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Canadian Prime Ministers have a fun gambit: when things start to go really badly for them, they "prorogue" (suspend) Parliament, which dissolves all committees, inquiries, etc, until such time as they are ready to reconvene, with a tabula rasa.
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Most egregiously, the far-right asshole and climate criminal Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament in the middle of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis in order to avoid a no-confidence vote that would have triggered new elections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932009_Canadian_parliamentary_dispute
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932009_Canadian_parliamentary_dispute
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While this DID save Harper's bacon, it also left Canada without a legislature during a global crisis that threatened the nation's entire future. It was a crazed, reckless thing to do.
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Canada has a safeguard to prevent this kind of gambit: as a constitutional monarchy, Canadian parliamentary manoeuvres have to receive the Crown's blessing, in the form of assent from the Governor General, the Queen's rep to Canada.
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This is the sober, apolitical adult supervision that fans of constitutional monarchies are always banging on about, and then-Governor General Michaëlle Jean completely failed to do his fucking job, leaving Canada without a Parliament during the GFC. He literally had one job.
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Proroguing Parliament didn't just save Harper from a no-confidence vote: it also dissolved all the Parliamentary inquiries underway at the time, including the "Afghan detainee transfer" affair, which was investigating Canadian forces' complicity in the torture-murder of POWs.
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In many ways, Trudeau is the anti-Harper: a charismatic Liberal who tells refugees they're welcome in Canada, marches with Greta Thunberg, and appoints the first-ever First Nations person to serve as Attorney General .
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Truly, there is no policy so progressive that Trudeau won't endorse it...provided he doesn't actually have to make it into policy. Because many of his policies are indistinguishable from Harperism, albeit with a better haircut.
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This started before he won the election, when Trudeau (whose father once declared martial law!) whipped his MPs to vote for a human-rights-denying mass surveillance bill, C-51.
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Trudeau did so while insisting that the bill was a massive overreach and totally unacceptable, but claiming that the "loyal opposition" should still back it so as not to be accused of being soft on terrorism in the coming election. He promised to repeal it after.
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Of course, he didn't.
Trudeau is often compared to Obama, a young and charismatic fellow who makes compromises, sure, but comes through in the clutch.
Tell that to pipeline protesters.
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Trudeau is often compared to Obama, a young and charismatic fellow who makes compromises, sure, but comes through in the clutch.
Tell that to pipeline protesters.
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After the Obama administration killed the Transcanada Pipeline - the continent-spanning tube that would make filthy, planet-destroying tar sands profitable enough to bring to market - Trudeau bailed it out, spending billions of federal dollars to keep it alive.
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Then, Trudeau - who campaigned on nation-to-nation truth and reconciliation with First Nations - announced that he would shove this toxic tar-sand tube through unceded treaty lands across the breadth of the naiton.
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And then he had the AUDACITY to march with Greta Thunberg at the head of a climate march, demanding a change to policies that would see billions dead in the coming century.
HIS OWN policies.
I mean, Trudeau's boosters have a point - Harper NEVER could have pulled that off.
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HIS OWN policies.
I mean, Trudeau's boosters have a point - Harper NEVER could have pulled that off.
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The Harper years were a Trumpian orgy of blatant self-dealing and cronyism.
The Trudeau years, on the other hand...
One of Trudeau's major donors is SNC Lavalin, a crime syndicate masquerading as a global engineering firm (think Halliburton with less morals).
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The Trudeau years, on the other hand...
One of Trudeau's major donors is SNC Lavalin, a crime syndicate masquerading as a global engineering firm (think Halliburton with less morals).
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SNC Lavalin had done so much crime that it was on its final notice with the Canadian legal sysem, a probation that it must not violate on penalty of real, big boy federal criminal prosecutions.
Then it did more crimes.
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Then it did more crimes.
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Remember Trudeau's historic appointment of a First Nations woman to the Attorney General's seat? Now was AG Jody Wilson-Raybould's moment to shine.
As Wilson-Raybould began aggressively pursuing these corporate criminals, she started getting calls from Trudeau's office.
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As Wilson-Raybould began aggressively pursuing these corporate criminals, she started getting calls from Trudeau's office.
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For avoidance of doubt, these were not calls of support. They were demands to drop the case and let the SNC Lavalin crime syndicate get off scot-free. Eventually the PM himself called her and demanded that she give his cronies a pass on their repeated criminal actions.
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Wilson-Raybould went public, decrying political meddling in the justice system. Trudeau denied everything and began to smear her (Harper had tons of scandals like this, BTW, only the counterpart was usually a rich old white guy, not a First Nations woman).
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But Wilson-Raybould had recorded the conversations, and she released the recordings, and proved that Trudeau had lied about the whole thing. Trudeau fired her and kicked her out of the party.
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But at least he's not Trump, right? He's the anti-Trump! (Well, except for the pipeline and that time he announced "No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there").
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Remember the Muslim Ban? As Trump was tormenting refugees at the US border, Trudeau tweeted "To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada."
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Yes, that was awesome. There is no policy so progressive that Trudeau won't endorse it...provided that he never has to do anything to make it happen.
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Canada and the US have a "Safe Third Country Agreement" that says that asylum-seekers turned away from the US border can't try again in Canada. To make #WelcomeToCanada more than a hashtag, Trudeau's government would have to suspend that agreement.
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Instead, Trudeau's government insisted that under Trump, "the conditions of the Safe Third Country Agreement continued to be met" and thus they would not suspend the agreement and give hearings to those turned away by Trump's border guards.
