Tag Archives: Brad Wall

Roundup: Pipeline drama queens

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It really doesn’t take much to set Brad Wall off these days, and in ways that are both a bit unseemly and frankly nonsensical, and really, really unhelpful in the long run. Yesterday is was Quebec’s environment minister filing a court injunction related to Energy East, but unlike what everyone was up in arms about, it wasn’t to block the pipeline – he made several assurances that he had no opinion on it. Rather, he wanted TransCanada to submit paperwork with the Quebec government for their own environmental process, and TransCanada has thus far said no. It remains to be seen if Quebec’s position holds legal water (there was a precedent in BC that may or may not apply), but from the apoplexy coming from the likes of Brad Wall or Brian Jean in Alberta, you’d think Quebec had declared the project dead on arrival. Except they didn’t. Rachel Notley kept a level head saying she knows it’s not a veto, so she’s keeping her guns holstered. Justin Trudeau said he understands the province’s desire to get social license for the project, but listening to conservatives, both federal and provincial, you would have thought that those terrible lefties had put a stake in the heart of the oil industry. In fact, it’s the opposite of helpful when they are quick to declare a crisis of national unity when really, it’s Brad Wall fighting an election, and the Federal Conservatives and Wildrose party in Alberta trying to assert themselves into the debate in the most divisive way possible (and seriously, guys – that’s not how equalization works, so stop using it as a talking point). Suffice to say, everyone is acting like a bunch of petulant drama queens, demanding approvals to pipeline projects without actually going through the proper process, claiming that Trudeau politicized the process (err, except it was the Conservatives who changed the law so that Cabinet was given final sign-off on these projects, completely politicizing the process), and that if he doesn’t do things their way that he’s destroying the country. That’s a mature way to handle things, guys. Slow clap.

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Roundup: Go knock doors

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While I’ve pretty much said my piece on the Manning Conference, one last headline caught my eye yesterday, which was the “Traditional campaigns dead! It’s a digital world now!” variety, which made me roll my eyes a bit, but here it is. The “experts” – all American – talk about how Facebook and digital ads are where it’s at instead of TV advertising, but it seems to me like they missed entirely what happened during the last federal election – you know, something that the Conservatives might have a vested interest in actually learning from their mistakes in, rather than what is going on south of the border, with their utterly insane primary season and unlimited corporate and private money. Because seriously, if they paid attention to what the Liberals did here, it was actually a lot of traditional campaigning, which was door-knocking. Yes, they flooded social media with their “days of action,” which featured candidates and their teams – wait for it – door-knocking. There wasn’t a series of YouTube or Facebook ads that won the election for the Liberals – in fact, the only commercial that anyone remembers is the one with Trudeau on the escalator, and mostly because everyone tried to mock it (not all of it effectively). How often in the last decade did we hear about the Conservatives’ fearsome electoral machine with their CIMS database, and how that was helping them cut swaths though campaigns based on the smiley and frowney faces of voter identification? It didn’t win them the election. Yes, the Liberals rebuilt their own voter identification database (“Liberalist”), but again, what was it used for? Door-knocking, and canvassing donations, but it also bears noting that the Liberals did not spend the most money, disproving that money is what wins elections. So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll take the words of these American “experts” that the Conservatives enlisted with a grain of salt, while the traditional shoe-leather method of direct voter engagement and going from door-to-door is putting in the hard work that won a majority of seats.

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Roundup: Mindless populism leading the way

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As Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall has made his voice heard in recent weeks in the lead-up to his re-election campaign, and the Conservatives in Ottawa have taken up his banner on all manner of topics, it is the issue of carbon pricing that is driving home a few truths about both Wall and the Conservative Party. While there is talk about setting a baseline $15/tonne carbon price nationally, which can be implemented either by carbon tax (per BC) or cap-and-trade (per Ontario and Quebec), Wall is adamant that he doesn’t want it imposed on his province, and is going so far as to suggest that any “national carbon tax” (which, let’s be clear, it is not what is being discussed) would be exempt from SaskPower because it’s a provincial Crown corporation. And in the House of Commons, former Speaker Andrew Scheer gave a ridiculous and gobsmackingly boneheaded Members’ Statement on Monday which mocked the notion of a “carbon tax” (which, again, not on the table) as a market mechanism, and tried to apply it to other forms of taxation, generally making a fool out of himself in the process. But if you listen to what both Wall and Conservatives like Scheer are saying, it becomes obvious that intelligent, principled conservatism in this country has pretty much gone the way of the Dodo, and that we are left with right-flavoured populism in its wake. Because seriously, an actual conservative thinker would look at a carbon price, and using whichever mechanism (but likely an actual carbon tax), use that in order to encourage the market to find their own ways to reduce their carbon emissions. In fact, it’s what the oil sector has been demanding for years now, and they’ve even built carbon pricing into their books while they waited for some kind of direction as to just how much it would be and by what mechanism it would be applied. But rather than having an actual conservative government that would take this tool to and use the market to innovate and achieve the desired end (being lower carbon emissions), you have a bunch of populists in both Saskatchewan and Ottawa who howled instead about a fictional “job-killing carbon tax” and who held their breath and stamped their feet rather than dealing with the problem of carbon emissions for an entire decade. So while the Conservative Party starts to re-examine itself in advance of its leadership contest, perhaps this is something that they should consider – a return to actual conservative principles rather than this populist noise, which resulted in a decade of poor economic decisions (like lowering the GST), incoherent policy decisions, and as we can see here, childish tantrums to what should be an actual conservative approach to solving problems.

