Category Archives: Reporting

Stories I’m reporting on in my own independent capacity

Engaging the public on the omnibudget

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With the omnibus budget bill now passed Second Reading, the NDP summoned the media to the National Press Theatre to discuss their plans going forward. Those plans include getting public input by holding town hall-style hearings outside of Ottawa, and through an “unprecedented” social media campaign which includes a websiteand the hashtag #HarperBudget.

The website is a single page, whose most predominant feature is the comment box at the centre for Canadians to give their input on the omnibus budget bill. The box to the side calls it a “Trojan Horse” bill – which it’s not – and there are five pop-up boxes at the bottom, under headings like “the environment” or “healthcare” that each have four or five bullet points about provisions in the bill. It’s not comprehensive, it doesn’t cover a number of things in the bill that are equally troubling (like dismantling the Inspector General’s office at CSIS). When Peggy Nash said they would be “shining a light” and “deconstructing” the bill, this is a fairly superficial attempt at doing so.

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Questions about Toews’ latest prisoner “reforms”

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Earlier this morning, Public Safety minister Vic Toews announced that they were going to start making even more restrictions on inmates in federal penitentiaries, including things like charging more for room and board, limiting the kinds of work that inmates can get, and charging more for things like phone calls.

Memorial University criminologist Justin Piché, who has been studying the politics of this government’s crime agenda, took to the Twitter Machine shortly thereafter to ask a series of questions about what these changes will mean (edited for formatting): Continue reading →

The Harper-versary speeches

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On the advent of the Harper-versary – one year of a strong, stable, national majority Conservative government – the three main parties all held events for the media. After all, who doesn’t love a good anniversary speech? (Note: “good” being a particularly subjective measure).

Stephen Harper was up first, as is his wont, and after the media filed into the caucus room, we were treated to some happy clapping before the speech itself. Apparently, Harper’s mandate is for one thing above all – to secure the prosperity of Canadians. And here I thought it was about killing the long-gun registry, the Canadian Wheat Board, passing the omnibus crime bill and any number of other measures that they have invoked the words “strong mandate” to justify.

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Public Accounts vs. F-35s: Procedural chaos

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The Public Accounts committee’s first meeting on the study of the Auditor General’s report on the F-35s was a battle of duelling procedural motions as the government tried to set the timeline further into the week, versus Liberal Gerry Byrne’s motion to accelerate the pace, much to the exasperation of NDP members.

Conservative MP Andrew Saxton’s motion, which was up for debate first, would see the planning meeting for the hearings to be held on Tuesday the 24th, with the suggestion that they begin hearing witnesses on the following Thursday. But when pressed as to why they didn’t use today’s meeting to do the planning session, the government offered no excuse, only that they wanted to “set forward a clear process” to move forward.

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Public Accounts vs. F-35s: Preview edition

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Liberal MP Gerry Byrne held a press conference this morning to preview this afternoon’s meeting of the Public Accounts committee, where they’re going to lay out the process by which they’ll examine the Auditor General’s report on the procurement process for the F-35s. Byrne has a relatively open-ended motion before the committee that includes a suggested witness list, a list of documents he wants tabled, and the provision that they begin immediately.

But the Conservatives aren’t quite so keen. They’ve tabled a competing motion which says that sure, they’ll begin a study on that chapter of the report, but they don’t want to meet to start scheduling witnesses until Tuesday, and they don’t have any suggested witnesses or requests for documents.

So why is this difference important? Byrne says that by beginning immediately, they can hold a full day of hearings starting tomorrow, rather than the four hours a week that the committee is allowed to sit while the House is in session. (He wanted to start this past Monday, but NDP committee chair David Christopherson called the meeting for today, and he respects that decision). He is also concerned that because the Conservative motion is less open-ended, that the Conservatives will use it to limit the number of meetings held and witnesses heard from in order to keep the process and investigation under wraps. The Conservatives have publicly said that they won’t support his motion – only their own, and they do hold a majority on the committee as well.

“There is no games being played unless my motion is defeated with no explanation, and with no alternative witness list actually being presented at that point in time,” Byrne said, and reiterated that he’s quite open to friendly amendments with regards to witnesses.

Byrne suspects that the Conservatives are trying to take control of the issue after the hammering they’ve taken in the media over the past two weeks. And if they try to take the meeting this afternoon in camera, he will let the media know what went down behind closed doors, even if it opens him up to a charge of being in contempt of parliament.

