Tag Archives: Dean Del Mastro

Roundup: Application versus consultation

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The head of the new Senate Appointment Advisory Board appeared at the Procedure and House Affairs committee yesterday, and has raised a few issues about this new process that are a bit troubling, which has to do with applications – rather, that there seems to be an emphasis on application rather than nominations arising out of consultations. In particular, the ability for people to apply for a seat on their own seems to be at odds with some of the design of the advisory process. Emmett Macfarlane notes that this wasn’t how he envisioned the process when he was asked to help design it, and that it not only overly bureaucratizes the process, but it sets it up for a particularly unsavoury sort to want to apply, which I concur with. Why is this important? Because we’ve only spent the past number of months watching the trial of a certain Mike Duffy, who was well known for wanting desperately to become a senator for decades, and how he viewed such an appointment as a “taskless thanks” which would also provide him with all manner of perquisites – and witness how he managed to monetize all of his relationships as a result of his appointment, as we’ve witnessed in testimony. We also lived though the bizarre spectacle that was Bert Brown, “elected” senator whose self-appointed crusade for Senate reform comprised largely of unsolicited meetings with provinces to convince them of his plan (on the Senate’s dime), and taking to the op-ed pages to basically call his detractors Nazis (I’m not sure how else you take it when he reminds you of his family’s military service in WWII as a rebuttal). Some of the best senators we’ve seen are those who never expected an appointment, and who never would have sought office on their own – people like Roméo Dallaire. It’s also why I’m not sold on the NDP fear that this process will just be elites nominating elites – a broad enough consultation will bring people of accomplishment and expertise in a wide variety of fields than just academia. But at the same time, the Senate should be a place that rewards experience and expertise rather than being a repository for randoms, given their role to scrutinise legislation and act as the country’s premier think tank. I have a hard time seeing how hot dog vendors can fulfil those roles, no matter how many people they interact with in a day.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/695336557893431300

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/695341816439136261

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Roundup: Looking to avoid mistakes

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The defence minister’s slow rollout of the new plans going forward in the Iraq mission to combat ISIS has been providing the government an opening in which to be attacked by both sides, but when Harjit Sajjan hits back against the government, there have been a few cries by the Conservatives that are a wee bit defensive. When Sajjan suggests that there were failures, the Conservatives wonder aloud if that means the girls who are going to school, or the humanitarian work that’s been done over the years. Sajjan, who was on the ground in Afghanistan for three tours, and has mused openly about looking to avoid the same kinds of mistakes, has plenty of ammunition to choose from. Read any book about the mission, and you’ll find countless examples of problems of poor management, poor communication, and as Sajjan has noted, unintended consequences of actions we’ve taken that helped our enemies in the longer term, particularly with recruitment. That he wants to take the time to get a new mission on the ground in Iraq right is hardly surprising in this context, but everyone demands answers. Meanwhile, Canada’s in the bottom third of allies in NATO for defence spending, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, though it has noted that capability and spending levels are not necessarily the same thing, and that countries who meet spending targets are generally useless.

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Roundup: Overwrought defences

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Plenty of developments in the Senate yesterday, all of them resignation related. Manitoba Senator Maria Chaput resigned due to health concerns, Conservative Senator Irving Gerstein has reached his mandatory retirement age, and Senate Liberal Senator Pierrette Ringuette has resigned from the Senate Liberal caucus to sit as an Independent. As part of the tributes to Gerstein, there were some overwrought statements on the Conservative side about the value of political fundraisers, and I will say that I’m not one of those people who has a kneejerk reaction to fundraisers who get appointed to the Senate. Why? Because these are people who interact with the voters as much as MPs do, and have a pretty good sense of what their issues are (if only to exploit them for political gain). It’s like being aghast that there’s politics in politics. Granted, the tone out of the Conservative Senate caucus these days of “See! There’s nothing wrong with being partisan!” isn’t helping their case any, but on a fundamental level they’re right. They just need to tone it down from an eleven to a two or a three. As for Ringuette, I will note that the fetishised tones being used to describe the “desire for an independent Senate” are as equally overwrought as the Conservatives’ defence of partisanship. I was particularly struck by Ringuette going on Power & Politics and declaring that there’s nothing in the constitution that says that the Senate has to be a partisan body, therefore she and others of that mindset feel that there’s no role for partisanship. Where that argument falls apart is that it’s right in the preamble of the constitution itself – that Canada has a political system like that of the United Kingdom, and last I checked, its upper chamber was also a partisan body (and no, this isn’t an invitation to compare the Senate to the House of Lords, because they are very different institutions, but the principle of the upper chamber remains). People who insist that something isn’t in the constitution (*cough*Elizabeth May*cough*) ignore the unwritten parts of it, which are just as valid as the written parts, and it’s not an adequate defence for how they imagine institutions to function. So while it’s good on Ringuette to want to go her own way, I do think that the conversation around independent senators is still in its early stages, and I have no doubt that there are plenty of surprises on the way.

