Tag Archives: CSIS

Roundup: The casework distraction

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Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel has sounded the alarm that the Liberals sound like they are about to cut off the special access for MPs’ offices to inquire about immigration files in favour of the directing their inquiries to the Ministerial Inquiry Division. Rempel’s concern is that this makes it harder for MPs to deal with immigration files on behalf of constituents – casework, as it is known. The department has thus far said there is no change, but in the event that there is, I’m actually not sure that this is such a bad idea. Why? Because, quite simply, this isn’t work that MPs should be doing. They shouldn’t be service providers on behalf of the public service, and I’ve heard from some staffers that the department won’t even start looking at files until the MP’s office forwards it to them, which is both appalling and a red flag that the system isn’t working the way it should be. An MP’s job is to hold the government to account, and to do so by controlling the public purse. Their staff should be focused on this work, and helping them with legislation as it happens. The expansion of the civil service, however, has prompted the development of MPs into ombudspersons for civil service interactions, which starts getting uncomfortable because it takes away from their actual roles. The fact that you have MPs who wind up dedicating staff to dealing entirely with immigration casework is quite simply wrong, and indicative of a system not working. Making immigration casework reliant upon MPs offices – no matter how non-partisan the work is – is a half-step away from a corrupt system where who you know is the determining factor for whether your files get looked at or not. It’s a civil service job to process files – not an MP’s job. If the Liberals are trying to clamp down on this abuse of process and focus on getting the department to do their jobs, while MPs to do theirs, I don’t actually see the problem with that. It’s how things should work, and if they’re trying to right that particular ship, then all the power to them. MPs should be focusing on their actual work, which let’s face it – most of them don’t, because they don’t actually know what their job is (see: crisis of civic literacy in this country). If the government of the day takes away from their distractions (work that they actually shouldn’t be doing), then maybe we can hope that it’ll help steer their attention back toward the work they should be. But maybe I’m being a wildly optimistic dreamer again.

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Roundup: Party accountability sacrificed for Big Data

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Justin Trudeau is encouraging his party to adopt a new constitutional structure, and I am completely aghast at the way in which he proposes to essentially blow up the way parties work in this country for under the banner of “modernization.” And even worse, that he denigrates the existing system as being somehow elitist if people hold party memberships. No, seriously. Paying $10 to get buy-in to the party membership is “elitist.” My head is exploding right now. As with the way the Liberals blew up their leadership selection process to absolutely obliterate any trace of accountability, they are moving to the exact same thing with their party policy process, and shifting to a Big Data approach that eliminates any incentive for the meaningful participation in the process that our system is built around. And let’s not kid ourselves either – for their last leadership race, the Liberals destroyed the line of accountability to the leader in order to populate their database. Now they want to put that process on steroids in the name of making the party – err, sorry, “movement” – wide-open. Anyone can participate! So long as they can collect all kinds of data on you in order to target and craft messages and fundraising appeals rather than have you be an engaged citizen. Remember that there is far more to the political process in this country than just showing up to vote every few years, despite what you may think. The process actually involves people getting involved with the party, buying memberships, attending meetings, talking about and developing policy positions that then get voted on and forwarded to policy conventions, where they are then discussed by delegates from across the country and voted on, and once adopted, form the basis of the party platform. That is real people engaging in the process. Granted, this has been made much more problematic the more we increasingly presidentialise our party leadership systems in this country – again, spearheaded by the Liberals in 1919 with delegated conventions, and culminating in the way that Trudeau was elected in 2013, so that leaders amassed so much power that they began dictating what the election platform was going to be, policy resolutions be damned. And to whom is that leader accountable? It used to be caucus when they selected a leader, then it was to the party members, who were a somewhat nebulous group but they still existed and could hold reviews. But now? When anyone can vote for the leader, he or she is accountable to nobody, with an increasing amount of power under the rubric of a “democratic mandate.” By blowing up the policy process, where does that leave the membership? Or can we even call them that anymore since they no longer have buy-in to the party? If the process becomes technology driven – as this Big Data approach suggests – then what happens to riding associations, to volunteers, to the people who engage in the process from the grassroots? Do we simply adopt a slactivist approach that the leader’s office drives? Rather than encourage more people to join the party, to get involved, to do the hard work that won them the election – how do you think all of those doors got knocked on? – this starts to take that human element out of it in favour of a charismatic leader’s direction. It’s not that the system wasn’t working as it stands – it was. The problem goes back to civic literacy. We’re not taught in schools that the fundamental part of engaging in the political process is to join a party. Parties haven’t exactly been great at reaching out to teach people this either, because their membership drives focus on nomination races or leadership contests rather than hey, here’s a way for you to get involved in how this country runs. And wide-open approaches haven’t worked for the Green Party, with their wiki-style policy platform (which, remember, got somewhat hijacked by Men’s Rights Advocates and was exposed as such during the election), so why are the Liberals getting on board? To populate their database. It’s cynical, and it’s destructive to the way that our Westminster system works. But hey, it’s modern, so let’s climb aboard without thinking about it!

