Roundup: A committee nobody will love

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So, the government has put the notice on the Order Paper about forming their electoral reform committee, and there will be howls of outrage from all corners as this is going to please precisely nobody. Well, except maybe Liberals who will be controlling this process. In short, Maryam Monsef’s principles for democratic reform have been distilled to five points from eight, and the committee will be constituted of twelve MPs – six Liberals, three Conservatives, one New Democrat, one Bloc and Elizabeth May, but the Bloc MP and May won’t have voting rights in keeping with established practice. The committee will invite all MPs to hold town halls in their ridings and submit a written report back to the committee by October 1st, and the committee’s final report is to be delivered by December 1st. Of course, the NDP are going toe be livid because Liberals continue to make up a majority on the committee (which is legitimate given that they have the most seats) and that it doesn’t follow Nathan Cullen’s “proportional” idea – which, let’s be clear, was all about gaming the committee to advance his own proportional representation agenda. May is going to be upset because she’d not getting a vote, and she too is going to be railing that it won’t allow her to advance her own PR agenda. The Conservatives are going to be upset because the possibility of a referendum is not in this proposal, and they see that as their way of holding onto the status quo (which they feel favours their own chances). And I’m going to add my own particular objections that, as I’ve written previously, there are some serious problems with those principles that Monsef has laid out. We’ll see how this exercise goes, and I have a sneaking suspicion that these town halls may start to become sideshows as groups like Fair Vote Canada start trying to Astroturf them in trying to get PR advanced as the model to go forward (and given how PR advocates tend to operate, the insults and nastiness are going to start flying pretty quickly). There is also the (not unjustified) suspicion that the fix is already in, that the Liberals have their preferred model (likely ranked ballots) and that this is all a big production number to make it look like they’ve consulted Canadians, and that may very well be the case. Suffice to say, I suspect the next few months are going to be one giant headache, especially for those of us who are cognisant of the civic literacy issues at play.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/730215513821982721

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/730216383448031233

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/730216678756339712

Good reads:

  • The government is time allocating the budget debate too, after the Conservatives prepared reasoned amendments to kill it.
  • The justice minister is promising a “quick process” to start filling vacancies on the bench.
  • The PBO says that not following through on small business tax cuts in future years will have a small hit to the economy. Pierre Poilievre is suddenly a fan of the office.
  • With the government now onboard with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, speculation is that they will adopt Phil Fontaine’s “collaborative consent” model.
  • The government has also delivered their response to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal on instituting “Jordan’s Principle” on First Nations healthcare delivery.
  • BuzzFeed tests the assertion that the Conservatives really had concerns and wanted to debate Mauril Bélanger’s bill. Robyn Urback declares a pox on all their houses.
  • Susan Delacourt notes that Trudeau has political capital to burn, and suggests risks he can take.
  • My Loonie Politics column looks at why the government may need to take a procedural firm hand to get the assisted dying bill passed.

Odds and ends:

Justin Trudeau heads to the Fort McMurray area on Friday.

Paul Martin’s portrait gets hung in the Centre Block today. Here’s a look at some past PMs’ portraits and the tales surrounding them.