Roundup: Humble and concerned

The Liberals had their post-election unofficial caucus meeting (technically true that it can’t be an actual caucus meeting as Parliament has not been summoned and only a handful of MPs have actually been sworn in yet), and the early results are that they need to be more “humble,” and address the concerns of Western Canada – somehow. Particularly because squaring the economy versus environment circle is harder in that part of the country (though really, the world price of oil is the bigger problem for them right now than any amount of environmental regulation could ever be). And like Scheer, there is this emphasis on the need for some kind of “listening tour” of the region, though I have my serious doubts about the utility of it given that the demands being made of the federal government are largely nonsensical, counter-productive, or non-starters (and many are being made intentionally so by the likes of Jason Kenney and Scott Moe because they want federal inaction on those specific items to be things they can get people angry about).

With this in mind, there were two interesting pieces out yesterday – one, a retrospective from Rosemary Barton about the recurring nature of Western anger, which has been around for decades and the fact that the Liberals have often been shut of the region in terms of seats, even worse than they are currently, and yet the country mas managed to survive. The other piece, from Jen Gerson, is a lengthy and exasperated piece that tries to shift some of the blame for the sentiments on the narratives that spring out of Central and Eastern Canada about Alberta, and how those contribute as much to Western alienation than anything else. And while Gerson makes some really good points in her piece, I did find it a bit one-sided in several respects, because it ignores some of the attitudes in the province that are just as off-putting to the rest of the country, from their smugness, their patronizing attitudes about how other regions facing unemployment should just decamp to the oilsands (which is ironic now that other regions are facing labour shortages but I don’t see a lot of Albertans eager to move there), their hostility towards Quebeckers (which many pundits raised as a factor in the return of the Bloc in this election), and this sense of entitlement that it was their hard work an ingenuity that put the oil under the ground rather than an accident of geology. And yes, I am an Albertan and I grew up with these attitudes as much as I did the feeling of being put upon by the rest of the country, or the grand mythologies we built up for ourselves about Pierre Trudeau and the National Energy Programme, and the conflation with the collapse of world oil prices that happened at that time.

Another of Gerson’s recurring themes is her insistence that Jason Kenney is simply trying to replicate Preston Manning’s attempt at channeling the province’s anger into a more productive course of action – forgetting that Manning’s Reform Party did serious damage to the institutions of Parliament, which have never recovered, or the fact that Kenney is not channeling those feelings in any productive way, but deliberately stoking anger through lies and snake oil promises for his own benefit. This needs to be identified and called out, and it needs to be done repeatedly and forcefully because Kenney will simply double down and bulldoze over anyone who challenges him over his bullshit – which makes it all the more important that it be challenged again and again. Giving him a pass because he says he’s a federalist and a patriot (while also sounding like a movie mobster running a protection racket) will only make it fester.

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Roundup: Frank dialogue and tone-deaf pronouncements

The Conservatives had their big post-election caucus meeting, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, they voted not to enact the provisions of the (garbage) Reform Act that would give caucus the ability to turf their leader and force a new leadership contest – predictably under the rubric of empowering the “grassroots,” which as was explained in yesterday’s post, does the complete opposite. As this is going on, Angus Reid had a poll of Conservative voters that showed them particularly split on whether they want Scheer to stay or go (42 percent go, 41 percent stay, 17 percent undecided), so that could be an indication that their own base is leaning toward dumping him at their leadership review in April – especially as the convention will be in Toronto, an area where the party was shut out, and they may be more motivated to punish him for it.

