Category: Chairman’s Desk

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star on May 3, 2020.

It’s not right, nor is it fair to compare one tragedy with another. To claim some grief more poignant than other grief.

But it is equally wrong to let new grief submerge the pain and memory of grief past.

As we come to grips with the devastation that COVID-19 has wrought on our communities, our health, our finances, our very way of life, it has also, for some of us, brought back painful reminders of another pandemic: HIV/AIDS, which has infected 74 million and killed 32 million people.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic is one that I remember well. It decimated my community; robbed an entire generation of unrealized promise, sowed terror among us, changed how we lived and how we were intimate with each other.

Like COVID-19, it began in a seemingly far away place. A mysterious illness that started manifesting itself in otherwise healthy young men.

I remember reading about it for the first time in “The Body Politic,” sitting on the steps of the Second Cup at Church and Wellesley. I also remember paying it no mind. Those were glorious, carefree days. Days filled with the certainty of invincibility that is only the promise of the young.

And then, my friends began to get sick. More and more and more of my friends got sicker and sicker and sicker. And then, they started to die. So many that I stopped counting after I had gone to 50 funerals. I had yet to have my 30th birthday.

Not only did they die, they died with the cruel burden of stigma. AIDS phobia was rampant. It showed its ugly face in many ways. People were disowned by their families. Jobs and homes were lost. Medical care was hard to come by. Partners were not allowed to be together in the last hours of life. Funeral homes refused to collect bodies. Politicians turned a blind eye.

It was then we learned that we would have to look after ourselves. And look after ourselves we did. Some took to the streets in protest. Others committed acts of civil disobedience. Still more cared, cooked and cleaned for our sick when no one else would. And comforted them when they would otherwise have been abandoned.

As a community, we challenged the rules. We demanded to be heard. We changed the way drugs were brought to market. We built our own health care and support organizations. We insisted that people who were HIV+ were not HIV/AIDS victims but rather were people who were living, yes living, with HIV/AIDS. We changed the way we had sex.

And, in doing so, we brought about a revolution, the embers of which still burn today. After all these years, we continue to be a community more self-reliant, more resilient, more skeptical of authority and more caring than we ever were before.

We no longer take every day for granted, no longer believe that anything will last forever.

And while those lessons stayed with us, only years later did we understand just what those lessons meant. What all that pain taught us.

As I have been remembering that time, recalling those friends and partners I still miss today, wondering how on earth I cheated the disease, I’ve been thinking about what lessons we will take from this pandemic when the television lights turn off and the headlines recede.

Will we learn the importance of being more resilient? Of being better able to take care of ourselves as a country and as a people?

Will we understand people have been impacted by this pandemic in brutally unequal ways and that we, as a society, all pay a price for that? Will we be willing to rethink what fairness means?

Will we understand that we truly are in this together? That we really are each other?

In the worst days of the AIDS crisis, no one could imagine that they would one day marry their partner and society would celebrate it; that my now partner would be the proud grandfather of three.

Our challenge today is hard and may grow harder still, but I am optimistic because I know Canadians are already coming together, strengthening our communities and mending the divisions revealed in this pandemic.

Crises reveal our character — how good we are, how kind we are. And if you know where to look for it, that character and that kindness is where you will find our strength.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star on April 26, 2020.

Though it was justifiably overshadowed by last weekend’s tragedy in Nova Scotia and the ongoing pandemic itself, parliamentarians this week resolved an important debate over when and how the House of Commons and its committees will convene during this state of emergency.

This debate seemed like a distraction or even a nuisance to most. After all, the pressing concerns of the nation are immediate: getting payments to those in need, producing ventilators, sourcing raw materials for testing. But far from being an academic concern, the smooth and proper functioning of Parliament is actually now more critical than ever.

The compromise motion approved this week suspends regular sittings of all 338 MPs until May 25. Instead, it strikes a new COVID-19 committee whose members will meet on the floor once weekly, and virtually twice weekly. While the plan had the support of the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc, the Conservatives objected to this proposal, arguing that the prime minister has effectively replaced Parliament with daily press conferences; pointing out that even as MPs refuse to meet, construction workers continue to work daily renovating Centre Block.

