Tag Archives: Yves-François Blanchet

Roundup: May sees some, but not all, of the documents

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Green Party leader Elizabeth May held a press conference yesterday to talk about the unredacted documents she saw related to foreign interference, and in particular what David Johnston had written during his brief tenure as Special Rapporteur. It wasn’t, however, quite what she had hoped and stated that she was disappointed that she could only read David Johnston’s unredacted report, rather than the documents that supported his conclusions, which were all footnoted, but not actually there to read.

It is worth noting that May was quite generous and believes this to be something of a mistake on PCO’s part, and if not a mistake, it’s part of their usual pattern of being overly secretive and disclosing the bare minimum, even if May had been properly vetted and given clearance to read the documents. And she makes an extremely valid point that if the point is to be reassured in the quality of Johnston’s work, then you also need to see the documents that he was seeing in order to determine if he had arrived at the right conclusion or not. And I suspect that she will be able to see those documents before too long, because someone at PCO must know just how bad it will look if she can’t see the supporting evidence, and that it will look like they have something to hide, which is counter to the entire point of this whole exercise.

With this in mind, it bears mentioning that Jagmeet Singh is planning on seeing the documents as well as soon as he can schedule the time in Ottawa (as he’s busy on the summer barbecue circuit), while both Pierre Poilievre and Yves-François Blanchet have refused, insisting that this is some kind of “trap” where they wouldn’t be able to talk about what they’ve seen and be unable to criticise the government. That’s not true, and there is plenty they could say about the documents without revealing specifics, but they would rather play the game of insisting the government is hiding something nefarious when the truth is so much more mundane than that.

Ukraine Dispatch:

American sources are saying that the number of casualties in the war are reaching nearly 500,000, but that number needs to be taken with a shaker’s worth of salt because Russia routinely undercounts its killed and wounded, while Ukraine doesn’t publicly disclose their official casualty figures (though I do note that they do very much use tributes to dead soldiers for propagandistic purposes). Russians are claiming that a Ukrainian drone smashed into a downtown Moscow office building, while Ukraine denies it targeted a civilians or civilian infrastructure.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1692492507878224375

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Roundup: A hospitalized interpreter should be a wake-up call, but probably won’t be

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The inevitable has happened, and a parliamentary interpreter collapsed during a Senate committee meeting after an acoustic shock and was sent to hospital as a result, when the committee chair decided to go ahead with a meeting despite the fact that two witnesses appearing by video did not have appropriate headsets. And to add to matters, this interpreter was a freelancer and not in the union, so they won’t be getting sick pay for this injury either, given that they were filling in for the full-time, unionised interpreters who are on leave for the injuries they are all facing because of hybrid sessions and meetings, and the fact that the vast majority of MPs and senators simply do not care about their well-being, or the fact that these kinds of acoustic injuries can lead to permanent hearing loss. They don’t care because it would mean giving up the luxury of staying in their ridings rather than coming to Ottawa when they don’t want to, even if it means treating the interpretation staff like furniture. (And as we’ve established, they cannot simply hire more interpreters because there aren’t any more to hire—they’re not even graduating enough to meet the level of attrition from retirements and those quitting from injuries).

To add to this was Government House Leader Mark Holland appearing at the Procedure and House Affairs Committee, where they are debating extending hybrid sittings, possibly permanently, and he spoke about his suicide attempt after his 2011 election loss and used that tale as justification for extending hybrid. And as brave as Holland is to share that story, I find myself deeply disturbed by the fact that he is using it to push for a morally bankrupt proposition around making hybrid sittings permanent when he knows the human cost to them. I am also appalled that the lesson is trying to be “when an MP is struggling, let them work from home” rather than “when an MP is struggling, let them take the time they need to get better and not create an unrealistic and dangerous expectation of presenteeism.” MPs are allowed sick days and leaves of absence. They do not need to be on call 24/7, or to vote on every single issue. There were rules about pairing for absences for decades, and they worked just fine. It’s the same with the groups who keep appearing at PROC, such as Equal Voice, who insist that we need to make hybrid permanent to let more women with children participate in Parliament—it ignores the human toll on the interpreters (and when you raise it, they simply handwave it away with the magic words “we need to find a solution”), and frankly these MPs have the luxury of options when it comes to arrangements they can make. Hybrid or virtual sittings injures interpreters. If there is a technological solution, Parliament has been ignoring it. It is frankly morally reprehensible that they continue to have this debate at the expense of the health of these interpreters. It would be great if this publicised injury and hospitalisation were a wake-up call, but I am frankly too cynical at this point to believe that is going to happen.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 244:

