Tag Archives: Statistics Canada

Roundup: Precious conformity

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Conservative MP Garnett Genuis penned an analysis piece for Policy Options that tried to explain why MPs vote in lockstep, and it’s just so precious you can barely stand it. Genuis dismisses the talk of heavy-handed PMO and whips offices, and after some lengthy discussion, concludes that it’s the human nature of conformity that’s at play. His mode of analysis was the voting record on C-14, the highly contentious medical assistance in dying bill.

It’s not that Genuis doesn’t have some good – if somewhat infuriating points – in the piece, talking about how MPs are so busy with their constituency work that they just don’t have the time to sit down and study the legislation that they were elected to be considering. That one nearly made me blow a gasket, considering that constituency work isn’t actually part of an MP’s job description and its growing importance has come at the expense of their actual jobs of holding government to account. That Genuis uses it as an excuse for having MPs let the “experts” in their leaders’ offices tell them how to vote is utterly galling. I can see why they would use this excuse, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good one or one that we should let them get away with (but then again, almost nobody knows what an MP’s actual job description is, least of all the MPs themselves, and yes, that is a Very Big Problem. His better points, however, included that sometimes it’s good for local nominations to see that an MP will be willing to break ranks from time to time, but it’s a mixed bag when they also need to be seen to have a united front with the party. It is a tension that he doesn’t delve deeply enough into.

But so much of his thinking is flawed, in part because he relies on the data of votes on a single contentious bill rather than a broader sample, which would produce a more thoughtful discussion, and also because he ignores the other incentives for why MPs will vote in lock-step. For some parties, like the NDP, the need for solidarity in all things means a much more conformist voting pattern in all things, and there is an internal culture of bullying to keep MPs in line so as not to be unseemly with dissent. With government backbenchers, there is the hope that toeing the line enough will earn you a post in cabinet or as a parliamentary secretary, because the ratio of cabinet-to-backbench seats is still too low in Canada to encourage a culture of more independent backbenchers in safer seats willing to do their job of holding government to account. There is also the pressure – which We The Media shamefully perpetuate – that you don’t want to be seen as breaking ranks lest it reflect poorly on the leader (though this seems to be a bit less so under Trudeau who has been vocal about encouraging more free votes). There is no discussion about the blackmail of a leader that can withhold their signature from an MP’s nomination papers during the next election (or whatever the mechanism is post-Reform Act, because there is no actual clarity in law there any longer). So yes, while there is a human tendency to conformity, it is informed by a whole lot of other factors that Genuis ignores, and that taints his analysis to a pretty fatal degree.

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Roundup: “Hot lesbian” pinkwashing

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By now, you’ve probably heard about that ostensibly pro-oilsands ad that proclaimed that lesbians are hot, and it’s better to use oil from Canada, where they’re considered hot, than from Saudi Arabia, where they would be executed, and it being accompanied by an image taken from Orange is the New Black. And his apology and attempts to walk back from how particularly boneheaded the whole idea was to begin with. (Seriously, his sputtering about what he considers to be “hot” is both hilarious and sad at the same time). As well, the fact that he didn’t use two men to make the same point is entirely because he was conscious that the same message wouldn’t have the same effect on his target audience (because let’s face it, the idea of guys kissing isn’t as titillating to the general public as the idea of two women). What hasn’t been really explored in all of this, however, is this increasing tendency toward pinkwashing, particularly from the political right, as an excuse for xenophobia.

If you’re not familiar with the term pinkwashing, it’s generally used to show how some modicum of LGBT rights is a contrast to the death sentence that can be associated with homosexuality in certain parts of the world, usually as a way of deflecting attention from other problems. A famous example is the way that Israel uses Tel Aviv Pride to deflect criticism of their other human rights problems, and there was a tonne of pinkwashing done in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando as a pretext to condemning so-called Islamist terrorism (never mind that the same people spouting this pinkwashing ignore their own homophobic records. Who cares if we want to take away their civil rights – we don’t want to execute them, is generally how the argument goes, as though that’s really the choice that the LGBT community wants to be faced with). And this lesbian ad isn’t even the first time that this argument has been used – the Erza Levant brainchild Ethical Oil tried similar arguments a couple of years ago to little avail.