The Opposition had a point: there is no reason that if other essential businesses have found a way to carry on by respecting social distancing and implementing necessary health and safety measures, the most essential business of all — government — cannot, or will not, bring itself to do the same.

But with this motion’s passage, an institution, much of whose strength flows from its aversion to change, has now itself changed. But it has hardly, as the expression goes, changed on a dime.

Real challenges remain for the speaker and his staff. There are MPs who represent rural ridings where broadband connectivity is spotty at best. The most popular teleconferencing software is insufficiently secure. Many MPs struggle with the technology. There is, surprisingly, no easy way to arrange for simultaneous translation. It is not clear if the laws of parliamentary privilege that protect members from defamation and libel lawsuits apply in the virtual realm. And, of course, other quaint, many would say anachronistic, customs, such as the tradition of directing remarks to the speaker instead of a specific member, may also need to be revisited. As you can see, the list goes on and on.

But beyond those challenges, Andrew Scheer and his party face a more substantial one: how to hold the government to account in the face of this new reality. Fortunately, he has some promising international examples to look to.

Westminster, the mother Parliament in the U.K., has adopted a similar “hybrid” approach to its sittings, in which a proportional fraction of members remains physically present while up to 120 participate virtually; either group may put questions to ministers.

And while it is not the same, they are making it work. It was, for example, hardly the end of the world last week when Sir Keir Starmer had to make his House of Commons debut as Britain’s opposition leader during prime minister’s questions without the customary cheering and hissing that mark such occasions.

All opposition parties struggle to find their voice in times of crisis. In Canada, it doesn’t help that not only is our opposition leader someone who has quit his job, the race to replace him has been suspended.

Yet the pressing need for checks and balances remains. As I wrote in this space two weeks ago, democracy is never as precarious as during a pandemic. The government has already shown itself unafraid of anti-democratic overreach. Its attempt to invest the minister of finance with sweeping emergency powers that would last 18 months being exhibit A. Only in the face of fierce public criticism, led by the opposition, did the government back down.

Make no mistake about it: there are legitimate questions to ask. And forget questions about what the government has done. That’s water under the bridge. No, questions need to be asked about this government’s plan for when and how it plans to reopen the economy and about when and how it plans to rebuild Canada.

And those questions need to be both asked, and answered, in our house, the House of Commons.

This article originally appeared in the Toronto Star on April 19, 2020.

Of all the things underpinning our pre-COVID19 lives that we paid little mind to, supply chains would have been at the top of the list.

And for good reason. Parts were seamlessly delivered on a just-in-time basis to our factories. Shops were filled to the rafters with the latest fashions. Shelves were loaded with asparagus and fresh berries, even in the dead of winter.

But as the song goes, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” and the past few weeks have shown how little time it takes for, if not it all to be gone, at least for the cupboard to be bare.

Initially, it was our reliance on Chinese goods that proved problematic as that country’s economy shut down. Since then, China has rebounded but at a cost. By leveraging its position as a vital supplier to the Western world, China has systemically strengthened its state power through commercial networks that manufacture and transport essential goods like medicines and personal protective equipment.

It’s no surprise that President Xi has taken advantage of this crisis to manoeuvre China toward greater dominance. It is also no surprise just how successful China has been in disrupting supply chains and isolating countries like Canada along the way.

To make matters worse, these moves come while our closest ally, the United States, seems intent on leaving us further isolated.

Two weeks ago, in a move Premier Ford declared “totally unacceptable,” U.S. officials halted the shipment to Ontario of 500,000 medical masks from manufacturer 3M.

The situation was resolved but the episode underscored the frightening reality that Canada, with zero domestic capacity to produce N95 masks, is wholly dependent on a supply chain built on trust.

So, amidst this never-before-contemplated disruption, maybe it’s time for a return to “made in Canada.”

Canada’s manufacturing sector has been shrinking for decades as trade deals like NAFTA have taken effect and production has moved overseas. For a long time, this decline has been characterized as the inevitable cost of globalization. But now, when Canada needs quick, reliable access to goods that we find more difficult than ever to acquire, we need to reconsider those assumptions.

