Bad actors, UBCM gains cred, an Alberta champ and the Georges
'Bang bang bang bang bang,' it's a law
A lot has happened since Northern Beat last surfed into your mail box. Here’s a slap grab bag of highlights.
Starting at the BC legislature…
‘Mad dash’ to the finish
In the final weeks of the fall session, the BC NDP were hustling legislation through the chamber like their hair was on fire and they were short on extinguishers in what Rob Shaw called “a mad-dash scramble of a fall BC legislative session.”
Opposition and various stakeholders had plenty of complaints, mostly related to the speed that complex legislation, including several substantive housing bills, were getting rammed through the house without enough scrutiny. Legislation is launched halfway through session, said BC Green MLA Adam Olsen “No debate. No discussion. No air. No proofing… No idea the impact that it's going to have.”
“Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,” he said, describing the velocity of legislation hurtling through the chamber.
Olsen said government was setting a dangerous precedent using its majority and too much involvement from the Premier’s office to hustle legislation into law without adequate time for democratic scrutiny.
“This government acts like they are going to be sitting in those seats forever,” Olsen said. “The very same tools and tactics that have been used to capture this place by the Premier's office could be used against them.”
[Someone should bookmark this passage in Hansard for future reference.]
Overheard in the press gallery
“It’s like Olsen has gone 15 rounds of a boxing match beating up his opponent every single round knowing at the end of it he’s going to lose on decision,” said a press gallery reporter, after listening to Olsen debate housing legislation for hours with Minister Ravi Kahlon.
‘Slapping together’ bills not ideal
BC United house leader Todd Stone weighed in on the “sloppiness” of eight bills requiring amendments due to incoherence, spelling mistakes and other errors. ‘
“It’s absolutely ridiculous.”
The NDP government was “slapping together” miscellaneous statutes bills containing significant changes that typically would be stand-alone legislation, Stone said. Instead, government “buries it in and amongst a whole bunch of other miscellaneous items. That's not how that's supposed to be done.”
According to reporters who have been around the legislative block a lot longer than me, most governments resort to curtailing debate on some bills to push them into law. Even so, this session featured an uncommon amount of complicated legislation shotgunned through the chamber.
New UBCM president busts some moves
Case in point was the encampment amendments which almost slipped into law without a proper vetting by municipalities if not for an impressive full-court media and ministerial press by Trish Mandewo, the newly minted, not-a-figurehead president of the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM).
The situation began on Nov. 6 when Attorney General Niki Sharma introduced legislation to legally define the minimum standards a ‘shelter’ must provide when a municipality seeks an injunction to move people from an encampment – overnight accommodation, access to washrooms, a shower, 24-hour staffing and a meal. This is when the public and Mandewo learned the details of the bill. Three days later, she met with Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon to register her concern municipalities hadn’t been properly consulted.
Two weeks on, without any meaningful consultation having taken place on the province’s part, the legislation sailed through second reading and BC Civil Liberties et al joined the fray, arguing the legislation would reduce protections for people in encampments.
A day later, on Nov. 22, Mandewo again reached out to Kahlon. This time to share UBCM’s legal opinion that the legislation would hamstring municipalities’ ability to manage unsafe encampments – most BC communities don’t have enough facilities to shelter their homeless (a provincial responsibility) and so couldn’t meet the proposed standards required for a court injunction.
Mandewo asked Kahlon to withdraw the bill
The next morning, having no indication the BC government was heeding her request, Mandewo went public with UBCM’s concerns. When press gallery reporters asked Kahlon about municipal concerns, his response was along the lines of too-bad-so-sad. “If local governments want to have shelter space, they should approve locations and we will fund them,” he said in an early morning scrum on Nov. 23.
Which presents cities and towns as obstructionist and ignores that nearly every community in B.C. has more homeless than there are beds to house them. Some, like Prince George, are short by dozens of beds, while cities such as Nanaimo need hundreds. Others still, Trail to name one, have been lobbying the province unsuccessfully for years to get more shelter beds.
Three hours after Kahlon blew off UBCM concerns and several reporters posted online about what was fast turning into a controversy, Premier David Eby changed tack. The province would pass the amendment, he said, but it wouldn’t become law until cabinet signed an order in council when all parties could “get to a place of mutual understanding.” This turned out to mean, until government could get critics to agree to the amendments as is.
By the following week, with the Union of BC Indian Chiefs also calling for a deferral, the BC government softened its position with Sharma conceding "the Premier has said we're open to changes through the consultation process. And if we don't get it in the right place, we wouldn't put it into force."
Back on the day Mandewo first went public, Eby admitted to “a little bit of surprise that municipalities and provincial governments have such different understandings of legislation.”
The bigger surprise for the rest of us is how two BC government ministers could bring forward encampment legislation without fully consulting the municipal governments tasked with managing encampments. If not for Mandewo’s assertive advocacy on behalf of municipalities, the Premier might not have intervened and the unworkable encampment provisions would now be law.
