Category Archives: Musings

Essay-style posts about issues of the day

Sober second thought is not an attack on democracy

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News comes from the Senate that they are ready to defeat Bill C-290, an NDP private members’ bill on allowing bets to be placed on single sports matches. It sounds benign enough, and the House passed it unanimously, so everything should be good, right? Well, not really. And herein lies a case where the Senate proves that its sober second thought is a very necessary part of the system.

If you look at the comments these Senators are making to the media, they focus on a very key fact – that it sailed through the House with virtually zero scrutiny. Less scrutiny, in fact, than most other private members’ legislation. If you look it up on LegisInfo, you’ll find that it had a mere hour of debate at second reading – and by “debate” I mean about four canned speeches about what a great idea it was, and that was it. It then received a single hour of study at committee where the only witness, other than the MP who sponsored it, was someone from the Canadian Gaming Association, who wants the bill to pass so that they can profit from it. And then it had twenty minutes at report stage, and twenty minutes of third reading debate. That was it. Not exactly a shining example of study, or hearing opposing points of view, or any of that.

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A note on this week’s opposition day

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According to O’Brien and Bosc, the authority on parliamentary rules and procedure, the purpose of supply days is so that the opposition has a chance to demonstrate why supply should be refused. After all, it’s the role of the opposition to oppose the government, and they hold said government to account by controlling supply – the public purse. They are allotted so many days with which to demonstrate why the government should be refused supply.

This is the supply day motion that the NDP have proposed, and which will be debated in the Commons on Thursday:

“That this House acknowledge that the Canadian economy is facing unprecedented risk and uncertainty; recognize that many regions and industries across Canada have already suffered significant job losses in recent years; urge all levels of government to work together to build a balanced, 21st century Canadian economy; and insist that Canada’s Prime Minister meet with his counterparts in Halifax this November at the National Economic Summit being held by the Council of the Federation.”

Could somebody please tell me where in this is an ability to demonstrate why the government should be denied supply? Anyone? Helpful suggestions and attempts to legislate – or even “insist” – from the opposition benches are not the job of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

Can’t we just get things done?

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Possibly the safest bet that you can make these days is on the first day that the House comes back after a break is for the likes of Nathan Cullen to come out and talk about how the caucus us “united and determined,” and how they’re going to be “proposition not opposition,” and gems like “we were sent here to get things done, not turn every issue into a political grenade.” And yet, it’s a pretty dangerous rhetorical game to start saying things like that without actually understanding what they mean.

If you ask the government, “getting things done” would mean having the opposition roll over and immediately pass everything. And if you ask the NDP, “getting things done” means that the government should abandon its agenda, see the light, and realise that the NDP have all of the answers and they’ll adopt their agenda whole-heartedly. But as we all know, reality doesn’t work that way. Everybody wants to “get things done.” The problem is deciding which things need to get done. And surprise, surprise, there are differences of opinion and belief as to which of those things need to be accomplished. It’s like it’s a democracy or something.

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A primer for Joan Crockatt on a backbencher’s job

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Over in the forthcoming Calgary Centre by-election, there is some grumbling about the choice of Conservative candidate, former Calgary Herald editor Joan Crockatt. But despite what everybody might feel about Crockatt’s credentials, or the fact that she was given a waiver that enabled her to run despite not having been a party member for six months before the race began, I have to say that I was completely dismayed – though not entirely unsurprised – by one of the comments she made to the Globe and Mail today:

“If I’m a backbench MP, I’m just fine doing that,” Ms. Crockatt said. “To me, the job is to support the Prime Minister in whatever way that he thinks.”

No. Just…no. That is not the job of a backbench MP, government or opposition. In fact, it’s pretty much the exact opposite of what a backbencher’s job is. A backbencher’s job, in government or in opposition, is to hold the government to account. That means that backbench MPs control the purse strings that the government wants to use in order to implement their programme. That’s why it’s their job to scrutinise the estimates, and ask tough questions about the spending programmes, and why the opposition has days set aside for the express purpose of demonstrating why the government should not be granted supply. It’s called accountability. You know, the whole reason that Parliament exists.

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The Rorschach Senate

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This past week, with not one but two Senate stories dominating the Canadian media coverage, we have been subjected to a number of intellectually lazy editorials about how these are somehow an indictment of the Senate as a whole, and that this should be a rallying cry for reform. No, seriously – somehow the May/December romance of one Senator, and the onset of dementia in another is somehow proof that appointing Senators is a problem. But it shouldn’t surprise me that any Senate story immediately becomes some kind of quasi-Rorschach test that the under-informed pundit class projects their pet theories on Senate reform onto.

