Tag Archives: Democratic Reform

Roundup: Partisan crybabies and skewered straw men

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As machinations and protestations go, the current drama in the Senate is starting to try my patience, particularly because so many of the players seem to be getting drawn off onto silly tangents at the expense of the bigger picture. In particular, the Conservative senators continuing to push this conspiracy theory that all new independent senators are just Liberals in-all-but-name is really, really throwing them off the message that Senator Peter Harder is trying to destroy the Westminster traditions of the Senate, and has a stated goal of removing any sense of official opposition from the Chamber. But when the complaints about Harder’s machinations are drowned out by their conspiracy theorizing, they’re only harming their arguments by making themselves look petty. And it is concerning what Harder has been up to, his latest move being a closed-door meeting for all senators to “discuss short-term and long-term government business.” Add to this are a number of the more established independent senators, who previously felt shut out, excusing Harder’s actions because he’s trying to bring them in, oblivious to the fact that this is how he’s trying to build his little empire.

Add to this conversation comes former senator Hugh Segal who penned an op-ed for the Ottawa Citizen, bravely skewering straw men all around him about those darned partisan senators not giving up committee spots to independent senators (when he knows full well that it’s an ongoing process and that committees don’t get reconstituted until after a prorogation), and coming to the defence of Harder, with whom he worked together all of those years ago during the Mulroney government before Harder transitioned to the civil service. Poor Peter Harder, whose budget has been cruelly limited by all of those partisan senators and how he can’t get the same budget as Leaders of the Government in the Senate past (never mind that Harder has no caucus to manage, nor is he a cabinet minister as the Government Leader post is ostensibly). Gosh, the partisan senators are just being so unfair to him. Oh, please.

So long as people are content to treat this as partisan crybabies jealously guarding their territory, we’re being kept blind as to what Harder’s attempts to reshape the Senate are going to lead to. His attempts to dismantle the Westminster structure are not about making the chamber more independent – it’s about weakening the opposition to the government’s agenda. Trying to organise coherent opposition amongst 101 loose fish is not going to cut it, and Harder knows it. The Senate’s role as a check on the government is about to take a serious blow so long as people believe Harder’s revisionist history and back-patting about how great a non-partisan Senate would be. Undermining parliament is serious business, and we shouldn’t let them get away with it because we think it’s cute that it’s making the partisans angry.

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Roundup: A badly needed review

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The Criminal Code is a mess. The government knows it, and the judicial system knows it, but the question is whether anyone has the guts to do anything about it – particularly because it’s been a particularly easy target to do one-off laws without worrying about the broader consequences. The number of private members’ bills dealing with singular tweaks to the Criminal Code are innumerable, because it’s seen as something that individual MPs can use to take a stand on some issue or another while at the same time considering it to be something that won’t impose a cost on the government as no dedicated spending must be attached to it that would otherwise require a Royal Recommendation. (This is wrong – there are tremendous costs attached to it, but it’s a loophole in the rules that there is no appetite to plug either). And when governments want to increase sentencing to look tough on an issue, they pass new laws to “crack down,” to the point where there is no semblance of a logical sentencing grid any longer. I remember sitting in on a Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee meeting during the Harper years when they were passing another marijuana bill and the Liberal senators were expressing frustration that things were such a mess that these new pot offences were giving more jail time than some child sex offences.

The government’s recent move to repeal some archaic laws around gay sex (including an unequal age of consent) is an example of one place where the government is doing something about a “zombie law” – one that has been struck down by the courts, but remains on the books because Parliament has yet to take the time to actually repeal it. (This was another case were the Conservatives outright refused to when given the opportunity when they were raising the age of consent for hetero teens). But there are plenty of zombie laws still sitting on the books and nothing is being done about them. The CBC has a look here at some of those laws, and expert urging to deal with them – particularly given that murder trial in Edmonton where the judge accidentally handed down a verdict that was predicated on a “zombie” law and he had to go back and give a lesser verdict after the fact to correct the mistake. Clearly this is a problem, but the government isn’t promising much action beyond vague assurances that these sorts of things will be part of their broader criminal justice review – the same review that will be looking at doing away with a number of mandatory minimum sentences. But this is something that they really do need to get cracking on, not only dealing with “zombie” laws, but also sentencing reform so that there is a coherent sentencing grid once again. Part of the problem, however, is that the justice minister and her office are moving at a glacial pace. Everything they’ve been doing, from judicial appointments to moving on certain bills, is taking far longer than it reasonably should, and that’s concerning especially when this criminal justice review is so badly needed. Let’s hope we hear more about it sooner rather than later.

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Roundup: The pull of status quo

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The wailing and gnashing of teeth of the electoral reform crowd is about to get worse, as they will soon convince themselves that the government is out to kill their dreams of a new electoral system. Why? Because after the committee demanded that minister Maryam Monsef give them a report of the electoral reform consultations she’s received, she’s told them that those consultations are showing fairly strong support for the status quo, and that there is no consensus on what kind of electoral reform that people prefer. Add to that, there is apparently a strong preference for the local representation connection in their various values questions, which goes toward supporting the status quo argument. I’m fairly thrilled to hear about so much support for team status quo and hope that this bolsters the case to abandon this whole foolhardy process, but I fear we’re still a little ways away from that as of yet.

Meanwhile, our friends at Fair Vote Canada are baying at the moon that the new survey the government plans to open to Canadians is biased toward the status quo based on sample questions they found on the testing site. Except of course that those aren’t the actual final questions on the survey, and the questions were generated by the company for testing purposes rather than the government for their actual survey, so no dice (yet) on that particular conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, killing this whole electoral reform headache can’t come fast enough, nor can the justifications based on the “values” quizzes by the government. Then maybe we can focus on the real problems, like civic literacy and engagement, rather than trumpeting solutions in search of problems.

