Tag Archives: Annamie Paul

Roundup: Senator Batters blindsides O’Toole

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There is much intrigue within the Conservative ranks, and it just got a lot more interesting. First thing yesterday morning was the story that Bert Chen, the member of the party’s national council who was suspended for circulating a petition to call for an early leadership review would be suspended indefinitely, rather than for just sixty days. But a short while later, another petition started circulating to call for a leadership review, and this one was one they couldn’t ignore – from Senator Denise Batters.

Batters laid out a fairly devastating line of attack in her video – noting that O’Toole is the one that is growing the “rift” in the party, and that he is responsible for the election loss because of what voters perceive to be his character flaw – that he is not trustworthy. “You can’t come back from that,” Batters stated. And as a senator, Batters has latitude to lead this petition drive on behalf of grassroots members that others don’t, given that she doesn’t have nomination papers that need the leader’s signature, and if O’Toole boots her from caucus, she will only get even more vocal from outside, and she has a parliamentary platform. There have been some talking heads who are insinuating that she is perhaps a catspaw for Peter MacKay, given that she supported him in the leadership, but I sincerely doubt that’s the case – as partisan as she can be, Batters isn’t a fool, and she’s not a puppet for anyone. The party president tried to dismiss her petition, saying it goes against the party’s constitution, but the section he cited was only in relation to the leadership process, whereas she is initiating a party-wide referendum, which is different. (And again, Batters isn’t a fool, and she’s a lawyer who was once chief of staff to Saskatchewan’s minister of justice). Some talking heads have also stated that this goes against the process from the (garbage) Reform Act, but as a senator, Batters is excluded from the Act, and she is leading a grassroots movement, not one from caucus. It’s also being stated that this is just one part of a multi-stage movement within the party to call for this leadership review, so we’ll see where this develops, but O’Toole’s problems are not going away anytime soon.

Meanwhile, a parallel drama is playing out in Alberta, where more than a quarter of UCP constituency associations passed a special motion that will force an early leadership review of Jason Kenney than the April date he had managed to negotiate with his caucus earlier – and they also want an outside auditing firm to ensure the security of the voting system for this review, so that there isn’t a repeat of the alleged shenanigans that coloured the initial leadership vote that got Kenney into power in the first place (which are still part of an ongoing investigation last I checked). Things are not looking up for Kenney either, and he and O’Toole suddenly have a lot in common.

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Roundup: Another of Kenney’s talking points blows up on him

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The Alberta government is facing yet another situation where reality butts up against their preferred victimhood narratives – this time around equalisation. You see, for the first time since the 1960s, they have received more in federal transfers than they paid in federal taxes, and we can thank Justin Trudeau’s benediction, not only in pandemic transfers, but in things like money that they sent to the province to remediate orphan wells as a job-creation (and environmental) programme – never mind that they never should have because it meant that private companies and the province were able to successful offload their environmental liabilities to the federal government after the Supreme Court of Canada specifically ruled that they couldn’t under existing bankruptcy laws.

Of course, this isn’t stopping Kenney or his government from trying to spin this to carry on their narrative. For example, the province’s finance minister is claiming that they are still being unfairly impacted because of their contributions on a per capita basis continue to outstrip their share of the population. Because they have the highest incomes in the country by far and we have a progressive federal income tax. This is yet more of the province’s outright disinformation on how equalisation works because they are trying to make people angry rather than properly telling them how the system works, because if people understood, they might not be able to summon some performative outrage about it, and that wouldn’t help Kenney and his agenda.