We must recognize that, even setting aside COVID-19, the world has changed. Exhibit A? The 3M issue. It is simply inconceivable that Presidents Bush or Obama, or any other former president for that matter, would pressure an American company to withhold life-saving equipment from Canada.

So too, the nature of Chinese power has changed the world. This week, the EU’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, explicitly urged member governments to consider ownership stakes in European companies whose tumbling stock market values may leave them susceptible to Chinese takeover during or after this pandemic. Canada’s industries are equally susceptible to anti-competitive efforts by China.

Conservative leadership candidate Erin O’Toole has leapt on these trends. In a campaign video released this week, O’Toole called out “corrupt foreign governments” and “incompetent global institutions,” like China and the World Health Organization, which have left Canada to fend for itself. O’Toole’s solution? “Buy, build, and grow Canadian.”

In the latter half of the 20th century, Canada’s economy was denationalized — through the sale of Crown corporations like Petro Canada, CN Rail and Air Canada — in the belief that the same public policy outcomes, previously pursued through ownership, could be achieved through regulation. At that time, both citizens and governments felt confident in the effectiveness of those regulatory policy tools.

As our leaders plan their long-term response to our latest economic catastrophe, already christened “the Great Lockdown,” it is worth asking whether they continue to have the same confidence in those same policy tools.

It’s possible that Canada’s response to the long-term problems this crisis has exposed will rely on not only a new role for the private sector but also a new relationship between public and private sector. As the last recession taught us, government bailouts alone will not bring back Canadian manufacturing. Nor will they bring us a supply chain we can trust.

That’s something that will take all of us — government, business and all Canadians — to do. As the prime minister says, “we are all in this together.”

This article originally appeared in the Toronto Star on April 12, 2020.

Among the more concerning broader societal consequences of the coronavirus — economic collapse, fear-mongering, widespread distrust — is a stunningly rapid deterioration of democracy.

To exploit popular anxiety as a pretence to seize power is a tactic as old as plague itself. When William Cecil, chief minister to Queen Elizabeth I, was battling the Black Death, he won the ability to shut the sick inside their homes for up to six weeks (likely reasonable enough) but then went on to pass the Plague Act of 1604, which banned any criticism of this unprecedented power.

Dealing effectively with pandemics can reasonably support the suspension of some norms and freedoms, but a careful balance must be struck.

We have already seen the virus extinguish popular protest movements from Iran to Hong Kong. Now, in some places, we are seeing how it threatens democracy itself.

To be clear, this is not about the lockdowns, quarantines, and mandatory physical distancing measures imposed by almost every responsible government in response to COVID-19. But even these sensible rules, in most cases guided by the advice of public health authorities, have resulted in penalties that can be unduly heavy-handed. Steep fines, such as the $300,000 one levelled against a Brampton-area man who hosted a backyard party for 20 friends, are an example. Surely there are reasonable limits to such sanctions.

What does concern me are the ominous cases of democratic rollbacks, like the ones we are now witnessing in Hungary. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Viktor Orban pushed through a draconian law that allows the prime minister to rule by decree, suspend Parliament and repeal any existing law and do so indefinitely.

The state will now impose years-long jail terms for sharing nebulously defined “fake news,” or acting to impede the response to the virus, giving the authorities wide latitude to imprison political dissidents. While these measures firmly tip the EU member state from democracy to dictatorship, the rest of the Union, mired as they are in their own COVID-19 response problems, hardly seem to have noticed.

Hungary is not walking this dangerous path alone. In Thailand, the prime minister has used his new powers to impose harsh curfews and expand censorship of the news media. In Chile, the military patrol the streets and public squares, having conveniently crushed protestors who had disrupted the country for months before the virus arrived.

And the list goes on. Amid the panic of the pandemic, it can be difficult to detect where, exactly, the line falls between justified response and anti-democratic exploitation. Some of the countries that have been most successful at flattening the curve have deployed aggressive contact tracing techniques that, on their face, would violate civil rights.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized the use of invasive cellphone location tracking, intended for counterterrorism, to track those who test positive for the virus and monitor others with whom they may have come into contact. The South Korean government’s policy of releasing detailed information including the names and movements of newly diagnosed cases has inadvertently revealed sexual affairs and other embarrassing personal information.

