Tag Archives: Statistics Canada

Roundup: Three Amigos without much outward progress

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Well, that was the Three Amigos summit, and it doesn’t sound like there was any outward progress on Canada’s biggest request, which is getting rid of that electric vehicle tax credit that would essentially crater Canada’s auto sector (and the nascent electric vehicle industry) in spite of decades of cross-border integration of our supply chains. But that progress may yet happen because the Canadian delegation was not solely focusing on the White House – where Biden was non-committal – but also engaging congressional leaders who have the real power in this situation, so there remains time to see if that credit will survive the tortuous and nonsensical budget bill process in their system.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives have declared that Trudeau’s approach to relations with the American administration “isn’t working,” and I’m not quite sure what they’re really on about, because there is a massive power imbalance here, and we can’t forget that we are largely an afterthought to the Americans, who are far more concerned about their southern border than the northern one. Softwood lumber has been an irritant for decades, and I distinctly recall the sector was unhappy with the agreement that the Harper government signed (which has since expired). Buy American? Again, this happens under every administration, and is not unique to the current government. Measures targeting agricultural exports? Erm, some of us recall the problems with country-of-origin-labelling that the Conservatives couldn’t make any progress on. Action against pipelines? Seems to me that Harper didn’t have any luck there either, even after plastering Washington DC with billboards and posters declaring that Keystone XL was a “no brainer.” Yeah, that didn’t work.

So what exactly does Chong propose? Performative temper tantrums for the benefit of the media? That seems to be the Conservative demand for most files, but there were two former diplomats on Power & Politics last night who basically said that if you want progress with the American government, you need to do it behind closed doors and not be seen to be pinning someone down, because they don’t respond to that well at all. But we also need to remember that the Conservatives also seem to think that diplomacy is the cookie you get for good behaviour rather than how you deal with problems, so it’s not unsurprising that this demand for performance is how they think this needs to be dealt with.

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Roundup: An unsuccessful distraction attempt

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Erin O’Toole emerged from hiding yesterday, and tried to set the narrative of the day about a supposed scary coalition between the Liberals and the NDP – which isn’t happening. A coalition government means that both parties have Cabinet ministers at the table, and given that we just had the dog and pony show of a Cabinet shuffle not two weeks ago, and there was nary an NDP MP among them, we can be reasonably assured that there will be no coalition government. Nevertheless, even a supply and confidence agreement, or some other arrangement, remains unlikely in the extreme because the Liberals know the NDP are in a vulnerable position, broke an unable to afford another election, so they will ensure the government survives regardless – there is no need to give them any leverage or excuse to try and take credit for the government’s actions (not that anything has stopped them thus far).

But while O’Toole tried to make big noises about the “coalition” that isn’t and never will be, he was trying to deflect from the ongoing problem in his party around MPs like Marilyn Gladu and Leslyn Lewis, who have been stoking vaccine hesitancy (while insisting otherwise), conceding that they have “caused confusion,” which is just more soft-peddling and mealy-mouthed refusal to take leadership or to put his foot down. Indeed, when asked about whether there would be any discipline for these remarks, O’Toole stated that they would deal with it “as a team,” which basically means that no, he’s not going to do anything about it.

While my upcoming column will delve further into just why O’Toole refuses to put his foot down, Gladu can insist all she wants that this isn’t a challenge of O’Toole’s leadership, the simple fact is that she continues to undermine it at every opportunity, and that is going to eventually erode what little trust or credibility O’Toole has left.

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Roundup: Subjecting a minister to a double standard

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I found myself bemused at the CBC story yesterday about Carolyn Bennett’s office allegedly being some kind of “toxic work environment,” according to a number of former staffers. Reading the piece, however, says little about Bennett herself – other than hammering on the point that she didn’t get along with Jody Wilson-Raybould, as though that were somehow relevant to her office – but rather that the toxicity was related to other staffers in the office who were clannish and played favourites with other staffers. The story made great pains to say that Indigenous staff felt their voices weren’t being heard on policy files, but again, this is about the behaviors of other staffers and not the minister herself.