Because really, so much of how the province is spinning this is yet more distraction sauce from Kenney’s continued failures, and the thousands of unnecessary deaths on his watch, and as I have pointed out elsewhere, Kenney has only one tool in his toolbox, and that is anger. He’s losing yet one more argument that Alberta is being treated “unfairly,” so you can expect a lot more gaslighting and deception in the near future as Kenney and company will try to push back against reality.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1458600346398478337

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Roundup: Glover says she’s the premier

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It was quite a day in Manitoba yesterday as Heather Stefanson was sworn-in as the province’s first female premier, but the leadership drama isn’t over. Her challenger, former federal Cabinet minister Shelly Glover has not conceded defeat, and plans to challenge the leadership election in court, citing irregularities and reports that Stefanson’s scrutineers looked defeated at one point of the counting and then something allegedly mysterious happened to a ballot box…or something. I’m having a hard time keeping track of it. Regardless, Glover insists that she’s really the premier, not Stefanson.

One could be very pedantic here and note that Stefanson has been sworn in, so she’s premier regardless. Her immediate predecessor, Kelvin Goertzen, was not chosen in a leadership election by caucus as interim leader, and he was fully and legitimately premier, even if it was only for a few weeks (and yes, he’s going to get a portrait in the legislature to reflect that status). So no, Glover is not premier, and even if by some miracle she were declared party leader (which won’t happen – the courts won’t get involved in the inner workings of a political party), Stefanson is still premier and will be until she resigns or is dismissed.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1455671852647559168

But on a broader point, Glover has always been a very problematic politician, stridently repeating talking points in the face of logic and evidence, and getting combative when challenged on her bullshit, particularly as she seemed to lack the critical reasoning skills to think through her positions. And this attempted court challenge is her combativeness and willingness to believe illogical or contrary things playing out in the very way she demonstrated during her nine years in federal politics (two of which were as a minister). And Glover had her own run-ins with Elections Canada, and at one point Elections Canada asked the Speaker to suspend her because of financial irregularities during an election (which were later resolved with revised filings that Elections Canada accepted, Glover terming them an “honest mistake.”) One has to question her fitness to lead given her history and temperament, but I’m not a member of the party.

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Roundup: O’Toole continues to sit on the vaccine fence with caucus

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Erin O’Toole continues to try and have his cake and eat it too when it comes to ensuring his MPs and senators are fully vaccinated in order to attend Parliamentary sittings. But in his desire to sit on the fence and play both sides, he may have inadvertently shown his hand. After the party’s big caucus meeting in Ottawa yesterday, O’Toole announced that caucus “agreed to respect and abide new rules which require Parliamentarians attending in the House of Commons and Senate to be vaccinated.” But he still planned to raise the point of privilege about the Board of Internal Economy decision, because of course.

But.

It seems that he tripped himself up in French, and spelled out that the plan was for those who “participate in person,” which is a pretty big loophole for the holdouts in the caucus. And yet, O’Toole and his caucus continue to oppose hybrid sittings (as well they should), so anyone who doesn’t show up shouldn’t be allowed to participate virtually either – unless this is yet another case of having his cake and eating it too. “They can’t show up, but they have the option of hybrid, so I guess we’ll allow them to participate that way!” with a show of feigned helplessness to the situation. And we still don’t know how many MPs or senators this affects (though the Senate has not yet issued its own vaccine mandate yet), so it could be three or four, or it could be twelve or fifteen, especially as there appear to be vaccinated MPs who refuse to disclose the fact because they don’t want to appear to their anti-vax constituents like they sold out. So this is where O’Toole finds himself. It’s still a losing battle because any privilege complaint will be voted down by everyone else in the Chamber, even if they try to drag it out until the New Year. And all the while, O’Toole continues to look like he’s pandering to the party’s worst elements rather than standing up to them and demonstrating actual leadership.

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Roundup: Rejections without significance

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Because it’s a story that refuses to die, we now know that both the Bloc and the NDP have rejected the four main votes in the (garbage) Reform Act, and now we await the Liberals, who will in turn doubtlessly reject it as well whenever they finally have their first official caucus meeting, and of course, we have political scientists trying to derive meaning from these refusals, as they have tried with the Conservatives agreeing to the four votes.