Russia continues to claim that Ukraine is planning to use a “dirty bomb,” which sounds increasingly like pretext for Russia to detonate one, and that they have been using their occupation of the Zaphorizhzhia nuclear plant to build it.

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Roundup: The House of Commons’ vaccine mandate

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The expected happened in a way that was a little unexpected – and perhaps a bit improper. The Board of Internal Economy apparently met (possibly virtually), and decided that as of November 22nd, there is a vaccine mandate for the parliamentary precinct, and that includes MPs, staffers, and contractors. It’s a bit of a cute way of imposing a vaccine mandate on MPs themselves, but it may not fly regarding the Chamber itself because of parliamentary privilege.

Mind you, a privilege argument won’t last long. While the decision to go the route of BoIE seems to be a bit of a dare – and Yves-François Blanchet seems to indicate that he’s of the opinion that this is a legitimate use of its powers (I wouldn’t be so sure), this could easily be challenged in the Chamber, but even if the Speaker determines that there is a prima facie case of privileges being infringed, the rest of the House can vote instead to dismiss it rather than send it to committee, or even if they do send it to committee, vote it down afterward. And they likely will, because all of the parties except for the Conservatives are in favour of the vaccine mandate, so it’ll pass one way or the other. Now the government can head off any challenge by introducing a motion in the Chamber on the first or second day to declare that MPs need to be fully vaccinated in order to be in the Chamber, and they can then vote it through and it’ll be fully legit, so if they’re smart, they’ll ensure that happens once there is a Speaker in place. (This will also likely happen in the Senate, but they are still in discussion in that Chamber, but one can likely assume a similar vaccine mandate will be in place with their own precinct areas and Chamber in a similar manner).

This leaves the question of hybrid sittings. The Conservatives and Bloc have been in favour of ending them, while the NDP have supported keeping it going. The Liberals haven’t officially said, but they have been pushing for this since before the pandemic, so you can bet that they’ll be fine with some form of hybrid ability going forward, which shouldn’t be allowed – the human cost of hybrid sittings when it comes to the toll it takes on the interpreters is frankly immoral to continue with. That will nevertheless by an ongoing conversation between the parties before any order to resume said sittings goes ahead in the first few days of the new parliament – but a rule should also be made that unvaccinated MPs shouldn’t be allowed to simply join by hybrid sitting instead. Parliament, whether in the Commons or the Senate, is an in-person job, and it’s an essential function of this country. The hybrid measures should only ever have been temporary and for the duration of that pandemic emergency, and now that we have vaccines, there is no longer a need for them.

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Roundup: Calling for a return to in-person sittings

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Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet held a press conference yesterday, where he called for Parliament to be recalled as quickly as possible, and for it to resume in-person with vaccinated MPs, ending the “hybrid” sittings that we were saddled with in the previous session. For once, I actually agree with Blanchet – we are at the point with vaccinations and public health measures that there really is not any excuse for MPs not to be attending in person (wearing masks indoors as often as possible), because we cannot continue as we were before dissolution.

For those of you who weren’t following along, the hybrid sittings were direct contributors to the toxicity of the previous session, as MPs didn’t have to look one another in the eye while they behaved in the ways that they did or levelled the accusations at one another that they did, and the limitations of those sittings, particularly at committee, exacerbated the procedural warfare and filibusters that parties engaged in. Additionally, there can be no moral justification for continuing the hybrid sittings given the human toll it takes on the interpreters, who were suffering acoustic injuries at an increased rate because MPs refused to use their equipment properly, or behave reasonably online in ways that wouldn’t disrupt or injure those interpreters. Some parties – particularly the NDP, but you can bet that the Liberals will chine in as well – will want to keep some aspects of hybrid sittings around, but I want to caution that this should be resisted as much as possible – we don’t want to incentivise these to continue, because it will erode parliament the longer it carries on.

