Roundup: Trudeau played chicken, and lost

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There was no presser for the prime minister yesterday, as he was instead at Carleton University delivery commencement addresses in both official languages for university graduates across the country. When the House of Commons did meet first for the usual COVID committee, it was a spectacle of Andrew Scheer making disingenuous attacks about the Auditor General’s budget, and Trudeau responding by trying to shame Scheer into supporting their bill later in the afternoon – a tactic he also tried with the attacks by the other opposition leaders.

And so, when the committee ended for the day and there was a brief pause for the Commons to transition to an actual (abbreviated) sitting, things degenerated. The government tried to pass a motion to do their usual tactic of passing the bill at all stages with a couple of hours for speeches, and that was defeated. They tried again, this time splitting out the disability portions of the bill to pass them swiftly first before going back for the rest, and that failed. Andrew Scheer tried to move a motion to suspend and reconvene a short while later, presumably so that they could engage in further negotiations, and that didn’t pass. And then the Bloc moved their own motion to suspend until such time that the House leaders signalled that they had come to an agreement. And that too failed. Out of options, the Speaker decided that since they couldn’t agree on how to conduct the day’s business, that the House would suspend until the next scheduled sitting day – next Wednesday, when they plan to pass the Estimates in one fell swoop. It was like watching some kind of farce film, but all too real.

The government played political chicken, in their presumption that one of the opposition parties would blink because this was about disability payments (for only about 40 percent of disabled Canadians, if the figures are to be believed, because this was the only real mechanism that the federal government had access to because disability supports are largely an area of provincial jurisdiction). Pablo Rodriguez says they’re still negotiating, but the Conservatives want the House of Commons to have proper sittings (though they are reticent about remote voting – quite rightly); the NDP want more support for people with disabilities and the CERB fraud penalties taken out; the Bloc are demanding a fiscal update, a first ministers’ meeting on health transfers (without strings or conditions of course) – because the weekly teleconference with premiers isn’t enough – and a ban on political parties taking the wage subsidy. I do, however, object to this being dismissed as “partisan sniping” because six months ago everyone was falling all over themselves to rave about how great hung parliaments were because they force parties to work together, and well, this is the result – everyone has priorities they want to advance and everyone thinks they have leverage, and the government tried to play chicken rather than meaningfully engaging at least one of those groups, hoping that the banner of “helping people with disabilities” would be enough to make the opposition roll over like they have been over the course of this pandemic. So no, it’s not sniping – it’s MPs doing their jobs (well, partially anyway), and we shouldn’t be dismissive of it.

Good reads:

  • Bill Blair says he doesn’t have any drastic solutions, but that RCMP oversight and criminal justice reforms are on the way (with no stated timelines, natch).
  • David Lametti has pushed back implementation of the Divorce Act changes until the new year, which lawyers say will only make domestic violence cases harder.
  • Seamus O’Regan and veterans advocate Sean Bruyea have settled their litigation out of court.
  • RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki won’t say there is systemic racism in her organization, but cops to “unconscious bias.” She is also reading complaint files.
  • The Alberta RCMP deputy commissioner doesn’t believe there is systemic racism (but then people have been tweeting about his own problematic actions).
  • Chrystia Freeland, meanwhile, is brokering none of that, and says that the police need to acknowledge systemic racism.
  • The Parliamentary Budget Officer says that extending CERB in its current form will double its cost – but that the Conservative proposal to reform it will cost even more.
  • CRA says that 190,000 Canadians have made repayments, and their snitch line has 600 complaints – out of 8.41 million applicants.
  • Adding to the complications around CERB are the fact that it is being used to fuel a new epidemic of opioid overdoses.
  • The former head of CSIS believes that banning Huawei from our 5G network would be met by “limited” and “short-term” consequences by China.
  • Erin O’Toole has released his policy platform, which includes a number of unconstitutional items, as well as scrapping environmental protections.
  • Susan Delacourt indicates that Trump’s behaviour has managed to galvanize the Canadian premiers, and as a result, the border won’t be reopening anytime soon.

Odds and ends:

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