The simple truth, however, are that these votes really don’t matter because the legislation is garbage. The power to elect caucus chairs doesn’t require its adoption, as we’ve seen, and the power over the expulsion of caucus members is largely illusory anyway because it tends to depend on what the leader says either way. I would be hugely surprised if the caucus and the leader ever parted ways on whether or not to boot someone out of the club, as that would create a schism and be a sign that the leader was on the way out. As well, the power of the caucus to pressure a leader to resign is actually better off without the Reform Act because what the Act winds up doing is protecting the leader by setting a high threshold and requiring a public declaration to trigger a vote, which can invite retribution. It has been far more effective to push a leader out with one or two public declarations by brave members that signal the writing on the wall rather than demanding a twenty percent threshold.

In the Hill Times piece, the Act’s author, Michael Chong, pats himself on the back for codifying these sorts of caucus decisions, but codifying them is part of the problem. Our Westminster system tends to work best under conventions that aren’t codified because it affords them flexibility and the ability to adapt, whereas codification is inflexible, leads to testing of the system and the pursuit of loopholes and getting around what has been codified. It’s the same with setting that threshold to push out a leader – it winds up insulating the leader more than empowering the caucus, and we’ve seen leaders resign with far less pressure than what this codified system affords, not to mention that by Chong codifying that party leaders must be selected by membership vote in the actual Parliament of Canada Act as a result of this garbage legislation, he has made it even harder for parties to return to the proper system of caucus selection and removal of leaders as we need to return to. Chong has screwed Parliament for a generation, and it would be great if the talking heads would stop encouraging him.

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Roundup: The House of Commons’ vaccine mandate

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The expected happened in a way that was a little unexpected – and perhaps a bit improper. The Board of Internal Economy apparently met (possibly virtually), and decided that as of November 22nd, there is a vaccine mandate for the parliamentary precinct, and that includes MPs, staffers, and contractors. It’s a bit of a cute way of imposing a vaccine mandate on MPs themselves, but it may not fly regarding the Chamber itself because of parliamentary privilege.

Mind you, a privilege argument won’t last long. While the decision to go the route of BoIE seems to be a bit of a dare – and Yves-François Blanchet seems to indicate that he’s of the opinion that this is a legitimate use of its powers (I wouldn’t be so sure), this could easily be challenged in the Chamber, but even if the Speaker determines that there is a prima facie case of privileges being infringed, the rest of the House can vote instead to dismiss it rather than send it to committee, or even if they do send it to committee, vote it down afterward. And they likely will, because all of the parties except for the Conservatives are in favour of the vaccine mandate, so it’ll pass one way or the other. Now the government can head off any challenge by introducing a motion in the Chamber on the first or second day to declare that MPs need to be fully vaccinated in order to be in the Chamber, and they can then vote it through and it’ll be fully legit, so if they’re smart, they’ll ensure that happens once there is a Speaker in place. (This will also likely happen in the Senate, but they are still in discussion in that Chamber, but one can likely assume a similar vaccine mandate will be in place with their own precinct areas and Chamber in a similar manner).

This leaves the question of hybrid sittings. The Conservatives and Bloc have been in favour of ending them, while the NDP have supported keeping it going. The Liberals haven’t officially said, but they have been pushing for this since before the pandemic, so you can bet that they’ll be fine with some form of hybrid ability going forward, which shouldn’t be allowed – the human cost of hybrid sittings when it comes to the toll it takes on the interpreters is frankly immoral to continue with. That will nevertheless by an ongoing conversation between the parties before any order to resume said sittings goes ahead in the first few days of the new parliament – but a rule should also be made that unvaccinated MPs shouldn’t be allowed to simply join by hybrid sitting instead. Parliament, whether in the Commons or the Senate, is an in-person job, and it’s an essential function of this country. The hybrid measures should only ever have been temporary and for the duration of that pandemic emergency, and now that we have vaccines, there is no longer a need for them.