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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: The problem with private members’ bills

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I’ve written a lot about the problems with private members’ bills, and in my column this week over at Loonie Politics, it came up again given that the lottery for the Order of Precedence was posted. I wrote about it back in the spring when there were a number of problematic ones that the Senate was possibly going to kill (and in some cases did when the clock ran out on them) for good reason – because they were bad bills. While interviewing Liberal Senator George Baker yesterday for a story I was writing, he offered this, which I unfortunately wasn’t able to include in the piece, but every MP should nevertheless read it and take it to heart:

“Here’s a real problem with these private member’s bills: if there’s a fault in the bill, if there’s a word out of place, if there’s an error in the wording or in the intent of a sentence of paragraph – if it’s a private member’s bill, then the Senate is in a quandary because if they amend the bill, then they will in all likelihood be defeating the bill. If you amend a bill in the Senate, if it’s a private member’s bill, it goes back to the Commons and it goes to the bottom of the list for consideration, and then the private member will come to the Senate committee and say you’re going to pass this bill. We had it happen three times in the past two years. They say you’re going to defeat the bill, so the Senate turned around and passed the bill, given the tradition of not defeating something that’s legitimately passed in the House of Commons, and Senate ignored the necessary amendments and they passed bad legislation.”

Baker is absolutely right in that there is a problem – MPs don’t have them drafted very well, and then don’t do their due diligence because these bills are automatically time-allocated by design. That a number of these bills died on the Order Paper in the Senate one hopes might be an object lesson to MPs that they need to do better, but unfortunately, the lesson too many MPs took is that the “unelected and unaccountable Senate” didn’t just rubber-stamp a bill because it passed the Commons. Except, of course, it’s not their job to rubber stamp, and we’ve had an increasing number of bad bills getting through the cracks based on these emotive arguments, and not a few hissy fits along the way *cough*Reform Act*cough*. And now we have bad laws on the books because of it, apparently content to let the courts handle it instead. It’s sad and a little pathetic, to be perfectly honest. We should be demanding out MPs do better, and when they screw up, they need to take their lumps so that they’ll do better next time. Otherwise they won’t learn – or worse, they will take the wrong lesson, and our system will be worse off.

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Roundup: Caution on the veto

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The particular bugaboos of electoral reform and the role of the Senate have been colliding increasingly in the past number of days, as there have been threats coming that certain Conservative senators have been threatening to use their majority to vote down any legislation on changes to the electoral system unless there’s a referendum first. And then this particular op-ed in the Citizen by a Université de Montréal law professor urging them to do just that makes me want to just take a moment to talk it all through. First, a few things to keep in mind – the senator who went to the media about this threat was Don Plett, who is, well, singular on some issues. He’s broken ranks before, and is willing to stick to his guns on others, but I wouldn’t ever quote him as the voice of the Conservatives in the Senate, even though he is now the caucus whip. The other thing to keep in mind is that the Senate of Canada, being probably the most powerful Upper Chamber in the democratic world, does indeed have the power of unlimited veto – there is no overriding it if the Senate decides that they want something to die. It’s a power that they very rarely use, particularly when it comes to government bills – it’s kind of like the nuclear deterrent for legislation. No, they’d rather make amendments and send it back, with few exceptions. The reason it’s treated with such caution is that they know they don’t have the democratic mandate to exercise these powers except in rare circumstances. In those rare circumstances, they will do it because it’s their job to have a check on a majority government, and be empowered to speak truth to power, which is why they are afforded the kind of institutional independence that they have. So with this in mind, I will hold up a big caution sign when it comes to encouraging them to overturn any theoretical bill on electoral reform. This all dredges up memories of the Free Trade Agreement, and when the Senate held up that bill from the Mulroney government until it could be put to the people, seeing as this deal was hugely contentious at the time, and it was believed that it was going to be selling out our sovereignty to the Americans. The election was fought on this issue, Mulroney won, and the bill passed, and lo and behold, the sky didn’t fall. But while there was merit in putting that question to the people, it was part of the chain of events that started to polarise the Senate, which prior to 1984, was said to have operated on a much less partisan basis. Tit-for-tat games ramped up the partisanship there, until things became so bad that Mulroney exercised the emergency powers of appealing to the Queen to appoint an additional eight senators in order to get the GST passed. The Senate is currently in a vulnerable spot, and while I wouldn’t ask them not to do their jobs because they are in a period of intense scrutiny and this would get blown completely out of proportion by an ignorant pundit class and MPs with agendas harmful to the independence of the Senate – but it would hurt them. That’s why this discussion needs to be approached extremely cautiously, and rash actions scrupulously avoided at all costs.

