May 5, 2021 - Loonie Politics

One third of the working age population in Ontario was born outside Canada; in Quebec, the number is one in six. Absent those people, you could lop 20 per cent off Ontario’s GDP and 10 per cent off Quebec’s output, according to a recent report by Scotiabank.

Immigration is an economic imperative for a country with a low birth rate and an aging population, that is speeding towards a worker-to-retiree ratio of two-to-one in the next decade or so.

But we are in the middle of a global pandemic that has restricted mobility between countries.

How does Canada maintain the steady stream of new workers that are needed to grow the economy?

Marco Mendicino, the ebullient immigration minister, has an ambitious plan to make up for last year’s shortfall by bringing in 1.2 million new residents over the next three years, including 401,000 arrivals in 2021. He said he remains confident we will hit that target, despite the new waves of the virus sweeping the globe.

Canada attracted 184,000 new residents last year, far short of the target of 341,000 but still an eye-popping number in the circumstances. If you wondered who was flying in the middle of the pandemic, now you know.

Mendicino plans to galvanize this year’s effort by opening a pathway to permanent residence for 90,000 people who are already in Canada on temporary visas as students or workers in sectors classified as essential by the government. From Thursday, the department of immigration will start accepting applications for its six new limited time streams, including those who have been in the frontlines in hospitals and long-term care homes. For French-speaking applicants, there are no intake caps, the government said.

The “domestic immigration” initiative is a smart move that has buy-in from opposition parties. “It’s welcome. Many of these people are 50 per cent processed already, so that means less resources are used. Most are already contributing to Canada, such as the truck drivers taking life-saving supplies coast to coast,” said Conservative immigration critic, Jasraj Singh Hallan.

Opposition criticism is limited to the Liberal government’s managerial competence. Hallan is critical of Ottawa’s ability to process 400,000 new applications, given the lengthy backlogs that still exist in the system. “They set targets but are never able to meet their targets,” he said.

Still, it suggests the consensus around immigration as a positive contributor to Canadian society still exists. In its last year in office, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government brought in 271,833 new residents. During its time in power, the Conservatives oversaw the arrival of 2.8 million new Canadians, mainly from countries like India, China, Pakistan and the Philippines. In his book Right Here, Right Now, Harper said governments that “make immigration legal, secure and in the main economically driven” will see it have high levels of public confidence.

Mendicino said he never takes that confidence for granted. This year, the target is to have 232,500 new residents, or 58 per cent, enter under the economic class stream; 103,000, or 26 per cent, under the family reunification stream and around 65,000, or 16 per cent, under the refugee and humanitarian classification — percentages that are broadly consistent with the Harper years. “We feel we have the mix right,” said Mendicino.

But how comfortable are Canadians going to be with hundreds of thousands of newcomers arriving from countries that are currently COVID hotspots?

Public opinion polls suggest that, while Canadians remain broadly in favour of mass immigration as an economic driver, there is trepidation about increasing the level while there is still uncertainty about the future course of the pandemic.

A Leger poll last October suggested 52 per cent of respondents wanted to see a lower level of immigration maintained for at least a year. A Nanos poll in November said only 17 per cent wanted more immigration in 2021 than in 2020.

Mendicino says the government is extremely concerned about securing Canada’s borders, including by banning flights from hotspots – a move that reduced international air traffic that was already down 90 per cent year on year by another third. “But in the long-term, we are very much committed to ensuring that we can attract highly-skilled talented people, so we can retain our competitive advantage,” he said.

The Conservatives may yet opt to call for lower levels of immigration because of the pandemic. In his leadership campaign, Erin O’Toole said that in the aftermath of COVID, it may be necessary to temporarily reduce skilled immigration “as it would be unfair to applicants if there are no employment prospects.”

If the Conservative leader does opt for a lower immigration target, it will be because he thinks it will sell politically, rather than because of any economic imperative.

The survey of private sector economists used by the Department of Finance in last month’s budget forecasts that unemployment will return to pre-pandemic levels next year.

The pervasive nature of immigration in this country means opinion is more enlightened than elsewhere. It’s hard to be snobbish when most of us are a generation or less removed from steerage and economy class.

At the same time, the influx of hundreds of thousands of people when the virus is still mutating does not seem to be a prudent course of action.

Canadians may yet conclude that you can have too much of a good thing.

â€¢ Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter: IvisonJ

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On this date last year, China conducted the first launch of its Long March 5B rocket, a new version of the slightly troubled Long March 5 vehicle. The 5B is designed to carry voluminous payloads, and it was called into service to carry two important capsules to orbit. One was a prototype for a manned spacecraft to carry Chinese astronauts; the other was a “re-entry” capsule designed to be able to bring home cargoes from future Chinese space stations.

The “crewed” spacecraft, without human passengers, is said to have performed well and eventually landed safely in Inner Mongolia. The cargo boat malfunctioned coming home and was lost.

Relatively little heed was paid to the fate of the Long March 5B rocket itself, which caused alarm amongst U.S. military sky trackers when its orbit unexpectedly began to degrade, creating the possibility that debris might survive the heat of re-entry and land anyplace along the rocket’s ground track. That’s just what it seems to have done,

raining bits of metal down on the Ivory Coast

. There was no harm to persons or property damage. Despite the loss of one of the two payloads and the haphazard discarding of the booster, China declared the mission a success.