As for Scheer, he arrived at his planned press conference three hours late because the meeting kept going, and it makes one wonder if the “frank discussion” going on inside were to blame – it’s possible there was an airing of the grievances happening, particularly for those who lost their seats. It didn’t seem to daunt Scheer, however, because when he arrived at the microphones, he essentially repeated his stump speech from the campaign. Sure, he said that “no one was more disappointed than me,” but he offered no signs of humility in defeat. When asked about the failure of his climate plan, Scheer said that they simply didn’t communicate it clearly enough rather than admit that it transparently wasn’t an actual climate plan (and his own senators have publicly clocked him on this fact). When asked if he thinks homosexuality is a sin, he prevaricated – again – and forcefully stated that he will defend people’s rights, which shows that he hasn’t learned anything from the campaign about his evasiveness.

Meanwhile, Matt Gurney makes the point that the party isn’t listening to what people in the GTA have been trying to tell them about what will and won’t fly there if they want to win seats there ever again, and are being told to “calm down” in response – which could spell trouble for Scheer.

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Roundup: The knives and the Reform Act

The Conservatives are having their first post-election caucus meeting today, and there is talk that the discontent may be more serious than the public picture they’re letting on in public – not that that’s surprising. But all of the talk of forcing an early “leadership review” of Scheer rests – whether from the talk of the disaffected Conservatives, or in the public musings of Andrew Coyne and Stephen Maher to name a couple – haven’t made a very careful study of the Reform Act beyond its stated good intentions when the bill is actually garbage.

In fact, I think that relying on the Reform Act could insulate Scheer more readily than it could push him out, given that it has a relatively high threshold to trigger the caucus vote to ouster a leader, and that high threshold can be used to intimidate any would-be usurpers or those who would use the ability to hold their leader to account for his or her sins – in this case, a bad campaign based on lies, a platform that didn’t appeal to any of the target demographics or ridings that they needed to win, and the inability of said leader to articulate positions on socially conservative issues that would offer any kind of reassurance to those target demographics and regions. (And did I mention the campaign of lies?) That intimidation can make it harder for the caucus to make a clean break and get on with choosing a new leader.

This having been said, I want to push back on something that Conservative MP Chris Warkentin said on Power & Politics last night as it pertains to this Reform Act business, wherein he said that he didn’t agree with giving caucus that power because it somehow “disempowered” the grassroots (followed by the ritual motions of insisting that they are a “grassroots party” as though that were actually true). For a century now, political parties in Canada have flattered their grassroots members by pretending that letting them choose the leader is “democratic,” when all it does is obliterate accountability. It means that the leader can claim a false democratic legitimacy and centralize their power by marginalizing both the MPs in his or her caucus, and eventually marginalizing the grassroots because that power has been centralized and those grassroots become an increasingly irrelevant means of pretending to get policy advice. It’s simply become an exercise in the grassroots willingly turning over their agency and power to the very person who will undermine them, but hey, it’s “democratic.” This is the root of the problems that have developed in our system, and we can’t just keep pretending that they don’t exist because “grassroots parties” no longer resemble that.

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Roundup: A quasi-exit for May

The other, non-Senate big news on Parliament Hill yesterday was Elizabeth May’s decision to step down as Green Party leader – sort of. She said that she would stay on as the “parliamentary leader,” but give up the mantle of big-P Party leader, and that one of her appointed deputy leaders, Jo-Ann Roberts, would be interim leader until the party could have a leadership convention – next October. May fully intends to stay on as an MP and run again as an MP (and said that she would not run for Speaker this time, but would pursue it in the next Parliament).

This particular kind of leadership dynamic is part of what ails Canadian democracy right now – this notion that there should be year-long leadership races, and that someone who doesn’t have a seat in Parliament should be leading the party in any capacity. The fact that the leader is not selected by caucus alone is one of the biggest problems with our system – it has allowed leaders to centralize power and when they get into power, that centralization rests in the PMO. And with May stepping back, and new MPs Jenica Atwin and Paul Manly also eschewing running for the role, they will again be a party where their leader is outside of Parliament, and who may or may not run for a seat anytime a byelection comes around, and they will face some of the challenges that Jagmeet Singh became all too familiar with.

