{"id":73959,"date":"2020-09-24T03:44:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-24T00:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/notes-on-the-throne-speech-and-a-reminder-that-julie-payette-is-governor-general\/"},"modified":"2020-09-24T03:44:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-24T00:44:00","slug":"notes-on-the-throne-speech-and-a-reminder-that-julie-payette-is-governor-general","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/notes-on-the-throne-speech-and-a-reminder-that-julie-payette-is-governor-general\/","title":{"rendered":"#Notes on the Throne Speech, and a reminder that Julie Payette is governor general"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Notes on the Throne Speech, and a reminder that Julie Payette is governor general<\/a><\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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If you want to watch Movies<\/a> or TV series visit the Dizi.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n Paul Wells: The speech was further from ‘bold solutions’ and closer to ‘old ways of thinking’. Then the PM took to the TV to deliver another message.\n <\/div>\n
\n There is the Prime Minister.<\/p>\n

He is standing in front of his desk. He is looking right at you. Right at you.<\/p>\n

He is warning of \u201ca fall that could be much harder.\u201d But while family Thanksgiving is a goner, he says, \u201cwe still have a shot at Christmas.\u201d (Spoiler: Christmas won\u2019t work either.)<\/p>\n

He is describing a \u201ccovenant,\u201d which Webster\u2019s defines as \u201ca usually formal, solemn and binding agreement.\u201d \u201cThe federal government will have your back whenever you need it,\u201d he says. That\u2019s the covenant. He also says, \u201cIf you need a test, you should be able to get it quickly.\u201d Which is odd, because a lot of people can\u2019t get a test quickly. And this guy\u2019s been<\/em> the Prime Minister for a while. And I thought we had a covenant.<\/p>\n

But already this column is going about as well as Justin Trudeau could reasonably have hoped it would, given who wrote it, because at least I am talking about his remarks on the TV, and not Julie Payette\u2019s in the Senate. Julie Payette is the governor general, and Justin Trudeau made that happ<\/a>en. And lately it\u2019s looking as though a lot of people who thought they had a covenant regarding safe workplaces are claiming Payette wasn\u2019t helpful<\/a> on that front. Which made planning Wednesday\u2019s ceremonies a bit of a logistical head-scratcher for the government, because when Trudeau inexplicably prorogued Parliament in August after kind of randomly firing his finance minister, he ensured that the next messenger of his government\u2019s new direction, to the extent there would be a new direction, would be Payette, because it\u2019s the governor general who gets to read a Throne Speech. And lately Payette is more of a wall than a window when it comes to getting your message out. Clearly some remedy needed applying.<\/p>\n

So the PM asked for broadcast time so he could interpose himself bodily between Payette and the evening news<\/a>casts, thus ensuring at least some of the clips would feature his mug instead of hers. At least one broadcaster seems to have ceded the broadcast time<\/a> on the understanding that Trudeau\u2019s message would be \u201curgent\u201d and \u201cnot political.\u201d In the end the message was: please remember to wear a mask, and hey, have you heard about our Throne Speech?<\/p>\n

Trudeau spent March to June delivering the first part of that pitch five times a week from the front steps of the house he\u2019s using while nothing happens at his official residence. He could have said the same thing at the same venue yesterday or tomorrow. He will, in fact, be invited in the next few days to rise in the Commons and deliver an \u201caddress in reply to the Speech from the Throne,\u201d as prime ministers always do. That speech will certainly be televised. He didn\u2019t need TV time on Wednesday night. It\u2019s not a scandal that he got some. But let\u2019s not kid ourselves about motive.<\/p>\n

The actual speech, the one delivered by Julie Payette, who is the Governor General, because Justin Trudeau wanted Julie Payette to be the governor general, was rather further from \u201cbold solutions\u201d and closer to \u201cold ways of thinking\u201d than it had been billed in advance. And that\u2019s probably a good thing. It was unrealistic and a bit creepy for a lot of people to spend the summer viewing a global public-health crisis as a chance to win political fights. Plagues generally complicate, rather than simplifying, public administration. Belated recognition of this reality is movement in the right direction.<\/p>\n

So the Throne Speech, which Julie Payette read, contained the word \u201ccontinue\u201d 23 times and the word \u201calready\u201d 10 times. It mentioned the Canada Emergency Response Benefit five times and the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy five times. (The word \u201cnuclear\u201d appears nowhere in it, despite recent pronouncements from the natural resources minister<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The speech was four times as long as this government\u2019s first throne speech in 2015, partly because it reminded us at length about things that have already happened: personal protective equipment shipped, Canadian Forces personnel in long-term care homes, the $19 billion Safe Restart Agreement, the $2 billion Safe Return to Class Fund, the COVID Alert app, the assault-weapons ban. It contained two things that sounded like sweeping advances in social<\/a> policy: national pharmacare and a national early learning and childcare system.<\/p>\n

It is handy to read the fine print. A National Early Learning and Childcare Framework was a Liberal platform commitment in 2015, and the project r<\/a>eceived $7.5 billion in the government\u2019s 2016 and 2017 budgets<\/a>. Two of the three elements of a pharmacare plan in Wednesday\u2019s speech, which Julie Payette read, were announced in the lamented Bill Morneau\u2019s 2019 budget<\/a>. The third, \u201cworking with provinces and territories,\u201d has historically been used as often by federal governments to explain the absence of progress as its presence.<\/p>\n

This suggests the Liberal government today is, to several decimal places, identical to the one we had before Trudeau fired his finance minister and asked the governor general he selected, Julie Payette, to prorogue Parliament. This suggests he had another motive for proroguing, and I know there\u2019s been lots of speculation about what that motive could have been<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So to sum up: the Prime Minister fired his finance minister for counselling caution and has now delivered caution. He shut Parliament down so he could signal a bold new direction, and is now continuing the work he was already doing, though the same cannot yet be said for the parliamentary committees that were investigating him. He went on TV so you wouldn\u2019t be reminded of a nasty workplace dispute at the GG\u2019s residence. When I write about such things, I get called a cynic, as though I were the one who thought of doing them. Please wear a mask. And download the app, he\u2019s right about that.
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