The second-ever Long March 5B mission lifted off on April 29 of this year, and it carried a much more precious cargo — Tianhe, an inhabitable module that is supposed to form the core of China’s third space station. The launch was broadcast live on Chinese television, and by all accounts the Tianhe module was

placed in the correct orbit

But once again the rocket it rode on has been chucked aside like a beer can, and once again skywatchers are trying to guess where and when it will come down. This is expected to happen on May 9 or 10, but the object is travelling at nearly 28,000 km/hr and it is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when the atmosphere will latch onto it and snatch it earthward.

This being a watery world, the rocket is most likely to splash into the Pacific. (Its flight path, happily, hardly interacts with Canadian soil.) But it seems obvious that China doesn’t know or care. The other spacefaring countries took steps to make sure large objects didn’t reach the surface uncontrolled after Skylab, the original space station, fell helplessly upon the Australian outback in 1979. CBC News interviewed an astrophysicist yesterday who gave them a quote to make any reporter jealous: “It’s just considered bad practice to throw large pieces of metal from the sky.”

“Bad practice” might be another way of saying “defiance of one’s natural duty to his fellow man.” The Long March 5B problem illustrates some features of the Chinese progress that is supposed by some to be about to leave the Western world devastated. Broadly speaking, the Chinese space program is trying to replicate accomplishments that NASA had mastered 40 or 50 years ago; the follow-up joke “Can NASA still do those things?” may be very natural, but NASA is flying solar-powered helicopters around Mars right now.

The beer-can approach to rocketry seems like a sign that China is in a hurry to catch up, and its glam new space station might have military applications. It would be a surprise if it didn’t. The ethical norms being asserted against China were once ignored by the space-pioneering countries, or little thought of; the Chinese state, silent about its rocket refuse, might claim that it is entitled to act in a 1960s way in learning 1960s spaceflight. Then again, maybe it has simply had two unfortunate accidents with the two launches of this model of vehicle. Is Red China a backward country, or an incompetent one, or both?

There is a 1971 UN treaty to handle situations like this: its full name is the Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects. This treaty creates procedures allowing states to claim and recover money for such damages from other states. It’s only been invoked once, and the country that did it is Canada, which billed the Soviet Union $6 million when the nuclear reactor from the Kosmos 954 satellite fell on Great Slave Lake and the surrounding area in 1977.

I know that sentence about a Soviet reactor falling on the Territories, spalling the wilderness with lethal nuggets of radioactive material, will come as news to younger readers. (Unless they’re in, or from, the far north. Those folks know I haven’t misremembered a Cold War thriller as history.) It was such a big news story at the time that there was an entire Saturday Night Live episode about mutant lobsters predicated on it.

Then, in a matter of months, it vanished into the oubliette into which the deep state somehow tosses these things. Canada ended up getting only $3 million from the Soviets, covering part of the cost of the joint U.S.-Canada cleanup effort, but it was thought very worthwhile to establish the reality of the

Space Liability Convention

. Better dust it off just in case.

â€¢ Twitter: colbycosh

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According to a recently published editorial, the thing about Western-world feminism that you probably don’t know is that it does not owe its origin to the 19th-century first-wave suffragists, abolitionists and socialists of song and story, but rather to men — specifically European imperialists and colonialists. From “time immemorial,” the invaders of Muslim lands have always put ideas about women’s equality to crude use in a “colonialist saviour complex” that has persisted in justifying imperial conquests around the world, most recently and notoriously in the case of Afghanistan. “It is typical colonialist nonsense,” the editorial says.

You could mistake the above proposition for an overwrought passage from the lecture notes of some painfully white gender studies professor who is determined to attract public notoriety sufficient to have her (or his) colleagues take him (or her) seriously. You could throw up your hands and utter some hoarse jibe about the absurdity of wokeness, or about “political correctness gone mad.” You’d be dead wrong about the passage coming from a gender studies professor, but it isn’t going too far to suggest you could be making an honest mistake.

It’s the lexicon that would throw you off. Like this: “Western cries of ‘women’s rights’ appear a harmless demand. But when coupled with the incompatibility of much of these rights with the Islamic religion, their destructive effects on human society, their historical origins and the dangerous agendas for Muslim societies curtained behind them, a more sinister perspective emerges.” It’s the diction that would lead you astray. “The feminist ideology has been utilized for decades as a Western justification for the invasion, subjugation and bullying of Muslims. Today, the West seeks to ideologically subvert Muslim cultures through ideologies such as feminism.”

You shouldn’t require any familiarity with the irrational excesses associated with the social sciences and humanities departments of certain third-rate universities to notice something a bit off about these claims. But if you find yourself agreeing with this sort of thing, you might want to check your head. The passages quoted above come directly from “Feminism as Colonial Tool,” an editorial published only last week in Voice of Jihad, the English-language propaganda organ of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, otherwise known as the Taliban.

It’s clever, in the same way the effort mounted by proxies of the Chinese Communist Party to subvert and weaponize the recent and urgently necessary “Stop Asian Hate” mobilizations in Western countries — a mischief rarely noticed outside the community of Uyghur human rights activists and pro-democracy diaspora Hongkongers — is also quite clever.