There needs to be a rebalancing of leadership roles in our system, and we need to keep the party leader’s focus back on parliament, with the rest of the leadership better handled by the Party president. But what the Greens are doing now is just perpetuating what is horribly wrong with our system.

Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt remarks on how May left on her own terms, while Paul Wells sees the end of May’s leadership as a chance for her party to overhaul its message and its organizational abilities.

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Roundup: A new breakaway Senate caucus

Expect some drama in the Senate coming up, as a group of Senators plan to break away from their existing caucuses – a couple of Conservatives, but most of them currently sitting in the Independent Senators Group – in order to form a new caucus that will concern itself with regional representation (and I have had independent confirmation of the reporting in this story). It’s expected that the formal application will be made this morning, and then the work of organizing starts, and because there are some ten to twelve senators in this group, they will have sufficient numbers for an official caucus under the current Senate rules (and will have even more right to salaries once the Parliament of Canada Act changes that Justin Trudeau promised will go through).

While I will be writing more about this later in the day, the names on the list aren’t too much of a surprise because they haven’t necessarily been playing well with the current ISG leadership, and many have bristled with some of the heavy-handed strictures in the ISG about party membership and so on. I have definite questions about how they plan to put more focus on regional issues as part of this group, and I’ll be making some calls over the day to get some more answers, but it’s going to be a very interesting next few weeks, and Justin Trudeau come to rue the day that he kicked his senators out of his caucus in order to avoid any audit revelations and pretend it was high-minded principle.

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Roundup: Waiting – or not – for a Cabinet call

One of the more interesting stories that was out first thing Friday morning was that of new NDP MP Heather McPherson, the party’s only Alberta MP, who mused openly to the CBC that she would be willing to take on a Cabinet position if prime minister Justin Trudeau offered it – but she wouldn’t cross the floor for it. Hours later, she backtracked on Twitter, saying that she obviously wouldn’t take a Cabinet position – likely because it was pointed out to her what that would entail. While this is obviously a rookie mistake, it might be worth delving into a bit more for the sake of everyone’s edification.

First of all, having an opposition MP in Cabinet – who remains an opposition MP and who hasn’t crossed the floor – is pretty much a coalition, even if you don’t want to call it that. Being in Cabinet, she would be bound to Cabinet confidentiality and solidarity, meaning that she would have to vote with the rest of the Cabinet, even if the rest of the NDP were opposed; and confidentiality could be a very sticky issue if they want to ensure that she’s not going to divulge Cabinet secrets to her caucus colleagues behind the closed doors of the caucus room (which in and of itself has its own confidentiality convention that, like Cabinet confidentiality, is intended to let the members have free discussions without then being picked off by media when their views are off-side from the rest of the Cabinet or caucus, as the case may be). Now, there are exceptions to how this can work, such as in New Zealand where they have developed a system where they could swear her in as a member of the Privy Council and bring her into Cabinet discussion where appropriate by not make her a full member of Cabinet (as they do with Green MPs in that government), but I’m not sure what the utility would be in this case, when there are better options available to Trudeau (such as appointing a Senator, which is more in keeping with our own traditions and one of the reasons why our Senate exists in the way it does). Regardless, the point is moot, and that’s as far as the thought exercise extends.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1190232873477058562

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1190247532246556672

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Roundup: Encana and illogical anger

The big news yesterday was that oil and gas company Encana decided to decamp their headquarters and head to the US under a new name to try and attract more investors there, and Jason Kenney and his ministers freaked out. They railed that this was Trudeau’s fault – despite Encana’s CEO saying otherwise, and despite the fact that there are to be no job losses in Alberta or loss of existing investments – and Kenney upped his demands on Trudeau (including the ludicrous demand that Trudeau fire Catherine McKenna as environment minister). And while the Trudeau blaming gets increasingly shrill and incoherent, there are a few things to remember – that Encana’s stock price has hewed pretty closely to the price of oil, that it lost more value under Harper than it did Trudeau, and that even bank analysts are mystified by the move. Perhaps Kenney’s blame is misplaced – imagine that.

