Roundup: Baylis brings back boneheaded ideas

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Yesterday, no-hope Liberal leadership candidate Frank Baylis offered his ideas about how to make politics better, and…*sighs, pinches bridge of nose* It’s so bad, you guys. Back when he was an MP, Baylis had proposed a motion to change the Standing Orders to do a bunch of dumb things that he felt would improve things for MPs, but then didn’t show up for the debate on his own motion, so it died on the Order Paper, fortunately. But I see that he’s back at it again.

I cannot stress enough how stupid of an idea term limits are in a system like ours, because you actually need to have institutional memory in politics, and you can’t build that up in ten-year increments. You just can’t. That’s one of the reasons why the Senate tends to be more valuable in that capacity (which has been curtailed thanks to Trudeau kicking Liberal senators from his own caucus and only appointing independents), but you need experienced MPs in your caucus. Term limits make that impossible, especially for ten years. Canada already has a problem with a higher-than-normal rate of turnover for MPs as compared to other similar democracies, and making the churn worse doesn’t help. Baylis kept justifying this by saying “I’m a professional engineer” when questioned about this on Power & Politics, which doesn’t actually give him any special insight.

His idea of letting the Speaker choose who gets to speak and not party leaders is partially sound, but only in particular circumstances. I get that he wants to eliminate speaking lists, which I do agree with, particularly for Question Period, but it’s not as much of a problem as the rules around speaking times, and how we structure debates. Of course, he then screws up that decent idea with the boneheaded notion of petitions to trigger debates. Parliament is not supposed to be about empty take-note debates. Debates should have a purpose—speaking to motions or legislation that actually do something, rather than speaking for speaking’s sake. That’s all that this idea does.

Finally, Baylis wants a second chamber like they have in Westminster and Canberra, but again, this is ill-thought-out. We already don’t have enough MPs to fully staff all committees (particularly without having parliamentary secretaries as voting members), and to keep debate going in the Chamber, and now you want to add a second chamber? He says this would “speed up decision-making and end legislative gridlock,” but it absolutely wouldn’t because that’s not what those chambers do in the UK or Australia. They are largely used for non-votable debates, and giving speeches or statements. That kind of thing may be of more use in the UK where there are 650 MPs who can’t make members’ statements with much frequency, but it doesn’t affect the pace of legislation at all. It’s so stupid that he didn’t even bother to read up on his own gods damned proposals, but hey, he’s a “businessman” and an “engineer,” so why bother to actually learn how politics works? Honestly.

Meanwhile, speaking of his other no-hope candidate…

Ukraine Dispatch

Russians claim to have repelled an offensive in the Kursk region. Ukraine received some more F-16 fighters from the Netherlands, and Mirage jets from France. Eight Ukrainian children who had been seized from their families were returned home.

Good reads:

  • Jonathan Wilkinson says provinces should discuss the possibility of a west-east pipeline (not that it will change the economics of it).
  • David McGuinty says that the “fentanyl czar” will be appointed before Trump’s thirty days are up, and that it won’t be a Cabinet-level post.
  • The federal government is committing $162 million to Jasper’s recovery, some of which is dedicated to interim and long-term housing solutions.
  • Cabinet ministers and other MPs have released a statement denouncing Trump’s plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
  • The federal government has banned Chinese AI startup DeepSeek from all government devices, citing concerns about its collection of private data.
  • RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme says listing drug cartels as terrorists gives the Mounties new tools to fight them. He also says border staffing is up 35 percent.
  • The Customs and Immigration Union says provinces who have their own border patrols are just an “expensive taxi” to deliver border-crossers to federal agents.
  • Trump’s proposed trade representative is clinging to the bullshit line that the tariffs are about fentanyl, which is a blatant lie (and contradicts Trump’s own words).
  • Liberal MP Soraya Martinez-Ferrada quit Cabinet to run for the mayor of Montreal, never mind that she was also the party’s campaign co-chair.
  • Chrystia Freeland also pledged an earlier date to reach the NATO defence spending target, in part by pledging to increase military salaries by 50 percent.
  • Karina Gould is worried about the pace by which leadership funding deadlines are set (which are deliberately supposed to be tough).
  • The Liberal leadership race is using a point system, meaning smaller ridings can have an outsized impact on the final outcome.
  • Alberta Health Services is halting contracts to certain providers after allegations of corruption have surfaced and are being investigated. (You think?).
  • The BC government may have pledged to fast-track certain mining projects, but the biggest factor on those projects not going ahead is economics and viability.
  • Emmett Macfarlane looks at the caretaker convention in the provincial context and whether Doug Ford has been breaching it on the election trail.
  • My Xtra column looks at how much more emboldened Poilievre will become now that Trump has created the permission structure for him to go even further.

Odds and ends:

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2 thoughts on “Roundup: Baylis brings back boneheaded ideas”

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