The minimal consultation strategy
This implement-first-consult-later approach is a trend with the BC NDP government and not just with legislation. Decriminalization is the most spectacular recent example where the province conducted minimal consultation with municipal stakeholders until after the pilot project was launched. It was only when city councils started passing their own bylaws to limit public drug use that Eby and his ministers finally agreed to step back and listen. Ultimately, they implemented rules that should have been there from the start. These mollified municipalities and pleased the party’s harm reduction activist base not at all.
Critics argue it’s the NDP’s nature to enact ideological policy change without enough concern for real world consequences. It certainly seems to be Eby’s inclination to govern at breakneck speed. He’s an ardent activist with many years in the trenches helping the less fortunate and no doubt has logged countless hours ruminating on ideal solutions to the social justice issues closest to his heart. Since the moment he was acclaimed BC NDP leader and inaugurated premier, he’s been crafting new policy and reeling off announcements like a man whose days are numbered.
No one argues progress is needed on many fronts, but the downside to unleashing a torrent of legislative change is the limited time it allows for consultation. Even a really great concept, nobly conceived, requires adequate planning and flushing out of the consequences to avoid disastrous unintended public policy outcomes.
On the other hand, after there has been significant backlash, as there was when BC implemented decrim with zero ground rules, Eby and his team were eventually adaptive. It just took a concerted, public, all-out campaign to get their attention. Maybe because a core of their support base seems to view any deviation from their original, narrow, idealized vision as mortal concessions.
As one hand taketh, the other giveth
Last week, the BC government announced its self-proclaimed no-nonsense strategy to teach big pharma a lesson and hold “bad actors” to account for fuelling the opioid crisis. The province appeared in the Supreme Court arguing for certification of a class action suit on behalf of all provinces, territories, and the federal government, against some 40 opioid pharmaceutical companies “for their part in allegedly engaging in deceptive marketing tactics to increase sales, which led to increased rates of addiction and overdose.”
A masterclass in government comms sleight-of-hand, the lawsuit is based on the BC government’s case against Purdue Pharma Canada. Launched in 2018, the province alleged deceptive marketing practices by Purdue and others caused opioid addictions and overdoses related to oxycodone (OxyContin).
Two years later, the province introduced its own addictive safer supply drug program with hydromorphone, brand name Dilaudid, as the main drug. Dilaudid is even more potent and addictive than OxyContin, delivering a euphoric high similar to heroin, which some addictions physicians say is causing new opioid addictions, as oxycodone did.
And guess what? Dilaudid is also made by Purdue Pharma!
Primarily available in pills known as ‘dillies,’ hydromorphone is three times stronger than oxycodone, the drug that fuelled the still ongoing unprecedented opioid crisis in North America.
In 2012, a mind-blowing 275 million opioid prescriptions were written in Canada and the U.S. These prescriptions an more over two decades created millions of life-wrecking opioid addictions, which in turn precipitated a heroin revival and seeded a market for the current fentanyl street trade, according to the Stanford-Lancet Commission on the opioid crisis.
Purdue settled BC’s lawsuit last year (as it did with some two dozen US states) – after the federal, provincial and territorial governments joined the case – for $150 million, while having made an unknown amount selling Dilaudid and other drugs to our governments in the meantime.
So, simultaneous to B.C. and Canada suing Purdue Pharma Canada for causing millions of oxycodone addictions, the province was paying Purdue to supply the main addictive opioid in its safe supply program, which is marketed as ‘treatment’ for the oxycodone-turned-fentanyl addictions the company originally helped create.
Whether any of the additional pharmaceutical companies BC is suing are also distributing drugs to BC’s safer supply program is unknown.
Carbon tax
On another subject, Rob Shaw wrote: “Only the BC Greens and Conservatives have clean hands and clear positions on the carbon tax — the Greens want it to increase in price, the Conservatives want it scrapped entirely. The NDP and United are fighting for the muddy middle ground, while rolling in a pit of hypocrisy.” Tell us what you really think, Rob!
To learn more about the climate vision held by each party, read here.
Did I say 6 months, I meant 10, or 6, no really 10
“We're six months out ‘til the next election,” David Eby said accidentally when answering a question on an unrelated topic in a press conference this week.
Whether Eby’s off-hand comment was meaningless or revealed a truth is now a matter of some debate. BC legislation sets the province’s next election date at Oct. 19, 2024, but ultimately, the decision is the premier’s to make. Eby has on many occasions said he will not call an early election. If he’s changed his mind and is now considering a June election, it would make sense on a few fronts.
Eby and his wife are expecting their third child about that time. It would be way better for them to enjoy their new baby over the summer with the election behind them, instead of Eby campaigning for the first four months of his new baby’s life.
It may also be great timing given the BC Conservatives’ rise in the polls. The NDP want the Cons strong enough to split the vote with the BC United, but not so popular they start cutting any New Democratic grass. Which may sound impossible for a party that garnered less than two per cent of the vote in BC’s last election, but the Conservatives are surging and who knows how much of a lift they’ll catch from the federal Conservatives once leader Pierre Poilievre’s campaign really starts to heat up.
Polls are not elections, but the latest poll from Abacus Data showed the BC NDP one percentage point behind the BC Cons in the interior and the north. Read Vaughn Palmer’s take on these and other issues at play.
