Tag Archives: Supreme Court

Roundup: Reaction to Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine

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Russian forces have been advancing in Ukraine, but not without opposition. Shelling continues against several Ukrainian cities and into Kyiv itself, as people are taking shelter in the metro. Closer to home, prime minister Justin Trudeau announced another round of tougher sanctions against Russian oligarchs and other key leaders, and there is talk that yet more sanctions are on the way, but it also sounds like there is some difficulty in getting all of our allies on-side, and the thing about these kinds of sanctions is that everyone needs to do them so that there aren’t loopholes that Russia can slip through. (Trudeau also announced measures to help Canadians in Ukraine get safe passage to neighbouring countries, as well as expeditated immigration processing for Ukrainians).

But one of the biggest measures—cutting Russia out of the SWIFT global financial transaction system—has not yet been implemented because Europeans are balking (though Canada has reportedly been pushing for this, along with the UK). Canada is somewhat fortunate because we are less exposed to Russian trade and money than other allies, but it’s that exposure which will make sanctions harder on Western allies the tougher they are on Russia—and that’s something that a lot of the talking heads can’t seem to get their heads around. If you look at what European countries are trying to get carve-outs for, it’s because they don’t want to lose the Russian money in their economies. And that’s a tough pill to swallow, especially as all of our economies are still recovering from the pandemic recession.

https://twitter.com/LillyResearch/status/1496964138962386945

https://twitter.com/MatinaStevis/status/1496758467943866374

Where this will hurt us especially is higher world oil prices, as cutting Russia out of the market will further restrict supply at a time where energy shortages in certain countries have turned to oil to fill that gap, creating demand and limiting supply. That will mean higher gasoline prices in Canada, and while these higher prices will be good for the Alberta economy (oh, look—one more boom for them to piss away), it’s going to be felt in the inflation data, which will have more people lighting their hair on fire, demanding Something Must Be Done, but they won’t come out and spell out that they mean wage and price controls, or a new NEP. Jason Kenney, unable to read the room, is trying to make this about a new pitch for Alberta’s so-called Ethical Oil™, and we have federal Conservatives demanding a fast-tracked LNG infrastructure to export to Europe, but seriously, that’s a multi-year and multi-billion-dollar investment that is going to be short-lived the fast were decarbonise our economies.

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Roundup: Proposing to ignore the virus

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In the wake of the demands by extremist-led “protests” to lift all vaccine mandates around the country, nowhere as this demand been capitulated to as fast as in Saskatchewan and Alberta, where both provinces are pretty much eliminating their mandates as soon as possible, with no consultation, and while their hospitals are still full. Federally, the Conservatives are making the same demand for this capitulation, and they’re using a bunch of specious arguments, like listing countries that are lifting their restrictions already, never mind that in most of those countries, they have better healthcare capacity than we do, and they are further along in their omicron waves than we are. Fortunately, Ontario is not rushing to join them for a change, so that’s one small favour.

What is more concerning, however, is this talking point about “learning to live with COVID,” but in abandoning all public health measures, including mask mandates, they’re not actually planning to live with COVID—they’re planning to ignore it, to let it rip, to capitulate to the virus as much as they are eager to capitulate to the extremists claiming to protest. Learning to live with the virus would mean adequate and sustainable precautions, better focus on indoor ventilation, ongoing mask mandates in indoor spaces, and so on—and the ongoing insistence on vaccination, because that’s what will save us in the long run. But that’s not what they’re proposing, because they are so keen to return to the old normal, never mind that said world no longer exists by any measure. And it’s not “following the science” to take the notion that we need to just let the virus rip at this point—it’s being intellectually dishonest and pandering to selfish instincts.

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Roundup: The “missing” PM reappears

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While things quieted down with the grifter occupation, a new cry went up on all sides, who were trying to draw Justin Trudeau out and into the fray. A narrative, fed by journalists who clearly still don’t understand what this occupation is all about, was that Trudeau was somehow “in hiding” and needed to engage with these extremists, grifters, and conspiracy theorists to end the current situation. Worse, every opposition party was adding their voice to this nonsense, insisting that “federal leadership” would resolve a situation that is clearly and explicitly that of the city’s civilian police force. Trudeau did show up in the House of Commons in the evening, during the emergency debate on the occupation, and pushed back at the Conservative narratives that the country is “divided” over this, and quite rightly repeated that Canadians stood together in the pandemic and that vaccination remains the way out, not these protests.

