Tag Archives: Danielle Smith

Roundup: Say no to a Consultant Commissioner

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Because a lot of people continue to be wringing their hands over government contracts to outside consultants, we’re starting to hear a few…less than stellar ideas. One of them came from Paul Wells yesterday, while on the CBC’s Front Burner podcast (Wells’ portion starts at 20:46). While there is some good context from Carleton University professor Amanda Clarke on the size of the problem (thread here), Wells is wrong about two particular portions, and he would have avoided this had he listened to my conversation with professor Jennifer Robson on my YouTube channel last week.

The first is the notion that when these consultants’ job is done, nobody is accountable for the work because most of their agreements mean that it can’t be subject to Access to Information rules, which is wrong. Fundamentally the minister is accountable no matter what. It wouldn’t matter if the work was done by outside consultants or the civil servants in the department, the minister remains responsible, and people seem to be forgetting this in their rush to condemn the consultants. The other part where he’s wrong is his idea to create a “consultant commissioner of Parliament” or other such independent officer.

No. Absolutely not.

We already have way too many gods damned independent officers of parliament, who are unaccountable, and to whom MPs have completely abandoned their constitutional responsibilities of oversight. Sure, the media and the opposition want someone independent they can quote on command to say mean things about the government, but that winds up just creating more bureaucracy, and doesn’t help the overall situation, especially as it drags us further down the road to technocracy rather than parliamentary oversight. The absolute last thing we need are more independent officers, and I wish to gods people would stop proposing them.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 335:

Russian forces have continued to pound the Donetsk region in the country’s east. Russians are also claiming Ukrainians are storing Western weapons in the country’s nuclear power plants, but have provided no proof. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is promising personnel changes at both senior and lower levels after high-profile graft allegations, as part of the country’s attempt to clean up its corruption problem.

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Roundup: Warning signs of grassroots demise in Ontario

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The Star profiles the four potential leadership candidates for the Ontario Liberal party, two of whom are sitting MPPs, the other two being sitting MPs, and I had a couple of observations. One is that the whole piece is framed in the absolutely toxic discourse of looking for a messiah to resurrect a party’s fortunes, which is one of the big problems in Canadian politics in the current era, and a big part of that is because we have devolved leadership contests into pseudo-presidential primaries, the result of which has been to hollow out parties and turn them into empty shells to be inhabited by leaders like hermit crabs. Those leaders turn that hollow shell of a party into a personality cult, until their time is done, and then the next leader does the same again. It’s also worth noting that the Ontario Liberals are currently one of the few remaining parties in the country that still used delegated conventions for the leadership—yes, a problem, but not as bad of one as one-member-one-vote systems. Of course, the article also derides delegated conventions as favouring “party elites,” which is a load of bullshit. Delegated conventions are better at engaging grassroots than OMOV because the riding associations need to get together to elect the delegates, who are then trusted to carry their wishes forward on subsequent ballots.

The other observation I see is that it largely glosses over the fact that the grassroots party in the province has crumbled, and many of its riding associations exist only on paper. This is absolutely shocking, because this is an admission that the party has completely failed in keep up the absolute basics of how our democratic system is structured. This is what leader-centric parties have led to, where the grassroots are seen only as votes for a leadership contest, donors, and a pool of volunteers at election time rather than the people who make up the party, who do the policy work, who run the nominations, and who do the work of accountability at the local level. The grassroots riding associations are supposed to be the interface between the riding and the caucus, especially in ridings that the party doesn’t hold currently. The fact that the party leadership (and I’m guessing Steven Del Duca most especially was part of the problem here) allowed things to atrophy this badly is a really worrying sign about the health of democracy in this province, but also this country generally because these trends are across parties and provinces, because we have failed to learn our lessons when it comes to the basics of civics. This is the kinds of things that people should have learned about in school (and why I wrote my book).

I will add that I would really prefer if the two MPs didn’t jump into this race, and that they stayed in Ottawa and did the work here rather than try to be saviours for the provincial party, especially because voices like Nathaniel Erskine-Smith are so necessary in Ottawa and being a “rogue” in the caucus, which I fear would be swamped and workshopped to death if he were to try to apply that to leadership. But maybe I’m just being cynical here.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 334:

Russian forces have increased shelling outside of their held territories in the East, particularly around Zaporizhzhia. The head of the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk region says that he visited Soledar, which the Russians claim they captured but Ukraine still denies. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with families of the victims from the helicopter crash earlier in the week. Zelenskyy is also promising further action to root out corruption, with key decisions coming this week, given that this continues to be one of the sticking points for Ukraine in joining with the European Union and other alliances. Elsewhere, here’s a look at how organisations are working to counter Russian disinformation about the war.

https://twitter.com/melnykandrij/status/1616832357826265091

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Roundup: New Zealand’s leadership selection

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New Zealand is about to have a new prime minister, and lo, it was a process that took a single day. Yes, it was an acclamation where only one person put his name forward (“to avoid disunity,”), but that is less of an issue because New Zealand is one of the last remaining parliaments where it’s decided by a vote held within the caucus among the MPs—the way that Westminster parliaments are supposed to work. And of course, it’s completely alien to how things have devolved in this country.