Nevertheless, there was a pretty special level of cluelessness that pervaded Stephen Maher’s Thursday column (which somehow made it onto A1 of the Ottawa Citizen), whereby Maher somehow seemed to be indicating that elections magically prevent the onset of dementia, and that we would never have had Senator Brazeau calling a reporter a bitch over Twitter, or Senator Zimmer’s May/December romance if they needed to stand for election. No, really – that was his argument.

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Justice Deschamps and the bilingual question

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This past week, we have seen a couple of different interviews with outgoing Supreme Court Justice Marie Deschamps, and there is something that both touched on, which was the selection of future justices. In particular, the question of bilingualism has been brought up, and Deschamps, a Quebec justice, is well placed to give her take on What It All Means in the context of her experience and role.

Think back for a moment to the last round of Supreme Court appointments, when the issue of bilingualism again reared its head, as it has periodically for the past few years. The NDP have had private members’ bills on the issue (one of which died in the Senate during the last election), and the Bloc made a big deal of it when they were still a relevant force in the Commons, but the momentum to formalise this requirement never picked up enough steam to get it into law.

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YCYC and our crisis in civic literacy

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Those of you who follow me over on the Twitter Machine know that I’ve been highly critical of the new “educational charity” Your Canada/Your Constitution pretty much since its inception. Last week they put out yet another press release that demonstrates their civic illiteracy, and more than that, the fact that they are deliberately misleading the public when they say that their goals are about education around our system of governance.

On the mandate page of their website, YCYC purports to do “research and education about the history, and ongoing development, of Canada’s Constitution and governments.” And in order to solicit donations from the public, they promise to use the money to develop education materials, host workshops and public forums for discussion, and hold contests to get people engaged. According to the site:

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The Online Party demonstrates the height of civic illiteracy

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News went out yesterday that a the Online Party of Canada has obtained “registered party status” and will be fielding candidates in the upcoming federal by-elections. Never having heard of them, I quickly found an interview that party leader Michael Nicula, the director of a Toronto-based IT services company, did with the National Post. The results were pretty appalling.

Nicula quickly demonstrates that he has close to zero civic literacy. He has no understanding of responsible government, the Westminster system, or even the basics of just what is democracy. All wrapped in this shock-and-awe package of the Internet as the panacea to all of our political woes.

It was this quote in the interview that immediately caught my eye: “Why do we have to spend billions of dollars on elections?” Nicula asked. “The American Idol contest is done on the Internet, and it works pretty well. Why not do the same? With more security of course.”

And then my head exploded.

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Meeting George Takach

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On my travels last weekend, I wound up at an event that was attended by a number of Nova Scotia Liberals, and along the way, had my first encounter with bottom-tier would-be Liberal leadership candidate George Takach (who at last check has not officially declared). Takach, a Toronto-based lawyer who hasn’t run for public office before but has apparently worked on Parliament Hill, was out trying to meet some prospective supporters at the event (as the current rules now allow anyone who totally swears they’re not a member of any other party – really! – to vote for the next Liberal leader). I should note that Takach doesn’t appear to have a website in place for his putative leadership bid either – just a Twitter account and a Facebook page, neither of which actually has a biography. That, I had to find through a Google search and came up with the page from his law firm. So, yeah, points for having a place to drive prospective supporters with a coherent platform or policy ideas in place. Or not.

Just as an observation, let me say that Takach wasn’t exactly working the crowd. Even among a smaller group of fairly prominent local Liberal organisers – you know, the kinds of grassroots organisers who have networks and who can mobilise people to support a leadership campaign – he didn’t pro-actively engage them and waited for people to come to him. And when people asked for his leadership “elevator pitch,” he got bogged down along the way numerous times, not to mention made his foundational platforms – like school meal programmes to help kids get a good start in life – things aren’t actually areas of federal responsibility. Oops.

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On Justice McLachlin and the question of record keeping

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While watching the Supreme Court hearing on the Etobicoke Centre election challenge this morning, I was struck by a couple of the arguments, and the questions put forward by a couple of the justices, and in particular, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin. The issue in question was record keeping, or the lack thereof in some of the instances in question with the challenge.

The arguments put forward by Ted Opitz’s lawyer suggested that the issues were “mere technicalities” and shouldn’t be used to disenfranchise voters because of mistakes that Elections Canada officials made. This position was challenged – and rightly so. These rules exist for a reason, and the need for documentation and record keeping acts as a safeguard. Chief Justice McLachlin at one point said that the presumption seems to be that since we’re not Afghanistan, we shouldn’t worry about it, even though these kinds of breaches might be questioned in such a country. Justice Abella also at one point asked that if these technicalities don’t matter, then why bother having the Elections Act guidelines at all?

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