Tag Archives: Space

Roundup: O’Toole’s “cancel culture” performance

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Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is making obligatory right-flavoured populist noises, decrying “cancel culture” because Queen’s University’s board voted to consider changing the name of their John A. Macdonald building, as is much the flavour of the day. It’s this juvenile, performative noise, but this is the kind of thing that O’Toole built his leadership around, without any critical thinking whatsoever, so here’s @moebius_strip to point out the sheer absurdity of it all.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1316454539596234753

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Meanwhile, there is consternation because the Library and Archives websites haven’t yet updated their biographies of prime ministers like Macdonald and Laurier to adequately convey that they had racist policies, and lo, cookie-cutter journalism gets the same four voices to decry this that appear in every other story. Never mind that Library and Archives says that they are doing consultations in order to do the work of reconciliation, and that there will be updated versions coming – it’s not good enough because this all needed to be done yesterday.

Part of the problem here, however, is that it will take time to get a properly nuanced version of history that both acknowledges their contributions to building the country while also acknowledging the racism of the era – particularly because it’s not simply black-and-white, and anyone who has read Macdonald’s biography will find it hard to simply pigeon-hole him as some kind of cartoon racist, which is certainly what some of the online dialogue would have us do. Yes, he’s a complex and problematic figure, but he was also a moderating influence, and his racist policies were actually the less-bad ones that were being demanded by a lot of voices of the era, which I doubt is going to be acknowledged to the satisfaction of his modern-day critics. It’s not a simple conversation, but that seems to be what is being demanded.

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Roundup: Getting the deficit vapours

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau was back making the media rounds yesterday, and one of the things he spoke about was the “ambitious green agenda” to be laid out in the Throne Speech, which has every pundit in the country clutching their pearls about the state of the deficit. Why? Because in Canadian punditry – and many government departments, finance especially – it is 1995 and will always be 1995. And some of that comes with the usual ridiculous assertions about comparing the nation’s finances to a household’s, or that of a business.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1301527104383848449

And then there was one column in particular which doubled down on not only the usual deficit vapours, but the notions that somehow inclusive growth isn’t a real strategy, which credible economists – and not just those on speed dial for certain media outlets who have one answer for every problem – will tell you is a bogus argument. But hey, it’s 1995 and will always be 1995.

https://twitter.com/twitscotty/status/1301505825366773762

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1301496695814004736

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Roundup: A confirmation on uttered threats

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We got a better read of the charges against the Rideau Hall intruder from last week, including more specifics on the weapons charges – a restricted revolver, a prohibited rifle, and two legal shotguns – as well as confirmation that the uttering threats charge was indeed directed toward the prime minister. This is, of course, in direct contravention to what RCMP sources were leaking to certain journalists last week that he didn’t intend to harm anyone, which never actually was credible at the time, and yet they dutifully reported it anyway.

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What is especially galling is that the RCMP seems to have zero self-awareness that this sort of thing fuels the calls about systemic racism in their organization – doing proper de-escalation and then floating this “not intending to harm” fiction when it’s a white guy with guns as opposed to a Black, Indigenous or otherwise person of colour where they will beat, taze, or outright kill them when they are unarmed. The contrast had been made to the arrest video of Chief Allan Adam video where he was tackled and pummelled for merely mouthing off after police outright harassed him for expired licence plate tags, whereas the intruder was armed and had intent to threaten the prime minister (if not outright assassinate him – that remains for the investigation to conclude and the courts to decide), and he was apparently unharmed after a ninety-minute conversation. The fact that they would float that “no harm” notion when the guy was armed and rammed through the gates pretty much confirms in everyone’s minds that white perpetrators of violence get treated separately and less lethally than anyone else – but they remain oblivious to it. Incredible.

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Roundup: The limits of Trudeau’s patience

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Late in the day yesterday, Justin Trudeau announced that he had come to the limit of his patience, that his calls for dialogue were not being heeded, and that it was time for the barricades to come down – something that was hinted at during Question Period a couple of hours earlier when the parliamentary secretaries sent to recite scripts said that “dialogue has its limits.” Trudeau did not say how those blockades were to come down – he wasn’t issuing orders to police, given that the enforcement was a matter of provincial jurisdiction, but part of the call was for Indigenous leadership to basically get their own people to stand down (though that didn’t seem to go so well on Wednesday after one Mohawk grand chief had to walk back his calls for de-escalation). And while some of the premiers, Scott Moe included, said they were pleased by the changed message, Doug Ford continued to blame Trudeau for things happening in his own backyard.