Like the Taliban, in recent months Beijing has become quite determined to manipulate “woke” habits of mind (I really wish “woke” wasn’t a word with such valuable currency these days, but for want of something more precise and explanatory, we’re stuck with it). Sometimes, the effort falls flat, as when the Chinese embassy in Washington had its Twitter account suspended in January for explaining away the dramatic decline in Uyghur birth rates in Xinjiang with the claim that China had emancipated Uyghur women from their status as “baby-making machines.”

But things have come a long way since January 2019, when Beijing’s then-ambassador to Canada, Lu Shaye, invited ridicule upon himself when he wrote in the Hill Times that Canadian revulsion over the abduction and imprisonment of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor was an eruption of “white supremacy.” While Twitter and Facebook are blocked in China, Beijing’s various propaganda platforms targeting mostly Western audiences have now amassed an estimated 28 million Twitter followers and roughly 200 million Facebook followers, including an unknown number of “bots” and fake accounts.

In the Taliban case, its weird critical-theory-type polemic exploits a widespread illiteracy in Euro-American discourse about Muslim societies, and particularly about Afghan society. It’s an illiteracy that invites the proliferation of a species of racism that could be called “progressive.” Like “woke”, “progressive” is a jumbled abstraction, since it can describe profoundly regressive and authoritarian tendencies as well as the politics of emancipation. But like “woke,” we’re probably stuck with it.

Afghan women aren’t taking their cues from any “colonialist saviour” in wanting to maintain what few gains they’ve made in law, education, social status and employment since the brutally misogynistic Taliban satrapy of Pakistan’s intelligence establishment was overthrown in 2001. And that desire for basic human freedom runs across Afghan society.

In its 15 years of intensive public-opinion polling in Afghanistan, the Asia Foundation has consistently found that Afghans overwhelmingly support the rights of women to work outside the home, vote, run for political office and so on. Now that the United States is determined to pull its troops out of the country by September, a crushing anxiety has set in among Afghans. Nobody wants peace more than Afghans do, but still, a series of Asia Foundation polls conducted since last September show that between 82 and 85 per cent of respondents say it’s “very important” that women’s rights be protected in any so-called peace deal with the Taliban.

Whatever the Voice of Jihad claims about what Afghans want, “troops out” has never been a top concern among ordinary Afghans, at least not since the days of the bloody Soviet occupation in the 1980s. In the Asia Foundation’s past 15 years of barometer readings, popular Afghan support for anti-government forces like the Taliban has rarely broken the double-digit barrier.

The thing about “woke” politics is that anyone can play the game.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet — known the world over for preening in front of a mirror while asking, who is the wokeist of all? — are at the moment impaled on a “Me Too” crisis of their own making by apparently ignoring grave allegations of sexual misconduct at the highest levels of the military command, and by spending the past six years mostly ignoring the recommendations in a 2015 judge’s report that laid out a process for dealing with allegations of sexual misconduct in the military, and now by appointing another judge to conduct another review of what has gone so badly wrong in coping with grave allegations of sexual misconduct in the armed forces.

Until this week, my favourite instance of wokeplay, which is almost entirely a phenomenon of the rich, the tenured and the powerful, was the Trade Commissioner Service’s heavily subsidized Women in Business Virtual Mission, run by the Canada-China Business Council. Bear in mind that Beijing is at the moment engaged in a mass purging and harassment campaign specifically targeting feminists, whose modest standpoints are said to be treasonous. The just-concluded Canadian part of the mission boasted that it was also “inclusive of those who self-identify as women.”

But this week, the winning iteration comes from the Central Intelligence Agency’s delightful

recruitment advertisement

that features a self-described “intersectional” cisgender Latina millennial and woman of colour with a generalized anxiety disorder and an aversion to “misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.”

American “progressives” were upset that their diction and grammar had been so cunningly appropriated by the monstrous and many-tentacled coup plotter and Latin American death-squad mobilizer of myth and legend. American conservatives collapsed in fits of despond about the woke usurpation of a storied American institution, now expunged of all its manliness and vigour.

If there is a lesson here, it might be that if a distinctly recognizable political style that makes such bold claims for itself can be so easily absorbed and reconstituted to suit the Taliban, Xi Jinping’s loudmouth emissaries, morally dubious Canadian multinationals, Justin Trudeau and his cabinet, and the CIA, it might not be quite the sticking-it-to-the-man phenomenon you thought it was.

Terry Glavin is an author and a journalist.

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Canada’s decision to extend the period between doses of the COVID-19 vaccines, as well as a modest increase in supply in recent weeks, have allowed us to catch up with some of our international peers on administering first doses. But given the ongoing scarcity of vaccines, and questions over deliveries from certain manufacturers, there may soon come a time when it will be necessary to mix and match doses. We need clarity from public health officials on whether it will be allowed in this country.

As of May 4, about 38 per cent of the population has received one dose. This compares favourably with the European Union, where about 34 per cent have received their first dose. However, Canada lags far behind many other countries in terms of the number of people who have been fully vaccinated: only three per cent of Canadians have received both doses, compared to nine per cent in the EU.

The reason for this large discrepancy between first and second doses has been the limited supply of vaccines. Following the lead of the United Kingdom, which announced at the end of December that it would observe a 12-week dosing interval for both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca (AZ) vaccines, Canada followed suit with an even longer gap between doses.

In a Feb. 24 report by the U.K. Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, the rationale for this strategy was clearly explained. The report notes that the 12-week gap between first and second doses is aimed at reducing deaths and preventing hospitalizations by giving some protection to as much of the population as possible in as short a time frame as possible.

