The questions about how prime minister Justin Trudeau will get Alberta and Saskatchewan voices into his reshuffled Cabinet continue to swirl about, and we’re already hearing some fairly crazy theories being bandied about – particularly that Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi is going to be tapped for Cabinet, either as an appointee to Cabinet who is not a parliamentarian, or as a Senator. Oh, but there aren’t any vacancies? Well, there is always the emergency provision in the Constitution that the Queen can appoint four or eight additional senators in order to break a deadlock, as Brian Mulroney did to pass the GST. Would this count as a deadlock? Probably not, and the Queen may privately warn Trudeau that this would likely be construed as an abuse of those powers for his political convenience.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1187454644315983872

Naming senators to Cabinet is actually routine – in fact, the Leader of the Government in the Senate is supposed to be a Cabinet minister, and while Stephen Harper ended the practice in a fit of pique over the ClusterDuff Affair, needing to give himself more distance from the Senate; Justin Trudeau carried over the practice in his bid to make the Senate more “independent” while appointing Senator Peter Harder to the sham position of “government representative,” while Harder maintains the half-pregnant façade that he is both independent and represents the Cabinet to the Senate and vice-versa (which is bonkers). There should be no issue with Trudeau appointing one of the existing Alberta senators to Cabinet (more from David Moscrop here), or appointing someone to the existing vacancy in Saskatchewan (and Ralph Goodale has already said he has no interest in it).

As for the notion of appointing someone who is not a parliamentarian, the convention is generally that they will seek a seat at the earliest opportunity – usually a by-election to a relatively safe seat. Jean Chrétien did this with Stéphane Dion and Pierre Pettigrew, so there is recent enough precedent. The hitch is that there are no seats in Alberta or Saskatchewan that they could run someone in during a by-election, and the closest would be a promise to appoint someone to the Senate seat from Alberta that is due to become vacant in 2021 (lamenting that it will be the mandatory retirement of Senator Elaine McCoy). It’s not very politically saleable, however. Nevertheless, Trudeau has options, but some of them involve swallowing his pride. (I have a column on this coming out later today).

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1187536180017061889

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1187547076470755328

Good reads:

• Bill Morneau reminds us that the Trans Mountain pipeline is expected to generate $500 million per year in associated revenues for the clean energy transition.
• Here’s an interview with André Pratte about his decision to resign from the Senate (which you can expect I’ll write more about in the coming days).
• Catherine McKenna’s campaign office was vandalized with misogynistic graffiti.
• Global has a post-election interview with Andrew Scheer, who seems a little lacking in some self-awareness of the campaign’s problems.
• Yves-François Blanchet says that he’s willing to work with the Liberals in spite of the Trans Mountain pipeline issue, and wants dairy compensation as a priority.
• While delivering her list of “terms” to the Liberals, Elizabeth May said she’s unlikely to stay on as Green leader for another election (but will stay on as MP).
• Ontario is going full steam ahead with spending $30 million to challenge the federal carbon price at the Supreme Court of Canada in spite of the election result.
• Jason Kenney delivered a budget full of cuts, including cuts to services euphemistically called “de-indexing” (which is a cut).
• Rachel Notley threw a little shade at Jagmeet Singh when describing their post-election phone call.
• BC has become the first province to table UNDRIP legislation, but with few settled treaties in the province it’s unclear how it would work out.
• Catherine Cochrane has been elected the premier of the Northwest Territories, making her the only female premier in the country at the moment.
• Jason Markusoff calls out Kenney for capitalizing on the anger against Trudeau to couch the cuts in his budget, and deflect blame with lies about equalization.
• Heather Scoffield describes the unease felt by the business community by the results of the election.
• Matt Gurney talks to an NDP insider about the campaign, but seems to get more excuses than he does honest answers about what went wrong.
• Gurney also notes that Trudeau seems to think that Albertans can’t hear him when he talks about fighting Kenney and the “oil barons” around him.

Odds and ends:

I was on CPAC’s Have Your Say for the final time of this election cycle, and my thanks to Mark Sutcliffe and his producers for inviting me to participate.

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