https://twitter.com/mattgurney/status/1230971079092514816

In the hours after the press conference, one sympathetic blockade south of Montreal was abandoned when riot police showed up to enforce the court injunction there. And in BC, the province’s Environmental Assessment Office suddenly told Coastal GasLink that they needed to engage in further consultations with the Wet’suwet’en people, since deficiencies in their previous efforts were pointed out to them over the course of the past couple of weeks, and were given 30 days to do so, which could further de-escalate the situation as the RCMP are moving out of their enforcement operations. But at the same time, that same group of hereditary chiefs has been shifting their demands, so that one minute on TV they’re saying the RCMP physically removing themselves from those operations was enough to start talks, the next minute putting out a press release saying that the RCMP needed to be out of their territory entirely, including routine policework, and then telling a radio station that because of Trudeau’s statement that they’re going to delay talks even further – all things that seem to me to further bolster Trudeau’s position that he’s been the reasonable one and the other side hasn’t been. And as for all of those people who insist that Trudeau is simply saying what Scheer did four days ago are ignoring the very important nuances of what has happened, as Andrew Coyne points out below.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1230958409530429440

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As for the handwringing by the likes of Scheer and Jason Kenney that these protests send a signal that things can’t get built in Canada, perhaps the signal is that things can’t get built the same way, cutting corners and running roughshod over these First Nations like they used to be able to. It’s like people who lament that we couldn’t build the railways these days, who seem to blithely ignore that said railways were built by displacing First Nations along its path, and importing virtual slave labour from China to do the work. If they think that’s the kind of thing that would fly today, then perhaps they need to give their heads a shake.

Meanwhile, Chantal Hébert worries that these protests were the “dress rehearsal” for future protests against the Trans Mountain construction, however I have a feeling that there are enough points of difference between the facts related to Wet’suwet’en territory and the Trans Mountain route that it will wind up playing very differently if that were to happen. Matt Gurney delves into the logistics and supply chains that depend on the rail corridors in this country, and how vulnerable the blockade has made us. Gurney also has a very good three-part series on Wet’sewet’en law and how it relates to the situation, which is well worth your time (parts one, two, and three). Paul Wells is dubious about Trudeau’s four-day limit to his patience, and the signals that it sends.

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Roundup: Cuts and capacity

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Andrew Scheer made a defensive manoeuvre yesterday by sending letters to each of the premiers promising that he wouldn’t cut health or social transfers if he formed government – his way of heading off attacks from Justin Trudeau that are trying to paint Scheer with the same brush as Doug Ford, as Ford continues to make ill-considered cuts across Ontario without regard for logic or reason (while, oddly enough, his government’s spending continues to increase). There is an added bit of significance to this in that Ford has spent the past year trying to sell the message that Ontario’s books are such a basket case that the province is in the road to bankruptcy – which is a complete and total fabrication. While yes, Ontario does have a high debt-to-GDP ratio, we also have to remember that the previous government was borrowing money where interest rates are below the rate of inflation – essentially they are getting free money that they could use to invest in the province.

Enter Kevin Carmichael at the Financial Post, who wrote a must-read contemplation of the state of the federal books yesterday. It’s an adult conversation about the actual state of our finances – contrary to Scheer, our books are in great shape and the deficit is miniscule, and contrary to Trudeau and Bill Morneau, the deficits are coming in smaller than projected and growth is greater than projected and with no new increases in spending, we could be back in surplus before the 2023 election (thought that is always this government’s problem). And with that in mind, he poses the question – do we need to sock away surpluses in anticipation of a future recession even though we already have the capacity to deal with it, or do we spend our current capacity on something that would have lasting changes for our economy, like national childcare? It’s the kind of grown-up conversation that we should be having, but we’re not as parties snipe at one another over who is more “divisive.”

