Roundup: Chong’s plans are a start

Posted on by

While new Conservative leadership candidate Steven Blaney decided to come out swinging with a niqab ban policy designed to appeal to those Quebeckers still hot for the idea and to give Kellie Leitch a run for her money, Michael Chong also came out with some policy yesterday morning – much more modest policy in line with how he thinks he could start to change parliament for the better if he were party leader. Because it’s not big policy pronouncements, it’s more in keeping with the kinds of things that leadership candidates should be focusing on, but that said, there are a few problems with what he laid out. I tweeted some of those concerns earlier, but I’ll elaborate a bit more.

So yes, Chong made a valiant attempt at doing this with this Reform Act, but it got so watered down in his amending the bill to get it passed that it rendered it useless, and the veto went from the party leader to their designated surrogate. This is a promise that is more difficult than it sounds because there does need to be a quality control mechanism in place (which is why it was introduced in the first place), but it also needs to be arm’s length from the leader, and Chong’s previous proposals for such an officer didn’t fly. He’ll need to try and thread this needle much more carefully going forward.

This one bothers me a fair deal because it’s buying into the nonsense that the Liberal Party has been spreading with their reforms to their party constitution. They claim it’s about “modernizing” the party structure and making it more responsive, but it’s more about populating databases, so that when they come out with top-down policy pronouncements, they can use their Big Data approach to justify anything. If other parties want to simply populate their own databases to target or micro-target policies even more that the Conservatives did during their decade in office, this isn’t actually good for democracy, and it’s not actually good for the grassroots. You don’t have people who are quite literally buying into the process (thus putting some skin in the game) and having an interest in their responsibilities as members when it comes to policy and nominations. It devalues membership, and I do think that’s a problem.

Promising reforms to the way the Senate operates while billing this as part of a package of giving power back to the grassroots is curious, but I’ll run with it only so far as to say that Chong shouldn’t actually be trying to out-Trudeau on this. Trudeau has put some things in motion that are not actually for the better, be it centralizing power in his own caucus, or trying to weaken the accountability role of the Senate, while his current “representative” there is trying to upend the whole system so that he can be the true bureaucrat that he is and empire-build, co-opting the whole burgeoning independent system for his own ends. Chong not grasping the constitutional role of the Senate Speaker, or the role of the Government Leader under Responsible Government is worrying, and I do feel like he should know better and not just try to play the reform-for-the-sake-of-reform card. That becomes a very dangerous thing under our system, especially because the system is not broken, so we should stop trying to break it while insisting on fixing problems that don’t actually exist.

Good reads:

  • On the CETA file, Jean Charest thinks Trudeau needs to get Merkel and Hollande to pressure the Walloons, while the Walloons admits it’s an internal battle at this point.
  • Justice committee members got a look at the reasons why Malcolm Rowe is the Supreme Court nominee and the thought process about his inclusion in the list.
  • Jane Philpott has promised changes to food labels and the Canada Food Guide.
  • The Canadian Forces are talking about updating their fitness guidelines after 75 percent of their members have been found to be overweight or obese.
  • The government has opted to agree to the Conservative motion on Yazidi refugees and will start bringing some to Canada within 120 days.
  • The PBO says the government is on track for lower deficits than forecast, for what it’s worth.
  • Backbench Liberal MPs have concerns about their own party’s mortgage rules changes, and hey, that’s how things are supposed to work in our system!
  • The government is in court arguing their right to disenfranchise expat voters, while still promising to change the system.
  • This look at the failure of Bill C-237 on gender parity shows why the government had some wrong arguments, but doesn’t examine the real-life nomination issues.
  • Here’s a look at how a Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton victory would affect Canada.
  • Stephen Gordon says that the Liberal economic advisory group’s suggestions will be stymied by Canadians’ aversion to user fees for infrastructure.

Odds and ends:

Alex Trebek talks to Don Martin about 50 Sussex becoming the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s new centre for exploration.