Meanwhile, I do fear that there will be Conservative MPs who continue to refuse either vaccination or to disclose their vaccination status (as a craven way of keeping their own anti-vaxx voters on-side) who will complain that they should be allowed to either attend the House of Commons without proof of vaccination, or to be allowed to carry on in a hybrid means without it. Even more to the point, I fear that at least one of them will turn this into a point of personal privilege, that their rights to speak in the Chamber are being infringed upon, and this will become a privilege fight (which would be doomed as the vaccinated majority eventually votes them down). Nevertheless, a return to in-person sittings needs to happen as soon as possible, and if some MPs refuse then so be it – and they can lose their salaries for absenteeism while they’re at it.

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Roundup: Shifts on the ground

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So, that was the election – the overall seat count doesn’t look like it’s change much, but on the ground it shifted quite a lot in plenty of places, with Conservatives making more breakthroughs in Atlantic Canada, and the Liberals making a comeback in Alberta. Two sitting ministers lost their seats – Bernadette Jordan and Maryam Monsef, and Deb Schulte was trailing around the time I posted this and went to bed. Those shifts to count for something, and they will mean a different make-up in the House once it returns, probably in late October.

While you’ll hear a lot of talk about how this election was “useless” given the result, I’ve got a column coming out later today that addresses those concerns, but I also wanted to make note about the question of timing – Trudeau pretty much had to go when he did because any later would have run into the municipal elections in Quebec and Alberta, which would spread their volunteer pool too thin, and going after that would mean an election close to Christmas, which everyone would bitch about (and Trudeau would want to avoid something like what happened in 2006). Meanwhile, going later would have meant more weeks of deadlocked bills in the Commons, for little added benefit.

As for the speeches:

  • Annamie Paul was up first, after placing a distant fourth in her riding (which was in no way a surprise). She gave some thanks to her volunteers, staff and family, but gave no indication of what her future plans are as leader, given the fact that the loss of another Green seat (while gaining one new one) won’t help her case as staying on as leader.
  • Erin O’Toole did not really give a concession speech, did not congratulate Trudeau on his win, but essentially made a promise to keep campaigning while falsely claiming that Trudeau had previously threatened another election in the next 18 months (whereas Trudeau simply warned that another hung parliament would likely wind up with another election in that time). O’Toole also made a few more false statements before calling it a night, essentially daring his party to keep him on as leader.
  • Yves-François Blanchet was also fairly bullish, but did concede that they needed to be more cooperative and said that the Bloc would participate in said cooperation, because they are still in a pandemic. That could mean Blanchet is the willing partner for the first few months of Trudeau’s agenda.
  • Jagmeet Singh was more gracious than the others in congratulating the PM on his victory, but then proceeded to take credit for the pandemic supports, and insisting that he will continue to push for things like dental care and his wealth tax which will be extraordinarily difficult to implement.
  • Trudeau was last, declaring that Canadians were sending his party back to work with a “clear mandate” – and *sigh* no, we don’t have mandates in our system of government. He also noted that voters have “Given this parliament and this government a clear direction.” Trudeau was the most gracious of all of the leaders in his victory, thanking the other leaders and their families, the Elections Canada staff and volunteers, and started quoting Laurier in talking about looking to the future that they hope to build together.

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Roundup: Substance-free gong show, English debate edition

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The English debate, with its much higher stakes, was no better than the French. It too lacked substance or any meaningful exchanges because they had a schedule of topics to get through, and wouldn’t you know it, they weren’t going to let exchanges get interesting or involved – they just wanted to move on. Justin Trudeau tried to paint Erin O’Toole as weak, Singh tried to paint Trudeau as unable to fulfil promises. Trudeau warned that Singh was trying to instil cynicism among progressives because he refused to acknowledge any work done. Annamie Paul kept insisting that the key to everything was to work together. And Yves-François Blanchet and moderator Shachi Kurl started getting into it, and that gave Blanchet the victim card he was looking for in the Quebec media, particularly around Bill 21.

