The News Rundown
- Canada's Premiers met this week in Halifax and surprisingly, were united in their main talking points, that is to tell the federal government of Justin Trudeau to stay out of their lane.
- Quebec Premier François Legault said Monday that "Every federal budget, we see more and more new programs in provincial jurisdictions. Enough is enough."
- Canada's 13 premiers meet Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss enduring political issues like the cost of living and the state of Canada's infrastructure, along with looming questions about the Canada-U.S. relationship.
- Ahead of this year's gathering of the Council of the Federation, chair and Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston sent a letter to Trudeau asking him to do a better job of engaging with the premiers and to "refrain from unilateral actions in areas of provincial and territorial jurisdiction, particularly in health care, education and housing."
- The letter reads: "We are asking you to work with us in a true partnership to revitalize cooperative federalism in Canada. We hope this letter will serve as an invitation to engage with premiers on ways to renew our relationship so that we can collectively deliver for Canadians. Canadians expect their governments to work together."
- Alberta Premier Danielle Smith clashes frequently with the Trudeau government over what she describes as federal overreach and has criticized Ottawa for circumventing the provinces to send billions of dollars directly to municipalities to build housing.
- This spring her government passed what she called a "stay out of my backyard bill" in the legislature, which gives the province oversight of deals between the federal government and municipalities — including federal housing funding.
- The premiers gather every summer to discuss shared priorities and present a united front when calling on the federal government for financial help and policy changes. The premiers also will discuss the state of health care, emergency preparedness and Arctic security, he said.
- Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe said he expects complaints about the equalization funding formula to bubble to the surface during the meetings. The federal program transfers money from some provinces to others to allow for a fair level of services across the country.
- B.C. Premier David Eby said Wednesday that his government will join Newfoundland and Labrador's court case against the federal government over equalization payments. Newfoundland launched the court challenge in May, arguing Ottawa's redistribution scheme puts it at a disadvantage. The federal Liberal government has rejected calls to overhaul the funding formula and said there will be no changes before 2029.
- The premiers are also expected to discuss how the U.S. presidential election in November might affect their provinces' economies. The United States buys nearly three-quarters of Canada's exports. The winner of that election will lead the U.S. through the upcoming review of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), scheduled for 2026.
- While Canadian officials successfully renegotiated the North American trade agreement with Trump's administration, saving Canada's most important trade deal was never a sure thing. Premiers are also urging the federal government to move up its NATO commitment to spend two per cent of GDP on defence spending by 2032.
- Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said "I’m encouraging the federal government to move more quickly. I think the timeline we have to think about is the next administration, whoever that may be, in the United States of America. So let’s hit that target in the next four years with a credible plan to do so."
- We talked about NATO last week during the NATO summit where Trudeau was pushed to hit the NATO targets, and finally committed to the lengthy goal of 2032. It's clear that Canada's premiers see more urgency.
- With the premier's meeting, we see that the premiers are more united than ever before, even across political lines that span from the NDP to the Conservatives. The message is clear, Trudeau needs to focus more on federal matters.
- Supplementals:
- One of the key markers for economic growth is what the job market is doing. This is reported in Canada and it covers breakdown amongst regions but also employers.
- Specifically employer in terms of whether or not it is public or private sector.
- Since Trudeau has been in power the public sector has grown by 43%.
- For the month ending March 31, the federal government payroll included 367,772 people. In March 2015, the end of the last full fiscal year of the Harper administration, the civil service population was 257,034.
- When we look at the department level, the departments that saw the biggest change were: Women and Gender Equality Canada, Infrastructure Canada, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada.
- The department that saw the highest number of people join its ranks was the Canada Revenue Agency. It employs just over 59,000 people, an increase of 19,000 since 2019.
- Outside of the National Capital Region of Ottawa and Gatineau the provinces that saw the biggest growth in the public service were New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and PEI.
- Newfoundland and Labrador now has 7,606 federal government workers, an increase of 2,895 or 61.5 per cent since Stephen Harper’s Conservatives left office.
- New Brunswick fared even better and now has 13,410 federal government workers, an increase of 5,129 or 61.9 per cent.
- Former Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan who hails from this part of the country said, “The last Conservative government gutted federal jobs in Newfoundland and Labrador, closing Coast Guard stations and Veterans Affairs offices and ignoring opportunities to locate public services in the province. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are as capable as any Canadian to work for the Government of Canada. I’m glad we reversed the cuts.”
- Another department that ballooned was the Privy Council Office, the department that serves the Prime Minister.
- It has 1288 employees compared to the 727 it had in 2015. The Prime Minister didn’t respond when asked why the number of employees had increased, directing the question to the Privy Council bureaucrats who did not respond to any request for information from Global News.
- Now while these stats are interesting on their own they explain a lot in terms of what happened with job numbers during the pandemic.
- Occasionally we would see reports that Canada miraculously added jobs in the pandemic or shortly thereafter. But very few of the people doing the reporting looked into what these jobs were: they were public service jobs.
