Tag Archives: CETA

Roundup: A new Supreme Court appointment

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The government announced their new pick for the Supreme Court of Canada, and lo and behold, it’s Justice Malcolm Rowe of the Newfoundland & Labrador Court of Appeal. It’s a little unexpected considering what they were signalling in terms of looking for more diversity on the bench, but they managed to find a bilingual justice in Newfoundland & Labrador, and they get to pat themselves on the back for making the first appointment to the top court from that province, so they’ve made history! Also, they’ve respected the constitutional convention around the regional composition of the court, and for that, the Conservatives have declared victory – because it was totally their non-binding supply day motion that forced the government’s hand! (Also, appointment panel head Kim Campbell seemed pleased that this was the choice from the short list that they submitted).

So Atlantic Canada is happy, and the government is making a big deal out of its new process including transparency by publishing the application form that Rowe submitted with his answers to a number of questions around his thoughts on significant decisions that he has been a part of, and his thoughts on the role of the judiciary in the legal system, which is unprecedented. As well, next week both the justice minister and Campbell will face a parliamentary committee to explain their choice (thus preserving the committee role of holding cabinet to account), to be followed by a Q&A session with Rowe to be led by a law professor with both MPs and Senators asking the questions. So transparency without devolving into an American-style “confirmation” process. At this rate, Rowe should be on the top court by early November, which means he’ll have missed about half of the fall session of the court (which isn’t as bad as the vacancy issue caused by the Nadon appointment where the court sat 8 in a number of cases). Of course, Rowe’s answers are already provoking some criticism, though it’s not necessarily shared by all members of the legal community. (Incidentally, you can see Carissima Mathen’s Power Play interview on the appointment here).

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/788201168585560064

So what of the signals the government was sending that they wanted an Indigenous judge, preferably a woman? Well I do think reality did set in when they faced pressure from their Atlantic caucus and the premiers to ensure that the seat remained an Atlantic one. It may well have been them floating a trial balloon about abandoning the convention, but it may also have been a warning. There are two more seats opening up in the next few years (barring deaths or retirements), being Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin (a Western seat) and Justice Rosalie Abella (an Ontario seat), and in both of those cases, the government is saying to the legal community that there had damn well better be some more diverse, bilingual candidates ready to fill those seats when the time comes – something that was more difficult to find in Atlantic Canada owing to their demographics. We’ll see in the next few years, of course, but I think the warning has been delivered.

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QP: Tributes for Prentice

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Half of the leaders were present in the Commons today, and after some tributes for the late Jim Prentice from all parties and a moment of silence, QP got underway. Rona Ambrose, mini-lectern on desk, asked about the size of the deficit, which is more than had been promised. After a quick rebuke about making investments, Justin Trudeau gave a tribute to Prentice of his own. Ambrose was concerned that jobs were not being created and demanded that he stop spending and focus on jobs instead. Trudeau noted that the Conservative approach didn’t create growth, while he was cutting taxes for the middle class. Ambrose then mischaracterized a whole list of things as taxes before decrying the possibility of a Netflix tax. Trudeau repeated his response about cutting taxes on the middle class. Denis Lebel was up next, decrying the lack of a softwood lumber agreement and how it was hurting families. Trudeau responded with the list of ways they are helping families. Lebel doubled down on the softwood lumber agreement, and Trudeau agreed that they were concerned about the file, but the former government’s broken relationship with the Americans didn’t help. Peter Julian led off for the NDP, demanding money for home care while mischaracterizing the changes to health care escalators. Trudeau reminded him that the Harper approach to healthcare was to write a check and not ensure that the money was spent on healthcare. Julian demanded that the health transfer escalator remain at six percent for another year, but Trudeau was not responsive to his logic. Brigitte Sansoucy repeated both questions again in French, and got much the same response from Trudeau in French.

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Roundup: Laying the groundwork for deadlock

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Over the past couple of days, we’ve seen the markers being placed, and the groundwork is now being laid for the likely deadlock that will be the committee report on electoral reform. With the last of the cross-country consultations taking place this week, the parties started marking their turf this week – the NDP with their vacant report showing “overwhelming” support for proportional voting – along with demands for local representation, which means that they’re going to demand Mixed-Member Proportional, which was their intention all along. The Conservatives, meanwhile, have no position other than they demand a referendum, and yesterday they released the results of their surveys which came back “overwhelmingly” in favour of such a thing. (Never mind that both the Conservatives and the NDP had pretty much zero rigour when it comes to how they achieved those results, and the selection bias was pretty evident, they’re only interested in shock-and-awe headline results). Oh, and the Conservatives insist that they’re willing to find a consensus on a system – really! – but without a referendum, it’s no way no how.