What’s more, even well-established democracies are flirting with injustice. Despite pleas from the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, the Republican-dominated legislature, abetted by the state Supreme Court, has used the crisis to play partisan politics. In recent voting, it refused to extend the window for mail-in ballots and reduced the number of polling stations in the state from 180 to five, all of which were conveniently located in areas that lean Republican.

As the curve is flattened and the threat of the virus recedes, it remains to be seen how many of these unjust measures will be repealed. The last time Orban awarded himself extraordinary powers under the guise of an emergency — powers he has yet to relinquish — it was the 2011 migrant crisis.

What every strongman has understood, from Cecil to Orban, is that a frightened public is also a compliant public. For the sake of our democracy, our leaders must understand that while we are willing to be compliant, to do our duty, to surrender some of our individual rights and liberties for the collective good, we are not frightened. Not in the least.

This article originally appeared in the Toronto Star on April 5, 2020.

The COVID-19 humanitarian crisis is compounded in its severity by an economic crisis that, like the virus, is worsening exponentially. Nowhere is this more pronounced than Alberta where, this week, the price of Western Canadian Select oil plummeted below $5 a barrel — equivalent to the price of a pint of beer.

We are facing the prospect of a depression that will leave no Canadian untouched. Every industry is experiencing the sharpest downturn in living memory as the economy has gone into deep freeze. But in a country where the energy sector accounts for more than a tenth of GDP, and a region where hundreds of thousands rely on that industry for their livelihood, the wholly politically engineered disaster of dirt-cheap oil is tragedy upon tragedy, akin to kicking someone already down.

In early March, when talks stalled between Russia and OPEC, the price of crude oil plunged by a third, thanks to deliberate decisions to flood supply in the market made by Moscow and Riyadh. What’s worse, the repercussions of the OPEC price war have been compounded by massive declines in demand as the world’s two largest oil consumers — China and the United States — moved toward total lockdown in response to the pandemic.

Just as Alberta and Canada’s economy were bolting down for the impact of COVID-19, the OPEC issue has brought challenges for the energy sector in general to the fore. While the impact may look different for conventional versus renewable energy companies, the reality is that both are united in their reliance on access to capital. Across the entire economy, that capital will now be much more difficult to attain than it has been for a long time.

The result? A crisis of unprecedented magnitude.

The falling price of oil means not only is the energy sector hurting but Albertans are seriously hurting right now as well.

And that’s bad news for every Canadian. For all the talk of economic recovery in Canada, we need to face the reality that we won’t have a recovery in this country without the energy sector. It plays a central role in our economy. It is critical for the effective functioning of almost every other industry as well.

And importantly the energy sector goes well beyond Alberta, too. One need look no further than the dire state of affairs in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the combined impact of COVID-19 and the oil crash has left the province in financial ruin.

It may be that the Trudeau Liberals are reluctant to take action to benefit the oilpatch while other sectors, the ones whose impact is more personal to many Canadians, are still reeling. But as our government moves forward with bailout plans for strategic sectors and looks at options to quickly restart the economy, it would be unconscionable — foolhardy to boot — to leave the energy sector behind.

Whether it is conventional or renewable, energy is one industry that can have a direct and immediate impact on jobs, stimulate investment and create benefits for communities small and large, including Indigenous communities.

That said, no matter how well calibrated the response, the impact will be devastating. There will be significant consolidation in the sector.

In the long run, though, this will provide a pivotal opportunity for innovators to come out on top and, in doing so, transform Canadian energy. It is a movie we have seen before: some of the current oilpatch leaders were born out of a previous downturn. Newer companies will be doing things better, with more efficient and sustainable methods.

The key to a successful government response will be not to shy away from traditional oil and gas producers but rather, partly out of economic necessity, to embrace them. And, at the same time, embrace the kind of technology and solutions needed to help the industry achieve a lower carbon footprint. That is where the opportunity lies. Ottawa cannot afford to miss out on it. Canadians certainly can’t.

Especially now that, just when we were facing the greatest challenge of our lifetimes, Saudi Arabia, Russia and others were content to effectively destroy our own energy industry.

Perhaps now, we will all listen more intently to Premier Jason Kenney’s long-standing pleas for North American energy independence.