[Canada] Canadian Politics Redux

[viper37]

That said, when anti-First Nations bias in Quebec results in the death of a First Nations woman - and shortly thereafter we see evidence of similar discrimination directed at First Nations people - it seems a bit rich to complain about anti-Quebec bias. How about you acknowledge the racism directed against First Nations first?

No one has denied there is racism in Quebec.Systemic racism is another matter entirely.
In these specific cases, the first one, the nurses and the director of the establishment were fired.  In the second, the nurses involved were both fired.  Only the union claims they were not racist and only acted as per the teachings they were given (by a 1st Nation woman...).

Like I said - I am not arguing that anti-French attitudes aren't real or anything like that. But that kind of highly charged rhetoric ("medical lynching" and "Alabama of the North") is in my observation just as readily directed at Anglo governments, provinces, and organizations so it doesn't seem particularly anti-Quebec except that in this case it's racism in Quebec triggering it.

It was specifically directed at Quebec, it's not the first time from him, it's not the first time in English canadian medias either.

And to expect people to jump to complain about bad things said about Quebec when the case involves Quebecois actively denigrating and discriminating against First Nations seems pretty off to me - especially as that pattern recently resulted in actual death.

It demonstrate the anti-french attitude of the professeral corps.  They never hesitated to lynch their French speaking collegue, but they have no problem with their english colleague acting like the racist troll he is.  Double standards.

As for the Francophone U of O professor who lost their job because of the whole N-word thing then yeah, from the reporting I saw the case leaves me pretty puzzled and the outcome seems both disproportionate and unfair to me. So barring any context I don't know about, I agree that that was pretty shitty. I'm not particularly convinced that the outcome would've been any different if it had been an Anglophone prof, though I could be wrong.

We've just witnessed it...

So I'm with Viper on this one.

there might be some hope for Canada after all.

[crazy canuck]

But the party platform in the next election is sure to confirm climate change is real.  Party policy statements aren't exactly binding on the leadership.

Glad to hear it.

It's still not entirely encouraging when the party leadership basically has to fight against its own committed militant base to establish fucking basic common sense. If the Conservatives want to convince people that they are not just an echo chamber of the horror freak show that American Conservatism is, it's certainly not great "optics".

O'Toole said emphatically that it was a Liberal lie that the Conservatives were a bunch of climate change deniers.  Hours later, the Conservative party proved him wrong.

It will be interesting to see what kind of climate change policy O'Toole is able to run with during the election, given such a dramatic lack of recognition within his party that there is anything to be addressed.

[Oexmelin]

I don't know enough of the internal dynamics of the Conservatives to know where it will go. Some party let their most militant members  mouth off during party conventions, and then the establishment does what it wants anyway; but that only works if the establishment is capable of actually delivering power. More ideologically driven parties have to contend with this on a regular basis. It's not fundamentally a bad thing, but with the recent changes in the procedure to select delegates, the current Conservatives will have to decide pretty quickly if they want to return to being the Reform.

Then our time-travel back to the 90s will be complete.

[Barrister]

I don't know enough of the internal dynamics of the Conservatives to know where it will go. Some party let their most militant members  mouth off during party conventions, and then the establishment does what it wants anyway; but that only works if the establishment is capable of actually delivering power. More ideologically driven parties have to contend with this on a regular basis. It's not fundamentally a bad thing, but with the recent changes in the procedure to select delegates, the current Conservatives will have to decide pretty quickly if they want to return to being the Reform.

Then our time-travel back to the 90s will be complete.

The Canadian right has long been a touch more populist and a touch more ideological than other parties.  The risk of a splinter party forming is very real - you can look at not only Reform, but also the Wildrose Party in Alberta, as well as Bernier's effort.

So they're constantly trying to ride the line of excluding the worst possible fringe (the out and out racists and anti-semites), but while keeping most people inside the tent where they can be both useful volunteers / fundraisers plus they're not out fighting against you.

It's touch.  You need to win the votes of suburban voters in large cities, but if yo focus exclusively on those voters you'll lose your base.

[crazy canuck]

I don't know enough of the internal dynamics of the Conservatives to know where it will go. Some party let their most militant members  mouth off during party conventions, and then the establishment does what it wants anyway; but that only works if the establishment is capable of actually delivering power. More ideologically driven parties have to contend with this on a regular basis. It's not fundamentally a bad thing, but with the recent changes in the procedure to select delegates, the current Conservatives will have to decide pretty quickly if they want to return to being the Reform.

Then our time-travel back to the 90s will be complete.

