With all of the leaders in the Commons today, the hope was that the show would be a little less awful than it was yesterday. On the whole, it was. Rona Ambrose led off, mini-lectern on desk, reading a plea that the government approve the Pacific Northwest LNG project, and Justin Trudeau dissembles about the choice between the environment and the economy. Ambrose lamented that too many pipeline projects were languishing and getting people back to work. Trudeau reminded her that their pipeline plans didn’t work because they didn’t get community buy-in, added that the Conservative voted against middle-class tax cuts. Ambrose changed topics, concerned about discussions with China that included cyber-security regardless of how many times Chinese hackers attacked Canadian targets. Trudeau stated that previous discussions were always ad hoc, while these new high-level discussions provided a more permanent framework. Ambrose expressed confusion about any extradition talks with China, and Trudeau returned to the same response about high-level dialogue. Ambrose asked again in French, and got the same answer. Thomas Mulcair was up next, asking if the Great Bear rainforest was no place for a crude oil pipeline, but wondered if it would also be one for natural gas. Trudeau didn’t give a clear response, mentioning analyzing various projects. Mulcair then lamented the adoption of Harper-era healthcare “cuts” (note: it’s not a cut, because the funds are still increasing), but Trudeau shrugged it off with talk of consultation with the provinces. Mulcair went another round in French, got the same answer, and then Mulcair moved onto labour rights and demanded that the government support their anti-scab bill. Trudeau spoke about the need for a better collaborative approach.
Tag Archives: Citizenship
Roundup: Say no to a Charter Rights Officer
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is leading a push for the creation of an independent Charter Rights Officer for Parliament, and that sound you hear is my head hitting my desk over and over again. Because no. We don’t need yet another officer of parliament. We really, really don’t.
What we need is for MPs – particularly the opposition – to stand up and actually do their jobs, rather than fobbing off their homework onto yet another officer, who is accountable to nobody, whose reports they can then wield like some kind of a cudgel while not actually fulfilling their own responsibilities as parliamentarians (which, I will remind you once again, is to hold the government to account). The proliferation of officers of parliament has so diminished the capacity of the opposition to do their gods damned jobs in this country that it’s embarrassing, and since the inception of the Parliamentary Budget Office, it’s only become so much more egregious because now they can ignore the Estimates cycle entirely (despite controlling the public purse being the inherent definition of what MPs are supposed to do, and how they hold governments to account).
Oh, but it’s hard! Oh, but why not cede this to subject matter experts like lawyers and judges? Oh, why don’t we just start pre-referring all bills to the Supreme Court of Canada while we’re at it and turn the dialogue between the Court and Parliament into a game of “Mother May I?” Honestly, would it kill MPs to actually debate policy, which Charter compliance is a big part of? Parliament has responsibilities to fulfil. Why don’t we actually make them do their jobs rather than finding yet another excuse for them to avoid doing it?
https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/780387082682458112
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I mean, given the current state of stare decisis, and the fact that s.1 is basically all policy arguments/analysis…
— Benjamin Oliphant (@BenOliphant) September 26, 2016
Roundup: Productivity has context
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.
Roundup: Making up titles
Senator Peter Harder made it official yesterday – the announcement of a Deputy Leader and Whip – err, sorry, “deputy government representative” and “government liaison” as he wants them styled, and it erupted in a bit of a fight in the Chamber that he can’t just make up names for people because the Parliament of Canada Act doesn’t work that way. I also have concerns with the job descriptions that Harder has given them (and these were provided to me from a Senator).
For his deputy, Senator Bellemare:
Assists the Government’s Representative to process the legislation coming from the House of Commons (government, private members’ bills and government bills in the Senate) in a transparent, impartial, constructive and non-partisan manner;
In the context of an evolving modernized Senate, assists the Government’s Representative so that all bills (including bills coming from Senators) receive a fair and non-partisan treatment;
Assists the Government’s representative to provide Canadians with a clear understanding of the treatment by the Senate of the bills coming from the House of Commons;
Assist the Government’s Representative in the Chamber, to make sure that due process is provided to Government legislation and all other bills and businesses,
Follow the legislative work of Committees,
Assist Committees to provide more substantive reports on their specific study of bills,
Assist informally Senators with rules and procedures.
And for his whip – err, “liaison,” Senator Mitchell:
It is the role of the Government’s Representative group in the Senate to facilitate the passing of government legislation and to contribute to the effective functioning of the Senate in a non-partisan and open way. The Government Liaison position will be responsible for administrative and management roles and for liaison with all Senators. Specific responsibilities will include:
-Working with the caucuses’ Whips and with independent Senators to help organize the business of the Senate, including, for example, the coordination of Senate Committee placements;
-Supporting sponsors of bills by ensuring that they receive the required input, briefings, and material from Ministers and government officials to present bills effectively;
-Assisting sponsors of bills to identify and deal with the issues and concerns raised by Senators in the debate and review of legislation.