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Roundup: Slight mandate confusion

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The effort to turn the delay in André Pratte’s formal Senate appointment while he finalizes the purchase of property in the right Quebec senatorial district into some kind of controversy continues to be weak sauce, but it did expose a bit of a schism between what the advisory board believes their job to be – finding names to be recommended, leaving the PMO to do the final vetting – and the PMO’s communication around their expectations – that the board should only recommend qualified persons (which, let’s be honest, is a little bit of buck-passing). I’ve seen what purports to be the application form, and it did have the seven vacant districts listed, but that doesn’t mean that Pratte filled that form out as a self-applicant, but may have been approached, which could be why the issue of property was not entirely sorted before he was recommended. Regardless, it remains a bit of a damp squib in terms of a controversy or conspiracy, as Conservative MP Scott Reid would have us believe. Does this mean that there will likely be more vetting the next time around? Probably. Is this a fatal blow to the process? Hardly. Growing pains at the very least, which is why they had the interim process that generated these seven names first, so that they could work the bugs out of the system. That said, I will repeat Emmett Macfarlane’s note that the bigger problem with this process is people applying. That way is almost certainly the way that madness lies, as every egomaniac and self-professed “top minds” in their field will apply (and I know of at least one person who is wholly unqualified but believes himself to be who is trying to get support for a self-nominated Senate application). This should be a process where people are identified and nominated by others in recognition for a lifetime of good work, not a means of ego-stroking and self-congratulation without having to go through the rabble of the electoral process. It defeats the whole point of the Senate as being a place where people who would not otherwise seek office can be given an opportunity to contribute. If you are seeking a Senate appointment, your motives should be immediately considered suspect, and should almost certainly be disqualifying. After all, did we learn nothing from Mike Duffy’s decades-long campaign to get himself appointed? Let’s not do that again.

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Roundup: A surprisingly packed budget

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And that was the budget. It was full of interesting things, but you wouldn’t know it based on the fact that absolutely everybody was fixated on the deficit figure, and barely even that it was built on a super cautious, pessimistic framework that basically presented a worst-case scenario in terms of assumptions, meaning that the only place it really could go was up, and yes, if the economy grows enough, then the budget will start to balance itself. The child benefit changes are the big news, and as for reaction, the Conservatives call the budget a “nightmare” while the NDP rail about all of the promises that it didn’t keep (because everything should have happened immediately).

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Roundup: A cynicism prescription

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We’re still talking Trudeau’s trip to Washington? Of course we are. Today some of it was a bit more oblique, but during his video town hall with Huffington Post, Trudeau was repeatedly asked about Donald Trump, and most of it he tried to avoid answering, talking about how lovely Cape Breton is (context: it’s become a kind of joke about how Americans fleeing Trump would move there), but he did offer that Trump would likely tone down his rhetoric should he win the nomination and start running for the general election instead. He did offer a few other, broader comments on what he’s witnessed in the American election cycle, about the cynicism that is on full display, and how it may need broad-based campaign finance reform like we saw here in Canada in the late nineties, and again after Harper came to power in 2006, where we got big money out of our politics. He’s got a point, but one suspects that there is more than just campaign finance laws that are broken in American politics. As for the big state dinner, Stéphane Dion said that it will help showcase that environment and the economy can exist together, as evident by some of the choices (like Catherine McKenna’s apparently inclusion). Meanwhile, it looks like we can probably expect an announcement on protecting the environment in the Arctic, as well as some overdue progress on thinning the border.