The context here is important. O'Toole spent time during his convention speech to highlight how important the climate change policy would be and that, as I said above, it was a lie that the Conservatives were a bunch of climate change deniers.   The party faithful threw that back in his face and defeated an innocuous resolution that said climate change is real and the Conservatives will have a plan to deal with it.

Not sure there is a path left for O'Toole toward developing a meaningful policy when about 50% of the party don't even acknowledge there is a problem.

This has all the makings of the Reformers splintering back in the day.  There is a good chance the Alberta crew will just take their ball and go home if the Conservatives introduce an effective climate change policy.
   

[viper37]

This has all the makings of the Reformers splintering back in the day.  There is a good chance the Alberta crew will just take their ball and go home if the Conservatives introduce an effective climate change policy.

It is a risk.  Albertans are raising their fists in anger at a children's movie that apparently gives a negative image of oil companies (they're all misunderstood gentle giants ).  These people may not be officially high in the Conservative Party ladder, but they're just the most vocal ones.  And you have to contend with the ultra-religious ones who look in awe at the Handmaid's Tale..  It's not an easy task.  Quebec&Ontario's conservatives are more progressive on most social issues while the ones from the Prairies are much more socially conservative.  You need both these wings to win, but I'm beginning to think the Trumpist wave has had pernicious effects over here as well.

[crazy canuck]

Looking forward to reading the SCC carbon tax decision today - how will they deal with this question within the framework of cooperative federalism and how will the POOG clause work into the analysis.

Exciting times for people who do constitutional law 

[Grey Fox]

Reports are that it's constitutional.

This doesn't get any play in the Francophone Quebec media, probably since we are unaffected by the Federal law.

[viper37]

Looking forward to reading the SCC carbon tax decision today - how will they deal with this question within the framework of cooperative federalism and how will the POOG clause work into the analysis.

Exciting times for people who do constitutional law 

It's Constitutional.  There wasn't much doubt that the Supreme Court would rule otherwise.  The Feds can do pretty much anything they want, good or bad.

@GF:
it's in La Presse at the very least.

[crazy canuck]

This is a decision that is very careful to create a high bar for the Feds to justify the creation of a national standard.  Having set that high bar the Court found (7 of the 9) that in this case the high bar is met.

The paragraphs below are from the headnote and I think capture the essence of the Court's reasoning.  The first deals with the part of the test which sets a high bar.  The second is the Court's rationale why it was met.

federal jurisdiction should be found to exist only where the evidence establishes provincial inability to deal with the matter. Provincial inability functions as a strong constraint on federal power and should be seen as a necessary but not sufficient requirement for the purposes of the national concern doctrine. In order for provincial inability to be established both of these factors are required: (1) the legislation should be of a nature that the provinces jointly or severally would be constitutionally incapable of enacting; and (2) the failure to include one or more provinces or localities in a legislative scheme would jeopardize the successful operation of the scheme in other parts of the country. And there is a third factor that is required in the context of the national concern doctrine in order to establish provincial inability: a province's failure to deal with the matter must have grave extraprovincial consequences. The requirement for grave extraprovincial consequences sets a high bar for a finding of provincial inability for the purposes of the national concern doctrine and can be satisfied by actual harm or by a serious risk of harm being sustained in the future. It may include serious harm to human life and health or to the environment, though it is not necessarily limited to such consequences. Mere inefficiency or additional financial costs stemming from divided or overlapping jurisdiction is clearly insufficient. Evaluating extraprovincial harm helps to determine whether a national law is not merely desirable, but essential, in the sense that the problem is beyond the power of the provinces to deal with it. This connects the provincial inability test to the overall purpose of the national concern test, which is to identify matters of inherent national concern that transcend the provinces.

Provincial inability is established in this case. First, the provinces, acting alone or together, are constitutionally incapable of establishing minimum national standards of GHG price stringency to reduce GHG emissions. While the provinces could choose to cooperatively establish a uniform carbon pricing scheme, doing so would not assure a sustained approach because the provinces and territories are constitutionally incapable of establishing a binding outcome-based minimum legal standard — a national GHG pricing floor — that applies in all provinces and territories at all times. Second, a failure to include one province in the scheme would jeopardize its success in the rest of Canada. The withdrawal of one province from the scheme would clearly threaten its success for two reasons: emissions reductions that are limited to a few provinces would fail to address climate change if they were offset by increased emissions in other Canadian jurisdictions; and any province's failure to implement a sufficiently stringent GHG pricing mechanism could undermine the efficacy of GHG pricing everywhere in Canada because of the risk of carbon leakage. Third, a province's failure to act or refusal to cooperate would have grave consequences for extraprovincial interests. It is well established that climate change is causing significant environmental, economic and human harm nationally and internationally, with especially high impacts in the Canadian Arctic, coastal regions and on Indigenous peoples.