Suffice to say, while the mainstream media did jump all over these ridiculous lesbian ads, the criticisms tended to focus on the surface images of photogenic actresses and the fact that it ignores that there are still problems in this country where the GBLT community is concerned, the fact that there was no discussion about pinkwashing was disappointing, because this increasing tendency (particularly from the alt-right and Trump supporters) to use the queer community as some kind of shield to justify their xenophobia is tiresome and needs to be called out for what it is. These ads provided a good opportunity to do so, but that opportunity was largely squandered.

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Roundup: Committing to change – for real!

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A rare bit of public damage control was on display yesterday as CBC obtained a copy of the orders that the Chief of Defence Staff put out two months ago, which told the nascent task force being assembled to deal with the forthcoming report by former Justice Marie Deschamps on sexual assault and harassment in the Forces, to basically set aside some of the coming recommendations. At this point in the timeline, General Lawson would have seen a draft copy of Deschamps’ report, and he would have had a good idea what was in it for recommendations. Within hours of the CBC report going public, Lawson put out a lengthy press release stating that the Forces would act on all ten recommendations, including the creation of an independent centre for reporting assault or harassment. A few minutes later in Question Period, Jason Kenney also said that all ten recommendations would be acted upon as well. It does make one wonder when any change in these orders occurred, and why Lawson changed his mind – though one can imagine that either the final wording of Deschamps’ report, and how it was received by both the government and the general public, may have forced a realisation that there was a real appetite for cultural change out in the wider public, and that the old way of dealing with issues internally, particularly with its culture of misogyny, weren’t going to cut it any longer. Meanwhile, it should also be pointed out that the Canadian Forces appointed a female commander, Brigadier General Lise Bourgon, to head our forces in Iraq, and more women in high-profile commanding roles can only help in driving home the message that it’s not a macho boys’ club any longer.

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Roundup: Closure and privilege

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It was wholly depressing the way in which the whole matter was rushed through. After the imposition of closure – not time allocation but actual closure – the government rammed through their motion to put all Hill security under the auspices of the RCMP without any safeguards to protect parliamentary privilege. After all, the RCMP reports to the government, and Parliament is there to hold government to account and therefore has privileges to protect that – the ability to have their own security being a part of that. Liberal MP Mauril Bélanger tried to amend the government’s motion to make it explicit that the Speakers of both chambers were the ultimate authorities, and the government said good idea – and then voted against it. And so it got pushed through, privilege be damned, with minimal debate and no committee study or expert testimony. The Senate, however, is putting up more of a fight, and the Liberals in that chamber have raised the privilege issue, and the Speaker there thinks there is merit to their concerns, and has suspended debate until he can rule on it. And this Speaker, incidentally, is far more aware of the issues of privilege and the role of Parliament and the Senate than his Commons counterpart seems to be, and he could very well rule the proposal out of order. One hopes so, and once again it seems that our hopes rest on the Senate doing its job, because the Commons isn’t doing theirs.

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Roundup: A million imaginary vacant jobs

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The government’s new ads about their Apprenticeship Loan Programme claims that there will be a shortage of “one million skilled tradesmen and women” over the next decade. The problem? Well, there’s just no labour data to support that claim, whether you go simply with skilled workers period – not just the trades – or any other sector really. And once again we find ourselves in the position where the government’s advertising is completely out of tune with reality, from promoting programmes that haven’t had parliamentary approval, which offer benefits that most people won’t get because they’re specific or the thresholds are low, or the benefits of which are highly overblown. But hey, we remember the excuse that this was all about trying to instil confidence in the economy and so on, right? Even the government admits that they need better labour market data, and they’ve started two new surveys to help provide it, but this is also what their cuts to Statistics Canada has wrought. But incomplete data is one thing – complete fabrications are another.

