Tag Archives: Deepak Obhrai

Roundup: Immutable committee math

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In a move that is possibly quite disappointing, the Liberals got unanimous consent yesterday to suspend the sections of the Standing Orders governing the powers of parliamentary secretaries – which could be an issue if they plan to put them back on committees with voting powers and the ability to move motions and so on. Some of you may recall that when this was the standard practice during the Conservative era, these committees simply became branch plants of the ministers’ offices, and everything was stage-managed within an inch of their lives.

However.

I also have it on good authority that this may not be exactly as it seems. Part of the problem is that there is a shortage of warm bodies in the Liberal ranks to fill the committees, particularly if you have a Cabinet of 37 out of 157 seats, and what looks to be a prospective parliamentary secretary list of at least 46 (given that Economic Development with have separate parliamentary secretaries for each regional economic development agency). Then, subtract the Speaker and the Assistant Deputy Speaker, who can’t sit on committees, and that leaves them with 72 MPs (maybe less – a couple may also remain assigned to NSICOP, which pulled them from other committees in the previous parliament) to distribute across 27 standing and joint committees, where the parliamentary math in the current hung parliament would see four Liberal MPs per committee. Quite simply, they don’t have enough.

What I’ve been told by my sources is that what they may wind up doing is allowing parliamentary secretaries to sit as regular committee members on committees that aren’t those aligned with their minister, so that they would essentially be pulling double (or possibly triple) duty, especially if they remain on the committees aligned with their minister in a non-voting capacity. It’s not pretty, but it may be what winds up being necessary if they intend to live up to their promise to keep parliamentary secretaries from being voting members of their interested committees. (Are we ready to start having a discussion about having a more reasonable number of MPs for a country of our size? Because seriously, not having enough bodies is an actual problem that has consequences for the efficacy of the institution).

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Roundup: Misleading his recruits

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After some confusion in the Conservative ranks, Andrew Scheer’s Quebec lieutenant, Alain Rayes, is apologising for misleading candidates in the province when he insisted to them that the party considered abortion a settled matter and that they wouldn’t allow any attempt to change the laws. Not so – Scheer’s actual pledge is that the government – meaning Cabinet – would not bring forward any bills, but the backbenches are free to do so, which is why anti-abortion groups have been busy trying to get their supporters nominated as candidates. And now the party and Rayes are saying that he just misheard Scheer’s pledge, which could put some of those Quebec candidates that Rayes recruited in a sticky position because some of them are saying that they decided to run for the Conservatives because they were assured that they weren’t going to touch abortion. Oops.

And this dichotomy of a hypothetical Conservative Cabinet pledges versus its backbenchers is one of those cute ways that Scheer can try to mollify the Canadian public while at the same time assuring his social conservative base that yes, he’s still the party for them, and he’s going to ensure that they have space to put forward legislation. From there, depending on whether or not they have a majority government and if so, how large it is, it comes down to counting votes to see if these kinds of bills have a chance of making it – and the current move in anti-abortion circles is to use backdoor attempts at criminalization through means like trying to create jurisprudence by means of laws that give a foetus personhood status through bills that treat them as such when a pregnant woman is murdered, for example, which they then plan to slowly extend to abortion services. It’s a long-term plan, but one that begins with getting enough anti-abortion candidates nominated and elected, so even though Scheer says his Cabinet won’t introduce these bills, as private members’ bills, they are unlikely to be whipped, and that leaves him to free his caucus to “vote their conscience.”

Of course, if he’s planning to be like Stephen Harper and assert pressure to ensure that these kinds of bills don’t make it through, then his courting of the anti-abortion community is hollow, and he’s lying to them, which will also be something that his base will have to contend with. But the clarification that only a hypothetical Cabinet wouldn’t introduce any anti-abortion measures is too cute by half, and relies on the fact that not enough people appreciate the difference between Cabinet and the backbenches, and why that distinction matters.