In the middle of this, the Liberals are all going to start turning in the reports from their town hall meetings, all of which focused on “values” rather than specific systems, in the likely hopes that they too will have enough loose data that they can fudge into justifying whatever system they want – or, in the likely event of a deadlock, to justify that the current system already reflects those values (except of course for proportionality, but we all know that demand is based on a logical fallacy, and it would be great if they would actually admit that), so they can wiggle out of their commitment to reforming said system wholesale. Kady O’Malley thinks that this will really come down to the NDP deciding on whether to stick to their guns on proportionality or if they’ll put some water in their wine and accept ranked ballots, but given their completely specious rhetoric on the subject to date (“First-past-the-post on steroids!”), I think that’ll be too hard of a pill for them to swallow.

So, with any luck, this whole thing will blow up in everyone’s faces, and the government will have to swallow their pride, admit defeat, and move onto other, more important issues. One can always hope, anyway.

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Roundup: The outsider instinct

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Over in the National Post, Michael Den Tandt offers the theory that Donald Trump and his excesses have poisoned the well for other “outsider” candidates worldwide, and that his flash-over-substance style will make others take a second look. Citing the Conservative party leadership in Canada, Den Tandt supposes that this dooms a potential candidacy by Kevin O’Leary, just as Boris Johnson basically outsidered-himself out of the running to be prime minister in the UK – but I’m not sure that I buy the premise of the argument.

I think that there remains a hankering for outsider candidates despite Trump, and that that precisely because he’s poisoned the well that we’ll continue to see these kinds of players railing against the establishment. As is playing out in the Conservative leadership race here, we’ll see more candidates establish themselves as outsiders struggling against the party “elites” because that’s the narrative that has been blown wide open in recent years. (See: Kellie Leitch and Brad Trost). Den Tandt acknowledges that Tony Clement dropped out because he was unable to attract donors for being too conventional and too much an established politician, which I think is part of what blows his whole thesis out of the water. It wasn’t that Clement got in the race too soon, it’s that this notion of needing to find an “outsider” is a particularly strong influence in the zeitgeist right now, especially for conservatives who feel that the establishment has been letting them down, that it hasn’t gotten them where they need to be (witness how Harper’s incrementalism has largely been undone in a matter of months, if you don’t count the permanent fiscal chokehold that the GST cut has put into place). I think it’s why Leitch is taking the Ford Brothers/Nick Kouvalis route of yelling “gravy train,” and why Maxime Bernier is playing entirely against the rest of the party’s established policies and is getting attention for it. Everyone wants to play against the establishment and they are looking for the right way to do it. I don’t think we’ll have another Donald Trump – it would be hard to get that kind of unconstrained id and utter narcissism in a single package again – but I think there is absolutely going to be yet more people trying to find the right balance. I’m not sure it’ll be as successful in Canada as it might be in the States (particularly as our system is not really broken like theirs is), but the impulse to find that outsider is still pervasive, and it will be felt in the race here.

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Roundup: Debating useless rule changes

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Yesterday was “debate the House rules” day in the Commons, and lo, there was some talk about eliminating Friday sittings again, which the opposition parties tend to be against, but fear the government will try to ram through anyway. And yes, we all know that Fridays are not like any other day, particularly because MPs need to get back to their ridings, but there are still debate hours that happen, and eliminating them means either making up for them elsewhere, or losing them altogether, after we’ve lost plenty of debate hours in the past number of years, all to be more “family friendly” with spring breaks and so on. Kady O’Malley followed the debate (I would have more if I didn’t have other deadlines to file), and some of the best and worst are below.

Eliminating whip/House leader-provided speaking lists absolutely needs to happen. It removes agency from MPs and is part of what has debased QP into this scripted farce and turned debate on legislation into nothing of the sort. If you take away the lists – and then ban the scripts – it will help to make the debate free-flowing once again rather than just exercises in reading speeches into the void.

Oh, the irony. The bitter, bitter irony.

I am dubious, as we would have people tabling all manner of nonsense to “prove” whatever they were saying in QP, almost all of it irrelevant. (Also, look up the story about the tabled hamburger from the Alberta legislature that they ended up preserving).

No. We do not need to privilege private members’ business any more than we already do. Most of it is out of hand, with useless and costly Criminal Code piecemeal amendments, more national strategies than you can shake a proverbial stick at, and even more bills to declare national days for every issue under the sun. The proliferation of PMBs is already out of hand, we don’t need to make it that much worse.