In late November, Abacus Data polled 1,000 British Columbians about who they would vote for if the election were held the day they were surveyed. Of the committed voters, a majority said they’d vote NDP, except in BC’s interior and north.
Time will tell if the Conservatives keep rising and whether Eby’s ‘six-month’ slip meant something or nothing.
For the record, the day after the above press conference, Eby clarified, “My family is expecting a significant event in six months, in June, and it is not an election.”
Other interesting polls
A Research Co survey found 38 per cent of Canadians would vote for the federal Conservatives if an election were held in December. The Liberals garners 24 per cent of voter support, the New Democrats 21 per cent, the Bloc Quebecois nine per cent, the Green Party four per cent and the People’s Party two per cent. The Conservative Party of Canada is leading among polled voters in every province except Quebec, where the Liberals are leading with the Bloc in second.
Other survey results from Research Co:
59 per cent of British Columbians feel like crime has risen in their communities despite no perceptible rise in crime personally for people.
52 per cent are proud of the Canadian health care system now compared to a high of 77 per cent in 2019. Pride in our health care system has been low before, but this is a sharp drop in a short period of time.
About 45 per cent of Vancouverites think their quality of life is worse than a year ago. About the same think public safety and homelessness have worsened, and 60 per cent say housing is less affordable, with only eight per cent who said they feel their quality of life has improved.
Guilt doesn’t need a rest and you don’t either
Since we have officially entered the season, we’re throwing in a government-funded Yuletide tale…
For those of you who have bought into the whole warm, festive Christmas-is-a-holiday-to-be-enjoyed thing, you should be ashamed.
Because, while History.com describes Christmas as a 2,000-year-old “sacred religious holiday and a worldwide cultural and commercial phenomenon,” in fact, the celebration of Christmas is evidence of Canada’s “colonialist religious intolerance,” according to a federal government-funded discussion paper, writes the National Post’s Tristin Hopper.
In a bizarre report originally flagged by Blacklock’s Reporter, Canadian Human Rights Commission researchers posit that our statutory holidays – namely Christmas and Easter – represent colonialist systemic discrimination against religious minorities who have to take time off to celebrate their holidays.
Which goes to show, viewing society through a strictly oppressor/victim lens can make even Santa look oppressive.
If time travel were possible (and who’s to say it isn’t), the human rights commission report writers might find allies in the Puritans of the 16th and 17th centuries. They too were known for their moral earnestness and obsessive need “to make their lifestyle the pattern for the whole nation.” The report writers may want to study the Puritan playbook. While they succeeded in banning the observance of Christmas (on the belief society should be purified of its Christian remnants), their prohibition obviously didn’t stick.
Maybe because you can’t keep a good holiday down. Christmas is bigger than any country or religion. For all its faults, Christmas unites people in a spirit of hope, joy and gratitude. Where’s the downside to that?
To the commission report writers, maybe stay focussed on actual human rights infringements and leave Christmas alone.
Albertan champion of uteruses
Last stop is the Alberta legislature. And before anyone groans about how only rednecks and people with oppositional disorder live in Canada’s rodeo province, get a load of this guy:
On Nov. 27, cisgender, queer, Indigenous, awkward speaker AB NDP MLA Brooks Arcand-Paul, exercised his right to cluelessly self-satirize during an address in the Alberta provincial legislature.
“I recognize my limitations as a cis-gendered man,” opens Arcand-Paul in a bout of handwringing, before pivoting into absurdity.
“And [I] recognize that we don’t have all the answers, especially with respect to folks with uteruses.”
[Those uterus folks are absolute conundrums]
Arcand-Paul goes on to argue for free contraception for “folks with uteruses,” “people with uteruses,” those who “still possess uteruses,” and of course “folks born with uteruses.”
In all, he averaged one “uteruses” every 29 seconds. (Might not be his personal best, but it’s the record to beat for MLAs elsewhere.)
By the speech’s end, my uterus was humming with acknowledgment.
Big shout out to Arcand-Paul and all those folks with penises, people born with prostates and those who still possess testicles. You really get us!
Three Georges make a right
I’ll leave the last words to three witty writers named George known for calling out uncomfortable societal trends and human behaviours.
“It isn’t the job of writers to present people as they want to be presented; writers owe allegiance to their readers, and the truth,” writes George Packer making the eloquent and insightful moral case against equity language in a special feature for Northern Beat courtesy of The Atlantic and Tribune Content Agency.
George #2 is the late great king of social commentary and acerbic observer of humanity. Carlin was no fan of soft talk and might possibly be rolling over in his grave as I type. Thirty-five years ago he said euphemistic language “reflects fear and conceals the truth,” representing “a retreat from reality.”
The last George on the list is Orwell, who said euphemisms are needed “if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” In a 1946 essay, he called insincerity “the great enemy of clear language.”
That’s all for today.
Thanks for reading and enjoy whatever the Christmas season means to you.
Fran
Questions, comments, intriguing leads, contact Fran@NorthernBeat.ca
For brain calisthenics, read NorthernBeat.ca