Meanwhile, I am growing very disturbed by the fact that my media colleagues are agitating for the prime minister to call in the military to resolve the situation, never mind that a) the power to call on the military to aid in civil powers is up to the provinces to use, not the federal government; b) the Canadian Forces are not a police force and should not be used as such, because we are not a police state, and I swear to gods I will keep posting this Battlestar Galactica clip until people get it through their heads that calling in the military is not a solution to anything. It will only feed the narrative that Trudeau is a mad dictator, which accomplishes these extremists’ goals for them. I also cannot believe that the media keeps normalizing this line of thinking, like their continued insistence that the federal government invoke the Emergencies Act, and the repeated refrain that “people don’t care about jurisdiction in a pandemic.” Jurisdiction is literally part of the rule of law. It matters. People should care. We need to stop treating this like it’s some stupid game, or that Trudeau is the premiers’ father who can just take over at any point. That’s not how laws work, and agitating otherwise because you think it’ll make a better story is really, really dangerous.

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Roundup: Recalling a committee for a dog and pony show

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The House of Commons’ access to information, privacy and ethics committee will be recalled for emergency meetings after the Conservatives were “alarmed” to hear that the Public Health Agency used anonymised mobile data to see how Canadians were responding to public health measures. The point of the data collection is to get a sense of travel patterns during these kinds of measures, and to see whether people stay at home, or how far they go, and because its anonymised, nobody can see who is doing what individually—they’re looking at patterns.

But this kind of wailing and gnashing of teeth over anonymised data is nothing new for Conservatives, who have sounded this particular alarm before when Statistics Canada was hoping to use anonymised bank data to track Canadians’ purchasing habits in a more robust and accurate way than shopping diary surveys can, and lo, that project got iced. Of course, because irony is dead, the Conservatives’ election platform had their “carbon points” plan, which would require so much itemised consumer data that it puts this kind of anonymised data to shame, but why worry about consistency or logic?

Because this is a House of Commons committee, we are guaranteed that this is going to be nothing more than a dog and pony show. If they agree to hold a study on this—which it’s not yet guaranteed—it’s going to be hauling public health officials before committee and subjecting them to ridiculous questions that have little to do with this particular issue, in the hopes of catching them out on something, and attempts to build some kind of conspiracy theory that the government was trying to play Big Brother during the pandemic, and it will balloon from there until the point where the government has had enough and starts filibustering the increasingly unreasonable demands by opposition members, and the committee will grind to a halt. Because that’s how this kind of thing happens every time, because our MPs are more concerned with being partisan dicks on committees than actually doing their jobs of accountability. But maybe I’m just getting cynical about the current state of affairs in federal politics.

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Roundup: At long last, the mandate letters

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On what turned out to be the final sitting day of 2021 for the House of Commons, the prime minister finally released the mandate letters for his ministers, nearly three months after the election, and two after they were sworn in to their new jobs. I’m not sure how well I can articulate the utter absurdity of the situation, because there is really no excuse why it took this long (let along why it took him as long as it did to swear in his Cabinet or to summon Parliament). The fact that they were released after the House agreed to rise at the end of the sitting day means that there can be no interrogation of these letters by the opposition until January 31st, which is way too long.

As for the letters themselves, there is a theme among them about building a more inclusive and fair country, and for tangible results to be better communicated to Canadians (you think?). Some of the highlights include:

  • Ordering several ministers to take a harder line on trade tensions with the US
  • Resurrecting legislation on CanCon requirements for the internet and having web giants pay news outlets, as well as modernising the CBC
  • Renewed action to fighting systemic racism, along with a number of initiatives directed toward the Black community
  • Implementing UNDRIP in all decisions
  • Developing a new cyber-security strategy

No doubt more attention will be paid to these letters over the coming days, and we’ll see how much misunderstanding comes from them (recall the line about not creating new permanent spending programmes from Chrystia Freeland’s previous letter which people took to mean all rather than in the context of COVID supports). It also looks like we’re getting talking heads grousing about inclusivity as though it were somehow a distraction from economic growth when inclusive growth is where the country needs to be headed to head off economic challenges plaguing us since before the pandemic.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1471544703212404736

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Roundup: Blockbuster jobs numbers—mostly

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Statistics Canada released the Labour Force Survey numbers yesterday, and they were very good—four times as many jobs were created as had been forecast by economists. All of the jobs lost during the pandemic have been recovered and more, and unemployment is very nearly as low as it was before the pandemic began (at which point we were at record lows, around statistical “full employment”), and it was even noted that “core-aged” women had their highest ever employment levels. Things are turning around. Mostly.