The quasi-American pseudo-presidential primary system that we’ve adopted in this country is corrosive to politics. It has hollowed out the political parties, and pretty much killed grassroots riding associations, because they no longer matter to the party. Memberships—paid or unpaid (as is the latest craze)—is about leadership selection, not sticking around to do the hard policy work, because the parties have centralized that and justify it using Big Data. It’s all about populating databases rather than ensuring you have a base of engaged partisans who act as a link between the community and the caucus in Parliament. The leader then turns the party into a personality cult while they wield almost absolute power because there are almost no checks on that remaining. At least with caucus selection, there is a direct line of accountability so that the caucus that chose the leader can remove said leader as well, which is one of the most important considerations.

Suffice to say, while one might have preferred that they at least had a vote between two candidates for the job, the fact that they have retained caucus selection is important, and Canada needs to return to the same system if we are to have any hope of fixing the damage to our system.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 332:

Russian forces claim that they took control of the town of Klishchiivka, south of Bakhmut, which their mercenaries claimed to have taken already. And they’re still claiming they’ve taken Soledar, which Ukraine disputes. Meanwhile, the NATO meeting in Ramstein, Germany, ended without an agreement on sending Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, as Germany is the holdout and needs to authorize the use of their technology.

https://twitter.com/oleksiireznikov/status/1616506280876642317

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Roundup: Danielle Smith and prosecutorial independence

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Because it never ends in Danielle Smith’s Alberta, we learned last night that members of her staff were indeed calling up Crown prosecutors to totally not pressure them on cases, only it wasn’t around public health order rule-breakers—it was around those arrested as part of the blockade at the Coutts border crossing. Remember that? Where they arrested Diagolon members for their plot to murder RCMP officers, where they had a hit list? Yeah, totally normal for the premier’s office to be calling them up and totally not pressuring them by asking if those prosecutions are in the public interest, over and over.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/1616209929165213696

When news broke, Smith denied that she was in contact, or that anyone in her office was…except there are emails, and her story around totally not pressuring those very same Crown prosecutors around pandemic rule-breakers kept changing, depending on which media outlet she was talking about, so her denials are pretty hard to believe, especially since she didn’t seem to understand how pardons work in Canada until earlier this week, by which point her story had changed about six or seven times (and is probably still changing).

Of course, I don’t expect that anyone is going to resign or be fired for this, because that would mean that someone would need to possess enough self-awareness, or have a shred of humility, or even be capable of feeling shame for their actions, and that’s pretty much a foreign concept in Smith and her cadre. And all of those voices who were having meltdowns about the Double-Hyphen Affair and the alleged pressure being applied to Jody Wilson-Raybould (which my reading of the situation seems to have largely come from Bill Morneau’s office) are strangely silent about what happened here, because I’m sure it’s totally different.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 331:

Ukraine is awaiting the decision of allied governments and particularly Germany about providing them with modern tanks, especially Leopard 2 tanks (which Germany controls the export licences for) as they meet at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Meanwhile, here are some testimonials from Ukrainian soldiers who are big fans of the armoured vehicles we have sent them so far, with another 200 on the way.

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Roundup: The bullshit narrative around the just transition “memo”

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Because Alberta politics is plumbing the depths of utter stupidity, there has been a multi-day freak out over the federal government’s supposed “just transition” plan (and yes, the federal ministers say they don’t like the term and prefer “sustainable jobs,” but the term is internationally recognised from the Paris Agreement and from similar American initiatives). Earlier in the week, there were a couple of credulous columns about a supposed “leak” of a federal memo talking about 2.7 million energy jobs being imperilled, or due to be transitioned, or some such nonsense.

And it was a completely bullshit story—there was no leak. There was no memo. There were selective quotes taken out of context and then torqued some more that came from a publicly available briefing package prepared for the minister of natural resources prior to a committee hearing back in June. And it doesn’t say 2.7 million jobs will be “transitioned”—it says that’s the size of the energy sector, and that there could be “significant labour market disruptions” given the transition of the industry due to global forces.

