Tag Archives: Amarjeet Sohi

Roundup: The admiral needs to take the hint

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Things are looking pretty dire for Admiral Art McDonald, the former-ish Chief of Defence Staff, whose little tantrum last week in writing a letter to the general and flag officers to demand his job back (not that they could do anything about it) is looking more and more impolitic. Why? Because the military police are now pushing back to say that he wasn’t “exonerated” as McDonald claimed in his letter, but rather that there was insufficient evidence to lay charges, which is not the same thing as the allegation being unfounded. And McDonald’s accuser is speaking out publicly and pointing to witnesses to the incident, which the military won’t say whether they were interviewed or not as part of their investigation. Nevertheless, the incident makes it even clearer that McDonald doesn’t understand civilian control and doesn’t have the character and temperament necessary to guide the Forces through this particular period of culture change, and it’s better for him – and everyone else – that he get the hint and retire before consequences follow from that letter.

Meanwhile, it seems that the former commandant of the Canadian Forces School of Military Intelligence is serving as a staff officer in Ottawa after being relieved of his command following an investigation into allegations of inappropriate conduct, which signals that there aren’t consequences if people simply get moved around.

Interested observers are wondering what is taking the government so long to take more action on what is going on with the senior ranks in the military, or to formally make General Wayne Eyre the permanent Chief of Defence Staff, formally taking McDonald’s reinstatement off the table (though he should have taken the hint when Eyre got promoted to full general). There is speculation that they are waiting for the Cabinet shuffle, but one would think that they’d want to make changes now, so that a fresh minister won’t have to come in and do the cleaning out on his or her first day rather than letting Sajjan do it now, and let his successor come in fresh. But that might require this minister and this government to have a modicum of self-awareness, and which would be your answer as to why they haven’t.

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Roundup: Quitting over a municipal issue

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News came down yesterday that Liberal MP Bob Bratina announced, in a bit of a huff, that he wasn’t going to run again in the next election because the government decided to fund an LRT project in Hamilton – where his riding is, and where he used to be mayor – because he’s personally opposed to the project. A certain Postmedia columnist picked up on this and insisted this was dire news for the Liberals, because they’re not even listening to their own MPs. There are counterpoints to this argument.

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This having been said, yes, we know that sometimes Trudeau and Cabinet can be deaf to caucus concerns, but in this case, Bratina is throwing a tantrum, insisting that they didn’t consult “the Hamilton guy” when the Labour minister’s riding is also in Hamilton, and the infrastructure minister, Catherine McKenna, grew up there. In other words, the voices at the Cabinet table are just as qualified to talk about Hamilton issues than the “Hamilton guy,” especially because he’s personally opposed to a project that is basically what his own party is standing up for right now – mass transit options as part of the oncoming rapid decarbonization we need to engage in if we’re going to get our GHG emissions below catastrophic levels. He should be well aware of this given it’s the party he ran for two elections in a row. If he wants to run for mayor again to oppose the project, he’s within his rights to do so.

As for said the aforementioned columnist’s coded language around “common sense” and “silent majorities,” it’s hard to square that with the current incarnation of the Liberals. In other words, it’s probably pretty safe to consider his dire warning about this as an example of concern trolling, for what it’s worth.

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Roundup: It’s a Liberal-led minority

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A hung parliament is not a big surprise, with the Liberals remaining in power, but the seat math is perhaps a bit closer than some had anticipated. The Conservatives only gained a handful of seats, and probably not enough for Andrew Scheer to quell any discontent that will start bubbling up in the ranks after such an uninspiring campaign. The NDP have lost almost half of their seats, meaning all the supposed “momentum” and the “upriSingh” that they kept touting didn’t translate into votes – but that’s what happens when you don’t have the organization capable of mobilizing your votes. The Greens only picked up an extra seat (at the time of this writing), one in Fredericton, where they had provincial strength, but it was certainly not the “Green wave” that they kept boasting about (not a surprise there either). The Bloc is now the third party in the Commons, meaning they’ll have a bigger role to play on committees – something they used to be very good at, once upon a time – but we’ll also see if any of the other parties will start to cope with the “new” block that is far more about Quebec nationalism than it is sovereignty, and that they are the federal voice of François Legault. And Maxime Bernier has lost his seat, so hopefully the fan club that he masqueraded as a party will dissolve entirely rather than solidify into a far-right movement.

To that end, Jack Harris won for the NDP in St. John’s, and he was a good MP in previous parliaments, so he’ll have to carry a lot of weight now that their ranks are diminished. Ralph Goodale was defeated in Saskatchewan, which is a huge loss of capacity for the Cabinet, because he did so much of the heavy lifting. The Liberals lost their Alberta seats, Amarjeet Sohi losing to Tim Uppal, who lives in Ottawa and has no plans to move back to the riding; Kent Hehr also losing the only Liberal seat in Calgary. Also, Lisa Raitt lost her seat to Adam van Koeverden, which will also hurt the Conservatives.

Trudeau’s loss of representation in the West is going to be a big problem for him, particularly because he ejected all of his senators from his caucus, and it was not unheard of for the Liberals to fill in the gaps in their representation with their Senators, and now they don’t have that. People have suggested that maybe Trudeau could appoint Goodale to the Senate in order to fill that gap (and there is a vacant Senate seat from Saskatchewan), but that will involve him eating a whole lot of crow, and possibly forcing him to rethink some of his ham-fisted moves around the Senate. It’s possible, but I’m not hopeful for that change of heart. But now we’re going to get a bunch of really bad hot takes about Alberta talking about separation or other such ridiculous nonsense, because Jason Kenney still has his punching bag and scapegoat.