https://twitter.com/ChrisGNardi/status/1436172199430328323

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1436142521118334983

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1436154327169581083

The fact that they are still moaning the fact that we’re in an election is getting really tiresome – but not quite as tiresome as the fact that Trudeau still can’t make a convincing case for it. He keeps trying to go hard on insisting there are huge and sharp divisions between the different parties, which is why he needs the electoral support to carry on making tough choices about the pandemic. What he won’t spell out is that he needs that support because the spring session was a toxic swamp that stalled virtually all bills for months, including the budget implementation bill for the fall economic update and all of the pandemic supports therein. The fact that he refuses to say that, for whatever “happy warrior” shtick he thinks is going to win him points, just gives the other parties a pass for their petty bullshit in the spring, and the campaign of dishonesty that accompanied it, and it just keeps him from making an actual case. I don’t get it, but clearly this hasn’t blown over.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1436137253504536581

If you need lists of takeaways, you have plenty to choose from – CTV, Maclean’s, the Star, and CBC. The CBC also has a half-assed fact-check of things mentioned during the debate.

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Roundup: No knockouts in the TVA debate

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The first official debate took place last night – TVA’s “Face-à-face” which was a debate in a slightly more behaved format than we tend to see with the consortium/commission debates. All four leaders displayed adequate French – though Erin O’Toole’s accent and pronunciation started to degrade the longer it went on – and it was broadly organized around three particular themes: the pandemic, social policy, and the Canada of tomorrow. As with most debates, there was no “knock-out punch,” the leaders largely held their own, and unlike 2019, no one got cornered and slaughtered as what happened to Andrew Scheer.

There were contentious issues – early on, the other leaders tried to gang up on Trudeau about the “unnecessary” election, which Justin Trudeau countered Yves-François Blanchet’s accusations with a reminder that on four occasions Blanchet voted non-confidence in the government and obviously wanted an election. O’Toole also claimed that Parliament was working together and that made the election unnecessary, but that was a complete lie, and there were five months of procedural warfare brought on by his MPs to drive that point home. Trudeau also made the point that the twenty percent of the population that remained unvaccinated shouldn’t be able to stop democracy, and that our institutions were robust enough to deal with it. Blanchet laid into O’Toole about his plans to cancel the child care programme and withdraw the promised money from Quebec in exchange for tax credits that won’t help create any child care spaces. Blanchet and Jagmeet Singh also got into it on a few occasions, particularly around who called whom a racist in the House of Commons, and on any issue that touched on race, Blanchet kept insisting that Quebeckers weren’t racist. It being a Quebec-centric debate (as opposed to inclusive of francophones outside of the province), it had its moments of parochialism, like the moderator demanding assurances from each of the leaders that the future Moderna plant will be built in Quebec and not Ontario.

While everyone is going to assert that either Blanchet won out of natural advantage, or that their own preferred leader “won,” just because I did want to make a couple of observations. Trudeau is still having difficulty articulating the need for an election – most especially around the toxic parliamentary session in the spring. Erin O’Toole kept repeating that he has a plan, and that he has a “contract with Quebec,” and just repeating those assurances, ad nauseum. He also did most of the interrupting and talking over others throughout the evening. Blanchet was chippy and peevish for much of it, while Jagmeet Singh would dodge direct questions in favour of his usual tactic of reverting to some kind of an anecdote about someone he allegedly met. And here are a collection of quotes from the evening, for what it’s worth.

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Roundup: Handwaving about tax loopholes

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The narratives about “closing tax loopholes” never really die, and lo, they have come back yet again on the campaign, as Jagmeet Singh hopes to use this as a campaign plank, and to basically start extracting a dollar figure from them. The problem? Well, that’s basically misunderstanding the problem with these “loopholes” – they’re a game of whack-a-mole. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t tackle them, because you should, and successive governments have been doing that for decades, but as soon as you close one, the well-funded tax preparation industry finds another that they can exploit, and all of that money that a government may have been hoping to recoup doesn’t appear.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1432361687361933312