The efficacy of this strategy depends on three factors: “1) how well a single dose of a vaccine prevents serious and hospitalized COVID-19 cases; 2) the overall efficacy of a single dose of the vaccine; and 3) whether the protective effects of a single dose persist over the extended (up to 12 week) period.”

Points 1 and 2 are not controversial. It is well established that all the major vaccines have a fairly high degree of efficacy after the first dose, including in preventing death and hospitalization. The controversy surrounds point 3, where there is reasonably good evidence that a 12-week gap works well with AZ, but is largely untested when it comes to the Pfizer and Moderna shots.

Pfizer Canada has said that it can’t vouch for the longevity of protection received from the first dose, especially given Canada’s very lengthy dosing interval of up to 16 weeks, which is the longest in the world.

This is especially problematic for those who received a dose of either Pfizer or Moderna in the winter or early spring. For someone who received a first dose in March and has been told their second dose won’t be administered till July, it’s not clear how well protected they will be past the 21-28 day window recommended for these vaccines. By contrast, those who received an AZ shot in March should be safe until early July.

There are two critical priorities going forward. First, provinces that administered early first doses of Pfizer or Moderna, especially to the elderly and front-line workers, need to prioritize the second dose as soon as possible.

Second, given that Procurement Minister Anita Anand has made it clear that Pfizer will be the workhorse vaccine for Canadians, a call must be made very soon on whether those who received a first dose of AZ will be allowed to mix vaccines. Canada is far behind other countries on settling the debate around mixing. The U.K., France, Germany and other European countries have already authorized mixing.

France went further by pro-actively recommending that those who received a first dose of AZ and are under 55 should receive a second dose of an mRNA vaccine, such as Pfizer or Moderna. The French and German decisions were taken in early April. The U.K. made a call in favour of mixing where necessary back in January, although health officials there note that it is preferable for people to receive two doses of the same vaccine, if possible.

It’s noteworthy that these European countries, whose health regulators are every bit as professional and cautious as Canada’s, pre-emptively took the decision to authorize mixing, foreseeing both a possible shortage of AZ doses as well as the rare blood clot issues among some age groups that have bedevilled the AZ vaccine.

Why is it taking Canadian officials so inordinately long to make a call, given our own supply constraints, rising infections and unresolved concerns around AZ? It’s not clear from the public record that a study on mixing vaccines has even been authorized in Canada, or whether it will be. Officials here say they’re watching studies taking place in countries such as the U.K., but Great Britain and other countries have already authorized mixing in advance of any formal findings.

In an ideal world, regulators would wait for the results of studies before making a decision on an untested procedure such as mixing COVID-19 vaccines. But we cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. It’s time to make a call.

National Post

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From introducing legislation to increase the federal minimum wage, to earmarking funds to improve standards in long-term care, all while defying the deficit doomsayers, the grits have presented a budget that makes meaningful progress on several key files.

The most significant component of the budget (and arguably the most transformational one) is Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s allocation of $30 billion for the implementation of a national child-care program.

Though details remain, and with unavoidable federal-provincial hand-wrangling set to ensue, Freeland’s substantial investment into child-care is nonetheless an immensely positive development; one that if properly executed, will strengthen Canada’s frayed social safety net.

When viewed in its entirety, the government’s 2021 financial plan is undoubtedly a far more activist budget than we are used to seeing from the Trudeau Liberals. Or from any other federal government for that matter, going back at least 40 years.

However, as resolute as Freeland and Prime Minister Trudeau have been on (finally) forging ahead on child-care, all while continuing to run deficits in spite of the habitual warnings from neo-con naysayers, they have been equally as gutless in challenging the super-rich.

In her budget, Freeland introduced only three new taxes measures (as far as I could read, at 739 pages, the budget was unnecessarily long and could have really used an edit) that the Liberals would be using to help raise revenue and level the economic playing field. These included new taxes on luxury cars, boats and personal aircraft, a one percent annual tax on vacant property purchased by foreign investors, and a three percent tax on giant multinationals that operate online marketplaces and social media platforms.

While these measures are preferable to no action at all, they really are quite pathetic and entirely insufficient in addressing the extreme wealth inequalities we are contending with today.

For instance, over the next five years, the new taxes on big tech companies are only expected to bring in a measly 3.4 billion. The new taxes on luxury items will see even less returns: a paltry $604 million over the same period.

This will do squat when you consider vast degree of inequality we are dealing with.

Just consider some of the latest data on the subject, compiled by the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

According to the Officer’s 2016 report, the richest one percent in Canada now controls an astounding 25 percent of the country’s wealth. Some, however, estimate that the number is even higher, at 29 percent, after it was reported that Canada’s billionaires increased their wealth by $78 billion over the past year, at the same time millions of citizens were losing their jobs and struggling to pay their bills and stay out of insolvency.

Freeland is well aware of this. So too is Trudeau. Yet still, they chose not to act on the issue with the urgency it requires, preferring instead to continue with the status-quo.

Now, if Freeland had shown the same fortitude she displayed on child-care and overall deficit spending, she would have championed far more robust taxation measures, like say, the implementation of a wealth tax.

Not only would a wealth tax have provided revenue for Freeland and the Liberal government to spend on other, necessary initiatives, (i.e., the creation of a national pharmacare program) but it would have had real influence in shrinking Canada’s unsustainable wealth inequality.