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There have also been a number of voices making the absurd comparison that governments are quick to help companies like Bombardier and SNC-Lavalin but won’t offer it to oil companies – which ignores that the Harper government also helped those same kinds of companies, while Trudeau bought a pipeline in order to de-risk it and ensure that it gets completed, not to mention that other companies usually asking for loan guarantees and aren’t reliant on oil or commodity prices. There is a lot of false comparison going on in order to nurse this sense of grievance, because that’s what this is really all about.

Meanwhile, here is some additional context on the economic situation in Alberta and Saskatchewan that we shouldn’t overlook as part of this conversation.

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Roundup: Performative or procedurally correct?

The NDP held their first post-election caucus meeting yesterday, saying goodbye to departing MPs and welcoming their rookies and returning MPs, and when they met the press afterward, Jagmeet Singh announced that he is going to press for pharmacare and for the government to abandon their application for judicial review the Human Rights Tribunal compensation for First Nations youth. But there are problems with both – on the former, he is proposing the party’s first private members’ bill be taken up with the matter, and on the latter, the substantive problems with the Tribunal likely exceeding its statutory authority to make that kind of compensation order is kind of a big deal and as a lawyer, you would think he might have an appreciation for bad jurisprudence while still pushing for the government to go ahead with the compensation that they said they would honour. But you know, performative outrage.

Which brings me back to the notion of pharmacare legislation. The whole promise is built on both bad practice and bad procedure. Remember that when it comes to private members’ bills, they are allocated by lottery, meaning that it’s random as to who gets what slot, and Singh is not proposing as leader to take away the slot of the first NDP MP whose name comes up so that he can dictate what bill will be presented. That’s not only heavy-handed, but it actively removes the independence of that MP (which the NDP is used to doing while pretending they don’t, but let’s call a spade a spade). So much for any of the issues that MP cares about – the leader demanded their spot. The second and more important aspect is that private members’ bills can’t initiate government spending, and pharmacare is provincial jurisdiction, meaning that it’s depending on negotiating with premiers. The bill, essentially, is out of order, unless it becomes an exercise in demanding a national strategy, which the NDP love to do, but one of their MPs went on TV last night to say that they intend to use it to lay out the framework they want to implement. I can pretty much guarantee you that it means the bill will be dead on arrival, and that the committee that decides on what private members’ business is voteable will decide that it’s not. (The sponsor who was forced to give up their spot for this bill will then demand that the Commons vote to override the committee, and when they don’t, the NDP will wail and gnash their teeth that the Liberals don’t care about Pharmacare, which is a script so predictable it might as well be a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie).

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What the NDP could do instead is use their first Supply Day to debate a motion on Pharmacare, which would then have a vote and let them scream and moan if the Liberals don’t adopt it for the reason that they’ve already committed to the implementation plan in the Hopkins report (which the NDP decry as not being fast enough), but at least that would be procedurally sound. But their apologists have been telling me on Twitter that all private members’ bills are theatre and only exist to make a point (untrue), or that they could simply get a minister to agree to it in order to spend the funds (never going to happen), but hey, it’s a minority parliament so the NDP can pretend to dictate terms as though they actually had bargaining given the seat maths. It’s too bad that they can’t be both performative and procedurally correct.

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Roundup: It’s the same government and words matter

Concern for civic literacy in this country took another blow as numerous media outlets started reporting that prime minister Justin Trudeau was meeting with Governor General Julie Payette to “signal his intention to form government.” They took this obviously wrong line directly from the PMO press release, but let me reiterate that it is wrong. Worse, Power & Politics said that Trudeau went to Payette to ask permission to form a government, which is so wrong that it should make the walls bleed with anguish. Payette doesn’t give permission. Trudeau is already the prime minister and the election doesn’t change that. Government doesn’t change – it merely carries over into a new parliament. What Trudeau was really doing was meeting about his intentions for the upcoming parliament, including when he would like her to summon it – but this was not actually or accurately communicated to Canadians. And true, he could have theatrically resigned and got sworn in again, but that would be both counterproductive and dumb, but again, this is the language that we’re using to describe this routine bit of government business.