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Roundup: Kenney’s latest salvo

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Over the weekend, Alberta premier Jason Kenney put out a video over Twitter that was an explicit declaration that he plans to campaign against Justin Trudeau in the upcoming federal election, but it was couched in the language of provincial separatism. Or rather, Kenney claimed that Trudeau was trying to “push Alberta out” of the Canadian federation, but he would rather “separate Trudeau from the office of the prime minister.”

For Kenney to claim that Trudeau is the source of Alberta’s woes is frankly ridiculous, and to say that Trudeau has been stoking separatist sentiment is laughable. Last I checked, Trudeau wasn’t the cause of the plunge in world oil prices, nor was his the government that has been blocking progress on the Keystone XL pipeline or Enbridge Line 3, and he not only bought the Trans Mountain pipeline to de-risk it, but ensured that the Federal Court of Appeal’s concerns were addressed so that it could begin construction without further court challenges. And if Kenney wants to throw Energy East or Northern Gateway in the mix, well, the former was withdrawn because the economics of the project were insufficient, and the Harper government’s inaction and lack of proper Section 35 consultation ensured that Northern Gateway would not go ahead.

Of course, Kenney is also perpetuating his campaign of lies and snake oil, such as his complaints that the province is getting a “raw deal” from equalization – remembering of course that Alberta doesn’t sign a cheque to other provinces, but that it comes from everyone’s federal income taxes, and Alberta has the highest incomes in the country by far, nor will a referendum on the programme do anything other than further inflame sentiment in the process that Kenney has been lying about. And he knows that he needs to keep the population angry at outside forces so that they don’t start turning on him given that he can’t fulfil the promises he made to them. This video was not only bizarre, but it also perhaps gives a hint of the kind of increasingly desperate measures that Kenney will have to resort to in order to keep stoking anger.

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Roundup: Changing the face of the bench

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The Globe and Mail has an interesting read about the way in which the current government is making a concerted effort to appoint more women to the bench as it (slowly) makes its judicial appointments. While the numbers of women appointed are disproportionate to the numbers that have applied, that seems less concerning to me because it has been shown that fewer women will apply to positions like these because they tend to downplay their own qualifications (just as with trying to get more women to run for public office). I also think that the justice minister has a point when she says that part of the reason for so few appointments being made from visible minorities is in part because there are too few applying, and too few in the justice system as a whole. I also look to something that Senator Jaffer said to me in a piece I wrote for the Law Times about the judicial appointments issue, which is that for many of the appointment committees, they don’t tend to look beyond their own boxes when they make recommendations, so we see fewer women and visible minorities being put forward, and that proactive approaches have been shown to be needed in the past. This government seems to be willing to go some of the distance in bridging that gap, but as always, more work needs to be done, and yes, it’s taking far too long in most of the cases.

What does bother me is the notion that by appointing women and minorities is that this is simply about quotas, and it’s the exact same things we’ve been hearing in the past couple of weeks with regards to people making their evaluations of the federal cabinet, and the quiet clucking of tongues when they go “rookie, diversity hire, not very competent.” Never mind that in many cases, much of the judging is harsh, unfair to the person or the situation they were put into, or deliberately misconstrued to present a worse picture than what actually happened (such as with Maryam Monsef). Never mind the fact that if none of these people are given a chance as rookies, they won’t actually get experience. And yes, some of them are performing poorly (and even more curiously, the ones who I think actually are having problems are the ones who are never the ones being written about). But hearing the constant quota refrain is getting tiresome to read about.

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Roundup: O’Leary’s debate debut

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Saturday night was another Conservative leadership “debate,” and again I use the term loosely because there was very little debating going on. Yes, this particular event did offer more chances for rebuttal, but given that it was staged and structured like the most boring academic conference ever (all it was missing was a line-up at the floor mic for people to give fifteen minute speeches in the guise of asking questions to the panel), we still didn’t get a lot of candidates challenging one another. Not that it didn’t happen – it did, but most of the candidates spent their time taking shots at either Kevin O’Leary (particularly deriding him as not being a Conservative), and Maxime Bernier (most especially around his ideas about equalisation, which, to be fair, are a bit daft).