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1157119930434609153

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Roundup: Untenable ideas that get print

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There were a couple of pieces over the weekend that had me scowling a little, mostly because they don’t seem terribly well thought-through when you actually delve in a little. One of them was a piece in Maclean’s that used polling data to posit the idea of a Green Party-NDP merger which is a bit silly because the parties are nothing alike in the slightest. The premise that they both claim to care about the environment and appeal to youth is flimsy on its face, because the Greens aren’t really that “progressive” of a party seeing as the federal party came into being with a lot of disaffected Red Tories in their mix, and if you delve into some of their non-environmental policies, there’s not a lot of millennial progressivity in there. (Seriously, it’s a dog’s breakfast of things, as they discovered in the last election when it turned out that a bunch of their social policies were written by men’s rights activists, given that there is a lack of adult supervision when it comes to policy development in that party). Add to that, the party cultures are essentially night and day – the NDP are centralizing and are about solidarity at all costs (and they rigidly enforce it), while the Greens are decentralized to the point of practical incoherence. I get that there is going to be a bit of a fad in political circles right now that believes that Alberta “proved” that mergers work given the Progressive Conservative + Wildrose Alliance “merger” into the UCP was prototypical, but that would be looking at quantitative data over qualitative – and the UCP is still young.

The other piece that deserves some consternation was Justin Ling’s op-ed that suggested that co-leaders would be a great thing for parties to deal with the problem of presidentialised leadership politics, and look how great it’s working for Quebec Solidaire. Err, except the solution to our presidentialised leadership politics in this country isn’t to share power, but rather to restore the selection and firing process to the hands of caucus. The biggest flaw in Ling’s argument, however, is that it’s antithetical to the way in which our system is structured, which is that it’s about giving advice to the Queen (and by extension, the Governor General/lieutenant governor). That requires a single voice – which is why Cabinet Solidarity is a Thing – and it’s also to create a single point of accountability. If you have dual leadership, then it becomes harder to pin blame. It also has more than enough potential to create factionalisation within parties more than we have already, as different parts of the caucus align themselves behind one co-leader or the other in power struggles. As with so many of these kinds of reform ideas, they sound interesting on the surface, that’s about it.

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Roundup: In the testimony’s aftermath

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Yesterday was the day for performative outrage, as the Conservatives demanded – and got – an “emergency debate” on their call for Justin Trudeau to resign. Of course, given the reality of how our parliament works these days, “debate” is a term to be used very loosely, and it was more like several late-night hours of stilted speeches being read to one another for the sake of looking tough. Woo. On the committee front, Gerald Butts offered to testify on his own behalf, which was accepted, and both Michael Wernick and the deputy minister of justice are on their way back for another round, though none of the other staffers mentioned by Wilson-Raybould are (though that is also because they shouldn’t appear before committee, under the doctrine of ministerial responsibility – it’s for ministers and deputy ministers as accountability officers to appear as they are responsible for them). Ministers of the Crown were also doing the media rounds, including Bill Morneau and Chrystia Freeland, and most of them were offering variations of the line that while they thought that Jody Wilson-Raybould was telling the truth as she saw it, they also believe the PM in that he would never be inappropriate or cross a line, which made most of the pundit class’ heads implode – never mind that the crux of this whole matter is that it’s a subjective test as to what kind of pressure is or is not appropriate. (On a related note, the Liberals really, really need to put Carla Qualtrough out more. She is easily one of the best communicators that they have in Cabinet, but she never gets out there enough on items other than Phoenix, which is too bad because they desperately need someone with her communications skills out in public). And we’ll see how this continues to play out in the caucus as well, given that the usual suspects are not remaining so silent, and the not-so-usual suspects have openly stated things like “sour grapes” (before being made to apologise).

https://twitter.com/WayneLongSJ/status/1101160075023011840

For context, here is a comparison between what Wilson-Raybould said, and what Michael Wernick testified before the committee. Here’s a look at whether the Ethics Commissioner really can get to the bottom of this whole mess. Here’s the who’s who of everyone Wilson-Raybould named in her testimony. Here’s a roundup of how the Quebec press is treating Wilson-Raybould’s testimony.

In punditry, Susan Delacourt looks at how nervous the Liberal caucus seems by this whole affair, and what that disaffection may be doing to the party in the longer term. Robert Hiltz suggests that Trudeau take a long, hard look at himself and his government, given what this situation has revealed about them. Chris Selley points out that the Liberal treatment of not being Stephen Harper as a virtue is going to be something that ends up costing them.

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Roundup: Another solution in search of a problem, by-election edition

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The good folks at Samara Canada have penned an op-ed in the Globe and Mail to call for legislation that demand swifter by-elections than currently exists, and would seek to remove the discretion of the prime minister in calling them. To this I say nay, because much like fixed election dates, this is a solution in search of a problem. Indeed, the piece entirely ignored that fixed election dates are not only antithetical to our system, which is based on confidence, but that it created a whole host of new problems and solved none. It used to be the big concern that prime ministers would call “snap” elections when it was deemed politically suitable, and that it wholly disadvantaged opposition parties. Of course, that’s entirely a myth that doesn’t survive actual scrutiny (recall that governments in this country were punished when they called elections too soon because they had good poll numbers), and fixed election dates instead created interminable election campaigns that required even more legislation to crack down on spending and advertising in defined pre-writ periods – something that wouldn’t need to exist under the proper system of ministerial discretion.