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Roundup: Witnesses that don’t fit the narrative

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The Senate is conducting pre-study hearings on Bill C-36 this week – seeing as the government wants it passed quickly and are doing everything possible aside from imposing actual closure to ram it through – and among the witnesses they’ll be hearing from is a male escort who has exclusively female clientele. You know, someone who will completely mess with the narratives that the government has been pushing with this bill about “protecting vulnerable women,” since the Senate tends to be good about that. I can imagine that the other sex workers will probably get a better hearing at the Senate committee than they did at the Commons justice committee, seeing as there is less of a vested interest in pushing the government agenda.

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Roundup: Passing knowingly flawed bills

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The Senate, it turns out, passed a tough-on-crime private members’ bill that contained a gaping error in it, and they knew it had an error in it and passed it anyway – with observations attached about the errors. Why? Because said private member had become a parliamentary secretary, and sending it back to the House to fix the error would have basically killed it because its sponsor could no longer sponsor it. It seems to me that there should have been a fix for that – generally a unanimous vote in the Commons that someone else take it on, as has happened when an MP retires while their bill is in process – but more to the point, if the government was so enamoured with it, then they should have drawn up a government bill that fixed the errors and put it through the process, which likely would have been expedited since it had already had committee hearings in its previous form. But hey, let’s keep up this nonsense of backbenchers sucking up to the government with these nonsense bills, and let’s keep up this bawling that the Senate shouldn’t overturn flawed bills that passed the Commons because they’re not elected. It’s really helping our legislative process, clearly.

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Roundup: NATO spending commitments

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As that NATO summit gets set to get underway in Wales, it looks like the face-saving final communiqué will state that the 2 percent of GDP on defence spending that they hope members will achieve will simply be “aspirational,” since it’s not going to happen with some members like Canada (which would essentially doubling our current defence budget). Stephen Saideman explores why it’s wrong for NATO to focus solely on the spending levels of member countries than it is on capabilities. It also sounds like NATO members are going to discuss making cyberwarfare as much of a threat to member nations as bombs, which is quite true of the modern era. It also sounds like the attention will be split between the threats posed by Russia and ISIS. Michael Den Tandt notes that while Harper keeps sounding tough, there is no escaping that the Canadian Forces are badly under-resourced – possibly as bad as the “Decade of Darkness” – and we can’t have it both ways of doing good work on the cheap. Katie Englehart has more on the broader context of the situation here.

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Roundup: Everyone on board the energy strategy

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At the final (for real this time) press conference of the premiers in PEI, they announced that everyone was on board for a national energy strategy. What that all means is up in the air, but it’s nice to know that everyone’s aboard – especially Quebec, who is also joining in with the other province to start bulk-buying their prescription drugs. BC and Saskatchewan made a side deal about wine and spirits between their provinces, while Alberta and Nova Scotia signed a labour mobility agreement around apprenticeships and credentials recognition (giving rise to the question of whether they’re making it easier for Nova Scotia to lose its young workers). Paul Wells writes about the changed tone of the meeting now that the PQ presence was gone, and both Kathleen Wynne and Philippe Couillard both are secure in strong majority governments, while he also has conversations with four of those premiers. Andrew Coyne remains thoroughly unimpressed by the whole affair, and the inability of the premiers to make trade concessions while they demand money from Ottawa when they have the ability – and room – to raise their own taxes for what they need.

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Roundup: Return of the fiscal imbalance

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Well, the premiers have met and have spoken and they think the federal government should pony up some more money – try to act surprised, everyone! Not only that, but they’re trying to revive the term “fiscal imbalance,” because it seemed to work the last time. In particular, they want more money for health to deal with an aging population (despite being guaranteed increases for the next decade) and reliable infrastructure funding (which is a bit more of a legitimate gripe considering the way the government back-loaded the Building Canada Fund). There was some talk about trade and labour mobility agreements, but nothing earth shattering on the interprovincial trade barrier file. Christy Clark noted that the topic of the constitution was not up for discussion – not even to bring Quebec into the fold at long last. Getting in his two cents, New Brunswick premier David Alward (who may not be premier for much longer, as his province is in an election) took the opportunity to lash out at Justin Trudeau for his saying that they should put a hold on more fracking until more studies of its impacts can be done. Alward says that New Brunswick can’t wait because it needs the jobs now.

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