- We saw a similar trend when the NDP was in power in Alberta, a huge increase in the public service.
- A job is a job but we still must question what this does for the country’s GDP.
- GDP is a measure of how productive the country is per-person. To see strong GDP growth economists like to see growth in either the primary industries (resource extraction), manufacturing, or research and development.
- Jobs created in the service industries (retail, hospitality, and others) and the public service do not add as much value to the national GDP figures.
- Those jobs to the public service in particular since the government can pull those levers can create a false-perception of how well the economy is doing.
- Canadians who have been struggling with finding employment or being underemployed knew what the markets were doing but the job reports were masked almost nationally by the huge increases to the public service documented here.
- Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre didn’t comment on this exact report but back in May in Vancouver said, “[Trudeau] is delivering worse service.You can’t get anyone on the phone at CRA. Incredible delays just to get a passport. And the federal government is not delivering any services that it wasn’t delivering before. In other words, after nine years of Trudeau, Canadians are paying more for bureaucracy to get less in service.”
- This is the state of government services in Canada, jobs for the sake of bureaucrats but a lower standard of service.
- Supplementals:
- While we normally like to take polls with a grain of salt, especially in BC where they have been fairly unreliable in the past, it is interesting to note that the BC Conservatives have somehow gotten within striking distance of the governing BC NDP. This has thrown a lot of questions into play, such as if the BC Conservatives will do far better in October's upcoming election than people might think they would.
- John Rustad, the leader of the BC Conservatives recently outlined his ideas on how to fix the healthcare crisis in the province, and it includes paying to send people outside the province for health care in the short term and expanding private clinics in an effort to fix the system.
- Rustad acknowledged Thursday that if his party were to form government in October the plan would cause the provincial budget to "spike," but said in the long-term it will bring down per-capita health-care spending. He said: "Our health-care system in B.C. is in crisis. More than that, it is failing. More money into the system is not the solution. What we need to be doing (is) actually be looking at models from throughout the world that work well and look at how we can be using those in B.C."
- Rustad's promises, three months before the provincial election, also include compensating health workers who lost their jobs for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
- The health-care plan is the first major platform piece for the party and has the governing New Democrats accusing Rustad of planning big health cuts, while the Opposition BC United claims he stole their ideas.
- Rustad said expanding publicly funded partnerships with non-governmental clinics for specific procedures and diagnostic services will get people off wait-lists and that similar models in Europe prove it can be done "seamlessly." He could not provide numbers for how much he expects the health-care overhaul would cost.
- "My anticipation is that we will see an initial spike up in spending as the model comes in place, but then that will level off to a place where we'll see the cost per capita dropped over time. I don't have the precise numbers. There are a lot of complexities that have to be put in place as we do the transition."
- Documents released by the B.C. Conservatives to accompany the plan highlight a report by Deloitte that projects Canadian health spending as a percent of GDP will grow to 13.9 per cent by 2040 and suggest "modernization" can bring that down to under 11 per cent. The report includes calls for more virtual care and improved data collection.
- NDP MLA for Langford-Juan de Fuca Ravi Parmar told reporters after Rustad's announcement the reduction would mean a loss of $4.1 billion in health spending. Parmar said: "At a time when we should be investing more in health care in British Columbia, John Rustad and the Conservatives are proposing taking money away from our health-care system," he said.
- This is funny, because even the NDP have been outsourcing cancer treatments to private clinics in the US. This is not exactly a new thing, and at some point we have to know that pouring even more and more money into health care with no increase in accountability will not fix the problem.
- Rustad said his plan to attract more workers includes speeding up the hiring process and "creating an environment where health-care workers want to be able to be here." Rustad said a new "wait-time guarantee" for certain procedures would mean that if patients can't be seen on time they would be sent for care outside the province.
- He said his government would also do away with the COVID-19 vaccine requirement for health-care workers and a committee would decide how the "thousands" of people who were fired would be compensated and hired back.
- A 2024 B.C. Supreme Court decision upholding the province's vaccine rules says approximately 1,800 health-care workers lost their jobs due to being unvaccinated contrary to these mandates.
- A recent study looked at Canadian emergency doctor burnout rates in December 2020, and then burnout rates reported by the same doctors in the fall of 2022, when emergency rooms were slammed with simultaneous tidal waves of respiratory syncytial virus and COVID when kids returned to school. The results showed a huge uptick in levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, a lack of ability to feel empathy for others, an emotional distancing and numbness that comes from feeling at the end of your rope. All of the negatives have increased among emergency doctors since COVID hit, and the consequences for patients could be disastrous.
- Dr. Kerstin de Wit, a professor in emergency medicine and research director for the department of emergency medicine at Queen’s University in Kingston said results to the survey were startling: “The most striking thing was how uniform the voice was. It wasn’t that we had a balance of good and bad things. Ninety-eight per cent of comments were about negative experiences, or feeling really desperate. It was a real gut punch.”