This all having been said, I am forced to wonder whether anyone could reasonably expect a minister’s office to be some kind of normal office environment, because I can’t really see it. These places are pressure cookers of constant deadlines and stress, and there’s a reason why they tend to be populated by fairly young staffers, many of them recent graduates, which is because they are willing to put up with the long hours, constant travel, and the obliteration of their personal lives where older staffers with families and obligations largely wouldn’t. And while we can say we’d prefer that these offices are healthy work environments and safe spaces, but this is politics at the highest levels in this country. It’s not going to be pretty, as much as we may like it to be.

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I also think it bears noting that Bennett has been the subject of a lot of criticism that is never given to male ministers, and in particular with the dust-up over her snarky text message with Wilson-Raybould a few weeks ago, seems subject to a double standard that women in ministerial roles are not allowed to have personality conflicts where this, again, is not even blinked at among men. Under this context, the CBC piece looks to be both catering to these double-standards, and looking like they have an axe to grind with Bennett, for whatever the reason.

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Roundup: Ford’s eagerness to please

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The Star had a very interesting, if very infuriating, longread out yesterday, which charted the ways in which Conservative-affiliated lobbyists impacted on the decisions that Doug Ford made over the course of the pandemic – the laundry list of exemptions that kept growing by the day, the fact that the long-term care industry has insulated itself from any and all accountability and is getting their licenses renewed as if the deaths of thousands of seniors aren’t on their hands, the illogical restrictions for small retail but not box store, right up to the illogical closure of playgrounds.

The piece was illuminating not because of the look at lobbying – all of which is legal, above-board, and not the same as we’d understand from an American context of the cartoonish Hollywood portrayals – but rather because of what it shows us about Ford himself. He’s someone out of his depth – his sole experience was a single term as a junior city councillor while he brother was mayor – who was not only struggling to understand his job, but who also has a pathological need to be liked, and to be seen to be doing favours for people he knows. People like these former Conservative staffers and operatives who are now in lobbying firms. It less that these lobbyists are cozy with the provincial Progressive Conservatives – it’s that Ford wants to please them and do them favours because he knows them. That’s why the pandemic in this province turned into such a clusterfuck – because Ford needed to please the people he felt close to.

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Roundup: Taking a “pause” when it comes to China

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In what appears to have been done by email over the long weekend, Alberta’s provincial government has asked its universities to pause any relationships with China, and wants a report on current activities, citing theft of intellectual property. And it’s a real problem, but this may not have been the best way to deal with it. With that in mind here is Stephanie Carvin with more:

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Roundup: Poilievre wants to lie to you about inflation

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StatsCan released the April inflation figures yesterday morning, and for the unprepared, they look bad – a 3.4 percent increase year-over-year, when the Bank of Canada’s inflation target is around two percent. This may look alarming, but there is a very simple explanation for why it looks high, and it’s something they call the base effect – meaning, when you compare it to last year’s figures, you need to put those figures in context. In this case, when you look at the April 2020 figures, we were actually suffering deflation in the early throes of the pandemic, when the first real lockdown started, and everyone was being sent home. We’ve had a fair degree of economic recovery since then, and inflation is really still running a little below target, but that gets obscured by the base effect, and that will likely carry on for another couple of months.

The problem, of course, is that you have media outlets that won’t properly contextualise this, looking at how much year-over-year prices like gasoline have spiked – which again, ignores that a year ago, gasoline prices dropped to an eleven-year low because demand cratered as a result of the pandemic. It’s a better headline to talk about “price surges” rather than explaining that base effect. And to be fair, some prices have gone up for a variety of factors, while others haven’t – it’s why the consumer price index looks at a basket of goods and provides an average, where some prices rise and some fall, and they provide additional measures that will strip out some of the volatile indicators to see how the more stable ones are faring. And more to the point, the Bank of Canada knows what they’re doing, and if they see runaway inflation starting, they will tamp it down with the tools available to them, such as interest rates.