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Roundup: A surplus thanks to federal funds

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Something jumped out at me yesterday while doomscrolling, which was New Brunswick crowing that they have a bigger-than-expected surplus thanks to all of the additional federal dollars that were sent to the province because of the pandemic. And it stuck in my craw a bit – provinces have been crying poor when it comes to healthcare dollars and around doing things like improving long-term care, and then they turn around and pat themselves on the back for running surpluses as a result of federal dollars. It doesn’t quite add up.

The fact that certain provinces have been using federal pandemic dollars to pad their bottom lines is a problem for Confederation, particularly as these very same provinces are demanding that the federal government turn over even higher healthcare transfers, and justifying it with historically inaccurate talking points about the original share of healthcare spending without also recognizing the other agreements made in the late 1970s. The current federal government is certainly willing to spend the money, but they have also learned that they don’t want to get burned by it like previous governments have. Recall that when the health transfer escalator was at an unsustainable six percent per year, provincial healthcare spending growth was in the low two-percent range, meaning those additional dollars were spent on other things that did not improve the healthcare system. Similarly, when Stephen Harper tried to buy peace with Quebec and sign a huge cheque to correct a fictional “fiscal imbalance,” the provincial government turned around and cut taxes, which wasn’t the intent of said funding, and yet it happened.

It’s with this in mind that Trudeau has promised that there will be strings attached to future health transfers, and he laid out what many of those strings will be in the campaign, whether it’s hiring targets for doctors and nurses, or minimum salaries for long-term care workers. And yes, premiers will bellyache about it, and the opposition parties will take up those cries in the House of Commons, but we have seen repeatedly over this pandemic that the provinces will demand money and then not spend the money they do get. Time for some accountability for dollars – because it’s all coming from the same taxpayer in the end, regardless of which level of government is trying to make their bottom line look better.

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Roundup: Self-awareness and civilian control

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When it comes to the issue of sexual misconduct in the Canadian Forces, there seems to be an epidemic of a lack of self-awareness. This is demonstrated time and again within the ranks as officers are given inappropriate promotions (remember the head of personnel who had known sexual misconduct allegations), are protected by the top brass (General Jonathan Vance, the infamous golf game earlier in the year), and the issue with Major-General Peter Dawe being given the role of sorting through the various reports on reforming military culture after he was suspended for writing the glowing letter for someone under his command who had been convicted of sexual assault. Every time, this has to be pointed out to them and how inappropriate their actions continue to be.

But it’s not just the ranks that lack self-awareness – it’s also their political masters. During a media availability yesterday, both prime minister Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland also had harsh words for the military’s inability to exercise self-awareness on the sexual misconduct file – but they have a role to play there as well, because in a democracy like ours, the military answers to civilian control. In our particular system, that should be going through the Chief of Defence Staff to the Minister of National Defence – but the current minister, Harjit Sajjan, has made it clear that he is not exercising his responsibility for civilian control, and is not properly overseeing the CDS, or his top decisions. Part of this may be because he is former military (he was actually active when he was elected and needed to go through the discharge process so that the CDS could no longer outrank him), and is steeped in the culture and cannot adequately see the reality of what is going on, or why he needs to exercise civilian control. And no, I’m not sure it was any better under the previous government either, who also appointed a former general to Minister of Defence (Gordon O’Connor), and generally let the military run their own show – especially with procurement, which is why there were so many botched files, from the F-35 to joint supply ships.

We need to re-assert civilian control by means of a competent minister who doesn’t have a military background, and someone who can actually perform some managerial competence and keep the CDS on a tight leash. But that may depend on Trudeau having enough self-awareness of his own recognise that this is what needs to happen as he decides on how to shuffle his Cabinet, and I’m losing confidence that this could actually happen.