- Today, emergency rooms are still filled with sick people waiting to be moved to the wards. In Ontario, the average wait time in May was 18.8 hours. Fewer than a third were moved to a bed within the government’s eight-hour target. Emergency departments are reporting record levels of “boarding,” a dehumanizing practice of holding patients in hallways or makeshift spaces after they’ve been admitted because there are no open beds upstairs. In Nova Scotia, emergency department deaths hit a six-year high last year, increasing to 666 deaths in 2023, from 558 the previous year.
- This is not an issue that is solely on any one province in Canada, it's Canada-wide. But with BC's high number of seniors and rapidly growing population, it's something that's also hitting BC harder than many provinces. It's clear that more needs to be done to innovate the health care system to improve outcomes, and it's not something that throwing more tax money at the problem will fix, otherwise it would have been fixed already. It's time to look at alternatives.
- Supplementals:
Firing Line
- Back on episode 368 we detailed Edmonton Centre MP Randy Boissonnault’s lobbying company and Global Health Imports company that he ran through the pandemic.
- This week in a rare summer sitting of the Ethics Committee we heard from Stephen Anderson, one of Boissonnault’s associates.
- The question is whether Randy Boissonnault remained an active participant in the medical supply business which he co-owned after he was appointed to Cabinet. This would have violated ethical rules if it happened.
- Boissonault was first elected in 2015, defeated in 2019, and re-elected in 2021.
- Anderson, who testified wearing a white suit with black Christian Louboutin boots and a Louis Vuitton bag, was helping the committee discover the identity of “the other Randy.”
- The other Randy emerged in text messages obtained by Global News when Boissonault and associates said the text messages were not referring to Randy Boissonault.
- The messages raising concern are messages from a “Randy” to the owner of a PPE company for a wire transfer of $500,000.
- Stephen Anderson said that the Randy in question wasn’t Boissonnault.
- The story through the hour-long testimony changed as first “Randy” was an “unfortunate auto-correct”, the situation where you type one thing into your phone but something else entirely comes out.
- Later this changed to Anderson only being able to reveal the identity in-camera as the person’s personal situation could be negatively affected by media exposure.
- There were 9 text messages referencing this other Randy which moves the idea of an auto-correct from something someone may consider to something that is far fetched.
- Anderson also admitted to lying to a Global News reporter who asked about the messages telling her that they referred to another Randy and not Boissonnault.
- NDP ethics critic Matthew Green said, “I appreciate that. I actually do. Maybe it’s the first truth I’ve heard today” after hearing about the lie to the Global News reporter.
- Following all the testimony, both the Conservatives and NDP believe that “other Randy” is indeed Boissonnault.
- Members of the committee agreed to ask Anderson to not only reveal the real identity of “Randy” by Friday at noon, but also to force him to hand over phone records and text message records. They also agreed to have Boissonnault testify once more in September.
- Friday came and went and now Anderson is in contempt of the parliamentary committee’s order.
- Boissonnault said he is “deeply troubled and disappointed” by Anderson’s testimony. He maintains that he surrendered the shares of GHI for no compensation and claims that he has no involvement with company operations since 2021.
- Boissonnault will be called back to testify again come September.
- This all of course culminates in looking at Boissonnault himself.
- Prior to becoming an MP Boissonault claimed to be an entrepreneur, journalist, and political commentator.
- Aside from the question of Anderson’s links, Le Devoir in Quebec has cast some doubts that he worked as a journalist.
- He had the status of columnist for the Edmonton station in the 2000s but as of today does not appear in the Radio Canada systems according to spokesperson Guylaine O’Farrell.
- With all this though the federal ethics commissioner Konrad von Finckenstein doesn’t see a reason to investigate Boissonnault further and that he’s satisfied that Boissonault had no contact with Anderson but given the testimony this week the Conservatives and NDP think otherwise.
- There is mounting evidence in this bizarre, surreal and flamboyant story that underscores truly how forgone this government is and it’s becoming clearer by the day that change at the top is the only thing that will cleanse the water.
- Supplementals:
Quote of the Week
“[Trudeau] is delivering worse service.You can’t get anyone on the phone at CRA. Incredible delays just to get a passport. And the federal government is not delivering any services that it wasn’t delivering before. In other words, after nine years of Trudeau, Canadians are paying more for bureaucracy to get less in service.” - Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre on the decay of services in Canada.
Word of the Week
Delivery - the fact of achieving or producing something that has been promised
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Show Data
- Episode Title: Stand and Deliver
- Teaser: The Premiers’ meeting delivers a united message to Trudeau, the public service has grown far faster than Canada’s population, and John Rustad has a plan to fix BC’s healthcare crisis. Also, Randy Boissonnault is in hot water again.
- Recorded Date: July 20, 2024
- Release Date: July 21, 2024
- Duration: 48:28
- Edit Notes: A few
Podcast Summary Notes
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