[viper37]

The last part pretty much applies to the issue internationally.  A Canadian corporation could very well establish its production in a country with less stringent rules, just like they offset high labour costs. And in the case of climate change, unless everyone acts, we'll never see the end of it. 

Kinda like that pandemic stuff, actually.

The same reasoning could be applied for the pandemic, if a province had decided not to implement any measure to slow the growth, or if the Federal had decided to set the bar higher than the provincial standards.

I do not disagree with the ruling, but I'm not reassured by this decision about Feds encroachment on provincial responsibilities.

[viper37]

Speaking of the pandemic, report by the Office of the Auditor general has released its first report on covid-19 response from the Feds.
Highlight: E.

'nuff said?

It would seem critics of the Federal govt's response were right.     Can't accuse the Auditor general of partisanship.

https://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_202103_03_e_43785.html#PPR

Here is CBC's take on the report.

Texte de La Presse

Despite nearly two decades of warnings, planning and government spending, the Public Health Agency of Canada was not ready for the global pandemic and did not appreciate the threat it posed in its early stages, Canada's auditor general says.

In a hard-hitting review released today, Auditor General Karen Hogan took the country's primary pandemic response agency to task for failures in early warning, surveillance, risk assessments, data-sharing with the provinces and follow-up on Canadian travellers who were ordered into quarantine.

"The agency was not adequately prepared to respond to the pandemic, and it underestimated the potential impact of the virus at the onset of the pandemic," said the AG's review — one of three that looked at the Liberal government's management of the COVID-19 crisis, which as of Thursday had killed 22,780 Canadians and brought the country's economy to its knees.

I am discouraged that the Public Health Agency of Canada did not address long-standing issues, some of which were raised repeatedly for more than two decades.

    - Auditor General Karen Hogan

The auditor also reviewed federal COVID emergency benefit programs such as the Canada emergency response benefit (CERB) and the Canada emergency wage subsidy (CEWS) to determine whether the benefits reached people in need and whether the government imposed enough controls to limit abuse.

Her most critical comments, however, were reserved for the topic of pandemic preparedness. Hogan said PHAC, which was established to ensure the country was ready for a major outbreak, "was not as well prepared as it could have been" because major contingency plans and issues related to surveillance had not been resolved or dealt with — even though some of them had been pointed out by previous auditors.

"I am discouraged that the Public Health Agency of Canada did not address long-standing issues, some of which were raised repeatedly for more than two decades," Hogan said.

"These issues negatively affected the sharing of health surveillance data between the Agency and the provinces and territories."
'Much more work to do'

While the agency took steps to address some of these problems during the pandemic, she said, "it has much more work to do on its data sharing agreements and information technology infrastructure to better support national disease surveillance in the future."

The report found that the agency's Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), a surveillance system that scours the internet for reports of infectious disease outbreaks in other countries, did not issue an alert to provide an early warning when COVID-19 first emerged in Wuhan, China.
A security person moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a World Health Organization team arrived for a field visit in Wuhan in China's Hubei province on Feb. 3, 2021. (Ng Han Guan/The Associated Press)

The network, which is part of PHAC, did email a daily report to domestic subscribers, including the provinces, with links to related news articles.

Officials at the public health agency defended the low-key approach by saying that at the end of December 2019, other international sources had already shared news of the virus, making it unnecessary to issue an alert.

The auditor also criticized the risk assessments the agency put together after COVID-19 began spreading around the globe — reports which key leaders used to make decisions on public health measures such as closing the border. She said those assessments were oblivious to the unfolding global crisis.
Risk assessment failed to appreciate the threat

"The agency assessed that COVID‐19 would have a minimal impact if an outbreak were to occur in Canada," said the audit.

In fact, right up to the point when the World Health Organization declared coronavirus a global pandemic — on March 11, 2020 — those risk assessments continued to rate the threat to the country as "low."

It wasn't until the day after — in response to escalating case counts in Canada and rising concerns among provincial governments — that Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam ordered an upgrade to the risk rating, the review said.
Deputy Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Howard Njoo defended the Public Health Agency of Canada's response to the pandemic, saying the global crisis was "unprecedented." (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)


Speaking prior to the release of the report, Dr. Howard Njoo, the deputy chief public health officer, said the audit offers a snapshot of a particular moment in the pandemic's trajectory and the agency has worked hard to address the problems.