So…turning the summer break from three months to four? No. But do feel free to sit more days in January regardless.

Not unless we start insisting that supply days start being about actually debating supply once again.

Because Parliament is just a debating chamber for hobbyhorses? Because there isn’t actual work that needs to get done?

Not unless parties start agreeing that second reading debates be severely curtailed, and that debate on government bills can collapse relatively quickly. But seriously, committee work already happens while debates are going on in the Chamber so I don’t see the point of this. At all.

Amen.

Seriously. I can’t believe that this actually needs to be pointed out.

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Roundup: Bernier’s Bay Street catnip

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Maxime Bernier gave a speech at the Economic Club of Toronto yesterday that was largely catnip for the audience there, saying that he wants to eliminate the capital gains tax, reducing corporate income taxes to 10 percent, making the accelerated capital cost allowance (ACCA) permanent, and eliminating corporate subsidies. While economics can point to the thinking behind some of Bernier’s plans (like below), others will point to the flaws in it, such as the ability to disguise salary as stock options that would no longer be taxed as capital gains, or the longer-term problems with the ACCA (like a new building being worthless for tax reasons in two years). It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Bernier’s ideas are largely slogans without a deep analysis of the real-world implications of them – kind of like how his plan to eliminate interprovincial trade barriers is just a gift to litigators rather than doing the hard political lifting necessary on such a file. Bernier has this kind of libertarian fanboy sense about him, that all of the problems can be solved by brandishing a copy of the constitution and shouting “freedom” will be all that’s necessary to kick-start a sluggish global economy, and that this will all be politically saleable to large swaths of the economy that have come to depend on government support in one way or another. And while yes, Bernier is indeed trying to bring some ideas to the table in this leadership contest while some of his competitors are trying to force the debate onto grounds of “values” and stoking national security fears, but it does remain true that it’s not really the point of leadership hopefuls to try and bring policy to the table that will change the direction of the party – that should be coming from the grassroots membership in a bottom-up and not a top-down process. But just remember – freedom! It’ll solve everything!

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Roundup: Productivity has context

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Parliament resumes today, and it’s going to be the start of a heavy legislative agenda, as the government’s months of consultations start wrapping up and decisions get to start being made. And if you needed a reminder about everything on everyone’s plates, here’s a handy piece about the priorities and challenges for the three main parties this autumn, and Kady O’Malley’s list here too. That said, a Huffington Post article was circulating over the weekend that set my teeth on edge, “proving” that the spring session was the least-productive in decades.

Why this is a problematic measure is that it’s focusing solely on the number of bills passed over those ten months (really, only about five of which was when Parliament was sitting). It’s a purely quantitative analysis that says absolutely nothing about the context of what happened, or about the bigger picture of what the government accomplished. And really, I will be the first person to say that the decision to pull the plug on the Friday they did was about forcing the Senate to pass the assisted dying bill, when they were actually scheduled to sit for a couple of more days, during which time they could have passed two more bills that were ready to go, but they didn’t, and that does deserve mention, but that’s not in there at all. What we get are Conservatives cherry-picking trips and “photo ops” – because who needs multilateral engagement, am I right? – rather than on some of the additional hurdles that the session faced. One of the biggest hurdles was around that assisted dying bill, and the fact that the opposition parties demanded far more hours of debate at second reading than the bill deserved (remember, second reading is about the principle of the bill, not the specifics), and they got huffy when the government tried to push those additional (useless) hours of debate into late nights to keep the agenda going, and when they tried to bring in a procedural hammer to move bills through, the Opposition blew their tops and we wound up with The Elbowing and the subsequent fallout from that. Let me remind you that the Conservatives fully participated in the days of psychodrama that followed, and now they have the gall to say that the government didn’t get enough done? Seriously? They were equal participants in determining the Commons’ schedule of what took place (especially the demands for more second reading debate on that assisted dying bill), and I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that when they were in government, they sat on that bill and didn’t move it despite its deadline. So yes, I find this whole accusation to be the height of cheek, and the analysis should have included far more context around the events of the spring.

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Roundup: No, the LG can’t threaten the premier

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Sometimes you see a terrible column, and sometimes there’s such a piece of hot garbage that you need to don a hazmat suit just to approach it and get hosed off afterward like you just came out of a leaking nuclear reactor. The Toronto Sun’s Christina Blizzard delivered one of those yesterday.