In fact, according to economist Alex Hemingway, a one percent tax alone on fortunes above $20 million would boost revenue in its first year by approximately $10 billion. That would soon pay for Freeland’s child-care plan, along with much else.

Perhaps what is most frustrating about this all, besides the federal government’s continued underfunding of its social safety net, is that instituting a wealth tax would not have even been politically challenging for the Liberals to do.

According to polling conducted by Abacus Data, a majority of Canadians (79 percent to be precise) support such a tax, including not only Liberals and others to the party’s left, but traditional Conservative Party voters as well.

Of course, effectively addressing income and wealth inequality requires much more government action than just implementing a wealth tax. Other policy solutions must be pursued in tandem to have a meaningful impact on wealth inequality. These include a combination of raising corporate, personal, and capital gains taxes, implementing an inheritance tax, and closing the many tax loopholes that exist in our system.

Unfortunately, in her budget, Freeland chose to do the bare minimum and continue to allow the status quo of extreme wealth inequality to persist.

Photo Credit: CBC News

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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Ah, the blame game!

This immediately recognizable term is defined in the Cambridge English Dictionary as a "situation in which people try to blame each other for something bad that has happened."

Those of who have either worked in politics, written and spoken about politics, or both have witnessed the blame game up close and personal. It knows no race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, income status, geographical location or ideological bent.

The political left blames the political right for just about everything. The political right blames the political left for just about everything. Conservatives blame Liberals. Liberals blame Conservatives. Conservatives blame Socialists. Socialists blame Conservatives. Liberals blame Socialists. Socialists blame Liberals.

I could go on, but it's easy to figure out.

Are there ever moments where the blame game depicts an accurate situation? Yes. There's always an element of truth in the air when fingers are pointed in vastly different directions. Fact can also trump fiction depending on what you believe is fact and fiction, of course.

Here's an example.

Who's really to blame for Canada's issues with vaccine distribution during COVID-19? Is the federal government mostly at fault? Or are provincial and municipal governments primarily at fault?

To be clear, no level of government in this country has been entirely blameless. All of them have made minor and major mistakes. When the coronavirus pandemic comes to an end through a combination of mass vaccinations and herd immunity in a few years' time, reports written about government policies, positions and decisions will depict significant errors, omissions, inactions and failures in great detail. No stone will be left unturned.

Nevertheless, the federal Liberals should clearly receive the lion's share of the blame. More than any provincial government, no matter the political stripe and the litany of municipal governments that serve our local communities.

Some people will argue this assessment was made for purely partisan reasons and to score political points. I'm afraid not.

Canada contained the effects of COVID-19 about as well as could be expected in 2020. The virus didn't spread too rapidly in most provinces. Lockdown/stay-at-home measures were fairly effective in the first and second waves. An enormous amount of money was spent in emergency relief funds for individuals and companies, which is why our national deficit currently sits at $354.2 billion, up from $39.4 billion in 2019-20. Alas, it's not like we didn't know this was going to happen, even if the final figure announced in the federal budget was mind-blowing.

When Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca produced excellent results with research studies and trials related to their vaccines, most of us assumed we would be able to regain some sense of normalcy in 2021. Until it became clear there was a huge disconnect between euphoric Canadians and Ottawa's political messaging.

What Canadians found out was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals had quietly established a working relationship with a little-known Chinese vaccine maker, CanSino Biologics, in hopes of creating a COVID-19 vaccine. That study failed in August, which forced the PM to scramble like mad to make deals with the mainstream vaccine makers. This threw Canada way back in line, and helps explain why we experienced so many delays with Pfizer, Moderna et al.

It also helps explain why Canada consistently ranked in the mid-to-high 50's, and briefly in the low 60's, in terms of the international vaccine rollout (per capita) during January, February and part of March. That's according to Our World In Data, which is managed by Oxford University/Oxford Martin School. We were behind many less developed countries, and almost on par with a few tiny island nations.

Trudeau and the Liberals still refuse to accept one iota of blame for this debacle, even though it turned into a national and international embarrassment.

Hold on. Aren't the provinces to blame for issues related to vaccine supply and management, storage and COVID-19 policies during lockdowns?

Indeed, the provinces have made plenty of mistakes, from Ontario PC Premier Doug Ford to B.C. NDP Premier John Horgan. Nevertheless, it was Ottawa who purchased, distributed and delivered the vaccines on a province-by-province basis. This specifically led to the vaccine shortfall we faced in Canada in early 2021.

Meanwhile, Trudeau's former Principal Secretary Gerald Butts tweeted this on May 1, "I talk to a lot of people in health care. I don't know one who thinks we could have avoided the third wave with vaccines alone. Not one. This is just not true."

Yes, the third wave would have arrived regardless of Canada's vaccine supply. At the same time, if Trudeau had focused on ordering from major vaccine companies like Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, and not put all his eggs in one basket with an unknown vaccine maker from Communist China, we would surely be further ahead today instead of having played catch-up for three months. Many people got sick, and some died, during this period of delay and confusion caused by the Trudeau Liberals.

Will Ottawa accept blame for vaccine distribution issues during COVID-19? Of course not. The only blame game the federal Liberals will ever play is the one that involves pointing fingers at everyone else but them. They have plenty of experience in doing this.