But more than just media outlets, we have the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre in particular who are determined to light their hair on fire and lie about the inflation figure in order to denounce the government (blaming it on deficit spending) or by saying that the Bank of Canada is in cahoots with them (when they are independent of government and kept at arm’s length). And lo, Poilievre even produced a video that railed about the price of lumber to make his point – err, except the price of lumber isn’t increasing because of the monetary supply or deficit spending. It’s rising because there is a housing boom, particularly south of the border, and lumber exports can’t keep up with demand, hence the price increases. That’s basic economics, which you think that the party that bills itself as “good economic managers” and the “party of the free market” would understand, but apparently not. And more to the point, we can be assured that Poilievre will neither a) read a gods damned report from Statistics Canada beyond the headline to understand what’s going on; or b) tell the truth when he can whip up hysteria for the sake of scoring points. And because they will quote statistics in a way that strips it of its context, they will lie to the public, and the media will do very little about it – at most, both-sidesing the comment rather than calling out the simple falsehoods.

Meanwhile, Poilievre’s antics were perfect to turn themselves into memes. It’s probably just as well.

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Roundup: Trying to make an election happen

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I find myself growing increasingly tired of the media’s singular focus on a snap election, wedging every possible story they can into this narrative. And every time I see it, I keep thinking “Gretchen, stop trying to make an election happen. It’s not going to happen.” Honestly, no party is suicidal enough to pull the plug with the third wave raging across the country, and the legislation to make safer elections happen still stuck at second reading and has been for months because the Conservatives have been playing procedural games in the Commons (though the government is hoping to finally get it to committee this week). And given next week is a constituency week, the soonest it might pass at this point is maybe – maybe – the first week of June. Maybe. And then it has a 90-day implementation period, so Elections Canada could not safely hold an election until maybe mid-September. Maybe. Yeah, it’s not going to happen.

Undaunted, The Canadian Press’ big story this weekend is about how parties are gearing up for a potential election, and how to do everything virtually if they can’t go door-knocking and so on. And I get that they are probably in the midst of doing some rudimentary preparations because this is a hung parliament and anything can happen, but honestly? It’s not going to happen until later in the fall at the very earliest. But this constant obsession with pumping out election stories is starting to look both desperate and tacky, especially because it’s not going to happen.

With that in mind, I found Chantal Hébert weekend column to be lacking, where she questions the need for the Liberals to have a majority if legislation is finding “dance partners” in the Commons. The problem there is that it’s a fairly facile measure of things, given that there are bigger problems than the few bills getting passed with a sufficient “dance partner” available – there have been so few bills passed this session because the Conservatives in particular are slow-walking every bill they can, and only recently did the Bloc and NDP wake up to that fact when they have bills they want to see advanced as well. Add to that, most of the committees are now in a state of dysfunction because of partisan dickishness, and most of them are in endless cycles of witch hunts on would-be “scandals” that have long-since played themselves out. I’m not sure how she sees this as being remotely productive, but that’s me.

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Roundup: Lying with statistics, quarterly GDP edition

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Statistics Canada released their fourth quarter GDP data yesterday, and it was surprisingly not bad – it far exceeded expectations for growth, with an annualized increase of 9.6 percent, and the estimates of January’s GDP numbers are that they will grow, in spite of renewed lockdowns/mockdowns across much of the country, which is good economic news. Comparatively, OECD data shows that Canada ranked second out of G7 countries in terms of GDP growth over the quarter – only Japan beat us. This should give rise to some cautious optimism about the direction of our economic recovery.

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Erin O’Toole, however, declared that these figures just will not do, and that the country needs “economic leadership.” As proof, he cited that the country’s annual GDP fell a record 5.4 percent – the most since comparable data began being kept in 1961 – never mind that the economic shock was brought on by the global pandemic, plus the false notion that we have the “highest unemployment in the G7,” as well as high pandemic spending levels. The Conservatives keep trotting out these unemployment figures, but every country measures unemployment differently, so they are effectively lying with statistics. Even if we measured our unemployment by the same way the Americans do, the gap is consistent with the gap in figures that always exists between our countries. Meanwhile, we still have the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7, and our pandemic spending has insulated the economy so that it will be more resilient once we’re able to open – and hey, we also managed to have a much lower death count than most other G7 countries because we paid people to stay home. But part of the problem is that O’Toole (and most especially Pierre Poilievre) never gets called out for essentially lying with statistics, because the CBC has essentially given up on economics reporting, and the Financial Post largely sticks to getting their commentary from Jack Mintz and the Fraser Institute (with one or two exceptions). So O’Toole can stand at the lectern in the current ad hoc press theatre in the West Block and lie with statistics unchallenged, and media won’t call out the misinformation because they will either both-sides it, or just report it verbatim because they don’t know enough about the numbers to challenge it. It’s a sad state of affairs.

