WE THE PEOPLE

The WE scandal ate up column inches for the past two weeks in Canada, mostly because it is a pretty easy-to-understand scandal in many respects - indeed, compared to the sponsorship scandal that downed Paul Martin (which was a relatively muddled thing), this one is straightforward and simple, nearly as easy to understand as Brian Mulroney's Airbus scandal back in the 80s and 90s: some rich people made sure the Prime Minister and/or his family got money in exchange for what appears to be preferential treatment.

WE itself is a bit of an odd duck as charities go, because it is actually two organizations: WE Charity, which is a charity, and ME to WE, which is not a charity but rather a for-profit company that "creates socially conscious products and experiences that enable people to change lives through their everyday choices" (that's from their website!) which means, apparently, "marketing stuff like fair-trade coffee, ecotourism, and awareness bracelets." In fairness, ME to WE has publicly committed to making sure that at least 50% of their profits are donated to WE Charity, and of course there are safeguards to ensure that they actually do this, like the one where they will tell you they do this.

WE Charity and ME to WE have frequently drawn criticism for the way that they sort of shuffle work back and forth between the charity and the company, but nobody has ever been able to prove - yet - that they've done anything illegal. That said, WE has often been criticized for being litigious - it sued Canadaland for libel in 2019, threatened Postmedia this week and sued Saturday Night magazine in 2000. (I don't want to reproduce Justin Ling's Vice article about WE in toto, but it is worth reading just to see what WE supposedly did to try to shut Canadaland up.)

Getting back to recent events: the Canadian government proposed a nearly-a-billion-dollar grant program, the Canada Student Service Grant, which would give students grants for doing volunteer work during the economic slowdown. The grant program itself is not the problem (it's not perhaps the most effective way to give students money during an economic crisis, but there have been many worse ones over the years). The problem is that the government tapped WE to run the program, and WE would have received approximately in between $20 and $40 million for administering the program, and then reporters doing their due diligence noticed that WE has, over the past few years, paid Justin Trudeau's mother and brother about $300,000 for speaking engagements. Everybody - the government, WE, you name it - promptly reversed course and basically suggested it was the other guy's idea in the first place, but the damage was already done.

To be fair: the Trudeaus are a wealthy family, and Margaret and Alexander Trudeau's speaking fees aren't astronomical given their experience and reputation. For you and me, $300,000 might be a lifechanging amount, but for the Trudeaus it really isn't. But this is just the latest in a series of ethical fuckups from Justin Trudeau's office when it comes to dealing with Canada's oligarchic elite.

DOWDESWELL THAT ENDS WELL

Bill 195, which passed this week in the Ontario Legislature, manages to both simultaneously be extremely controversial and also relatively obscure, mostly due to a lot of reporting about being the sort of reporting where a reporter says "opponents say it will do this, but the Premier says they are sillypants." So let's talk about it a bit.

Bill 195 is an emergency powers bill which effectively grants the government the ability to make unilateral orders of indefinite length about "closing or regulating any place, whether public or private, including any business, office, school, hospital or other establishment or institution," "rules or practices that relate to workplaces or the management of workplaces," and "prohibiting or regulating gatherings or organized public events." Obviously, during a pandemic, all of these are relevant issues and there should be some mechanism for the government to swiftly shut things down or conduct emergency operations as needed. The problem here is that the bill, as I said, lets the government conduct these orders effectively indefinitely, because although the government can technically only issue these orders for 30 days at a time, the bill also provides for the orders to be extended for another 30 days, and then again, and so forth.

The reason I keep saying "effectively" is because all of these orders have to be issued from the office of the Lieutenant Governor. Non-Canadians may or may not be aware that technically, Canada's head of state is still Queen Elizabeth, so we have Her Majesty's official representatives within the federal and provincial levels who technically have to sign off on all legislation passed by those governments because technically the Queen is still in charge, so long as she never actually tries to be in charge (which would of course likely spark an actual small-r republicanism movement within Canada). So if the provincial government wants to issue an order, they'll draft it and then send it to the Lieutenant Governor's office, who will then issue it, because Elizabeth Dowdeswell is a respected elder bureaucrat and not really the sort of person to trigger a constitutional crisis.

Because the parts of Bill 195 that state what they can do are so broadly worded, the bill thus effectively gives the provincial government sweeping power during the pandemic to do more or less whatever they like in those areas. Want to argue that the bill means the government can unilaterally strip away collective bargaining rights? Well, that certainly "relates to workplaces," and it's not like this government was particularly thrilled about unions in the first place. Want to more strictly regulate employee use of vacation time (which has already all but been promised to happen in the healthcare sector)? No problem. And so on and so forth.

Granted, the Conservative government already had a majority anyway, but voting on unpopular measures makes those measures more publicly visible and increases the chance of weakening support within the party for such measures (like the way that Belinda Karahalios was booted out of the Conservative party for voting against Bill 195). If the government can just do stuff unilaterally, individual members of the governing party can try to avoid the blame for that stuff.

The truly odd thing about all of this is that the government's justification for these new powers is the pandemic creating an emergency, but presently Doug Ford is pushing hard for as wide a re-opening of public schools in September as possible, which is something... that should not happen in an emergency, I am pretty sure.

(I am not going to get into the Ontario government's near-total lack of planning for school re-opening, which is only marginally better than the sheer insanity happening in the USA right now and that mostly because our Covid-19 numbers are so much lower. Of course, our numbers have started ticking upwards again as people started relaxing and thinking it was over, so here is hoping we don't blow all the isolation we dealt with for six months.)

MEANWHILE IN THE USA

Right now Congress is scrambling because the temporary unemployment benefit surge that was passed back in March is going to expire this week. I say "Congress," which implies that both parties are at fault, but the Democratic-led House of Representatives passed a bill extending the benefit increase almost two months ago, because the need for it was obvious. However, the Republican party, which controls the Senate (and oh yes the presidency, can't forget that) thinks giving poor people money is a crime against humanity, especially when there are banks and oligarchs they could give money to instead. (Lest you think this is hyperbole, compare the numbers in the March stimulus bill for individual benefits that affect poor people versus corporate bailouts and upper-class tax cuts and get back to me.)

Thus they refused to pass any such legislation of their own, and now the USA is a week away from thirty million people not being able to make rent or mortgage payments. (Most individual states' eviction moratoriums that are still in place are set to expire this week as well, and since none of those moratoriums cancelled rent during the moratorium period, it just means a lot of people owe a lot of back rent they can't pay.) Which all seems kind of bad on all sorts of levels.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Mostly playing Blood Bowl II on PC of late - the game of fantasy football with orcs and lizardmen and vampires and such. Blood Bowl has always been one of those tabletop games I have always enjoyed but never really gotten into deeply, partially because I'm not that good at painting the miniature figures and partially because to really get the full experience of Blood Bowl, you need a league of eight to twelve people where Blood Bowl is, like, your thing that you all do for fun together, but this PC version is pretty good and captures the spirit of the tabletop game. (The prior PC versions of Blood Bowl were much less good; this is more streamlined and moves about as quickly as the tabletop version does.) So it's an easy recommend from me, although I recognize that this is a niche recommendation to say the least.

See you soon.