Roundup: A painful lesson in committee cooperation

Posted on by

News broke yesterday morning that rogue Liberal backbencher Nate Erskine-Smith had been reassigned from the public safety committee by the party whip, and immediately everyone was all “uh oh, this is totally because he spoke out against his party.” Yes, Erskine-Smith has been making all kinds of waves, talking about his disagreement with the approval of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, advocating for the decriminalisation of all illegal drugs to treat them as a public health as opposed to a criminal law issue, and most recently, prostrating himself before his electorate to decry his government’s decision to abandon electoral reform (and using the curious tactic of using language that both undermines his government’s legitimacy and advocates for a system that undermines the very agency he has as an MP to stand apart from his party, but whatever).

Of course, it also appears that none of those commenters from the peanut gallery actually bothered to read the story about why Erskine-Smith was yanked from the committee, and it had little to do with his outspokenness than the fact that he was overly naïve as a newbie MP if trying to make parliament a nicer place. In this case, he wanted to operate by consensus on the committee and tried to get the other parties onside for amending the bill on establishing a national security committee of parliamentarians. The problem was that in the process, he was manipulated by Tony Clement into deleting some of his government’s own provisions because, you know, consensus and working together! So yeah, painful lesson, and maybe he’ll learn to be a little less trusting the next time. I get that you want parliament to be a nicer place and politics to be done better, but if you’re not careful, your opponents will (metaphorically) shiv you because they have their own goals, and they don’t necessarily want to buy into your platform. And let’s not forget that the competition of ideas is part of what keeps our system vital and accountable.

Of course, the fact that the whip could take this step has the usual suspects up in arms about how too much power is in the hands of the leader (by way of the whip), and the standard calls about reforming committees were trotted out. The Liberal Party’s promises on committee reform – more resources, electing chairs by secret ballot, and ensuring parliamentary secretaries are no longer voting members – were pretty much accomplished, but Conservative leadership candidate Michael Chong has his own reform ideas (try to look surprised), but reading them over, I have doubts. In particular, his plan to take away the power to assign MPs to committees and replacing it with a secret ballot process is dubious, in particular because a) I can’t imagine trying to count those ballots, b) it won’t solve the problems of MPs all trying to get onto the “sexier” committees while leaving some of the less exciting ones to be scrounging for members, c) critics – which the leader assigns – are on those committees, so for a party like the NDP, the secret balloting process would be useless, and d) this is a typical Chong suggestion of a solution in search of a problem. MPs like to bitch and moan about being assigned to committees they don’t like, but rarely actually ask for committee assignments, nor do they seem to have an appreciation that sometimes the party has to spread out their talent to places where it’s needed as opposed to where MPs want to go.

I’m also not keen on Chong’s plan to merge five committees to bring down the total number because there’s no actual need. We have 338 MPs and we don’t have a super-sized cabinet with a bloated parliamentary secretary brigade to match it, and in the previous parliament, they already reduced committees from 12 to 10 members apiece. There are enough MPs to go around, and merging the mandates of committees overloads them rather than letting them undertake studies of their own accord, which they should be doing. There’s no real crisis of overloading MPs with work right now (which was not always the case), so this particular suggestion seems gratuitous.

Good reads:

  • The government has relented and offered a $372 million interest-free repayable loan to Bombardier, which is far less than the $1 billion they were demanding.
  • Not getting a bail-out? The news media.
  • Chrystia Freeland is in Washington DC to meet with officials there, while Harjit Sajjan is hinting about new military spending following his meeting there.
  • The Court Challenges Programme has now been restored.
  • Karina Gould had her debut appearance before a hostile government operations committee with members still angry about the demise of electoral reform.
  • Gould is also now having to eat her predecessor’s (and the party’s own) words and is now defending First-Past-the-Post, albeit tepidly.
  • Rona Ambrose insists that they didn’t talk shop on that billionaire’s yacht. I guess that makes it okay then, err, except the part for deriding “billionaire lifestyles.”
  • MPs on the health committee are going to study “violent pornography” as a public health issue. Slow clap, guys.
  • John Geddes looks at data showing that Canadians have similar capacity for populist sentiment over immigrants, but less political incentive to mobilize it.
  • The Government Operations Centre was monitoring MMIW rallies (as they were with Idle No More rallies back in the day).
  • Statistics Canada is quietly studying proposals to eliminate the mandatory short-form census by 2026 using other government databases to get the data.
  • Éric Grenier crunches the fundraising data to look at the Conservative leadership race and finds that Maxime Bernier could benefit from second-place votes.
  • Neil Macdonald has breakfast with Lisa Raitt.
  • Andrew Scheer is proposing tax-free maternity and parental leave benefits.
  • Robert Hiltz wonders if the question isn’t who is the Canadian Donald Trump as opposed to whether the same constituency exists for one up here.
  • Susan Delacourt wonders about survey data showing that Facebook is the second largest source of news in this country.
  • My Loonie Politics column explores the parochial edge to the Conservative leadership candidates and wonders if O’Leary will change this.

Odds and ends:

Maclean’s profiles parliamentary watering hole Metropolitan in advance of budget day.

Liberal MP Ruby Sahota now leads her party’s Ontario caucus.

Note: My Loonie Politics columns are now paywalled. Use promo code Smith and a yearly subscription is $40 instead of $50.