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Roundup: Barton in charge

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The announcement came down yesterday making it all official – Rosemary Barton has now passed the gauntlet of the competition process and has officially been named the permanent host of CBC’s Power & Politics. It’s not as though she didn’t more than prove herself in spades over the course of the election, with six-days-a-week broadcasts, and sharp coverage, but that Chris Alexander interview, where she shut down one of his tantrums and put him in his place – that has become legendary in political circles already. A senior journalist in this town described her as an “accountability interviewer,” and that’s something that’s been desperately needed in this city, where there has been a certain amount of timidity in the kinds of interviews we’ve seen. Not having a Jeremy Paxman of our own, we’d seen many a political show host in this country tiptoe around members of the Harper government for close to a decade because they often threatened (or instituted) boycotts after one hissy fit or another (John Baird being particularly famous for them), but Barton was having none of that – and it went for opposition MPs as well, like her interview with Thomas Mulcair pretty much on the day she was given the interim job when Evan Soloman’s sudden firing happened, and she didn’t put up with Mulcair’s too-cute-by-half routine. In their release, CBC pointed out her history as a reporter, going back to her starting out as a researcher for the French-language RDI while in Winnipeg, and covering politics in Quebec City – the kinds of chops that her predecessor never had, who relied instead on personality than on hard-won experience in covering the beat. And with Barton’s permanent appointment comes the acknowledgement of the changing face of politics in Canada – the fact that she’s not a middle-aged white male is important in an age of younger MPs, and of gender-equal cabinets, that a younger woman is tougher and more competent in the role than her middle-aged male contemporaries. It’s just too bad that this announcement didn’t happen in June on the heels of Solomon’s departure. (And as for Evan Solomon, it was announced that he’s taking over the afternoon broadcast for Ottawa’s CFRA radio station, because all is apparently forgiven for his ethical lapses).

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Roundup: Political drinking

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The admission by new Liberal MP Seamus O’Regan that he’s seeking treatment for an “alcohol-free lifestyle” is one that has brought plaudits and expressions of support from across the political spectrum. This is, after all, the age where people are being more open about issues like addiction and mental health, in order to shake the stigma that still surrounds it. But as Laura Payton writes in Maclean’s, this does present a problem with the way that Ottawa works currently, where much of the socialising here revolves around cocktails. Social functions put on by lobby and industry groups are in that 5-7 hour, when MPs come out of votes or committee meetings and head to them for drinks, hors d’oeuvres and schmoozing. It’s pretty much the only bonding experiences that MPs have left, given that the shared experiences of dining together three nights a week before late sitting debates happened were killed off in the early nineties in an attempt to make the institution more “family friendly.” But really, what this misses is the fact that it’s a far less booze-intensive place than it used to be, and I’m not talking about the post-Confederation days when there used to be a pub in the basement of the original Centre Block. No, up until the early nineties, there was far more access to alcohol around the Parliamentary precinct, where there used to be beer machines everywhere (one of the last was in the Press Gallery’s Hot Room), where there used to be the Press Club where reporters and sometimes politicians would drink together at the end of the day, and when martini lunches were a Thing. And those late night debates were often lubricated by drinks with dinner, during an age where you couldn’t order by the glass in the Parliamentary Restaurant, but rather had to buy the whole bottle (which they would put your name on and keep behind the bar for you). So really, if anything, it’s probably the easiest it’s ever been for people who are abstaining to be around the environment. On the other hand, there has been a direct loss in the collegiality between MPs since the booze largely stopped flowing. Make of it what you will, but the relationship between politics and alcohol is an interesting and fairly interconnected one, which makes a story like O’Regan’s a particularly interesting one to consider in the broader context.

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Roundup: Different approaches to transparency

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The government announced yesterday that they would be halting compliance measures related to the First Nations Financial Transparency Act, and would restore the funds frozen to those 38 bands that had not reported yet. It was a move that First Nations applauded, while Conservatives and other small-c conservative types decried as making things less accountable. We also found out that the previous government was considering putting those non-compliant bands under third party management, which sounds fairly drastic. It’s not that First Nations are against being accountable – for the most part, they have indicated that they want to be, but that the previous government’s legislation was ham-fisted and in some cases unfair because it forced the reporting of revenue streams that didn’t come from taxpayers. In fact, they have long raised the notion of the creation of a First Nations Auditor General, but the Conservatives were never in favour of it. And to be sure, there are bands that do require a closer eye because in some First Nations, there are problems with nepotism and corruption, and it does need exposure. The question becomes what tools are best able to accomplish the goal that aren’t paternalistic or steeped in racist assumptions. It’s something that the current government is looking to engage with, and we’ll see where their consultations take them, but this will no doubt be part of their move to transform their relationship with Indigenous Canadians.

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Roundup: Defining recession

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While I fear this may becoming a quasi-economics blog over the course of the campaign, it’s numbers yet again in the national consciousness as we learn today whether or not we’re in a technical recession, though there’s a bunch of political dispute over what a recession means. Jason Kenney was on Power & Politics on Sunday trying to broaden the definition to say that it would need to be over a number of sectors rather than just the energy sector as we seem to be seeing in Canada, and while that may be a perfectly reasonable explanation if it was anyone else, it was however his own government who put the definition of two quarters of shrinking GDP into their “balanced budget” legislation just a couple of months ago. Oops. To that end, Rosemary Barton writes about deficit and recession politics on the campaign trail, while Mike Moffatt calculates the projected federal deficits for the next few years based on current economic indicators. And Stephen Gordon gives us some food for thought:

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