Shortly thereafter was news that Trudeau had tapped Canadian ambassador to France, Isabel Hudon, and Anne McLellan, for his “transition” to his “second term,” at which point my head exploded because there is nothing to transition, and we don’t have “terms” in Canada. He may be shuffling his Cabinet, and there may be shakeups in PMO or in their Machinery of Government shop, but it’s the same ministry. There is nothing to actually transition to or from. It’s just a Cabinet shuffle. And again, this was not accurately communicated nor explained to Canadians.

There are clear concepts in Westminster parliaments that are not being accurately described, either by the hapless fools in Trudeau’s PMO, or by any of the media bureaux, who should know better. We are inundated with Americana politically, and there are so many people – both politicians and journalists – who want to playact American politics in Canada because it’s “fun” or “sexy,” when we’re a different country with a very different system, and “borrowing” terms or concepts (or in the case of the NDP, entire election planks that don’t make sense) that don’t actually translate here don’t help anyone. Instead, they create confusion that bad actors exploit to their own purposes, who know that they won’t be corrected when they deliberately misconstrue things. This is a problem, and would that our media outlets could see that this is a problem that they have the power to fix – but they don’t, and here we are. Do better, everyone. Seriously.

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Roundup: Brad Wall’s basic nonsense

Former Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall penned an op-ed for the National Post yesterday that, amidst quoting some classic rock lyrics, repeated a bunch of debunked mythology about pipelines that never happened, the federal price on carbon, Bills C-48 and C-69, and even pulse exports to India. (Seriously – does Wall not read anything?) But amidst this pile of false narratives, Wall decided to make a few “suggestions” about how to mollify Alberta and Saskatchewan, which included the non-starters of letting the provinces set their own carbon price on heavy emitters (effectively ignoring the whole point of the national price is to ensure that provinces don’t undercut one another in a race to the bottom), an “equalization rebate” which is not actually equalization – and worse, wants to offload the environmental liabilities of orphan well clean-up to the federal government under the guise of said “equalization rebates.” (Seriously, the Supreme Court just months ago said that the responsibility for orphan wells can’t just be offloaded because of bankruptcy, and companies need to be responsible for remediating them, because we have a polluter pays principle in this country). Wall also demanded that Trans Mountain be completed and privatized with a significant portion going to First Nations interests (why the privatization matters to him I’m not entirely certain), and amendments to C-48 and C-69 to ensure that pipelines can get to the West Coast – even though that would seem to undermine the fact that all projects need to undergo a proper assessment. Suffice to say, the demands for a “fairer deal” with the federation are generally built on false premises, such as lies about how equalization works, and a sense of grievance that no amount of capitulation will actually solve. (Ask Brian Mulroney about that one).

For a reality check, the Hill Times consulted with professor Andrew Leach about all of the claims that Trudeau single-handedly destroyed Alberta’s economy – complete bunk, of course – but it has some good facts in here about the context of the oil price crash, and the demands for MOAR PIPELINES! when there won’t be enough production capacity to build yet more pipelines once the TMX expansion, Enbridge Line 3 and Keystone XL all finish construction.

Meanwhile, Wall’s successor, Scott Moe, is warning that the separatist talk is “alive and happening.” I’m going to call bullshit – only a few loudmouths and swivel-eyed loons are talking about it, and not seriously. Ordinary people simply vent frustrations because they’re being fed a diet of lies and snake oil, which is what Jason Kenney and Moe want – people to be angry at Justin Trudeau, so that their attention can be safely elsewhere.

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