“Holding a public accounts committee in private is a bit of an oxymoron into what public accounts are what all about,” Byrne said. “It’s contemptible – the real contempt of parliament here is holding such important meetings in private and trying to basically squander the opportunity that’s available to us.”

Fear and loathing in the Alberta debate

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I’ll admit up front that my familiarity with Alberta politics is about eight years out of date, since I moved to Ottawa and jumped to the federal scene. But I decided to tune in to the Alberta leader’s debate tonight, as a somewhat disinterested expatriate observer, for old time’s sake.

Throughout the debate, two things rang through – fear of the Wildrose Party and their social conservatism, and loathing of politicians and the money they make, as typified by the controversy over the “no-meet committee,” whereby MLAs were paid a thousand dollars a year to sit on a disciplinary committee that hasn’t hand cause to meet for years.

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Decrying MacKay’s “sad spectacle”

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It was the NDP’s turn to talk about the F-35 process, and their defence critic, David Christopherson, and public works critic, Matthew Ravignat, who presented themselves at the National Press Theatre to discuss the situation. Christopherson started off saying that while MacKay had assured the press that the F-35s were the best value, we can never know that since there was never a competitive bid or tendering process. He then veered off to talk about the submarine programme, and decried how MacKay said yesterday that all four subs would be in the water by 2013, and yet responded to an Order Paper question weeks ago saying that the HMCS Cornerbrook will be in drydock until at least 2016, never mind the fact that we don’t have enough trained crews to maintain operational readiness.

Ravignat, however, had somewhat harsher words for MacKay.

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Calling out an incompetent minister

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In the first of two opposition press conferences on the F-35 procurement today, the Liberals were up first, with both Marc Garneau and John McKay to discuss “accounting versus accountability” with the process, in light not only of the Auditor General’s report, but the government’s defending the differences as being “a difference in accounting.”  The intention had been for Bob Rae to join in by Skype, but this was prevented due to technical issues, some of which were the difficulty in shooting him on the screen behind the two MPs. Nevertheless, Garneau and McKay held their own, as Garneau launched into the Conservative government, saying that they had lied to Canadians about holding an open competition, and then lied to them on the escalating costs.

“There was nothing open and transparent about the way the Conservatives handled the procurement process,” Garneau said.

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Trans bill gets new life in the Commons

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It may not be entirely history repeating, but for the second time, the bill to codify the rights of transgendered and transsexual Canadians reached the House of Commons. In its previous incarnation in the previous parliament, it made it through the House of Commons and over to the Senate, however it wasn’t able to make it though before the election was called. In fact, it would have needed the better part of a year to make it through the Senate given that it would have fallen behind a truckload of government law-and-order bills provided that its sponsor, then-NDP MP Bill Siksay, had found a champion for the bill in the Senate, which he never did. (And no, this wasn’t because the Senators were being petulant, but rather that they simply hadn’t been asked).

This time the torch is being carried by new NDP MP Randall Garrison, his party’s new GLBT issues critic, and he led off Second Reading debate thanking the 18 seconders of the bill, pointing to its broad, cross-party support. His speech had a few major points – that “sexual orientation” as a grounds of rights protection does not actually cover trans people, given that many of them identify as heterosexual, and that they need express protection in order to be full participants in society. He went on to outline the two terms at the crux of the bill – gender identity, being a person’s self-conception as being male, female, both or neither as separate from their birth sex; and gender expression, which is the dress, behaviour, speech or mannerisms which reflects one’s conception of their own gender that may differ from their birth sex. Neither term is vague under established jurisprudence, Garrison asserted, nor is the legislation radical, as there are protections in the Northwest Territories and in anti-discrimination policies in Vancouver, Ottawa and Toronto. Not only that, the Human Rights Act review years ago recommended these changes, and we have signed UN conventions, which obligate us to extend those protections.

Garrison outlined three major reasons why trans people need the law: Access to healthcare, protection from violence, and economic inequality. With healthcare, trans people don’t have equal access to gender reassignment surgery, and those who choose not to get surgery face additional complications in receiving timely care. For protection of violence, there are no official statistics as police don’t track transphobic violence, but an Egale Canada survey of queer youth reported a 90 percent rate of transphobic bullying in schools. And as for economic inequality, many trans people face difficulties in finding a job, and retaining one once they begin the process of transitioning.