The Government Liaison will exercise these responsibilities in a collaborative and non-partisan fashion.
The problem with these descriptions is that they are largely comprised of buzzwords. Throwing around terms like “due process” and “non-partisan” is hard to square with the fact that these are government representatives, and government is inherently partisan. While I can grudgingly agree that having a Deputy makes some sense out of pure logistics, the “liaison” role is largely nonsense. The existence of the Independent Working Group means that there was no need to have a Whip to organise committee assignments for non-aligned senators, and senators are grown-ups and should be able to arrange getting materials from Ministers and government officials. They have phones and emails, and assistants who can make arrangements. And “assisting sponsors of bills to identify and deal with issues and concerns,” which purported will including helping senators draft amendments? Again, they’re grown ups who can do their own jobs and talk to the Law Clerk if they need to. Aside from bigfooting the Independent Working Group – and making this move without consulting them – what is most striking is that Harder made this move for largely the sake of optics – he wanted both a Conservative and a Liberal by his side to make a big show of being bi-partisan, even though the role he gave Mitchell is ludicrous, and heaven forbid that Harder just have Bellemare by his side, because that would give the impression that he is really a Liberal, and he couldn’t have that. So instead Harder is making things worse for everyone with this particular move, angering both the Conservatives and the Senate Liberals, while still acting outside of the Parliament of Canada Act and the Senate Rules. It’s undermines his credibility, the work of the independents at pushing for meaningful reform, and is going to make getting anything accomplished in the Senate difficult for the foreseeable future.
QP: The PM is going to Washington
Monday after a constituency week, and the PM was in Toronto to play with a pandas and talk to Huffington Post readers in a video town hall. Rona Ambrose led off, asking about the possibility of the Afghanistan war memorial being cancelled. Kent Hehr responded that the Veterans Affairs was working with Heritage Canada, with more to come in a few months. Ambrose changed topics, asking about Trudeau meeting with the Centre for American Progress, repeating some of their statements about the oil sands. Catherine McKenna reminded Ambrose that they believe that the economy and the environment go hand in hand. Ambrose then changed to the TD Economics projection for ballooning deficits, but Scott Brison was having none of it, reminding her of the debt legacy of the previous government and stated that they would not cut ideologically. Denis Lebel was up next, after a long absence from the Chamber, during which he repeated the Centre for American Progress question in French, and he got the same answer from McKenna in French. For the final question, Lebel repeated the TD question in French, and Brison repeated his own answer in French. Thomas Mulcair next, asking about the upcoming vote on their EI motion. MaryAnn Mihychuk reminded him that they are working hard to reform the EI system to help workers, which was coming shortly. Mulcair repeated the question with some additional notes about EI vote the Liberals made in the previous parliament, but got the same answer. Mulcair changed topics to the softwood lumber negotiations, asking if the PM would take a stand in Washington. David Lametti responded that they were working to maintain stable access in the US market. Mulcair then lamented the lack of new targets or timelines from the Vancouver meeting. McKenna insisted that carbon pricing mechanisms were on the way.
Roundup: Points for process
From all accounts, the First Ministers meeting in Vancouver got off to a terse start. Premiers were unhappy over the regional bickering over Energy East and discussions of carbon pricing, while Indigenous groups were grousing that they should also have been at that table when it comes to coming up with a plan on combating climate change. By lunch, word around the place was that Trudeau was digging in his heels and was ready to impose a national carbon price on the provinces if they continued to balk and not work together to come to some kind of framework. And, by those same accounts, something changed after lunch and they struck a more conciliatory tone, and even though the meeting ran overtime, they came up with the Vancouver Declaration on Clean Growth and Climate Change, which was essentially an agreement on process. They have six months now to form four working groups and when they meet again in September, the expectation is that there will be more concrete plans, but carbon pricing mechanisms will be part of it – though there seems to be some indication that somehow carbon capture and storage will be seen as some kind of mechanism related to climate mitigation, despite the fact that thus far it’s been an expensive failure of a concept (but hey, Brad Wall is fully committed to it). And then even more grousing happened from the opposition, where the Conservatives complained that there was too much uncertainty for market investment (though not really if you consider that carbon pricing is coming, which the energy sector has actually been demanding and building into their projections), and the NDP moaning that there are still no targets or timelines (to which one wonders if they would have simply imposed them and told the provinces to deal with it if they were in charge, as with their vaunted plans for a cap-and-trade system despite the fact that BC has a successful carbon tax). So if nobody goes away happy, does that mean it was some measure of success? Perhaps, but one shouldn’t diminish the fact that there was a victory for process, because (and it can’t be stated enough) process matters. Democracy is process. So if you have a process laid out, it means that you can move ahead in a coordinated fashion with a plan and a road map and go from there. That may be an understated ending to the conference, but we’ll have to see what the next six months bring.
Roundup: Pipeline drama queens
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.