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Meanwhile, in more news that O’Toole is unwilling to have an honest discourse, his staff penned an op-ed in his name in the National Post calling on the government to turn to India instead of China for future economic growth – but the piece was deafeningly silent on Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism, which has turned into pogroms against Muslims and mistreatment of Sikhs in the country. It’s a lie of omission to simply call India the world’s largest democracy and ignore the flagrant human rights violations going on there as well – but this is pretty much what we’ve come to expect from O’Toole and company, because We The Media have enabled them the whole way.

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Roundup: Consulting the caucus

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Yesterday the Star reported that Justin Trudeau has been so weakened by the WE Imbroglio that he is *gasp!* asking his Cabinet ministers and caucus for ideas about the upcoming Speech from the Throne. I find the fact that this is a news story to be pretty distressing because this is supposed to be how governments work in this country – it’s not supposed to be a one-man-show with the leader and his or her office running the whole party’s platform and policies.

This criticism certainly extends to what we just saw out of the Conservative leadership race, where each candidate had a policy book that they were running on – something that should never happen because it’s not leaders who are supposed to come up with policy, but the party’s grassroots members, and the Conservatives especially like to crow that they are a “grassroots party” that respects its members, and so on. If that was the case, why would your leadership candidates be trying to run on different policy platforms? And you can’t say that this is about what the leader believes in – policy platforms are not beliefs, and the party shouldn’t be contorting itself to fit the leader because it’s not supposed to be a personality cult, but sadly we’ve missed that boat, and that’s exactly what parties have become in this country.

As for the notion that Trudeau should be consulting with the Conservatives on his Throne Speech, as raised in the Star piece, he really has no obligation to – it’s not O’Toole’s job to prop up the government, even if Trudeau wants to project some kind of “all in this together” message about the economic recovery. That’s not how our system works – we need opposition to hold the government to account, and trying to co-opt the opposition with promises in exchange for co-operation weakens that accountability. There are two other dance partners that the government can tap to maintain confidence, but subverting the official opposition is not a viable course of action.

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Roundup: Feigned confusion and a filibuster

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As anticipated, the government unveiled their reforms to the wage subsidy programme yesterday, which included more of a sliding scale for revenue drops and how much support businesses could get before the subsidy phases out, which helps ensure that businesses don’t reach a “cliff” in terms of restart growth only to have that support ripped away at an arbitrary level. This has the business community both applauding the government for responding to concerns, while also moaning that it’s so complicated now, which has some economists rolling their eyes. It also looks like the government that insisted they don’t like abusive omnibus bills is rolling the legislation for these changes in with the new-and-improved disability payments, as well as the justice timelines legislation, so that’s something to look forward to when the House comes back next week for a single day.

Meanwhile, the Ethics committee met yesterday to start their own look into the WE Imbroglio (conveniently with many of the same faces who subbed in at the Finance Committee during its hearing), to which the Liberals on the committee, knowing that they don’t have sufficient votes, decided instead to filibuster things, which is not a good look. Their arguments that this undermines the work of the Ethics Commissioner ignores that his role is supposed to support them, not the other way around; the fact that they were blocking a motion to demand the receipts from Margaret and Alexandre Trudeau’s public speaking events from their Speaker’s Bureau going back to 2008 is a little more suspect, and I haven’t heard a reasonable rationale for it or how it relates to the proposed study on how well the conflict-of-interest regime is working. Suffice to say, this isn’t a good look for the Liberals, and there are better ways of beating the Conservatives at their own game than playing into their hands. It’s too bad that they can’t seem to grasp that.

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