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Roundup: Cullen pens a hot mess

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NDP MP Nathan Cullen penned an op-ed for National Newswatch over the weekend, and it’s a total hot mess. Hot. Mess. Where to begin, where to begin? Let’s start with the opening paragraph:

One of the recurring conversations I’ve had over the years, with folks of all political leanings, is the condition of our democracy and how our voting system doesn’t reflect their voices at the national level.

Demonstrably false, since what we vote for are who to fill individual seats. People who are elected to those seats are the reflection of the wishes of that riding. Ergo, our voting system actually is reflective of voices at the national level. The entire second paragraph is a gong show:

It’s not a new charge that the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system too often produces false majorities. Our current voting system is broken. Too many Canadians simply feel their vote does not count. Something is deeply wrong if our very voting system encourages people to tune out of our democratic process.

Nope, nope, nope, and nope. There is no such thing as a “false majority” because the popular vote is a logical fallacy. You can’t extend 338 separate and simultaneous elections, mash them together and come up with a figure when you don’t have the same number of parties running in all ridings, nor does it reflect the fact that we elect individual seats, not parties. The voting system is not broken – it accurately reflects that we elect individual seats in individual ridings. Canadians feel their vote doesn’t count because of sore loserism, and apparently votes only count when the person you voted for wins, which is childish and wrong. Our voting system does not encourage people to tune out of our democratic process – our appalling lack of civic literacy does. From there, Cullen goes on to defend his idea of a “proportional” Commons committee to consult on electoral reform, except it’s a) not proportional, b) it’s designed to play up his desire for proportional representation (if the committee can be proportional…) and c) it’s designed to game the process, while he professes new ways of doing things. From there, Cullen meanders into a defence of the NDP as “progressive opposition,” which sounds more defensive by the day as the Liberals continue to outflank the party on the left, and finally, the piece moves into a defence of Thomas Mulcair as party leader, with Cullen professing support – you know, to look like he’s not angling to replace him should Mulcair happen to fall well short of expectations at the upcoming leadership review vote. After all, the federal NDP have a culture of it being unseemly to not be in complete and total lockstep at all times when the cameras are on. So there you have it – a complete hot mess. What is that old journalistic expression? Get me rewrite.

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Roundup: No Fridays off

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It’s not the first time I’ve written on this topic, and it certainly won’t be the last. Yesterday’s column by David Akin about making MPs continue to work on Fridays has me itching to reiterate a few points, even if some of Akin’s writing style makes me cringe a little. (Seriously, PROC is an “obscure but important” committee? Really?) Akin makes good points in that we are already seeing a greater diversity in people running and getting elected, and more women running and getting elected than ever before, and that people who put their name on the ballot know that the job entails actually being in Ottawa five days a week for roughly half the year. And really, that’s one of the points that makes me a bit crazy when we keep circling back to these discussions about making parliament “family friendly.” Parliament is not just another workplace, and you can’t apply the same standards to it that you would with any other job. We all know that a great deal of sacrifice is involved with the job, which is why we compensate MPs fairly well for it (though one could quite easily argue that they are underpaid, though populist sentiment means that argument will never win the day). Even more crazy making were MPs on Procedure and House Affairs committee saying things like “It’s special being here,” while trying to figure out how to vote from their riding or telecommute to the job in Ottawa, never mind that the job involves being in Ottawa because it relies on building personal relationships. No, it’s not “special” to be in Ottawa – it’s the job you signed on for. Being present to vote is what you signed on for. If you didn’t want to be in Ottawa but still serve the public, you could have run for local city council, but no, you wanted to play a federal role. That means being in Ottawa. It doesn’t mean being here year-round, and clearly it’s not given the growing number of constituency weeks, but constituency work is not what your job is. Your job is to hold the government to account, which means being present, debating, reading the Estimates and the Public Accounts, doing committee work, grilling ministers and department staff, and engaging with stakeholders as part of that job. All of that is done here. Sure, helping people with passport forms is all well and good, but it’s not actually your job. In fact, the growing MP role as civil service ombudsman is a distressing turn of events, because it starts to subtly politicise the system, but it also takes away from the accountability role. We are already in a crisis of civic literacy in this country. Having MPs justify the fact that they don’t feel the need to be in Ottawa to do their jobs, and to wrap that justification up in the flag of being family-friendly is a problem. Yes, it’s tough, and marriages break up with too much frequency, but the system already bends over backwards to accommodate spouses and families. The reality remains, however, that this is not a job that you can do from home, and candidates needs to go into it with their eyes open rather than making excuses to shirk their duties once they get here.