Throughout the recent round of braying to call by-elections, none of the arguments has convinced me that this is anything more than a moral panic. While the op-ed does correctly point out that MP offices remain staffed and operational, reporting to the party whip instead of the departed MP, the op-ed laments that there is no MP to push files through the bureaucracy – something that is not only not an MP’s job, but is something we should actually be discouraging because it sets up a system that starts to look corrupt, when it becomes who you know that will get action on your files. If anything, parties should actually take advantage of the fact that when a by-election hasn’t been called yet, it gives the riding associations ample time to locate a good candidate, run an effective nomination process, and then start door-knocking. If parties got their act together, they’d have more time to do this, rather than waiting months, and trying to get a hint as to when the by-election might be called before they even start their nominations – something that is absolutely boggling. Jagmeet Singh should have used the time to do the door-knocking at every available opportunity, and yet that didn’t seem to be the case for the months he was complaining that the by-election hadn’t been called.

You don’t have to convince me that it’s important to run these by-elections in a timely manner, and that having an MP in place as soon as possible is the right thing to do. It absolutely is. But more legislative constraints on executive discretion won’t solve any problems, and only creates more of them. We keep seeing this time and again, and yet we keep coming back to yet more proposals for even more of them, creating a spiralling cycle of more rules to fix a problem that was never actually a problem in the first place. Time to step off this merry-go-round.

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Roundup: Dishonest blame-laying

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As this so-called convoy of “yellow vest” protesters moves eastward toward Ottawa, many of them demanding magic wands to expedite pipeline approvals that won’t actually happen (seriously, trying to fast track and cut corners is what got approvals thrown out in the courts before), I find it exceedingly curious – and a bit alarming – that Jason Kenney refuses to denounce some of the elements that have attached themselves to these “yellow vests,” most especially white nationalists and racists who are trying to use these rallies to agitate against immigration and asylum seekers. Kenney simply waves them off as a “handful” of people with “kooky ideas,” while he takes the intellectually dishonest route of blaming Justin Trudeau and Rachel Notley for Alberta’s oil sector woes, never mind the global supply glut, the shale revolution, and market inertia, or the fact that capacity only became an issue in recent months when production increased – or the fact that when he was in federal cabinet, pipeline projects weren’t making any faster progress either.

Trudeau and Notley didn’t create the problems of consultations on Northern Gateway. They didn’t create the market condition problems for Energy East. They didn’t create the American regulatory issues around Keystone XL. Trudeau bears some responsibility for the consultation issues around the Trans Mountain expansion, but that also has to do with institutional inertia and how bureaucratic Ottawa and the NEB in Calgary thought of Section 35 consultations in spite of successive Supreme Court of Canada rulings. These are broad and, in some cases, intractable problems for which easy solutions don’t exist, no matter what Kenney or Andrew Scheer say. Putting the bulk of the blame on Trudeau and Notley is completely and utterly dishonest, and Kenney knows it. But why does truth matter when you’re trying to stoke anger to win points?

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Roundup: It’s Statute of Westminster Day!

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Today is the anniversary of the Statute of Westminster, which you should be very excited about. Why is it important? Because in 1931, this is not only the Act of Parliament that gave Canada its sovereignty in terms of setting our own foreign policy – essentially meaning we were now a real country and no longer a glorified colony – but more importantly, it also created the Canadian Crown. In fact, this is where the Crown became divisible, and suddenly the Crown of the United Kingdom split off to become the Crowns of Canada, New Zealand, the Irish Free State, South Africa, Newfoundland, and Australia. The realms have changed since then, but the principle remains – that the King (now Queen) was no longer just the King of the United Kingdom, but that each realm had their own separate legal Crown as well. This is an important milestone in Canadian history, and we should pay much more attention to it than we traditionally do – particularly if you’re a fan of the Canadian monarchy because this is where it all began for us.

With this in mind, here’s Philippe Lagassé explaining the consequences of the Statute with regards to royal succession and the compromises that resulted from it.

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