Going after Bernier may not seem like the think you would expect, but he has been leading the race in terms of fundraising, which is not an insignificant thing. One does have to wonder, however, if there are enough self-described libertarians in the Conservative Party to give him the edge he needed. Bernier, incidentally, says he was being attacked because his opponents are afraid of his position on equalisation. And to be fair, he’s probably right, but not for the reason he thinks, but rather because it has the potential to severely damage the party in the more “have not” provinces of the country, most especially in Atlantic Canada, where they already have zero seats.

As for O’Leary, this was his first real event on the campaign, and he didn’t exactly sparkle, but he did stand out from his competitors a few times, both when he refused to criticise the country’s justice system, pointing to his experience abroad, and in the kinds of shots he took at the current government, which were of a more brash tone than other candidates were taking. He also played his ethnic cards, saying he would consider it a personal failure if Lebanese Canadians didn’t all take out party memberships and declaring that he “owns the Irish vote.” Okay then. Will his brashness that help him? Maybe, considering how very milquetoast most of his competition has been, and the crowd who laps up this populist demagoguery seems to love people who “tell it like it is.” O’Leary, meanwhile, shrugged off the attacks and kept his cool, and didn’t take the bait and made a point of directing his attacks to Trudeau (and premiers Wynne and MacNeil) instead of his fellow candidates.

And the rest? Lisa Raitt had her best night ever, possibly bolstered by the fact that it was a bit of a hometown crowd for her, and she seems to be making her working-class roots that much more of her narrative, but I’m still having a hard time seeing what kind of direction she proposes to lead the party in other than “I’m everything Trudeau is not.” Also, props for bringing up that Globe and Mail piece on “unfounded” sexual assault rates and challenging the government to do something about it. Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux were laughable, Chris Alexander seemed to be doing a lot of “me too” to the points of other candidates – most especially Raitt – but had nothing really new to say. Andrew Scheer made a point of being parochial, Michael Chong remains the grown-up at the table which probably dooms his campaign, and for as middle-of-the-road as he is, everyone was quoting Erin O’Toole’s big line of the night saying “We don’t beat the celebrity-in-chief with another celebrity-in-chief.” The problem is that nobody quoted the second half of his statement where he brought up Robert Stanfield as the model to follow. Remember Stanfield? Who never beat the celebrity PM of his day (being Pierre Elliott Trudeau) and who never became prime minister? Yeah, not sure that was the wisest analogy. Also, O’Toole kept making Silence of the Lambs references, but completely wrong ones. He thought he was being funny by calling all 32 Atlantic Canadian Liberal MPs “lambs” who were “silent,” when Silence of the Lambs is about a cannibal and a serial killer. Not sure that was appropriate. Oh, and about eight or nine candidates need to drop out by oh, yesterday, because at this point, they’re going to start doing more damage than good.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/828343848346779648

Meanwhile, Peter MacKay says that Leitch’s immigration policy is going to damage the party, while Michelle Rempel lists the things she’s looking for in making a decision about a leadership candidate (and spoiler: Kevin O’Leary wouldn’t make the cut).

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Roundup: Cancelling trips never contemplated

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At the risk of this becoming a media criticism blog, I have to take exception to the big Globe and Mail story that they were pushing all weekend, about how Justin Trudeau was not going to attend the Trump inauguration in January.

I. Can’t. Even.

Seriously. Canadian prime ministers never go to inaugurations. The protocol people in Washington make it pretty clear that they don’t want heads of government or heads of state to attend. This is not a scandal. Nor does it have anything to do with Trudeau’s decision to go on his little cross-country tour. The rest of the piece is fairly hysterical about the tour, and Trudeau not going to Davos, Switzerland either, and then meanders into the fact that the US ambassador was recalled on inauguration day.

