Tag Archives: Stephen Fletcher

Roundup: Alberta sends the wrong (price) signals

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It was Throne Speech day in Alberta, and sure enough, it contained an ambitious laundry list of upcoming legislation designed to undo much of what the NDP had put into place as a means of “restoring” the mythical Alberta Advantage. (Full speech here). Shortly thereafter, the promised Bill 1 to repeal the province’s carbon levy was introduced – pretty much guaranteeing that the federal carbon price will be imposed once the bill is enacted. It doesn’t repeal all of the carbon prices in the province, however – it merely shifts them to the largest polluters, which does nothing about the demand side of carbon consumption, and won’t shift consumer behaviours, nor will it do enough for those large emitters, because for all of Kenney’s talk about looking to protect the energy sector, he just shifted the bulk of the burden onto them. (It also won’t really help consumers because poorer households will be worse off now).

Meanwhile, here’s Andrew Leach to explain why Kenney’s repeal of the carbon price is handing a rhetorical victory to Ontario, and why the reliance on magical technology from the future to reduce emissions won’t happen if there aren’t proper price signals to spur its development.

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Roundup: Self-inflicted leadership wounds

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There was a fairly damning piece out about the state of the NDP yesterday, as they began their caucus retreat in Surrey, BC, and how the party basically put itself on hold for two years after they turfed Thomas Mulcair but left him in place for two years while they engaged in an overly long leadership process, only to let their fundraising collapse and their outreach stagnate. I do have vague recollections about how they were totally going to use the two-year!leadership contest to totally re-energise the party, and it would totally bring in all kinds of new fundraising and members, and so on. Turns out, none of that happened, Mulcair being left in place slowly poisoned the well, and at the end, they wound up with a leader without a seat, and who has been largely absent both from Ottawa and the national stage (leaving another defeated leadership candidate in his place in Ottawa). I’m hoping that the entire Canadian political scene takes this as an object lesson that the way we’re running leadership contests is very bad, and that we need to get back to the sensible and accountable caucus selection (and removal) of leaders. The pessimist in me, however, sees this very likely reality that they won’t take the lesson, and we’ll continue stumbling along.

Also in NDP news is the damage control about the Erin Weir debacle, and they’re getting out activists and pet columnists to come to their defence and to insist that Weir is the worst person imaginable, ignoring that he took to the media to defend himself after a campaign of leaks started against him as part of the Mean Girling around him, and they’ve offered nothing to substantiate that he is a harasser in any meaningful sense of the word. Jagmeet Singh even proclaimed that he wouldn’t be intimidated by “elites” from the party’s own grassroots – their own current and former MPs and MPPs in Saskatchewan – into changing his mind. It’s actuall a bit stunning.

Notwithstanding

Because this is still Very Big News, there is talk coming out of PC circles in Ontario that Doug Ford is willing to use the nuclear option to show that he’s tough against the courts where Trudeau isn’t, and then uses the false notion that the Notwithstanding Clause could have been used on the Trans Mountain ruling – which it couldn’t, because the Clause only applies to certain sections of the Charter, for which Section 35 is not a part of. But since when to facts matter when you’re pursuing a private grievance in a big, public way? Worse was the fact that people were trying to get Ford to bring up the fact that Justice Belobaba refused to freeze Omar Khadr’s $10 million settlement and turn it over to the widow of his putative victim. Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, continues to say that this is a political issue for Ontarians to deal with, not for him to swoop in and do something about, and he’s right.

Meanwhile, here’s Paul Wells snarkily congratulating Ford’s government for embracing the extremism it too Stephen Harper a decade to find and for making the Notwithstanding Clause easier for any other government to use in a fit of their own pique. Law professor Vanessa MacDonnell thinks that Ford should clearly articulate why he is invoking the Notwithstanding Clause, while Susan Delacourt wonders why Trudeau left it up to Brian Mulroney to forcefully denounce the invocation.

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Roundup: Performing partisanship

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Andrew Potter put out a very interesting post yesterday about self-help for partisans, given the tone of the rhetoric right now, and it came at a particularly apropos moment given how unreadable my Twitter reply column has become since the publication of my fact-check piece for Maclean’s. And no, it’s not just Conservatives who are sore that their team has been caught out, it’s also an equal number of their opponents who are utterly obnoxious in using the piece to prove something about the Conservatives.

What has really gotten me, however, are the number of partisans whom I’ve worked with, who have been sources for pieces I’ve written that have savaged the Liberal government, who are taking to Twitter to accuse me of bias. And I had to step back from my reactions to realise something that Potter articulated in his piece:

And maybe that’s the big problem — that everyone has stopped arguing with their opponents, and has decided to simply perform for their supporters.

And this is it exactly – they’re not engaging critically with what I wrote or acknowledging that I have a record of being just as critical on the government on very substantial issues (as opposed to cheap outrage and the usual hairshirt parsimony that means nothing). They have to take to social media to denounce me in order to perform their partisanship. And I get it. But it’s really, really disappointing.

But as Potter also points out, this is also reflecting itself in how Parliament is operating these days – MPs aren’t debating with one another. They’re performing for their base, and we can see that in the way that we went from debate to reading speeches into the void, and from QP that engaged on issues to one that is now solely focused on generating outrage clips for social media. Parliament is ceasing to be about debate or ideas, or about governance or accountability – it’s about performing for your base so that you can win a few more votes. And that’s not only sad, but it’s terrifying for what it means for the future. And that’s why I think we need to have a rethink of where rules changes have gotten us, and start reshaping those rules that will force MPs to re-engage with Parliament in the way it’s intended to run, rather than allowing it to further degrade into this puppet show we’re careening toward.

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Roundup: Gearing up the political advertising

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As we move closer to an election, there is going to be a lot of talk about political ads. An awful lot of talk. One of those talks is going to be about third-party advertising, and how much we’ll see because the federal spending limits are low as to render them fairly marginal, not that it’s stopped groups like Unifor or the National Citizens Coalition from grousing that the limits are too small for them to be of any good. Curiously, Stephen Harper used to be against these kinds of limits but he’s been in power for nine years and has done nothing about it, but you’ll have to guess as to why he’s had such a change of heart. Another thing we’ll see more of are social media ads which are cheap to produce and distribute, and can be used to refine and retool until they are considered “ready” to go for a major national buy – assuming that they don’t already get “earned” attention from news outlets without them having to actually pay for them to get wide distribution. Of course, we can look forward to being bombarded by ads outside of the writ period over the summer, so we should all be thoroughly sick of it by the time the election rolls around in October.

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Roundup: Partisan government tweets

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The government continues their questionable communications strategies, as they are now asking federal departments to tweet favourable messages about the government’s new “family tax cut” programmes using hashtags like #StrongFamilies. You know, a slogan that Harper debuted at a party event back in the summer. And these tax measures? Not actually adopted by Parliament yet, so advertising about them is premature (not that it stopped them with the Canada Job Grant, and they’re doing TV ads already on the basis of these unapproved tax measures). Despite what Tony Clement will tell you about how this is important messaging from the government to let people know about their new programmes, it all smacks of partisan advertising – just like those terrible marijuana ads that use torqued and demonstrably false claims (like 400 percent stronger marijuana). Getting public servants to start bombarding social media with these kinds of partisan messages further degrades the neutrality of the civil service, and shows the government to be treating it as their own personal ad agency, which they should not be doing.

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