Photo Credit: CBC News

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The Quebec Superior Court’s recent ruling on Bill 21 has set up a constitutional face-off over the largely untested limits of parliamentary sovereignty in Canada, raising questions about whether the notwithstanding clause can be used to override guarantees that predate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Passed by the national assembly of Quebec in 2019, Bill 21 prohibits public servants from wearing religious garb or symbols while on the job, ostensibly in an effort to preserve the religious neutrality of the state.

Proponents of Bill 21 insist that the legislation is necessary to promote the ideal of “laicity,” under which public institutions are to be protected from the influence of religious conviction. Conversely, detractors, such as myself, claim that the law codifies discrimination and prevents religious people from participating in public life as equal citizens.

The general consensus among legal scholars has been that, in the normal course of litigation, Bill 21 would be found to violate religious freedom and religious equality, both of which are guaranteed by the charter. Anticipating this, the national assembly invoked Section 33 of the charter, the so-called notwithstanding clause.

In essence, Section 33 allows Parliament and the provincial legislatures to declare that a law shall operate in spite of any guarantee contained in Section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of the charter, subject only to legislative renewal every five years.

The notwithstanding clause thus empowers Canadian legislatures to judicially circumvent many of the charter’s most important guarantees, including freedom of religion, freedom of expression, the right to equality before and under the law, as well as the right to life, liberty and security of the person.

The dominant narrative holds that the notwithstanding clause was a necessary compromise leading up to the enactment of the charter in 1982: fearing that courts would use this new instrument to strike down duly enacted laws, the provincial premiers insisted on a provision that would uphold parliamentary sovereignty in the face of judicial activism.

From an international perspective, however, Section 33 is a constitutional anomaly. Virtually no other bill of rights allows lawmakers to derogate from fundamental rights and freedoms without justification, much less in a way that essentially evades judicial scrutiny.

Indeed, in the Superior Court’s ruling on Bill 21, Judge Marc-André Blanchard held that, despite its manifest flaws, he was unable to strike down the legislation as a violation of either religious freedom or religious equality. While acknowledging that the law “sends the message that people who practice their faith do not deserve to participate fully in Quebec society,” he concluded that — outside of a narrow range of circumstances — the invocation of Section 33 insulates Bill 21 from being rendered of no force and effect.

Blanchard further rejected submissions that a prototypical form of religious freedom predates the enactment of the charter, and that, consequently, Section 33 cannot be used to override this foundational guarantee. This is disappointing. While these submissions might seem trite, they correctly recognize that the freedoms guaranteed by the charter did not simply spring into existence in 1982.

On this point, there’s ample evidence that freedom of religion was an accepted principle within Canada’s constitutional architecture well before the charter. Writing in 1922, W.P.M. Kennedy, one of Canada’s first constitutional scholars, affirmed that, “Religious toleration is one of the cornerstones of the Canadian Constitution.”

Similarly, in a landmark 1953 ruling on religious freedom, Supreme Court Justice Ivan Rand held it unquestionable “that the untrammelled affirmations of religious belief and its propagation … remain as of the greatest constitutional significance throughout the Dominion.”

And yet, the charter has so engulfed our understanding of Canadian constitutionalism that it has led some to accept the untenable conclusion that Section 33 gives our lawmakers unlimited license to override a guarantee as fundamental as freedom of religion.

To appreciate just how potentially dangerous such thinking is, consider this hypothetical scenario: in the not-too-distant future, an extremist government wins a majority of the seats in Parliament and, as part of an effort to satisfy the prejudices of its partisan base, passes a law outlawing the practice of certain minority religions. Knowing that this legislation would otherwise be struck down for violating freedom of religion, the government invokes Section 33 to protect the law against inescapable charter challenges.

We can only hope and pray that such a nightmarish scenario will never come to pass. But if it somehow did, would we really expect a law so contrary to our Constitution’s core principles to be upheld on the basis of the notwithstanding clause?

This isn’t to say that all invocations of Section 33 should be considered illegitimate, even where they’re used to circumvent the judicial application of guarantees such as freedom of religion.

For better or worse, the notwithstanding clause is a duly enacted provision within the Constitution and we must be prepared to accept its occasional use. To this end, some constitutional scholars have made the case that, properly applied, Section 33 can actually help foster institutional dialogue between legislatures and courts on matters relating to the charter.

At the same time, the notwithstanding clause shouldn’t give Canadian legislatures a blank cheque to override rights or freedoms that happen to be enumerated in the charter. Section 33 only applies to the enforcement of specific charter guarantees, not to the underlying source of those guarantees. To insist otherwise ignores the raison d’être of our constitution: namely, to circumscribe the state’s authority over its citizens.

This remains one of the strongest arguments against Bill 21, the validity of which will, in all likelihood, be decided by the Supreme Court of Canada. Regardless of the outcome, one thing is certain: the fate of Bill 21 stands to fundamentally alter the course of Canadian constitutionalism.

National Post

Kristopher Kinsinger is an Ontario lawyer and a master of laws student at McGill University. The views expressed here are his own.

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It’s worse than you think: an ominous phrase that could cover any number of issues, but here refers to the impending closure of the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline that brings vital oil to Ontario. Or, if you’re Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “carbon pollution.”