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1432362354314993667

Additionally, Singh alleged that Justin Trudeau was somehow directing the CRA to not go after large corporations, and that he isn’t charging the “super rich” tax evaders. But again, this distorts reality – the CRA is an arm’s length agency from government, and free from political direction, and don’t direct audits or collection activities. Yes, the current government has provided more funds for CRA to undertake those activities, but they can’t tell them who to audit. Additionally, when CRA finds a file that they deem suspicious, they forward it to the RCMP, and if they feel that there is criminality, they forward it to the Public Prosecution Service – which, again, is arm’s length and not subject to political direction – and they decide whether or not to lay charges. Thus far, they have not with some of the high profile investigations into the Panama Papers, or other such leaks, likely because they know their chances of a successful prosecution are slim because these particular practices wind up being legal in the long run, no matter how often governments try to crack down on them. Regardless, Singh trying to portray this as either cronyism or a lack of political will is not reflective of reality.

Also not reflective of reality – some of the hand-waving he’s been doing in other interviews, such as this one where he says he’ll “get it done” on ending the deferral period for blood donations for men who have sex with men – never mind that Canadian Blood Services is arm’s length from government and not subject to their orders. You can’t Green Lantern your way through government. Implementation of your ideas matters – a lot.

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Roundup: Let’s just ignore the toxic spring

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We are coming out of the first week of the campaign, and we still see a bunch of pundits and talking heads questioning why the Liberals called it in the first place, and I have to wonder just how much they paid attention to what went on during the last session of Parliament. It was a toxic environment – the most toxic I have seen in over a decade. Non-money bills didn’t advance for months because of procedural warfare, and at least one pandemic support bill was months late in being able to deliver for people who needed it. Committees were holding witch-hunts and the civil service was busy sending millions of pages to committees on wild goose chases. But did anyone bother to explain this? Not really, because then it would become a “process story,” which we are supposed to be allergic to. Putting the events of the spring into context, along with some of the considerations about timing (there are municipal elections in Quebec and Alberta in October) should be part of the media’s job, so that we’re not just being stenographers to what the parties are telling us (so we can then both-sides it). But that might be too much effort.

Of course, this is Justin Trudeau, and while he was perfectly happy to point out the obstruction on the days leading up to dissolution, once the campaign started, he was all about his upbeat, positive narratives, and talking about people being given a say in the “most important election since 1945,” because that’s his campaign persona and style – upbeat, upbeat, upbeat. Happy-clappy at all times. That doesn’t mean that those of us who follow Parliament can’t look past it and point out what was going on.

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Roundup: Ghoulish misdirection

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I continue to fume about yesterday’s ghoulish questions in Question Period, where the federal government is being blamed for the deaths in long-term care facilities because the vaccine rollout hasn’t been as expeditious as many had hoped, which is not only gross, but it’s about trying to provide cover for the (mostly conservative) premiers who have failed to do their jobs. Vaccines were never supposed to be the way we stop those deaths – actual public health measures like testing, tracing, and isolation were supposed to do the job, but the fact that premiers continued to under-fund these and didn’t invest in expanding capacity even when given billions of federal dollars to do so, were the actual solutions to preventing those deaths. But instead, these premiers and their ideological inability to grasp that in a pandemic, you need to pay people to stay home and cushion the economic shock, absolutely refused to do that and kept insisting that they re-open their economies with “a little bit of COVID” going around. Of course, that “little bit of COVID” turns into a whole lot of COVID because of exponential growth, and new variants mean even greater transmission. But the cover being given to these premiers is obscene.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1354227667713855490

And lo, we have a report that shows that provinces continue to sit on federal pandemic funds, with Ontario clocking in at $6.4 billion unspent, as they struggle to re-open schools (recall that they cut corners from the expert recommendations and then had outbreaks) and have unchecked spread of the virus in yet more long-term care facilities, which now appears to be the so-called UK variant. So what is Doug Ford doing about it? Howling that he wants the federal government to institute even more border measures including testing people when they arrive (they are already tested before they get on the planes), and trying to pretend that Pfizer is simply lying to us about not shipping us more vaccines. And guess what? Reporters are focusing on the vaccines and hounding Justin Trudeau about it rather than demanding accountability from Ford for all of the deaths in long-term care that are because of his inaction.

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