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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.

https://twitter.com/jameslhsprague/status/699297692837666816

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Roundup: Trying to game the committee

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As we heard late last week, the NDP’s democratic reform critic, Nathan Cullen, has been pushing his new idea of a “proportional” committee to better examine electoral reform options and come up with an idea that can be presented to Canadians. It’s a gimmick, of course, and it one has to be cognisant of Cullen’s agenda, which is of course a certain kind of proportional representation system that his party favours, just like Cullen’s other suggestion of “trying” an election with a new system and then asking voters for forgiveness by means of a referendum after the fact. It’s trying to game the system in a way he prefers, as Colby Cosh pointed out over the weekend, which should raise any number of red flags for those who take Cullen’s proposition seriously.

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Roundup: On “mature” democracies

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Oh, Maryam Monsef. I try so hard to be optimistic that your democratic reform mandate won’t be one big gong show, and yet I keep finding myself disappointed. The latest example – Monsef insisting that First-Past-The-Post is okay for fledgling democracies, but “mature” democracies can “do better.” And then my head exploded. If there is anything that makes me insane is this notion that somehow proponents of FPTP are just too stupid to grasp all of the wonderful things about various other voting systems (most especially the unicorns-and-rainbows that fans of proportional representation will extol), when some of us are quite learned, thank you very much, and have no interest in alternative voting schemes because they’re predicated on a lot of emotional bunk rather than solid civics. The cries that somehow FPTP is “unfair” or ensures that “votes don’t count” are the siren songs of sore losers who are actually the ones who don’t understand the way our system works, and when you try and point out the inherent flaws in their logic, they get huffy and try to change the goal posts. (I have had innumerable conversations like this. They always wind up the same. Always). And no, proportional representation won’t increase voter turnout. That’s been proven. Declining voter turnout in western democracies is part of a broader problem that is tough to grasp, but I would hazard that a lack of civic literacy is the bigger problem there – just like Monsef’s argument that somehow FPTP isn’t a “mature” system. I’m going to turn that around – I think FPTP is a mature system, and it’s one that, if we were a mature democracy, we would actually understand its intricacies as well as is pleasant simplicity, but no – we are a civically illiterate culture who doesn’t learn about how the system works, so we complain instead that it’s somehow “broken,” when what’s broken is our understanding and political discourse around it. If Monsef wants legitimate democratic reform, then tinkering with the system with abhorrent notions like online voting, lowered voting ages or alternative voting systems aren’t going to actually solve anything. What will solve our democratic deficit is a real push for civic literacy that will re-engage Canadians with the system. But that’s a hard, long-term problem, and everyone wants a quick fix. Those quick fixes will only serve to make things worse, as they always have (and past quick fixes are part of what’s broken about our system as it exists), and Monsef needs to start grasping this reality. One would think that a “mature” democracy would have that level of self-awareness, but I fear we’re not there yet.

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Roundup: Hollow Senate threats

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As the Conservatives grasp their diminishing influence in the opposition benches, their threats of using the Senate to get their way seem to be increasing. Yesterday, as the Liberal government announced their bill to repeal two of the anti-union private members’ bills that passed in the last parliament, at least one Conservative MP was beating his chest and threatening that the Senate would be used to defeat the bill. The problem? That he’s unlikely to find allies in the Senate to carry out this threat. You see, one of these bills badly fractured the Conservative Senate caucus in the last parliament, which is almost certainly what led to Marjory LeBreton tendering her resignation as Government Leader early, and her threats to the caucus very nearly provoked a revolt. Given how much trouble they went through to pass the bill in June, and how much they had to crack the whip and still have dissenters, those who abstained or who just refused to show up for the vote, I really doubt that they would have any fight left in them on this bill. It makes the insistence from their MP caucus that they will somehow be a rearguard action to stop bills they don’t like from being passed as not only fanciful, but actually pretty insulting to that Senate caucus, who they’re treating as just another group of backbenchers that they can push around, and with a leadership contest soon to get underway, they’re going to find that their senators are about to start getting a lot more independent, as the guy who appointed them is no longer around and his influence has almost faded entirely as even his MP caucus swallows themselves whole to reverse their previously held positions now that he’s gone. If they think that they can still wield that influence to preserve this unpopular and contentious bill, well, they may soon find themselves getting a rather rude awakening. (Meanwhile, the Conservative allegation that the repeal of those bills was somehow repayment for an illegal union donation that the Liberals didn’t even know about, and which was repaid as soon as it was uncovered, is laughable considering that the repeal of these bills was in the bloody platform).

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