There are still a lot of vacancies and there is a mismatch between jobs available and the skills that unemployed workers possess, and while the government is pouring money into training, that takes time. And labour shortages mean wages are likely to continue to increase (and if anyone says they’re stagnant, they are either lying or haven’t read the data). As well, productivity has taken a dive over the last quarter, so that will matter as well. Conservatives are claiming that the increase in jobs is as a result of the majority of pandemic benefits ending, but I’m not sure there is a direct comparison that can be made given the skills mismatches that are in the economy (and which pre-date the pandemic, which was one of the reasons why the Bank of Canada, among others, was making a concerted effort to call for inclusive growth). There is work still to do, but the government is feeling pretty good about the data.

Meanwhile, here are some economists’ takes to consider:

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1466771813594140675

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Roundup: Some shocking civic illiteracy stats

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I generally make it a policy not to talk about polls, but this one was just so disheartening that I feel the need to say something about it. Abacus Data asked a series of questions about federal government and governance, and it’s just…depressing to see the rate of responses that clearly show a lack of interest and a lack of education in how our system works.

These are the very basics of Responsible Government, and it’s important to understand what that means. But I recall that when I was in school, we talked about achieving Responsible Government as a recommendation in the Durham Report, and that Canada eventually got there, but they never explained what it actually meant, or what it entails in practical terms. And that’s a problem, especially when we are inundated with American popular culture about their politics, and their conception of how the UK’s system works (the rate of them who believe that absolute monarchy still exists is high. It’s very high) bleeds over to our popular understanding as well, and it’s a problem. That’s why I wrote The Unbroken Machine.

Some of these responses are simply an indication that people aren’t paying attention to the news, and that the way in which media communicates things can be unhelpful and confusing in how things are discussed. Abacus didn’t make sides for other questions in the survey, such as which level of responsibility does education fall under – which was better at 83 percent correctly answering that it falls under provincial jurisdiction, but again, this is the kind of ignorance that leaders like Jagmeet Singh like to exploit in order to drive cynicism. Civics education is vitally important, as is media literacy, and we are failing Canadians fundamentally because we refuse to teach them correctly in this country.

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Roundup: No undoing these elections

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In Alberta, the province’s municipal affairs minister has declared that he can’t vacate a seat on Calgary’s city council given the revelations that surfaced against one councillor from a time before his election, when he was a police officer. And this is actually a good thing – you do not want to give provincial governments the power to suddenly start vacating seats on municipal councils in their province, because that can very, very easily be weaponised to settle scores, particularly when there is friction between the municipal and provincial governments. (Seriously, given the rank incompetence of several provincial governments, you do not want them to have this power, no matter that it may sound nice for this particular circumstance).

There is a certain amount of resonance in this with the situation around ousted Liberal candidate and now independent MP Kevin Vuong, While there is some social media backlash over his visit to a local business that needed their MP’s help on a CRA issue, there are plenty of people who are demanding that something be done about his election, be it having the Speaker declare his seat vacant or the like, but I worry about that because of the implications for what it means as a precedent (especially given the fact that charges were not pursued in the allegations against him, which a gulf from the kind of conviction that would ordinarily be used as an excuse to declare such a vacancy). There needs to be a very high bar because this is democracy, and one of the things that happens in a democracy is that sometimes the people get it wrong for whatever the reason, and in this case, there is the added issue that the party did a closed-door acclamation process rather than an open nomination, so they have to wear this as well.

In both of these cases, there is something of an object lesson about why it’s important to get things right when you’re considering who you’re voting for (and why local journalism matters). There is nobody who can swoop down and save you from your bad choices, so it’s very, very important that you choose wisely.