And while Danielle Smith was caught out on this lie, it not only hasn’t stopped her from having a public meltdown about it, but Rachel Notley decided to get in on the action, because it’s pre-election season, so that means out-bidding, and trying to distance herself from Trudeau—never mind that her own climate plan when she was in government included “just transition” language for coal workers. It’s all so bloody stupid, and we’re all dumber for watching it play out. I’m going to especially call out Power & Politics for adopting Smith’s mendacious framing of this supposed memo, and for both-sidesing it on their website rather than fact-checking Smith’s claims against the actual bloody document. This shouldn’t be that hard. Stop giving these lying liars the credibility they’re looking for. Call them out for what they are.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 329:

The search for survivors has been called off at the site of the bombed apartment building in Dnipro, with the death toll sitting at 45 including six children. Meanwhile, Germany looks willing to approve the transfer of Leopard 2 tanks from allied countries to Ukraine in the next few days (and a few may come from Canada if that’s the case). Ukrainian officials are also saying they are still fighting in Soledar, and that it has not completely fallen to the Russians or their mercenaries.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1615314617374212097

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Roundup: Ford opts for more private clinics

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As expected, Doug Ford announced a plan to move more outpatient surgeries to private clinics. While I have a column on this coming out later today that goes into my thinking on this in greater depth, I did want to share some of the more salient tweets on this through the day, because they’re asking the right questions.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1615014400385077251

We should note the interview that provincial health minister Sylvia Jones did Power & Politics, where the question of these clinics upselling to patients was raised, and Jones dismissed any concerns as this being about “choice,” which is a red flag.

Jagmeet Singh was, of course, demanding that Justin Trudeau swoop in to save the day, in spite of not really having any particular federal levers to deploy.

Meanwhile, Chrystia Freeland was busy subtweeting the whole thing.

And of course, the Beaverton had one of the most salient responses to Ford’s announcement, as they are wont to.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 328:

The death toll from the Russian missile strike on the apartment building in Dnipro has risen to 40, as rescuers continue to sort through the rubble. There was also Russian shelling in Kherson, killing three people. Meanwhile, Russians may have finally taken Soledar, though it remains unconfirmed, though that came at a horrific cost of thousands of dead or wounded Russians—a tactic where the Ukrainians are trying to exhaust the Russians leaving them vulnerable in other areas.

https://twitter.com/tpyxanews/status/1615112061951909894

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Roundup: On Trudeau’s feeling re-energized

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The CBC’s Aaron Wherry has a longread out right now about Justin Trudeau’s time in office, and the sense that he’s feeling re-invigorated and is almost certainly going to run for a fourth election, likely in 2025, which some of us (myself included) have not been so sure about. But there is a lot of observation from insiders and observers that he does seem to have the fight back (indeed, I heard from some people in the know of the funk he found himself in at one particular point), and that it’s not necessarily Pierre Poilievre’s presence that is doing it, but that he has a sense of unfinished business, of promises yet to be fulfilled.

To that end, the piece notes that Cabinet and caucus have been told to focus on four Cs: competence, confidence, contrast and campaign-readiness (in that order), of which the first is going to be incredibly important when it comes to trying to dispel this notion that “everything feels broken,” particularly when there is a pervasive sense that government can’t even get the little things right (though I would note that some of the “little things” are more complex than they may appear on the surface, and a lot of what people are complaining about is not the job of the federal government to fix, no matter that they may try to claim some kind of policy ownership, such as investing in housing when those funds are the only policy lever they have available). And yeah, some of it is their own fault (see: judicial appointments), where they decided on processes that hampered them more than it helped them, and absolutely their inability to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag is one hundred percent one of their biggest own-goal problems, which they seem resolutely unwilling to do anything about.

I know there is also a lot of talk about the “smell of death” on this government, and I will probably write something longer about that elsewhere, but nevertheless, it was interesting to read Wherry’s piece and put some of it into the context of these conversations that are being had around the pundit sphere. There are a lot of things to consider about this government, and little of it can fit into some of these fairly facile narratives.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 327:

There was a fresh round of Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure across Ukraine on Saturday, and one missile struck a nine-story building in Dnipro, killing at least twelve people, while another 30 to 40 people are still missing and could be trapped under rubble. The missile—the kind used to strike warships—may have been aimed at a nearby power station. This as Ukrainian officials continue to insist that the battle for Soledar is not lost, and this certainly takes the attention away from that. CBC also heard from a Russian conscript who was at the site of the Makiivka counter-attack, which struck Russian barracks.

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Roundup: The slow pace of judicial appointments

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In what is a fairly perennial story, there are complaints that delays in the justice system are being caused, in part, by the slow pace of judicial appointments by the federal government. One should probably also point to the fact that provinces continue to under-resource their court systems, but the federal government can wear much of the blame around these vacancies, in large part because of the system that they have chosen to set up in order to make these appointments.