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Roundup: Green insiders spill the tea

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This apparently was the weekend for the tea to start being spilled about what was really going on inside the Green Party, and we got a lot of details. The primary one is this lengthy read that details the struggles inside the party, and there is plenty of blame to go around, but what is on offer here really shows that Annamie Paul was a key author in her own misfortune. To add to that, Elizabeth May also writes in her own words an account of why she stayed silent on Paul’s orders, how she tried to support Paul in any way possible including offering to resign and let Paul run in her riding, which is the first time I’ve heard that such an offer had been made. More to the point, it is a fairly detailed accounting of how Paul misunderstood how Greens view their own leadership, and tried to impose a very top-down view of it, including demanding that her MPs didn’t speak to the media, and how even now, Paul announced her intentions to resign but hasn’t formally done so, which is why the party is in a weird state of limbo.

While once again I have no doubt that racism, misogyny and antisemitism all played a role in Paul’s departure, her own actions were certainly part of what happened, from her salary demands (she wanted the party to pay a salary equivalent as though she were a sitting MP), to her control over the party that was unlike the party’s constitution, which the national council largely did accede to. This being said, everything that has come out this weekend really makes me think that the glass cliff narrative is less likely a driving force in what happened, and a more complicated series of events took place. It is too bad, given how Paul did acquit herself on the national debate stage for the most part (until you realised her answer for everything was “we have to work together”) and it’s a shame that it all came to this.

Meanwhile, May also stated over the weekend that she won’t take the interim leader position, and says she wants Paul Manly, who lost his seat, to do the job until they can run another leadership contest. Of course, it may be too late for the party by this point, but we’ll see if they can salvage what remains, but it’s not looking promising.

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Roundup: Did Paul hit a glass cliff?

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Not unexpectedly, Green Party leader Annamie Paul announced her resignation yesterday morning, citing that she didn’t have the heart to go through the restarted leadership review process, and saying that she didn’t expect when she smashed the glass ceiling, that the shards would rain down on her and that she’d have to walk over them. Without denying that some of her problems related to racism, misogyny and antisemitism, I find myself somewhat conflicted about the notion that she is a case of a glass cliff.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1442538999579561984

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1442541082126913547

Why I’m unsure this is necessarily applicable is because the party wasn’t in a great deal of a mess when Elizabeth May decided she no longer wanted to be leader, and it was certainly doing well electorally (they had just won two additional seats for the first time ever federally), and they had some provincial successes that they were counting on. Unlike most “glass cliff” scenarios, it wasn’t like a woman or minority was brought in to clean up a mess or was outright set up to fail. But part of what happened is a problem that is getting more common in Canadian politics, which is that we have so utterly bastardised our party leadership selection processes and fetishised “outsiders” coming into parties to lead them that we have set up the expectation for someone like Paul, who had no political experience, to come in and lead a party as though it were an entry-level job. When Mike Moffatt talks about the pipeline of talent to replace a leader, that’s not unique to the Greens either – the federal Conservatives also suffer from that problem, in part because Stephen Harper actively killed the ambitions of anyone else in the party and surrounded himself with yes-men, so it’s no wonder that his successors have largely proven themselves to be duds (and Rona Ambrose was never intended to be a permanent leader, so any course-corrections she made to the party were largely undone by Scheer and O’Toole). Did Paul get mentorship and training to succeed? Erm, was there anyone in the party that could give it to her? Aside from Elizabeth May – which may be the problem. This is also a problem when you choose leaders who don’t have seats, and who lack the political judgment about how to go about seeking one as soon as possible (and when your sitting MPs refuse to give up their seat to the leader). There are a lot of points of failure here, including structural ones in how leadership contests are conducted – but I fear that simply calling this a glass cliff may be absolving Paul a little too much of her own culpability in her political demise.

Where the party goes from here we’ll have to see. May said she had no interest in being interim leader, though I suppose she will be back to being “parliamentary leader” for the party, though I suspect she may also want to make a run for Speaker as she has previously expressed a desire to do (which she will lose). But the party is going to find itself dealing with fairly existential questions pretty shortly.

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