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But at least Trudeau handled the pandemic better than Harper handled the Great Financial Crisis.
No, really, he did!
Mostly.
I mean, unless you were in a nursing home or on a First Nations reservation.
https://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/an-emergency-season-pandemic/
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No, really, he did!
Mostly.
I mean, unless you were in a nursing home or on a First Nations reservation.
https://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/an-emergency-season-pandemic/
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But still, Trudeau's government did a MUCH better job than the Trump government, or Boris Johnson's Tories. Neither Liberals nor Conservatives will really fight cronyism, climate change or authoritarianism, but there are still substantive differences between them.
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But in some ways, they are depressingly similar.
Take corruption.
Long before the plague struck, @canadaland was publishing damning reports on We Charity, a massive, beloved Canadian charitable institution nominally devoted to ending child slavery.
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Take corruption.
Long before the plague struck, @canadaland was publishing damning reports on We Charity, a massive, beloved Canadian charitable institution nominally devoted to ending child slavery.
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Canadaland's initial reporting on the charity focused on its partnerships with companies that were using child slaves to make their products, but the investigations mushroomed after the charity sent dire legal threats to the news organisation over its coverage.
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And then Canadaland founder @JesseBrown found himself smeared by a US dirty-tricks organization that got its start working for GOP politicians, who got a contract to plant editorials criticizing Canadaland's We coverage in small-town US newspapers.
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Private eyes started following Brown around, even keeping tabs on his small children. Rather than being intimidated, Brown kept up the pressure on We, which prompted whistleblowers to leak him even more details about the charity's activities.
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These included massive, mysterious real-estate holdings, hard-to-excuse criminal investigations of its Kenyan activities, and (here's where I've been going with this all along) GIANT CASH PAYMENTS to Trudeau's family, as well as valuable gifts to his Finance Minister.
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And, as with the Wilson-Reybould affair, Trudeau's initial response to this was to simply deny it, calling his accusers liars. But then the scandal kept unspooling, his Finance Minister quit in disgrace, the charity (sort of) folded up and shut down, and Trudeau...
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Well, Trudeau prorogued Parliament, shutting down Canada's government in the midst of a crisis that was - unimaginably - even worse than the 2008 crisis that Harper had left the nation rudderless through to avoid his own scandal.
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(Again, for constitutional monarchy fans, that's two entirely political proroguings in the midsts of global crises, signed off on by the Queen's supposedly apolitical and sober check on reckless activity)
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Shutting down Parliament seems to have rescued Trudeau's government from snap elections, which may well have been won by the Tories, who have resolved their longstanding racist and plutocratic tensions with a new ghoulish nightmare leader:
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/canada-erin-otoole-conservative-party-cpc/
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https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/canada-erin-otoole-conservative-party-cpc/
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And, as Trudeau has reconvened Parliament, he's promised something genuinely amazing: a massive, national stimulus package meant to keep families, workers and small businesses afloat through the looming second pandemic wave.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-canada-economy/canada-bets-the-farm-on-big-spending-as-second-wave-threatens-economic-recovery-idUSKCN26F1NF
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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-canada-economy/canada-bets-the-farm-on-big-spending-as-second-wave-threatens-economic-recovery-idUSKCN26F1NF
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This is something Canada - and the US, for that matter - desperately needs. Canada is monetarily sovereign: it issues its own currency and its debt is in the same currency, meaning it can never run out of money (no more than Apple could ever run out of Itunes gift cards).
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The Canadian DOES face constraints on its spending, but they're just not MONETARY constraints - they're RESOURCE constraints. If the Canadian government creates money to buy the same things the private sector is shopping for, there'll be a bidding war, AKA inflation.
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But as a new wave of lockdowns and mass illness looms over the country, there's going to be a hell of a lot of things the private sector isn't trying to buy - notably, the labour of the Canadian workforce, millions of whom will be locked indoors through the winter.
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An analyst warns that Trudeau's proposal is likely to add CAD30B to the deficit, which is a completely irrelevant fact unless that new money is going to be chasing the same goods that Canadian business and citizens are seeking to buy.
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Trudeau has promised to create a national prescription drug plan (a longstanding hole in Canada's national health care system), as well as universal childcare, and he's denounced austerity as a response to the crisis.
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There's a part of me that is very glad to see this. My family and friends are in Canada, after all, and if Trudeau lives up to his promise, he will shield them from the collapse we're seeing in the USA.
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But that is a BIG if. Trudeau isn't Harper. He's more charismatic, he's got better hair, and he says much, much better things than Harper.
However, when the chips are down, Trudeau out-Harpers Harper.
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However, when the chips are down, Trudeau out-Harpers Harper.
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Mass surveillance legislation. Corruption scandals. Lying about corruption scandals. Bailing out the pipeline. "No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there." Abandoning asylum-seekers to Trump's lawless regime.
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"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action." It would be pretty naive to assume that merely because Trudeau has promised to do the right thing, that he will do the right thing.
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Indeed, if history is any indicator, the best way to predict what Trudeau will do is to assume that it will be the OPPOSITE of whatever he promises.
I won't lie. I felt a spark of hope when I read Trudeau's words.
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I won't lie. I felt a spark of hope when I read Trudeau's words.
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But hope is all I've got - and it's a far cry from confidence.
Or relief.
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Or relief.
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ETA: Correction to Tweet #5, Michaëlle Jean is a woman, not a man, and her pronouns are she/her.
ETA: Correction to Tweet 12: Should be "Transmountain pipeline" not "Transcanada pipeline"
