Tag Archives: Bill Morneau

Roundup: The shameless Duff

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Senator Mike Duffy is back in the news again, once again claiming his housing allowance for his long-time residence in Ottawa, because of course he is. There are a couple of problems here, but the first one is the way in which the story is being reported.

“Hasn’t the Senate tightened its rules?” is usually the first plaintive wail that we hear, and yes, they did. They have put rules in place around what constitutes proof of a primary residence in the province that a senator represents, and those rules include things like driver’s licence, health card, CRA tax assessment – things that Duffy didn’t have when he was first appointed and yet started claiming his housing allowance for the residence he lived in for years already. Duffy has since acquired the necessary documentation to “prove” that his primary residence is PEI. It’s also problematic to start devising a formula for how many hours one has to spend in their primary and secondary residence because it is generally a qualitative and not a quantitative measure, complicated by the work that senators do, and in some cases, there are senators who can’t travel back to their primary residences because of health concerns and are essentially forced to spend more time in Ottawa than they would otherwise. They may yet assign some kind of hour or day measure, but my understanding is that there is not one at the moment.

The bigger problem here is not the rules or the Senate itself (and for the love of all the gods on Olympus, I wish that my journalistic colleagues would stop treating this issue as a problem of the institution than its actors), but rather that Duffy himself is completely and utterly without shame. If he had any shame or decency, he wouldn’t keep claiming for his Ottawa residence, because he would know that it’s what got the whole issue rolling in the first place. But no – he is entitled to his entitlements, and has taken the fact that he was not convicted of criminal fraud and breach of trust as validation rather than the fact that he was nevertheless condemned for his behaviour while recognizing that it didn’t quite meet the test of being criminal. And that’s why this is really a Mike Duffy problem and not a Senate problem. He never should have been appointed as a PEI senator, and yet here we are.

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Roundup: Lessons from Trump

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Because apparently there is absolutely nothing else to talk about, we’re going to take lessons about the whole Donald Trump fiasco here in Canada. I’m not quite sure what lessons there are to take directly, given that we have more safeguards in our system of government, starting with a stronger party system than exists in the States, that one would think would do a better job of weeding out a candidate like Trump from running for leadership of a party. While Robert Hiltz lists some better comparisons to Trump in Canadian politics than Rob Ford (hello Pierre Karl Péladeau), I would simply add that part of the problem comes from the ability to vote for a person directly, as in a primary system in the States or a mayoral contest, rather than indirectly as our parliamentary system currently operates. The lesson of Trump, combined as well with the lesson that Jeremy Corbyn in the UK is providing in spades, is that for every charismatic leader like Justin Trudeau that gets elected from an open membership process to great success (so far), there is just as much the possibility of getting a Trump, or an Alison Redford, who skews the party and its dynamic by force of their personality, and like Corbyn, is accountable to nobody and relies instead on the supposed “democratic legitimacy” of the leadership election process. In other words, if we want to take lessons and avoid a Trump or a Corbyn in the future, then we need to stop perverting our Westminster system and return to a system of caucus selection of party leaders, where there is a system of accountability in place that keeps those leaders and their excesses in check (and provides that the leader first have a seat rather than be a complete outsider vowing to “shake things up” without actually understanding how the system works to begin with), and keeps them from getting too powerful at the expense of the rest of the party.

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Roundup: The Sophie Grégoire Trudeau problem

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The issue of assistants for Sophie Grégoire Trudeau has become a bit ugly in social media, and overblown in the political arena while opposition parties on both sides of the spectrum try to cast the prime minister’s family as being these out-of-touch elites (some of it completely speciously, as the Conservatives try to equate Trudeau’s statement about not needing government funds for childcare and suddenly billing for nannies was hypocritical, despite the fact that he wasn’t the leader of a G7 nation before), because if there’s nothing that this country loves, it’s cheap outrage. And really, that’s what a lot of this is, combined with some garden variety sexist expectations that she should be a doting wife and mother in the home, taking care of meals and childcare on her own without any public profile. But before we delve into it further, a couple of important reminders.

Seriously, for the love of all the gods on Olympus, stop calling her the First Lady. We don’t have a First Lady in Canada because we have a royal family, and the closest equivalent – aside from Prince Philip as the Royal Consort – is the somewhat antiquated term of the Chatelaine of Rideau Hall.

No, this is completely wrong. We don’t elect governments or parties in this country. We elect 338 MPs, who come together in a parliament that forms a government. So in essence, we did elect the family that came along with the MP who was able to form a government.