Um, guys. This is routine. They are almost always recalled, and then it takes them months and months to get new ambassadors approved by the US Senate. Remember how it took Obama nine months to get Ambassador Jacobson here? And how we were worried that it meant that he was mad at us or something? And then it took another several months between Jacobson and Heyman? Yeah. This is not out of the ordinary. Yes, Heyman has been very popular, but did you honestly think that Trump would keep an Obama fundraiser in the post after he took office? And more to the point, would it kill our political reporters to have a sense of history and perspective in their stories, rather than trying to make everything some kind of proto-scandal? It’s not only wrong, but it’s dull. We can do better.

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Roundup: The scourge of billionaires

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If you thought that the temptation to blame elites for everything was simply the crass tactics of Kellie Leitch – herself among the most elite of elites – then you’d be wrong. Yesterday Rona Ambrose decided to take a page from the very same playbook and rail in a speech open to media about how the Liberals were elites who were *gasp!* meeting with billionaires to talk about investment opportunities in Canada. OH NOES! The horror of it all! And not just billionaires – billionaires from Beijing and Dubai! Because it never hurts to get a bit of a protectionist/xenophobic twist to your moral panic. But then again, the Conservatives never could decide if they actually wanted to attract or shut down foreign investment, as they left rules deliberately vague so that they could indulge their protectionist, populist impulses when it suited their needs politically.

Part of what’s galling is the real lack of self-awareness that Ambrose is displaying in this kind of speech. While she’s trying to take a populist tack, her examples are all poor ones to prove her case about those darn elites being against ordinary working folks. Leaving aside that as MPs, they are the elites, the examples of things like cancelling the children’s fitness tax credit don’t even fit their rhetoric. Why? Because the Liberal not only replaced those myriad of tax credits with a broad-based income tax cut, but also with far more generous and untaxed child benefit payments, while those tax credits were non-refundable, meaning that they were generally inaccessible to low-income Canadians who needed them, but rather were far more beneficial to higher-income families who had the money to spend on the sports or arts or whatever to get the full benefit of said credits. In other words, trying to make a “regular families” argument in the “us versus the elites” narrative doesn’t stand up to logic or reality. The fact that they are willing to start indulging in this kind of rhetoric should be alarming, because the last thing we want to do is start trading in the politics of resentment like we’ve seen in the States. Only madness lies that way.

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Roundup: Pushing back against Leitch

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In the wake of Wednesday’s Conservative leadership “debate” – and I use the term loosely because there was no actual debate, just presentations sans Power Point – the wedge that Kellie Leitch has been nursing in her campaign became all the more stark. While Michael Chong may have been first out of the gate with his condemnation, Deepak Obhrai has used it to crank his campaign up a notch yesterday, with both an appeal for support in order to oppose Leitch specifically, and also told tales about messages he’s received from Leitch supporters telling him to leave the country.

At one point during the presentations on Wednesday, Leitch held up a book Points of Entry from sociologist Victor Satzewich to justify her screening proposals. The problem? That Satzewich’s conclusions in the book were the opposite of hers, that the system was working, that demanding more face-to-face interviews for all visa applications would make the system grind to a halt, and that while he went into the research sceptical, his research convinced him that things were better than he had initially surmised. So that’s kind of embarrassing for Leitch (or would be if she had any demonstrated capacity for shame, which I’m not convinced is the case).

Meanwhile Leitch, whose other Trumpian note has been to rail against “elites” – as though she were not the epitome of one – has been holding fundraisers in Toronto with Bay Street lawyers for $500 a pop. You know, more of those elites which she’s totally not one of. Also, if she’s so convinced that she’s going to be Prime Minister by 2019, isn’t this some kind of ethical conflict for her to be holding these kinds of cash-for-access fundraisers?