As my colleague Kelly McParland argued in Tuesday’s National Post, Trudeau is in a cleft stick trying to keep this pipeline open, because Michigan Gov. Gretchen Witmer’s arguments against it are precisely the sorts of things our prime minister has been saying all his adult life about oil spills, etc. But it’s worse than you think, and possibly than he does, because the extinct polar bear in the room is Trudeau’s belief that fossil fuels are useless rubbish.

I don’t just say he thinks they are bad on balance. You could be a global warming alarmist who’s committed to phasing out fossil fuels fast enough to reach net zero by 2050, yet acknowledge that oil, coal and natural gas have brought enormous benefits and still do, so ditching them will hurt. But Trudeau is not in that camp. On the contrary, like U.S. President Joe Biden, he seems to believe getting rid of fossil fuels will be so great, we should do it even if there is no climate crisis.

Clearly the prime minister is not a man given to practicalities. Thus, as McParland pointed out, like Gov. Witmer, he can easily believe a pipeline that has operated safely for seven decades is incredibly dangerous. Or that if we get rid of fossil fuels, starting with the half-million barrels of crude oil and natural gas liquids that Line 5 brings through Michigan to Ontario a day, nobody will miss them.

McParland said the situation “reflects once again the perils that arise from the prime minister’s eagerness to leap into any mosh pit of idealistic fervour that happens along.” And it is true that, like his father, the younger Trudeau is quick-witted but flippant. But there are forms of idealism to which he is not remotely susceptible, like saving unborn babies. So I would suggest there’s considerable consistency in his enthusiasms, driven by deep investment in a worldview that turns on two key related points.

First, good intentions are a mighty instrument for good in human affairs. And second, all utilities can and even must be maximized simultaneously. Thus to fight climate change is to fight racism, gender inequality, poverty, crime and anything else bad, and vice versa. Which makes the remarkably large number of adults who think this way strikingly obtuse about the reality of the trade-offs that are ubiquitous in life, including in government.

Here is Trudeau in his own words, specifically his opening words in an April 22 press release about his address to Biden’s climate summit, where he announced an increased commitment to crack down on greenhouse gases: “Climate change is the greatest long-term threat that we face as a global community, but it is also our greatest economic opportunity. By taking bold climate action, we will create new jobs for the future, strengthen our economy and grow the middle class, while also ensuring clean air and water for our kids and grandkids.”

See? Once he resolves to get rid of fossil fuels, instead of it being a massive bummer requiring remedial actions, belt-tightening and loss of political popularity, it’s the greatest. New jobs, a stronger economy and a middle class 98 feet high. Plus “clean air and water,” as if CO2 really were “pollution” like volatile organic compounds or particulates. This man is not a climate scientist. Or an economist.

Biden also spoke at the summit of this being a “moment of peril, but also a moment of extraordinary possibilities.” And if you think the “peril” is chucking fossil fuels, guess again.

It was all fun and games posing for the cameras in Kyoto or Paris and making vague noises about a better future. But now we’re talking a 40 per cent-plus cut in GHGs within nine years and net zero in 19, so we actually have to start doing stuff. Like getting rid of most fossil fuels. Which makes having that nasty pipeline shut down so it stops spewing such garbage into our gas tanks and furnaces a win-win.

Trudeau doesn’t even have sufficient political leverage to keep the pipeline open, partly because he certainly doesn’t have sufficient intellectual leverage. Not because he believes in a man-made global warming crisis. Because he believes the transition to the green economy is all hugs and puppies, like public policy generally.

Alas, as Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.” So we’re about to discover, or rediscover, the obvious truth that fossil fuels bring enormous benefits and getting rid of them would hurt terribly. And that the utopian, effortlessly polemical philosophy of progressives is seductive but childish.

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Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault appeared to back down Monday after the Liberals made changes to Bill C-10 that would have allowed the CRTC to regulate user-generated videos posted to sites like YouTube as if they were television programs. He now promises to make it “crystal clear” that the “content people upload on social media won’t be considered as programming under the act.” If he follows through on his promise, it will likely appease the NDP, which belatedly raised concerns about free expression, but it should still concern Canadians that the mandarins in Ottawa believe it is their duty to exert control over the cultural content we produce and consume.

It wasn’t that long ago when broadcasting a radio show required expensive recording equipment and high-powered transmitters, and producing anything more elaborate than a home video was only within the purview of a handful of television networks and Hollywood studios. It was in this era that Canada developed its fixation with protecting its domestic cultural industries from the “threat” of American manifest destiny expressed through a form of cultural imperialism.

This type of adolescent thinking led to our current system of Canadian content (Cancon) regulations, which acts as both a government-enforced subsidy to Canadian artists and producers, as well as a significant handicap for broadcasters who now compete in an international market that’s dominated by tech companies like Netflix and Amazon.

Bill C-10 is ostensibly trying to address this imbalance by bringing these companies under the jurisdiction of the CRTC, and thus subject to similar Cancon restrictions — in effect, pulling new media companies into our antiquated 20th-century regulatory environment, instead of doing away with the regulations that don’t meet the needs of the 21st century.

Guilbeault says that C-10 is about getting the “web giants to pay their fair share when it comes to Canadian culture.” It’s a laudable goal given that companies like Google and Facebook have used their oligopolies in the advertising, search and social media markets to devastate the news business in Canada, and around the world. But while countries like France and Australia have been addressing this issue through legislation designed to give media companies more intellectual property rights, Guilbeault has been distracted with dictating what Canadians watch on TV or post on YouTube.

