What does the federal result mean here?
Saskatchewan will have an MP for the first time in more than 5 years. The Conservatives won the 13 other seats in the province. Our weekly political panel breaks down the election and the reaction from the legislature. This week's panel featured Regina Leader-Post columnist Murray Mandryk, Canadian Press reporter Jeremy Simes and Morning Edition host Adam Hunter.
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Globe and Mail
4 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
The politics of political party data hypocrisy
Imagine if select Canadians could decide which laws applied to them and which didn't, as long as they vowed to follow a set of rules that they had written and made available for public consultation. 'I, John Doe, declare that I am no longer subject to the income tax laws of Canada and instead will abide by my own rules. Rule No. 1: I don't pay taxes.' That, of course, would be anarchy. But it happens to be the way Canada's federal political parties want to operate when it comes to privacy rights: one set of rules for themselves and another for everyone else. This hypocrisy was hidden in plain sight this week when the government tried to pull a fast one by sticking a set of bespoke privacy protection rules for federal parties at the bottom of a bill dealing with the cost of living. There on the last three pages of a 22-page bill about oranges (affordability) was an unexpected and unannounced section about apples (voter data). The proposed changes to the Canada Elections Act would exempt federal political parties and entities acting on their behalfs from all provincial and federal privacy regimes, and create a new one exclusive to them. The changes, which have the support of the Conservatives, put it plainly: a federal party and any company it hires to collect and manage data 'cannot be required to provide access to personal information or provide information relating to personal information under its control or to correct – or receive, adjudicate or annotate requests to correct – personal information or omissions in personal information under its control.' The law would be retroactive to the year 2000 – a crude power flex. The Liberals, the NDP and the Conservatives are appealing a 2024 B.C. Supreme Court ruling that said federal parties are subject to provincial privacy laws and must turn over the voter data they gather if ordered to do so. Passage of the bill will end the court case – a slap in the face of the judiciary. The same legislation would require federal parties to write their own privacy policies and make them public. But the required contents for those policies, as set by the legislation, are laughably slight. The parties will have to name the person responsible for overseeing the policies they write, state what kind of personal information they collect and how they collect it, and reveal what training they provide employees about safeguarding that information. And that's it. This comes nowhere near the demands that the federal government makes on private companies through its much-vaunted 'digital charter.' Under that 2022 law, individuals are supposed to have 'control over what data they are sharing, who is using their personal data and for what purposes, and know that their privacy is protected.' As well, Canadians can 'demand that their information be destroyed' when they withdraw their consent for its collection. No such luck with federal parties, though. And yet these are the same parties that, in 2019, uploaded voter e-mail addresses to Facebook without voters' knowledge. In 2021, the Liberals used facial-recognition software to verify the identities of people voting in nomination races. The parties are constantly scraping up voters' personal information, whether through party memberships, door-to-door campaigning, petitions or other means, and then sharing it to suit their purposes. That data is one of their greatest assets, and they don't want to give it back once they have it, or have anyone other than themselves oversee its collection, use, disclosure, retention and disposal. On the Liberals' part, they are showing a particular indifference to Canadians' privacy that could also be seen this month in the Mark Carney government's plan to allow police to go on warrantless fishing expeditions in people's internet subscriber information. The whole thing is wrong. Canadians should have the right to take their names off party lists, and to be informed of how their personal information is being shared and used by the parties. The parties don't want that, though. At least, not for themselves. Tough rules are for everyone else.
National Observer
6 hours ago
- National Observer
Canada's Conservatives still aren't serious about housing
He was so close to getting it. Jacob Mantle, the newly-elected thirty-something Conservative MP for York-Durham, rose in the House of Commons on Tuesday to make a point about housing costs. 'Oxford Economics reports that Toronto's housing market ranks among the worst in the world for affordability. At the same time, mortgage delinquency rates in Toronto are higher than at any time during the pandemic. The financial burden is suffocating the next generation of homebuyers.' But Mantle wasn't actually interested in proposing solutions to that problem. Instead, he wanted to whine about the fact that the Carney government isn't going to table a budget until the fall, which the government has defended on the basis that it will be better able to account for the fallout from Donald Trump's tariffs by then. And despite his supposed concern over housing, Mantle was dismissive of the government's plan to embrace and scale up modular housing in Canada. 'My generation refuses to live in a shipping container,' Mantle said. For what it's worth, I suspect many members of his generation (and mine) would be happy to live in the sort of modified shipping containers that are being designed and built right now, including the ones in his own city. But modular housing is so much more than just the use and conversion of shipping containers. It's an entirely new approach to homebuilding, one that uses factories and their inherent economies of scale to drive down costs. They can be one or two-storey, single or multi-family, and configured in any number of layouts and sizes. In an environment where driving down construction costs is a nearly existential issue for Mantle's generation, you'd think he would be more open to new ideas and economic innovation — especially when it promises to use more Canadian materials and labour. Then again, if you've been paying close attention to the Conservative Party of Canada's approach to this issue, his behaviour was entirely predictable. Under Pierre Poilievre's leadership, the party and its MPs have repeatedly highlighted the very real problem of rising housing costs in Canada and the disproportionate impacts they have on younger people. But when it comes to actual solutions to that problem — ones, at least, that don't involve cutting taxes or regulations and assuming the market will magically solve the problem it has helped create — those same Conservatives either disappear into the metaphorical bushes or come out on the other side of the issue. In Calgary, for example, opposition to a city-wide measure to increase affordability and density while reducing sprawl came mostly from Conservative-leaning councilors like Dan McLean, Peter Demong and Sean Chu, with some conspicuous cheerleading work coming from federal Conservative MP Greg McLean. In British Columbia, provincial Conservative party leader John Rustad decided to go to bat for the very 'gatekeepers' standing in the way of new housing that Poilievre had repeatedly promised he would eliminate. Even in Ontario, where Conservative politicians have been more visibly and vocally on-side with pro-supply measures, the results of the Ford government's efforts have been underwhelming, to say the least. We are not in a moment where we can afford to reflexively turn our noses up at potential solutions. And yet, Conservative politicians like Mantle seem determined to find fault in every proposed approach that doesn't flatter their own pre-existing ideological and political biases towards cutting taxes and reducing government involvement. Modular housing will not be, in and of itself, the solution to a problem that has been building for more than two decades. But that's only because nothing on its own will, or could, be the solution. The Carney government has embraced modular housing as a way to lower costs and improve affordability in Canada's housing market. Canada's Conservatives, on the other hand, seem determined to miss the mass timber for the trees. Instead, we need every possible lever being pulled right now, from regulatory reform and improved operating efficiencies to direct government involvement, procurement, and even development. Mantle is right that the status quo has failed his generation. But he's wrong to indignantly oppose a good-faith effort at challenging and changing it, and all the more so as he pretends to speak on behalf of an entire generation. We can only hope that his party and its online proxies don't decide to turn modular housing into this year's iteration of the 15-minute city and throw a self-evidently good and decent idea into the stew of online conspiracies it always seems to have at low boil. Yes, that might feed the eternally hungry appetites of their increasingly online political base. But it won't do anything to address the problem Conservatives like Mantle claim to care about. At some point, Canadians may conclude that they're not actually all that interested in solving it.
CBC
16 hours ago
- CBC
Is Ford's government conservative enough? One group says no
Doug Ford is facing a fresh call from within his party to be more fiscally conservative. As CBC's Mike Crawley explains, this comes from an anonymous group describing itself as a grassroots movement of conservatives who want change in the province.