And this really is the important point. We have a constitutional monarchy so that the royal family takes on the ceremonial and celebrity functions and prevents the Head of Government from becoming a cult of personality. Unfortunately, in this age of media and social media, where the Trudeaus are consider bona fide celebrities in their own right, it has created a kind of cult of personality (which is only worsened by the fact that the fact that Trudeau was elected by a nebulous “supporter class” means he is accountable to nobody and he knows it). So when the public comes looking for Grégoire Trudeau to do speaking engagements and to do the kind of celebrity outreach that members of the royal family do so well in the UK (but certainly less so here because of their relative absence), how are we supposed to react? What expectations do we put on her as the spouse of the Head of Government, who has no defined role? While I have no objections to the nannies or single assistant (Trudeau is prime minister of a G7 country, and demanding that his spouse do all of the domestic work is frankly odious, particularly given her diplomatic expectations), I find myself torn about the need for additional help. I have no doubt that she needs it, because she has chosen to parlay her celebrity toward charitable causes. And it’s less about the taxpayer’s money that rubs me the wrong way, but the fact that this is getting uncomfortable under our system of government and constitutional traditions. That we have a prime minister who has formed a kind of cult of personality is very uncomfortable, but it’s not a problem with an easy solution, short of insisting that members of the royal family start spending more time on our shores to do the work of the celebrity face of our constitutional order. Is the solution to have the party pay for her added assistants? Maybe. Or to charge speaking fees on a cost-recovery basis? One can imagine the howls out outrage that an “elite” is charging charities money already. There’s not an easy answer, but the discomfort around the larger problem of where our system is headed is something that we should be talking about. Unfortunately, that conversation is being drowned out by cheap outrage and the June and Ward Cleaver crowd, which is only making this whole exercise reek.

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Senate QP: Pointed questions for Morneau

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After being forced to cancel Ministerial Senate QP in the last sitting week because of interminable procedural votes, it was happening this week on a Tuesday instead of the usual Wednesday, with special guest star Finance Minister Bill Morneau. Senator Carignan led off, asking about tax evasion and the Panama Papers, and wondered why the government wasn’t pursing a blacklist for those caught evading taxes. Morneau first thanked the Senate for the opportunity, then said that they are working with other G20 companies to do things like tighten rules around base erosion and tax-shifting, and went on to note the funds in the budget to combat tax evasion. Carignan pressed on the blacklist, and Morneau spoke about the communiqué that came out of the last G20 finance meeting.

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Roundup: Linda Frum’s misplaced concerns

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Conservative Senator Linda Frum has decided to take on the topic of the current batch of Senate reforms, and I can’t even. And yet, I must. So here we go. Her two main points are about the institution’s lack of accountability and lack of legitimacy, and while she notes all of the changes with the former, she is way off base with the latter – but more on that in a moment. Much of the problem with Frum’s whole thesis is that it ignores historical context and perspective. With the lack of accountability, she correctly laments that the Duffy incident highlighted poor financial controls, but this is not unique to the Senate – most elected legislatures also lacked adequate controls until very recently, hence we had the moat cleaning imbroglio in the UK, or the Nova Scotia MLAs who bought flat screen TVs and generators as office expenses, or federal MPs improperly claiming their own housing allowances just a few years ago. It’s a process and the Senate was actually ahead of the curve of the Commons for much of the last number of years. And good for her for denouncing the “everybody does it” excuse. But her analysis of the Senate’s legitimacy issue is, frankly, jejune. The Senate does not need to derive its legitimacy from popular elections because it comes from the constitution and from Responsible Government – as with all Governor-in-Council appointments, the Prime Minister is empowered to make them so long as he or she maintains the confidence of the Commons, and he or she is accountable for making them. That is where the Senate’s legitimacy is drawn from, and people who insist otherwise tend to be more enamoured with Americana rather than the actual function of our own Senate – a body geared toward more deliberation than as a competing legislative body. Popular election would make the Senate just that – a competing chamber more inclined to gridlock if it is controlled by an opposing party to the government in the Commons, and otherwise full of 105 backbenchers for the Commons parties to boss around, seeing the great expense and organisation that would go along with Senate elections (even more than MP elections given that senators represent a whole province and not a small riding). Leaving aside Frum’s conspiracy theory that all of the new independent appointments are just closet Liberals (and I will give her the point that Peter Harder’s insistence on styling himself an independent is deeply problematic), Frum is boggled by the notion that a body that is not a confidence chamber can operate without defined government and opposition sides, and that Senators could weigh legislation on its merits rather than on the basis of the whip. In fact, Frum goes so far as to posit this baffling gem:

So long as we senators are not elected, our democratic legitimacy depends on government-appointed Senators following the leadership of a government that is elected – and that government, in turn, must honestly acknowledge its responsibility for the actions of the senators it appoints.