That’s right – this columnist thinks that the lieutenant governor should threaten Kathleen Wynne to shape up or she’ll dismiss her, because 167 years of Responsible Government was just a failed experiment. One lesbian first minister in this province and we’ve decided that it was too much – time to hand power back to the queen and be done with it.

You see! Voters can’t be trusted! Obviously we’d be better off under absolute monarchy again because they won’t let such terrible governments to let themselves get elected and then implement the agendas that they were elected on. It’s like the fanboys in the First Order who remember the good old days of the Galactic Empire and preferred it to the messy democracy of the New Republic.

It’s called confidence. Whichever leader in the legislature or Parliament that can command the confidence of the chamber gets to advise the LG/GG/queen on how to exercise the powers of state. Not a difficult concept.

It is utterly galling that a columnist can be so utterly ignorant of basic civics that this is the kind of utter bilge that they spew onto newsprint. We do have a problem with basic civic literacy in this country, and when you have columnists like this spreading complete nonsense out of some sense of partisanship, it gives a warped impression to people who read this and makes them believe that it’s actually normal and expected that the GG or the LG can boss around a government that you don’t like. No. Absolutely not.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/775866168863260672

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/775866395414372352

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/775866681998635008

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/775868249749807108

So let me reiterate that Blizzard’s column is utter hot garbage. If the Sun had any shame, they’d pull it and apologise profusely for putting it out there, and Blizzard would be sent to a remedial civics course, but I doubt that’s going to happen because she’s just passionate about how bad Wynne is, or some bullshit excuse like that. So in the meantime, I’ll just leave this here:

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Roundup: Revisionist history mythologizing

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The electoral reform committee was back yesterday and the “star” witness was former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, currently heading the institute that bears his name. If you’ve been out of the loop, Broadbent is an unabashed supporter of Proportional Representation, and figures that Mixed-Member Proportional is the cat’s pyjamas, and proceeded to regale the committee with any number of ludicrous statements about both the current system and the purported wonders of MMP, and then delivered this particular gem: that MMP would have spared the west the National Energy Programme in the 1980s.

I. Can’t. Even.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/770351319471325185

The amount of mythologizing around the NEP in this country borders on psychosis. There was a time not so long ago that people also caterwauled that a Triple-E senate would also have prevented the NEP, with no actual proof that would be the case if you actually stopped to think about what would be involved in creating such an institution (particularly the imposition of party discipline because if you think you would be electing 105 independent senators, you’re even more delusional than the premise of the question belies). Most of these mythologies around the NEP forget that there was a history involved with global energy crises, broad support in the rest of the country, and that it was a global recession that happened around the same time that was largely responsible for the economic collapse that ensued as opposed to the NEP itself, but the two became conflated in the minds of most people. It didn’t happen in a vacuum or because Pierre Elliot Trudeau simply rubbed his hands and tried to come up with a diabolical plan to screw the West. For Broadbent to suddenly claim that a PR system would have ensured more regional voices at the table and common sense would have prevailed is simply revisionist history combined with the kind of unicorn logic that his preferred voting system would have been responsible only for the good things in history and never the bad. It’s egregious bullshit and needs to be called out as such.

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Roundup: An important disavowal

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Oh, hey – the author of a study on ranked ballots that relied on survey data from the last election has admitted that it wasn’t really a good study because the behaviours of voters would be different using a different ballot system. Gosh, you think? This is the same study and survey data that people have been citing in the blind panic that “OMG it will be first-past-the-post on steroids so obviously the Liberals want it!” because somehow it would give the Liberals 205 seats, based on that singular poll about second choices in the last election. It ignores that the selling feature of a ranked ballot – other than ensuring that a winner will always have more than 50 percent of the vote (no matter that you need to keep redistributing votes until you reach it) is that it eliminates the need for strategic voting, and in Australia it has given the Green and other minor parties a few seats of their own in the House of Representatives, plus allowed their National Party to remain independent of the Liberal (read: conservative) Party. Considering that they have largely relied on coalitions in the last few parliaments has shown that it’s not just geared toward majoritarianism, the way that people have been freaking out about in Canada. That said, why this particular study was allowed to stand considering its obvious design flaw is a bit galling, and this walking back from the results should have come much sooner rather than this committee hearing after months and months of false and misleading media stories proclaiming that ranked ballots would exacerbate the “distortions” of the current system, which have poisoned the well when it comes to having a reasoned discussion on the various systems that are out there. (Note: Those distortions are not real but a result of misreading the results based on a logical fallacy. Also note that I am not actually a proponent of ranked ballots, merely of proper and informed debate on electoral reform, which we have not been getting).

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