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And now we’re already getting a lot of really dumb hot takes on hung parliaments, with ridiculous statements like “Canadians voted for a minority,” which no, they did not do, and “Canadians are forcing cooperation because they couldn’t get proportional representation,” which again is not how this goes. As for the seat math, because the Liberals are so close to majority territory, it means that they are unlikely to have to form any kind of form agreement with any other party, but will be able to cobble together votes on an issue-by-issue basis, which makes all of the talk about red-lines and demands beforehand kind of dumb (as I pointed out in this column).

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Roundup: A StatsCan privacy check

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While the ongoing issue of Statistics Canada looking for financial transaction data continues, the actual privacy practices in the institution aren’t being adequately explained to Canadians – and they certainly aren’t being represented accurately by the opposition. So with that in mind, here’s professor Jennifer Robson to explain just what she has to go through in order to access data for her research at StatsCan, in order to give you a better sense about how seriously they take this kind of thing.

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This is why the complaints that the data won’t be secure as it’s being anonymized is pretty specious, and the pearl-clutching that StatsCan would have a person’s SIN is also overblown considering that they already have it – they matched up people’s tax returns with their census forms to ensure that they had accurate data regarding household incomes, and lo, nobody made a peep about that when it happened. Again, this overblown rhetoric around what is being planned about this financial transaction data is not only risible, but it’s actively mendacious (particularly when Conservative MPs keep saying things like this is a project by the Liberal Party or by Justin Trudeau himself). And yes, StatsCan has done a woeful job as to explaining what it needs these data for, and this government is largely too inept to communicate any of that information either. And yet here we are.

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne points out that while the Conservatives have been spending years attacking StatsCan, the real privacy threat comes from the unregulated use of personal information by political parties, not the country’s statistical agency.

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Senate QP: Frustrated as an Albertan

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Following the swearing-in of five new senators, Senate QP got underway with special guest star, natural resources minister Amarjeet Sohi. Senator Larry Smith led off, asking about the Trans Mountain pipeline and research around diluted bitumen spills and the federal response. Sohi responded with a bit of a roundabout recap of the Federal Court of Appeal decision and the lack of marine considerations with the original NEB report, and now they were filling in that gap – but didn’t really respond to the question. Smith asked how this research played into the tanker ban on the northwest coast of BC. Sohi noted the ban didn’t apply to Trans Mountain, but that it was in place on the northern coast because of the lack on infrastructure there to deal with a spill, but natural gas from LNG was a different matter.

Senator Neufeld worried about low prices for natural gas versus high carbon prices, and Sohi reminded him that climate change is real and causing damage to coastal communities and forests, with billions of dollars in costs, meaning it was irresponsible for any government to ignore those costs, which is why they gave provinces the flexibility to price pollution in a way that makes sense to them, and cited the success of BC’s model.

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Senate QP: Infrastructure questions

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The first Senate ministerial Question Period of the fall was the return of Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi, his third time before the Senate in such a manner. Senator Larry Smith led off, raising the government’s financial reports and the PBO report talking about delays to Infrastructure spending rollout, and wondered why things were so slow. Sohi noted the approval process and the lag time that was part of it, and that they will pay invoices as they are forwarded to the federal government. Smith noted the Senate national finance committee study on infrastructure spending, and Sohi noted that they had streamlined some of their processes and eliminated some of the the paper burden, but they were still working toward simpler bilateral processes with the provinces based on four funding streams.

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Roundup: A couple of thoughts on the BC situation

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Given the (likely) minority government result in British Columbia last week, a number of people have been trying to game out various different scenarios for how this all might happen. Meanwhile, media everywhere are flocking to hear what the Green Party has to say, with their apparent balance of power, while Elizabeth May in Ottawa keep spouting this laundry list of things that apparently 57 percent of British Columbians voted for, despite the fact that there is no actual proof that those voters all voted for those very things, be it electoral reform or stopping the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion. Nevertheless, when UBC economist Kevin Milligan asked my thoughts, here is what I told him:

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I do think the fact that the legislature won’t sit until October is a key factor. BC has always been a bit weird about this, and there has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from some political scientists over social media that there is a pattern of cancelling the spring session of the BC legislature and few people seem all that bothered about it, while Christy Clark seems to make it sound like it’s such a terrible imposition that they have to bother sitting at all, which is weird and uncool for a democracy.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/863822997072732161

There is a burgeoning convention that if it’s been six months, that it’s more likely that the GG or the lieutenant governor will call an election rather than entertain an attempt by the opposition to form government. And what I meant by how leaders perform in the meantime is whether there are any temper tantrums (particularly from the NDP leader, who has been fighting a reputation for being a hothead throughout the campaign), and that will weigh on how the public perceives any kind of government arrangement – we did live through this in Ottawa in 2008, and the fact that Harper mostly kept his cool while Stéphane Dion went apoplectic certainly helped Harper’s case with the general public. As I also mentioned, I have a suspicion that the Greens will try to overplay their hands in trying to get a bigger share of the governing pie, and making a list of demands that may not be saleable to Clark. Of course, the moment that happens, she has ammunition to go back to the voters to say “look at how unreasonable these people are, and they want to destroy the economy, so you need to give me a real majority mandate.” We’ll see if any of this happens, but this is pretty much what I have to say on the matter for now.

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Senate QP: Rapid-fire Sohi

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Fresh from a vote in the House of Commons, Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi headed over the the Senate for their own Question Period. Senator Smith led off for the Conservatives, asking him how the government is determining priorities for their infrastructure programme. Sohi acknowledged that when they formed government, there was a lack of data on the infrastructure needs around the country, which is why they put their initial focus on repairing existing infrastructure while they got the longer-term plan underway. Smith asked when they anticipated getting their data out to Canadians, and Sohi said that once the budget implementation act was approved, he would sit down with provinces to work with their reporting to match federal standards, given that it was all a series of bilateral agreements.

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