The past couple of days, we’ve had yet more attention paid to the Reform Act, and with any luck, it’ll be the last time we pay attention to it, as the three major parties all have largely voted down – or ignored – the law after their first caucus meetings. And really, it’s for the best – it was a terrible law that did nothing like it promised. It did not help to “rebalance” the powers of MPs in the face of their leaders, and it didn’t increase the accountability of leaders, despite people claiming it would. While the original version of the bill would have made the necessary change of taking away the leader’s veto power over a nomination and replace it with a different mechanism, but that got watered down to uselessness. The rest of it was meaningless noise because the problem is less the removal of the leader than the selection. Giving the caucus the power to remove the leader in writing is ridiculous because they really can do it anytime they like and have the gonads enough to do so – Chong’s laying out percentages made it more difficult because it became a dare to get enough open supporters, rather than having one or two courageous people to go forward to the media (witness Alison Redford or Kathy Dunderdale’s resignations). So long as we select leaders by party membership, any attempt by caucus to remove a leader, no matter how justified, becomes seen as a snub to the grassroots by elites, which is the trap that Chong walked into. Party selection of leaders is what created the unaccountable situation, and the larger the membership base that selected them, the less accountable they get. And it annoys the crap out of me that political scientists everywhere don’t take the selection problem into account when they insist that the Reform Act is better than nothing. No, it wasn’t. And as Kady O’Malley quite rightly points out, it was a colossal waste of time. I would go further to add that it was a colossal, cynical waste of time. Chong had tried to move these changes at party policy conventions several times and failed, so he tried in the Commons to exert pressure there. And a number of different voices in the party have told me that this is all building to a leadership bid by Chong, and one has no doubt that he’ll try to come in as the Great Reformer, and build his brand that way. For him to use that much parliamentary time and media airtime to build this profile leaves a bad taste.

Good reads:

• Barack Obama gave the final nay on Keystone XL yesterday. Jen Gerson writes the pipeline’s obituary.
• In reaction, Trudeau expressed disappointment, Dion said it proves the need for more sustainable development, and Notley disliked the “dirtiest oil” label.
• The French ambassador hopes that the change in tone from Canada on climate policy will help push other nations in the right direction.
• That conflated flap over whether or not there were ministers of state in cabinet was chalked up to a need to update the legislative framework.
• Rona Ambrose started walking back on old positions, like supporting an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women, or medical marijuana edibles.
• Some public servants behaved unseemly at Foreign Affairs, with the cheering and the booing, but unlike the story says, it wasn’t a press conference – it was a private event these journos staked out and crashed.
• Jen Gerson warns that marijuana legalization could wind up with the Beer Store model.
• Aaron Wherry wonders about our heightened expectations of the Trudeau era.
• Susan Delacourt offers some comms advice for the new PMO.

Odds and ends:

In case you were wondering, Harper can still request a small RCMP protection detail.

Ottawa job numbers show the government has quietly been on a hiring spree.