Which is strange, given that, even in the absence of C-10, the streaming giants have been pumping billions of dollars into our economy. Just last week, Netflix announced that it will be opening an office in Toronto and hiring a content executive to work with Canadian creators to produce new films and television series. And in February, Amazon pledged $1.25 million to support content produced by Black and Indigenous Canadians.

Perhaps it would be naive to think these announcements were not made in response to C-10. But Netflix says it has spent $2.5 billion on Canadian productions since 2017, while Amazon has filmed 22 original movies and television series across the country, including in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Montreal and Toronto. While both services have produced or licensed Canadian content, they will still run into problems under C-10 because, despite contributing so much to the Canadian economy, many of their productions will likely not reach the high bar set by the CRTC’s Byzantine Cancon regulations.

Film studios often choose to shoot in Canada because production costs are lower; and Canadians are increasingly turning to streaming services because they offer the type of content people want to watch. It’s a system that’s working well in the absence of government regulation, and one that will only be made worse if companies are forced to comply with the CRTC’s draconian and outdated rules.

Even more troubling is the government’s explicit attempt to remove a clause that exempted “programs that are uploaded to an online undertaking that provides a social media service by a user of the service” from being subject to the act. This would have given the CRTC the power to regulate everything from TikTok videos, to podcasts, to live streams.

The minister now claims the government has seen the light and realized that the “exclusion was too broad,” maintaining that the bill is only intended to regulate “platforms like YouTube when they act as music streamers.” But YouTube is not a radio station, and if the recording industry has a problem with the unauthorized reproduction of songs, it can, and should, address them through copyright law.

And Canadians should not forget that not only did the Liberals explicitly remove the protection of user-generation content from the legislation, despite warnings that it could have serious implications for free speech, they also shut down debate on a motion that simply asked for the bill to be reviewed to ensure it was in compliance with the charter of rights. The government only capitulated following an intense public backlash.

Canadians were right to be outraged that Ottawa would have the hubris to believe it should have a say in the types of cultural content they produce. Culture, after all, is dictated by the masses, not the political elite. This should also be true when it comes to determining what media we want to consume, and how private companies make decisions about what type of content they produce.

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The Kenney government is

taking the province back to the hard regimen of last spring

— patios, gyms, hair salons and personal services to close; K-6 schooling will go online; outdoor gatherings limited to five people; and much more.

This will be enormously painful to many businesses, families and individuals.

But for the next few weeks, there’s really no other way.

The UCP’s special cabinet committee debated for hours Tuesday before coming out with rules that will infuriate many in Premier Jason Kenney’s uneasy caucus.

As we’ve seen in Alberta, rules don’t work without public compliance and enforcement. Both have slipped badly, along with public faith in frequent promises that the crisis will end quickly.

A new poll from Marc Henry’s ThinkHQ shows that 44 per cent of Albertans

feel COVID-19 problems will extend into 2022

A small number think we’ll return to something like normal life by the end of summer, or maybe October.

In total, just 46 per cent believe the ordeal will be over at any point this year.

A month ago, on April 6, Kenney said effusively: “If we just stick to our guns for a few more weeks, we’ll head into what I truly believe will be the best summer in Alberta’s history.”

At that point, the variant strains didn’t dominate. Vaccination was starting to push down deaths. Kenney had some cause for optimism, although many medical experts said he was wrong.

Then the third wave took over, increasing hospitalizations and giving Alberta the highest infection rate in all of Canada.

Saskatchewan and B.C. had similar challenges but are doing much better.

Alberta’s plight is stark and obvious. We are the new epicentre of COVID-19 in Canada. We’re far behind in medical and economic recovery.

This has finally snapped trust in the mantra that if we just do everything right for a little while longer, it will soon end.

The crazy thing is that the UCP line could finally be close to the truth. Vaccine is flooding into the provinces. That will surely push the infection numbers down and ease pressure on the hospitals.

But it won’t be easy for the UCP to win back public confidence.

Kenney has given too much comfort to those who flout the rules. They simply scorn his frequent scolding.

The resistance has spread right into his own caucus, with MLAs who themselves spread ideas that can prolong the pandemic in Alberta.

Marc Henry says, “Kenney has been trying to ride two horses at once. It doesn’t work.” Except in the rodeo.

Unchecked, a truly alarming protest movement has sprung up, aspiring almost to insurrection. It’s hard to miss the similarity, at least in language, with what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

The protesters at McDougall Centre on Tuesday were rallied in part by these words in an email: “Everybody knows these extreme measures have no basis in science whatsoever and that they will lead to the complete destruction of our province and a full descent into tyrannical rule if allowed to continue.

“Jason Kenney has declared war on the people of Alberta. We must rise up now and put an end to these criminal acts of terrorism.”

Everything about that is ridiculous, from the bogus claims about science to the image of Kenney as a dictator and terrorist. His main goal in life has always been to shrink government, not to swell it to tyrannical dimensions.

And yet, his respect for the rights of these people is met with fuming contempt. He owes them nothing.

It is still possible that the latest rules, firmly applied and enforced, can combine with vaccination to finally suppress COVID-19. Widespread support from exhausted Albertans is crucial, too.

As for the premier, it appears that he’s finally picked the right horse. May he ride in a straight line.

Don Braid's column appears regularly in the Herald

dbraid@postmedia.com

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