"Certainly, this pandemic is unprecedented," said Njoo. "We haven't had a pandemic like this ... in at least over 100 years."

A lot of countries around the world are learning lessons, he said, and "I think we're all learning from each other ..."
Drawing a blank on the border

The audit also found out that PHAC and the Canada Border Services Agency did not know whether two-thirds of incoming travellers followed quarantine orders.

"The agency referred few of the travellers for in‐person follow‐up to verify compliance with orders," said the review.

Part of that problem could be due to the limits of public health information.

    Tax agency lacked tools to keep wage subsidy away from ineligible employers: AG

    Ottawa proposes $7B top-up to transfers for health care, infrastructure

    Conservatives demand national plan to end COVID-19 restrictions

"Of the individuals considered to be at risk of non‐compliance, the agency referred only 40 per cent to law enforcement and did not know whether law enforcement actually contacted them," said the audit.

The auditor said PHAC also fell down on data sharing. The public health agency did have an agreement with the provinces and territories to share data, but it was not fully implemented when the pandemic hit.

The auditor general also said the federal government didn't do enough to ensure the "integrity" of the Canada emergency wage subsidy program (CEWS).
'Integrity' of CEWS program 'at risk'

CEWS was launched in March 2020 to subsidize up to 75 per cent of wages for workers who were kept on their employers' payrolls.

To get the program out the door as quickly as possible, the CRA was only able to conduct limited tests before approving payments, said the audit.

"Without effective controls for validating payments, the integrity of the program is at risk and ineligible employers might receive the subsidy," the audit concluded.

It also said the agency did not have up‑to‑date earnings and tax data for assessing applicants. For example, 28 per of applicants did not file a GST/HST return for the 2019 calendar year.

"We noted that the subsidy was paid to applicants despite their history of penalties for failure to remit and other advance indicators of potential insolvency," said the audit. "Indeed, the agency held no legislative authority to deny access to the subsidy on the basis of an employer's history of non‑compliance with tax obligations."

[crazy canuck]

Kinda like that pandemic stuff, actually.

The same reasoning could be applied for the pandemic, if a province had decided not to implement any measure to slow the growth, or if the Federal had decided to set the bar higher than the provincial standards.

I do not disagree with the ruling, but I'm not reassured by this decision about Feds encroachment on provincial responsibilities.

It is not just that the provinces failed to implement any measure, there must also be evidence that the province is unable to do so.  COVID is actually a very good example of why the case safeguards provincial powers.  Even of a province decided to go all US Red State and not have any restrictions, that would not prevent other provinces from taking effective measures within their own jurisdictions.

Also, the analysis has nothing to do with the Feds setting a higher standard than a province.  The Court is quite clear that is not a reason for the Feds intruding on provincial jurisdiction.

[viper37]

Kinda like that pandemic stuff, actually.

The same reasoning could be applied for the pandemic, if a province had decided not to implement any measure to slow the growth, or if the Federal had decided to set the bar higher than the provincial standards.

I do not disagree with the ruling, but I'm not reassured by this decision about Feds encroachment on provincial responsibilities.

It is not just that the provinces failed to implement any measure, there must also be evidence that the province is unable to do so.  COVID is actually a very good example of why the case safeguards provincial powers.  Even of a province decided to go all US Red State and not have any restrictions, that would not prevent other provinces from taking effective measures within their own jurisdictions.

Also, the analysis has nothing to do with the Feds setting a higher standard than a province.  The Court is quite clear that is not a reason for the Feds intruding on provincial jurisdiction.

But in this case, there is a clear scientific consensus that unlimited GHG emissions are harmful. 

I'm more concerned about cases where the evidence is not as clear as in this case, were only climate deniers and other tinfoil hatters would insist everything is fine, like the pandemic.

Maybe I'll have to read that ruling with a clear head later.

[Zoupa]

I don't argue that there is no anti-French/ anti-Quebec sentiment in English Canada. Living in Ottawa it was definitely a thing I encountered. And I have no reason to doubt the things I heard from my Franco-Ontarian and Quebecois friends either. I've seen a lot less (IIRC none) out here in BC though - I'd be curious  to hear Zoupa's perspective on anti-French sentiment out here, since I expect he's a lot more attuned to it.

Well, my car got egged while sitting in the parking lot of the appartment complex we were renting at about a month after we moved to BC.

It was the only car hit, and the only car with Quebec plates.

So there's that.