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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: Nonsense parliamentary suggestions

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It’s not just the Senate bat-signal I see in the sky, it’s also the Parliament bat-signal as a whole. Starting with the Senate, one of those so-called “Senator-elects” in Alberta writes a baffling column about “restructuring” the Senate to better reflect regions, while moaning about how Alberta’s oil industry isn’t getting the same help as the auto industry would when being faced with job losses. I’m not quite sure what he’s trying to get at, but the thing with the traditional moans about “Western alienation” and hoping that cockamamie schemes like a “Triple E” Senate is that it would do precisely zero to counter the problem, particularly as the problems they’re trying to fix generally can’t be solved by the Senate in the first place. Moving along, former NDP MP and former democratic reform critic Craig Scott pens a gong show of an op-ed about changing the Office of the Speaker in the Commons, supposedly to better insure its independence but it comes off pretty much as the sour grapes of third party grumbling that it really is. Giving the Speaker all kinds of new powers with no real checks on them? Giving him or her the independence to rule with an iron fist despite the real threats inherent within Responsible Government? Plus a bitter kick at the protocol position of the Senate Speaker? It’s incoherent nonsense. Speaking Speakers, outgoing Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer has some thoughts about reforming Question Period, most of which make more sense than what Scott had to say. I have a column out later today that picks up on these points, and I promise you it’ll make far more sense than Craig Scott’s rambling.

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Roundup: Refugee hysteria

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The question of Syrian refugees in the aftermath of the Paris attacks has reached ridiculous proportions, as a number of American state governors declared that they were going to let ISIS win and terrorize them, by insisting that they didn’t want any Syrian refugees in their states. Because it’s the refugees that have been responsible for mass shootings in the States, right? Closer to home, Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall decided he was going to be the one to try and crank up the concern trolling over refugees to eleven, saying that he wants the whole thing suspended because he thinks that security screening is being compromised in order to reach the “quota” and “deadline,” despite there being zero evidence to that effect, and the fact that in order for people to be registered refugees under the UNHCR, most of these kinds of background checks will already have been completed. Unfortunately, Wall is also cynically pandering to populist sentiment that has been stoked by the hysteria of what happened in Paris, in defiance of logic and fact. What is fortunate, however, is that pretty much every other province has disavowed this kind of nonsense and is ready to push ahead, with Quebec and Ontario ready to accept some 16,000 refugees, Rachel Notley being okay with the accelerated timeline, Greg Selinger saying that Manitobans are excited to welcome newcomers, and Christy Clark recognizing the urgency to bring refugees over. So it looks like Wall is the outlier on this one, but that’s not exactly a surprise, considering that critical thinking hasn’t been his strongest suit on a number of other files *cough*Senate reform*cough*.

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Roundup: Trying to politicize the RCMP – again

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Trying to cash in on the Duffy trial, the NDP decided to send an open letter to the RCMP Commissioner yesterday, essentially demanding that the case against Nigel Wright be re-opened and expanded to include current chief of staff Ray Novak, for some unknown reason. Oh, and they want a “clear response” as to why there are no charges. There are a few problems with this approach, so let’s list them, shall we?

  1. The RCMP don’t have to answer to the NDP. Sorry, but they don’t. They don’t have to explain why they didn’t press charges for someone else’s partisan gain.
  2. We’ve pretty much determined that in order for a bribery charge to be even feasible, they would have to establish the mens rea – the intent – that the $90,000 cheque was intending to buy influence. It wasn’t, and we have Wright’s testimony under oath to that effect. Are there no lawyers in the party that can explain this?
  3. And this is the big one – the NDP are explicitly trying to politicise the RCMP by making them part of their campaign against the Conservatives in the campaign.

Whoever in the NDP brain trust decided it was a good idea to drag the RCMP into the election should give their heads a shake because it’s kind of gross. The NDP brought them into a previous election – you’ll remember the December 2005 letter from the RCMP that the NDP used against the Liberals in that election, and when Harper won the election, how there were plenty of curious appearances of ties with the then-RCMP commissioner and Harper. (An investigation, it should be noted, that amounted to nothing). One would think that the RCMP would have learnt their lessons, and that they’ll be more circumspect. I guess we’ll see if they are, but suffice to say, the NDP trying to repeat that particular cheap stunt is not particularly endearing, and they should rethink trying to drag nominally non-political actors into the fray. No good can come of it.

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Roundup: Parsing the bribery charge

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Mike Duffy says that he looks forward to his day in court, and wants it sooner rather than later. Considering that the court system is a little jammed, that may not happen sooner. In the aftermath of the charges, Kady O’Malley delves further into the reasons why Nigel Wright wasn’t charged with bribery even if Duffy was charged for accepting said bribe (hint: proving the intention of “corruptly” makes it a high bar for prosecutors), as well as the rules around sitting parliamentarians testifying before the courts. Stephen Maher looks at those charges relating to what Duffy was charging the Senate for partisan activity and wonders what the party knew about those expenses.

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