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Roundup: Breakaway caucuses are more headaches for O’Toole

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Things in the Conservative caucus seem to be getting increasingly precarious, as a “small number” of MPs continue to remain unvaccinated, and others refuse to disclose even if they are vaccinated, which is going to be a problem for Erin O’Toole in two weeks when they need to show proof of vaccination to enter the parliamentary precinct, their offices, or reach the House of Commons.

As if this weren’t enough, you have more unofficial “breakaway” caucus groups forming – one of them calling themselves the “civil liberties caucus,” apparently headed by Marilyn Gladu, who are concerned with the loss of “medical privacy” over vaccine status; the other is allegedly rallying around fiscal and deficit issues (and I would be tremendously surprised if this isn’t a faction led by Pierre Poilievre). And for context, particular “caucus” groups are fairly normal, but they tend to be around things like friendship groups with other countries, or other soft parliamentary diplomacy. This is not it, and while Gladu insists that this isn’t about O’Toole’s leadership, but it’s hard not to see it that way – especially as he should have been clamping down on the anti-vax contingent in his caucus and party more broadly because there is still a pandemic going on, and pandering to a group that is heavily influenced by conspiracy theories is frankly insane.

Nevertheless, this is where we find ourselves. O’Toole continues to try and play both sides of the fence, saying he’s encouraging vaccination but won’t enforce it when people refuse for no good reason at all. The fact that the party has made itself beholden to its social conservative and more fringe base because they’re the ones who both fundraise and volunteer is a problem for the party over the long term, as the need to keep appeasing this base isn’t going away. That makes it harder for the rational, moderate Conservatives from having influence (witness the savaging they gave to Michael Chong in 2017, and Peter MacKay last year, even though MacKay wasn’t even a real Red Tory). So long as O’Toole refuses to put his foot down in the face of a global pandemic, he’s enabling more of the decline and that bodes very poorly for the future of the party, and Canadian political discourse.

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Roundup: Time to change the dress code?

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NDP MP Randall Garrison is pushing for the House of Commons to update is dress code, in particular around the gendered rules that men need to wear a jacket and tie in the Chamber in order to speak and vote. Part of Garrison’s stated motivation is to make it easier for future trans and non-binary MPs, even though accommodations are already routinely made, such as allowing Indigenous MPs to wear beaded necklaces or other symbols in place of a tie. I don’t see why it would be any different to accommodate a trans or non-binary MP in a similar manner without any fuss – a mere notice to the Speaker would suffice.

On the one hand, there is a certain amount of archaic assumption in the “contemporary business attire” around jackets and ties for men, and only men – there is no dress code for women in the Chamber (and these rules apply to those of us who sit in the Press Gallery in the Chamber, incidentally). Business attire in the current context is starting to slide down the scale – particularly in this era of work-from-home – so I’m leery of loosening the restrictions too much, particularly as it is not beyond the realm of possibility that you would have a bunch of MPs in track suits, yoga or sweat pants, hoodies, and mom jeans (and I have seen male MPs in mom jeans with jacket and tie in the Chamber, which was not a pleasant sight). Printed t-shirts are also a very real concern, because we will immediately slip into them being used as props, particularly during Members’ Statements, and we do not want that to happen. On the same token, I wouldn’t have minded imposing a few more rules for women in the Chamber, such as mandating jackets as part of “business attire,” because sometimes the definitions of what constitutes “business attire” for some female MPs has been particularly…challenging. (Flashback to the old Megan Leslie Outfit Watch on my former blog).

I get that ties suck. I really do. I used to really hate them, but I’ve somewhat reluctantly grown to accept them and now I have no issue with it. And once we’re into late May and early June and the humidity starts to climb, wearing suits is not fun (and whereas I have threatened to show up to the Gallery in shorts and sandals – but with jacket and tie – one reporter has actually done so and was my hero for the day). But at the same time, I think there should be some kinds of standards, for both men and women, because frankly there can be a demonstrated lack of both maturity and good taste among MPs and there need to be some guidelines. Can they be loosened a little? Sure, that should be okay, and maybe we won’t require a tie at all times – within reason. It does merit a discussion in any case.

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