In order to de-politicise these appointments as much as possible, the process involves independent judicial advisory committees vetting applications from lawyers who want to become judges, and those who are highly recommended get passed onto the minister’s office for another round of vetting (which has a political element because the prime minister remains politically accountable for all judicial appointments), before the appointments are finalised.

While this sounds all well and good, the problem is twofold—that the government has a stated desire to appoint more diverse members to the bench, but at the same time, they insist on self-nominations. The problem there is that a lot of people from the diverse communities they draw from don’t feel either qualified to apply, or they simply feel like they won’t get it because of the persistent image of judges as being old white men, and that it will keep replicating itself so they don’t apply. This draws out the process while they wait for more diverse applications, and on it goes. What these committees should be doing is more outreach and going out to nominate lawyers who they feel would do well on the bench—particularly as there is an observed difference in people who are nominated for an appointment like this, and those who apply and get it. But this government refuses to do that kind of outreach work, even when it would net them better, more diverse results, and here we are, with a slower process for these appointments, and mounting complaints that the government is shuffling their feet when it comes to ensuring the benches are filled so that they can deal with the backlog in the courts.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 324:

Days after Wagner Group mercenaries claim they took the town of Soledar, Ukrainian forces continue to insist that they are holding out, and that it’s a “bloodbath,” with them having killed over 100 Russian troops so far, and that the Russians are just walking over their own bodies to keep fighting.

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Roundup: The hypocrisy around McKinsey concerns

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It was a little weird yesterday, that with Justin Trudeau off in Mexico City, that a number of MPs from all opposition parties descended on the Hill to hold press conferences and send out a raft of releases, as though they all just got back to work after the holidays. (I know, they were working in their ridings, but it was just an interesting turn of events). One of the things that all of the opposition parties demanded was a parliamentary inquiry into the use of McKinsey contracts by the government. Which is fine, if a week after the raft of stories on them, and the minister of procurement says she’d be happy to turn over documents if the right committee requests them, which they haven’t, but then Pierre Poilievre, who deigned to show up in front of microphones, wondered why civil servants weren’t being allowed to do their jobs.

Ahem.

Poilievre was a former minister in the Harper government, which imposed cuts on the civil service and a lot of their capabilities, while their use of outside consultants exploded. This story from 2013 shows the rapidly increasing use of those consultants, to the tune of billions of dollars per year. This study from 2011 documents the ballooning use of these consultants to create the “shadow public service” that is being decried currently. And there can be legitimate uses for outside consultants, but the fact that Poilievre is calling on the government to let the civil service to the work is the height of hypocrisy. The utter lack of shame in his saying that is…frankly unsurprising and telling, but it’s also completely galling at the same time.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1612937741523881984

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1612938363685806080

Meanwhile, Poilievre wouldn’t answer questions about his MP who refused to aid asylum seekers in his riding, but instead derided them as “illegal refugees.” Instead, he went on a rant about how the government hasn’t fixed the problems of irregular crossings, or that they haven’t renegotiated the Safe Third Country agreement with the Americans, and demanded that the government close Roxham Road, as though that wouldn’t force these asylum seekers to other, more dangerous crossing points where they wouldn’t be processed upon arrival.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 322:

Wagner Group mercenaries hired by Russia claim that they are now in control of the salt mining town of Soledar near Bakhmut, but Ukraine says their forces continue to hold out. Russians want to control the underground tunnels around Soledar. A vocational school in Kramatorsk says that no, the Russian strike against them didn’t kill “hundreds of Ukrainian troops” as the Russians are claiming. Here’s a bigger-picture look at the fighting around Bakhmut, which is now described as a “meat grinder.”

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Roundup: The first Sovereignty Act lawsuit

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The first legal challenge to Danielle Smith’s risible “Sovereignty Act” has been filed, and it’s from the Onion Lake Cree Nation, citing that the Act tramples on their treaty rights, that it’s ultra vires the province’s authorities, and that they were not consulted on it when it impacts their rights. This shouldn’t be a surprise—they warned her that she didn’t consult them and that this was going to be a problem, and she not only didn’t listen, she made the utterly offensive comparisons, claiming that the federal government oppresses Alberta like it did First Nations. This is who she is. I can’t wait for the courts to smack this legislation down for the unconstitutional mess that it is.

 

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 300:

Russian drones struck Kyiv’s power grid for the third time in a week, as 18 out of 23 drones were shot down over the city, and those successful drones are said to have caused fairly serious damage. There were also reports of kamikaze drones flying over a nuclear power plant in the Mykolaiv region.

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