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Roundup: The new Senate hurdles

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Just how MPs should deal with an increasingly independent – and assertive – Senate is the question posed by former MP Bryon Wilfert and his firm partner Paul Hillier, and it’s a question that I’m really not sure that Justin Trudeau adequate considered when he embarked on this path to modernization. While they note that no longer having senators in caucus limits the closed-door opportunity to hear and debate government proposals, I will state that they overplay the concern about the ability to whip those votes. There has never been any formal power to whip senators’ votes, but they relied primarily on sentimentality or affiliation, and sometimes senators went along, and sometimes they very much didn’t. That’s one of the reasons why there remains a bit of a taint around the post-2008 Harper appointees, because most of them came in being told that they could be whipped, and they behaved as though they could – up until fracture points around the contentious bill C-377, and then they rebelled against their Senate leadership (and it’s not a coincidence that Marjory LeBreton resigned as Government Leader shortly thereafter). They also point to the very real problem that with so many new MPs, and with the Liberal senators no longer in caucus, the personal relationships between parliamentarians that would normally exist no longer do, and that does start to exacerbate the problem of driving legislation through the Senate.

Where I see their proposed solution as being problematic is the suggestion that committee chairs be the new agents to set the legislative pace and of trying to build consensus. Why I think this is a problem is that the point of committees is to hold the government to account, which is why ministers are so frequently called to appear before them. If the chair is acting as the agent of the government, rather than of the committee itself, it creates something of a conflict in their roles. As well, many of the committee chairs are from the Conservatives (not that the Senate Liberals are the same party as the government, but there is an assumption of greater sympathy despite the fact that the relationship has been pretty testy to date). Trying to co-opt those chairs into being government agents to drive consensus would seem to be antithetical to the purposes of having an opposition, and its accountability functions. It also puts those chairs in the awkward position of having stakeholder groups trying to court them in order to get their support in rounding up senators to support the bills – groups that would also want to come before committee to plead their cases when the bills get to said committees, which again presents a bit of a conflict. If anything, I do think this highlights the value of having caucuses for organisational purposes, and arranging these meetings – and yes, the Independent Senators Group could possibly host these same kinds of stakeholder discussions without trying to come to an internal consensus, allowing their members to make their own minds up (and to date, they have operated on a rule that anyone trying to get support does so outside of their meeting room). It will continue to take getting used to, but it will continue to take some serious thought about what roles we’re asking people to take on within the chamber in order to get bills passed.

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Roundup: The AG’s disastrous advice

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The Senate’s internal economy committee is signalling that they are looking into setting up an independent audit committee, and my alarm bells are going off so hard right now because if they follow the path that the Auditor General wants them to go down, then they are risking serious damage to our entire parliamentary system. And no, I’m not even exaggerating a little bit. You see, Michael Ferguson wants to ensure that if there are any senators on this independent committee, that they are in the minority and not in a position to chair it, because that would mean they’re still writing their own rules. And the answer to that is of course they’re writing their own rules. They’re Parliament. Parliament is self-governing. In fact, it’s not only ignorant but dangerous to insist that we subject our parliamentarians to some kind of external authority because that blows parliamentary privilege out of the water. If you don’t think that Parliament should be self-governing, then let’s just hand power back to the Queen and say “thank you very much, your Majesty, but after 168 years, we’ve decided that Responsible Government just isn’t for us.” So no, let’s not do that, thanks. And it’s not to say that there shouldn’t be an audit committee, and Senator Elaine McCoy has suggested one patterned on the one used in the House of Lords, which would be five members – three senators, plus an auditor and someone like a retired judge to adjudicate disputes, but the Senate still maintains control because Parliament is self-governing. It allows outsiders into the process to ensure that there is greater independence and which the senators on the committee would ignore at their peril, but the Senate must still control the process. Anything less is an affront to our democracy and to Responsible Government, and I cannot stress this point enough. Ferguson is completely wrong on this one, and senators and the media need to wake up to this fact before we really do something to damage our parliamentary institutions irreparably (worse than we’re already doing).

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