While at least one Conservative MP, Shelly Glover, indicated she would support the bill, she and Kerry-Lynne Findlay indicated their unease with the lack of definition in the bill for the terms “gender identity” and “gender expression” – never mind that in existing human rights legislation, none of the grounds of protection have included definitions. For her speech, Findlay not only repeated that she wanted the definitions, but stated that the bill itself was unnecessary as Human Rights Tribunals were dealing with trans issues under the category of “sex” just fine.

Rising for the Liberals, Irwin Cotler noted that this debate was taking place on the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the Charter’s implementation, and talked about the ongoing discrimination that trans people face, and cited a number of court decisions which stated not only that the current laws fail to acknowledge the situations of trans people, but that the lack of protections keeps their situation invisible. And yes, he would be supporting the bill. Garrison’s deputy critic, Dany Morin, used his time to read statements from trans individuals into the record in order to have their voices heard in the debate.

The final speaker for the first hour was Conservative MP Dean Allison rose to express his concerns that the term “gender expression” is just too vague and could cover anything, and that the law was no place to deal with gender norms. As his last point, he raised the unfounded concerns about washrooms, and how “gender identity” was an invitation for sexual predators to hide in women’s washrooms – no matter that such fears have been disproven consistently.

Speaking to Garrison after the debate, he was concerned that the government had given a line, and would be using it to oppose the bill. But I’m not so sure. I was there for the previous bill’s debates and I watched the very same concerns being trotted out by parliamentary secretaries, and the bill passed regardless.

The second hour of Second Reading debate will take place in about six weeks or so.

Rae says Harper is not “just the piano player in the brothel”

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In a speech to caucus that was open to the media, Bob Rae excoriated Stephen Harper over the F-35 debacle. Really, really took him to task, especially seeing as the Harper government is one whose hallmark is centralised control. And it was that control that Rae zeroed in on as he put the blame for the debacle squarely on Harper’s shoulders.

Rae pointed to the “leaks” coming from PMO in advance of the Auditor General’s report. The “leaks,” which don’t happen by accident, said that nameless officials misled Harper and that he was “privately furious” and he was going to make sure that it never happened again.

Rae typified the PMO as “the most highly centralised and tightly controlled government in Canadian history.”

“You can’t get away with the fiction that a $10 billion dollar mistake in calculating the cost of the F-35 stealth fighter had nothing to do with the man in charge, with the man whose name and whose moniker is on every single publication of this government.”

Rae says that such denials might work for others, but not for Harper.

“He cannot now pretend that he was just the piano player in the brothel who didn’t have a clue as to what was going on upstairs.”

Rae charged Harper with misleading the public, putting out a misleading prospectus, false figures and false documents to the tune of billions of dollars. “Any company that did those things would fire the CEO and replace the board of directors. Police would be called in and the civil litigation would be huge.”

And given that Canada no longer has cabinet government, but Harper government, Rae says that Harper personally must wear the debacle and resign.

Rae also touched on the federal budget, given that he has not had a chance to speak in the House about it, and said that there they had five simple questions about the document.

“Does it make the country more prosperous?” Rae asked. “Does it ensure that the prosperity in the country is deeply shared? Does it improve our environmental and fiscal sustainability – is it a budget that points the way to genuine sustainability for the country? Does it improve our democracy and the quality of life in our federation? And finally, does it allow Canada to be at its best in the world?”

Not surprisingly, Rae answered no to each of those questions. He also mentioned that the only time “climate” is mentioned with in the budget is as a reference to the investment climate, which is important, but so is climate change.

Rae’s criticism wasn’t spared simply for Harper, but he had a few words for the NDP as well, whose “filibuster” on the budget speech was not grounded in sound tactics, but simply prevented others from speaking in his estimation, and that it denied 40 MPs from getting a chance to speak.

“The era of love and good feeling is clearly over inside the NDP,” Rae said. “It’s a new regime. We now live in a world where anger is apparently better than love, arrogance is now better than humility, and petulance is much stronger than respect.”

And he had one last shot at Thomas Mulcair.

“The way to beat Harper is not to become mini-Harper. It’s not a strategy that’s going to work, but it says a lot about the new NDP.”