I barely even know where to start with this, other than to say “Nope. Nope, nope, nope. So much nope.” You see, the Senate has institutional independence under the constitution. The whole point of the Senate is that it’s supposed to push back against a prime minister when that prime minister tries to ram through dubious legislation through a majority Commons that they control. If said PM also has senators under their thumb, then it kind of defeats the purpose of it, no? And no, as I explained in my column this week, the PM doesn’t have the responsibility to police the Senate because of that institutional independence. And I get that Frum is doing yeoman’s work in trying to defend her partisan affiliations, which are totally legitimate. I too don’t think that a Senate full of independents is the best thing for our system, but that doesn’t mean that a greater presence of independent senators – enough to ensure the balance of power is no longer weighed in the favour of any one party – is illegitimate or unconstitutional. Frum is wrong on that point, and it needs to be said.

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Roundup: The verdict as reflection on the institution

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Now that they’ve had a couple of days to digest the events, we’ve got some weekend punditry on the Duffy verdict and What It All Means™ for the Senate as an institution, and well, some of it is really hard to swallow. Rick Anderson has eight thoughts about the expenses issue, and most of them are on the right track, except for number four, which is about the Board of Internal Economy (Commons) and Internal Economy Committee (Senate), and his belief that these bodies are too political to police parliamentarian expenses. The problem with this line of thinking is of course parliamentary privilege – parliament is self-governing. It needs to be. It cannot be brought under the heel of a bureaucracy, because if we can’t trust our parliamentarians to run their own affairs, then we might as well just hand power back to the Queen. Do they get it right all of the time? No, of course not, but this is a democracy and there is an accountability process, and yes, that includes for the Senate. Of course with the Senate, it is much more tied to public pressure, but that public pressure has forced the Senate to make any number of changes in the past few years (they had already started before the whole ClusterDuff affair started, but that certainly accelerated things). This is of course why I have trouble with Adam Dodek’s condemnations of the Senate post-verdict and his (frankly wrong) assertions that nothing has really changed, and his assertion that most senators treat the job as a part-time gig. I’ve known very few senators who feel that way, and most that I’ve met and been in contact with are just as engaged as MPs with their files – even more in many cases when those senators have causes that they are engaged with. The days of senators sitting on a number of corporate boards is drawing to a close as boards are professionalising and the need for a senator as a “prestige” appointment become less common. (I would add that I actually think it’s not a problem for senators to sit on a non-profit board as a way of constituency outreach). And then there’s Michael Den Tandt who retreats to the same old fears about these new independent senators being wholly unaccountable, as though something has materially changed from when they were all in party caucuses (which is false), and that somehow that caucus could keep them more in line (no, not really). Apparently Den Tandt has forgotten that the Senate has institutional independence for a reason, and his musing that the Conservatives should champion abolition by way of a referendum is frankly ridiculous – despite what people may think about a referendum being a tactic to pressure premiers, it returns to the same problem of using majoritarian tactics to pressure minority provinces into giving up their counter-balancing representation. I think I’ll leave this meme here for his edification.

Mean Girls Senate Abolition

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Roundup: Fair Vote Canada’s shambolic release

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It’s not everyday that you get a completely unhinged press release in your inbox, but holy cow did Fair Vote Canada come out with a doozy yesterday. It’s hard to know where to start with such a work of “shambolic genius,” as Colby Cosh put it.

You see, according to the geniuses at Fair Vote Canada, they have cleverly parsed that when Trudeau pledged to “make every vote count” (a boneheaded statement because every vote already counts), he was referring to their slogan, and therefore he must really advocate for Proportional Representation, and because Trudeau has said he has no pre-conceived ideas about what the outcome of the consultations on electoral reform would be, he must really mean that he’s just trying to figure out which proportional representation system to use, because that’s what he’s signalled by using their slogan. Genius, I tell you. Genius!

But Wait… There’s More!™

While referring to Parliament as “the law factory” (Seriously? Seriously?!), they started invoking the Charter to claim that “equal treatment and equal benefit under the law” must mean that Canadian citizens are entitled to having their votes represented in direct proportion to the votes cast. Which is insane and ridiculous because that’s not how our system works at all, and is completely wrong when it comes to jurisprudence. You see, the Supreme Court of Canada has already rejected this line of reasoning, both in terms of the deviation of voting power (i.e. unequal riding sizes) for the purposes of better governance, but also with attempted challenges to the First-Past-The-Post system in the Quebec courts, which were roundly rejected and which the Supreme Court of Canada refused to grant leave to appeal. That means that as far as they’re concerned, the law is settled, and for Fair Vote Canada to try and advance this line of argument is futile and wrong. Because the law is settled. But considering that the whole basis for their advocacy of PR is rooted in sore loserism at the ballot box, it makes complete sense that they are also sore losers when it comes to the judicial system as well.