Well, we gave responsible devm't a shot for 3 mths…I guess we should go back to "no brainers", fights w ENGOs, threats of exploding trains
— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) March 1, 2016
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Roundup: Boutique tax credits for everyone!
The very first Private Members’ Bill up on the docket to be debated is one that give me a real headache, and it’s one that should be disallowed from being voteable, all because of a wee little loophole in the rules. The bill, from Conservative MP Ted Falk, aims to increase the tax rebate which charities receive to match the same level that one gets for political donations. The problem? That this is really an expenditure, and private members’ bills are forbidden to spend money without a royal recommendation (though MPs have gone to increasingly ridiculous lengths in recent years to try and contort logic to pretend that those bills don’t spend money when in fact they do). The even bigger problem? That a loophole currently exists in the rules that makes it technically possible for these bills asking for a tax credit to bypass the spending rules because technically (and under the way that procedure is interpreted) the bill seeks to reduce tax paid, not increase or expend taxes. That’s not actually true, mind you – ask the Auditor General or any decent economist and they’ll tell you in no uncertain terms that tax credits are actually expenditures, and unfortunately there is precedent on Falk’s side, particularly with a certain PMB from Dan McTeague several parliaments ago where he got a tax deduction in under that technicality and it was deemed to be in order. The government repealed the measure in their next budget, but the bill got though when really it shouldn’t have. Unfortunately it opened the door to these kinds of bills that are looking to create new boutique tax credits, and that’s a problem. Our tax code is already thousands of pages, and far too complex. Boutique tax credits are actually terrible policy, but governments have decided that they’re good politics because they feel like they’re rewarding certain groups for certain behaviours, and damn the consequences. The Auditor General has sounded the alarm that these measures aren’t being properly tracked because they’re not deemed expenditures (even though they are), which means that they’re not being given proper parliamentary oversight to ensure that it’s money that’s being well spent – and he found many cases where it’s not. But as Falk is demonstrating, the floodgates are opening, and it won’t be long before the Order Paper is replete with these PMBs demanding new boutique tax credits for everything under the sun, to encourage all manner of behaviour that they deem a social good, under the rubric that they’re not spending any money and thus within the rules. It’s a loophole that Parliament needs to set upon itself to close for the sake of the tax code and parliament’s ability to hold these kinds of spending measures to account. Sadly, one suspects that in their self-interest, MPs won’t make the needed rule change and we can expect this situation to get worse with every passing parliamentary session.
https://twitter.com/avelshi/status/704465684797915136
Roundup: Coming up with a new organizational model
There’s the Senate bat-signal, and there are a couple of articles out there about how the Senate organizes itself that need to be discussed. Global has an exclusive piece about how the Senate agreed to change its organisational funding model in light of their new post-government caucus reality, but *gasp!* it’s all closed-door negotiations about your taxpayer dollars! Oh, I’m sorry, did I yawn there? Senate caucus funding used to be allocated along government and opposition lines, but with there being no governing party in the Senate any longer, Senate Liberals were at risk of losing their operational funding, and yes, this is an issue because it costs money to run things and the Senate is an integral part of our democratic system. The compromise that they came up with, allocating funds on a proportional basis of seats, is actually pretty novel. Yes, it’s more money than they got before, but remember that the Senate Liberals can no longer draw from the caucus resources of their Commons counterparts either, particularly for things like research dollars, so not giving them some kind of additional resources would be punishing them again for Trudeau’s unilateral decision to kick them out of caucus. Let’s not forget that democracy costs money, and one of the most egregious forms of cheap outrage journalism is pretending that a parliamentary body can be run for pennies when it absolutely cannot, particularly if we want them to do the heavy lifting of parliament, as they are increasingly doing. Meanwhile, there is some consternation that the government won’t be appointing a whip when they appoint their “government representative” in lieu of a Leader of the Government in the Senate, but mostly because there has been a defined role in terms of the government whip for doing some of those organisational tasks like allocating offices and parking spaces, not to mention organising committee assignments when there are only so many spaces to go around and lots of senators want on some committees and fewer on others. After all, the whip’s job is more than just telling people how to vote – that role has been far less prevalent in the Senate, and well before Trudeau’s edict, Liberal Senators were not being given instruction by their Commons counterparts and exercised a great deal of independence. (As for the Conservatives, we saw in the Duffy trial that Nigel Wright was trying to encourage Harper to exercise levers of power that didn’t actually exist within the Senate, to the institution’s detriment, and while many Conservative senators don’t see anything wrong with the way they’ve been doing things, well, they haven’t known any differently and that’s part of the problem). Of course, with no government caucus, there is less of a need for that role, but what I suspect is going to end up happening is that the Senate’s internal bureaucracy is going to wind up taking on more responsibilities to deal with this lack of the traditional structures and growing number of independent senators. Again, there are organisational duties that need to be performed, and it would behove the institution to figure out who’s going to do them.
Roundup: Refugee hysteria
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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