdoing, paid a fine which would have included remediation for the wronged parties, and would have a structured monitoring regime put into place to ensure better governance going forward, and it wouldn’t have protected any of their executives from future prosecution. One particular law professor, Jennifer Quaid, noted that even though they weren’t a good candidate for a DPA, it would have actually been more transparent than the plea bargain that they wound up with, there is no guarantee of remediation to wronged parties, and it’s unlikely there will be the same structure imposed, so maybe, just maybe, the DPA was the better plan in the first place.

Jody Wilson-Raybould tweeted out in response that the system worked, while Justin Trudeau said in an interview that he may have acted differently had he known this would have been the outcome, but he was trying to do the best he could at the time. And there are certain people screaming about prosecutorial independence, but I keep going back to the conversation that Wilson-Raybould taped with Michael Wernick, and so much of it was them talking past one another – him looking for an explanation and her not providing one until the end of the conversation when she said that she gave a report to PMO months prior, to which Wernick said “That’s news to me.” This key exchange was completely glossed over in most of the reporting because they fell instead for the juicy quotes that Wilson-Raybould had set up in conducting the conversation the way she did. So much of the communications and relationship breakdown is on full display in that call. (That being said, I remain deeply troubled with how much SNC-Lavalin was stage-managing the legislative process around the DPAs, even if lawyers in the field had been demanding that legislation for a decade because we were behind our comparable Western allies in making these kinds of arrangements available).

Meanwhile, certain journalists want to insist that this doesn’t mean that the story is over because parliamentary committees. Erm, except they would need the support of the Bloc to push forward with them, and they have explicitly stated that they have no interest in doing so. (Also, I am a bit concerned that Elizabeth May was conspiracy theorizing over Twitter regarding who this plea deal is “protecting.”)

On a related note, Wilson-Raybould was chosen by The Canadian Press as their Newsmaker of the Year, and make news she certainly did (and still does).

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Roundup: Considerations for Teck

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We’ve been hearing a lot about the proposed Teck Frontier oilsands mine in northern Alberta lately, and demands by Jason Kenney and a number of Conservative MPs that its approval be fast-tracked as close to immediate as possible. Energy economist Andrew Leach has a few thoughts on the matter, particularly of how to reconcile Teck in the broader scope.

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Roundup: Immutable committee math

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In a move that is possibly quite disappointing, the Liberals got unanimous consent yesterday to suspend the sections of the Standing Orders governing the powers of parliamentary secretaries – which could be an issue if they plan to put them back on committees with voting powers and the ability to move motions and so on. Some of you may recall that when this was the standard practice during the Conservative era, these committees simply became branch plants of the ministers’ offices, and everything was stage-managed within an inch of their lives.

However.

I also have it on good authority that this may not be exactly as it seems. Part of the problem is that there is a shortage of warm bodies in the Liberal ranks to fill the committees, particularly if you have a Cabinet of 37 out of 157 seats, and what looks to be a prospective parliamentary secretary list of at least 46 (given that Economic Development with have separate parliamentary secretaries for each regional economic development agency). Then, subtract the Speaker and the Assistant Deputy Speaker, who can’t sit on committees, and that leaves them with 72 MPs (maybe less – a couple may also remain assigned to NSICOP, which pulled them from other committees in the previous parliament) to distribute across 27 standing and joint committees, where the parliamentary math in the current hung parliament would see four Liberal MPs per committee. Quite simply, they don’t have enough.

What I’ve been told by my sources is that what they may wind up doing is allowing parliamentary secretaries to sit as regular committee members on committees that aren’t those aligned with their minister, so that they would essentially be pulling double (or possibly triple) duty, especially if they remain on the committees aligned with their minister in a non-voting capacity. It’s not pretty, but it may be what winds up being necessary if they intend to live up to their promise to keep parliamentary secretaries from being voting members of their interested committees. (Are we ready to start having a discussion about having a more reasonable number of MPs for a country of our size? Because seriously, not having enough bodies is an actual problem that has consequences for the efficacy of the institution).

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