Moral of the story: Fair Vote Canada has long used falsehoods and logical fallacies to advance their case. This ridiculous and completely specious release is just one more in a dishonest string of arguments they’ve made and will continue to make as this debate heats up in the coming months.

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Roundup: The first independent Senate appointments arrive

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The big announcement came first thing yesterday morning – seven new senators are to be recommended, one of them to be the government’s “representative” in lieu of a caucus leader in the Senate. Some of the names appear to be good ones – that “representative” is former senior bureaucrat Peter Harder (who did lead Trudeau’s transition team when they formed government), plus Justice Murray Sinclair, editorialist André Pratte and Paralympian Chantal Petitclerc, among others. One of them is a former NDP minister in Ontario. Harder used to be a Progressive Conservative staffer, before transitioning to the civil service. There don’t seem to be any obvious Liberal patronage appointments in the bunch (i.e. party fundraisers or the like), and there does appear to be some semblance of merit-based appointments in here, as well as respect for gender and diversity.

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Roundup: It’s not a wealth transfer

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Woe be Saskatchewan, apparently, with the collapse in global commodity prices, affecting both its oil and potash industries. Its premier, Brad Wall, is in full-on populist mode in advance of a provincial election, and when not goading Montreal mayor Denis Coderre over Energy East, he’s also demanding some kind of federal dollars should the Trudeau government decide to bail out Bombardier, as well as funds for his idea of a well-capping programme. To be fair, the well-capping idea is a good one, but Wall’s bombast is probably not helping, particularly when he makes comments about equalisation funding. The Conservatives have been all about equalisation in Question Period, with questions yesterday demanding “fairness” for Alberta and Saskatchewan after the territories were having their formulas adjusted, despite the explanation that the adjustments were because of changing Statistics Canada measurements. More egregious was when former Speaker Andrew Scheer decried that wealth was still being transferred to other provinces based on calculations from when Saskatchewan was benefitting from $100/barrel oil. And my head very nearly exploded when he asked that because it’s about as wrong – and frankly boneheaded – as one can get when discussing equalisation. Despite the common mythology, the federal equalisation is not a wealth transfer between provinces. “Have” provinces don’t write cheques to the federal government in order to pass them along to the “have not” provinces. It’s nothing like that at all. Every Canadian pays into equalisation by way of taxes, and the federal government will transfer some of its general revenue funds to provinces who need help in providing an equal level of service to its citizens. Now, provinces like to make all kinds of claims based on what their per-capita contributions to the programme are, but it’s not a bloody wealth transfer. I get why they like to claim that it is for political purposes, but it’s wrong and it just fuels these ridiculous regional conflicts (like the ones we’re seeing now between the west and Quebec based on nonsense rhetoric over Energy East) to no good end. So seriously, MPs and premiers – knock it off. You’re not helping anyone.

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Roundup: Prairie drama queens

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Finance minister Bill Morneau was in Calgary yesterday as part of his pre-budget consultations, and while listening to the questions during his televised press conference after the meeting, I am forced to wonder if Albertans aren’t trying to be Confederation’s biggest drama queens about their current economic woes (and yes, I say this as a former Albertan). You’d think that the province was actually disintegrating, but if you look at their numbers, their unemployment rates are only now reaching the national average (around 7 percent), and those that are employed (being the vast majority) are making more money in those jobs than the national averages. Yes, their provincial budget has a huge hole blown through it with the fall in oil revenues, but it’s nothing compared to what Newfoundland & Labrador’s budget hole is looking like with their own oil shock. Meanwhile, I don’t hear the pundit class bemoaning the job losses in that province, or people threatening their premier (though he’s been on the job only a couple of months). People were asking Morneau about extraordinary funding mechanisms outside of equalisation, and while he demurred on answering most of it, I am reminded of the usual Twitter snark of some economists like Mike Moffatt, who quite rightly point out that nobody would have even contemplated the kinds of bailouts for southwestern Ontario when their manufacturing centre crashed the way you hear about what they’re demanding for Alberta. The other problem that the loudest of critics (especially Kevin O’Leary) can’t seem to grasp is that there is a global supply problem with oil – there’s too much in the market, which has depressed prices. What exactly can Alberta’s provincial government do to prop up the sector when there’s already too much supply in the market? Even getting that oil to tidewater would just be adding even more to the global supply chain, which one would imagine wouldn’t help with the depressed prices. Supply and demand, and all of that. Yes, it’s a challenge, and it’s a long-term one that’s rearing its head now. Yes, there is a need for some bigger transformation initiatives, and the provincial government is looking to make changes, and I’m sure the federal government will try to get in on that action, but transitions are difficult things. There are going to be hard periods ahead, but simply demanding federal handouts and calling for Rachel Notley’s head aren’t helping matters.

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