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QP: Trudeau “on bended knee”

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With the Prime Minister off in Argentina, neither Rona Ambrose nor Thomas Mulcair bothered to show up for QP either today, leaving Elizabeth May the only leader in the Commons – and she’d already used up her question for the week. Denis Lebel led off, lamenting the lack of create jobs and accused the government of “showing their cards” when it comes to talking about NAFTA — err, except that they haven’t actually said anything other than they are willing to come to the table. Navdeep Bains rose to reply that there are nine million American jobs tied to trade with Canada, and that they are looking out for Canada’s interests. Lebel repeated the exact same question in English, and Bains expanded on the size of the trading relationship between Canada and the US. Lebel moved onto the softwood lumber agreement, and Bains assured him that they were working hard on the deal. Candice Bergen picked up and railed about how naive the PM was for “waving the white flag” on NAFTA (again, not sure how exactly he did that), and Bains kept up his reassurances that they wanted to protect Canadian jobs under the agreement. Bergen then demanded that the government press for TPP to move ahead at the APEC summit in Peru, and Bains gave a dig about how the Conservatives negotiated TPP in secret while the Liberals were being transparent about it. Nathan Cullen led off for the NDP, accusing the government of “decision-based evidence-making” when it comes to electoral reform, and Maryam Monsef said that she was eagerly awaiting the committee report. Cullen claimed that the new survey the government was planning to roll out was to dissuade people from proportional representation, but Monsef insisted that they just wanted to hear from more people. Alexandre Boulerice asked the same again, only angrier and in French, but Monsef kept her happy talking points about being committed to the file and that she was waiting for the committee report.

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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: An unexpected reversal

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So, after the somewhat unexpected reversal of last night, I looked back to something from the past few days to help explain this bit of insanity that we’ve all witnessed. Michelle Rempel heard this from Republican officials late last week when she asked them how this all happened:

Here’s a look at what a Trump presidency is going to mean for Canada:

As the numbers tightened, we saw this going around:

https://twitter.com/kfile/status/796206974652321794

Meanwhile, a reminder about the underlying attitudes:

https://twitter.com/james_j_gordon/status/796200489918623745

I’m going to wait before I can have much else to say about the power of nativism, and this “drain the swamp” ethos that has taken over so much of the rhetoric in the campaign, and the part that civic ignorance feeds into the politics of resentment that in turn fuels this kind of thing. But wow.

I will say how glad I am once again to live in Canada, with a constitutional monarchy and a system of Responsible Government, with a Supreme Court that isn’t partisan, and with a neutral civil service. Because we’re probably going to be reminded about how important that is in the next few years.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau will be stopping in Cuba and Argentina on the way to the APEC meeting in Peru, and everyone is recalling his father’s frienship with the Castros.
  • The government has named a five-person panel to make recommendations regarding overhauling the National Energy Board.
  • Here’s a look at the latest round of Order Paper questions, with questions on alcohol on government flights, classified documents and ministerial swag.
  • Here is your look at ministerial expense repayments for various and sundry reasons.
  • The Victims of Communism memorial is now up for a new design from five different bidders, to go with its new location. The original design is out of the running.
  • Correctional Investigator Howard Sapers is leaving the job and will be leading a review of segregation in Ontario prisons.
  • Conservative MP (and former sportscaster) Kevin Waugh thinks that female athletes are treated better than their male counterparts, and is being criticised for it.
  • The first Conservative leadership debate is tonight.
  • The premier of PEI is (rightfully) expressing some scepticism over the province’s electoral reform plebiscite results, and reformers are howling as a result.
  • My Loonie Politics column looks at whether the instances of Liberal backbenchers voting against the government are really signs of independence showing.

Odds and ends:

The Yukon Liberals won the territorial election on Monday night, and Trudeau congratulated prospective new premier Sandy Silver.

Both women candidates in the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race have dropped out citing harassment and intimidation.

Roundup: Postcards for values

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Yesterday the National Post reported that the government is planning on sending a postcard to every household in the nation and asking them to head to a website to answer questions about their democratic values. Immediately the Twitter-verse went into full-snark mode, wondering why the government would do this rather than hold a referendum, and wondering at the cost of such an exercise, but there were a few phrases that struck me as I read it, and that goes back to the fact that they’re asking Canadians what values they’re looking for in their voting system as opposed to asking them to choose a system. Why does that matter? Because it basically allows the government to justify whatever decision they end up making by selling it as living up to the greatest number of the “values” they got feedback on. And when the committee report comes back a deadlock with several dissenting reports (as it inevitably will), the government will be further empowered to finally suffocate the whole ill-fated enterprise and list all of the ways the current system conforms to the majority of the “values” that they polled Canadians on, and lo, we shall never speak of this again. Or something like that.

Meanwhile, PEI had their plebiscite on electoral reform and with a stunningly low voter turnout of 36 percent even with several days of voting, lowering the age to 16, and giving people a myriad of options to vote including online, it came down to several preferential rounds where Mixed-Member Proportional won a very narrow 52 percent win. This again translated into two very different sets of reactions – elation from the PR crowd for whom this validates their crusading on the topic, never mind that the mandate for said system is really, really weak (between the low turnout and the fact that it took several drop-off rounds to get that bare majority vote), or the fact that the plebiscite was by definition non-binding and there is more than enough opportunity for the government to get out of it (and really, I’m not sure that such a low vote is mandate enough to make such an important change). The other reaction was a sense of somewhat smugness from proponents of a referendum on electoral reform at the federal level, basically telling their opponents (who insist that such a referendum would favour the status quo) that they’re wrong. But if you think about it, such a low turnout and the fact that MMP barely squeaked past may indeed be an indication that there was more of a desire for the status quo than is being acknowledged. Nevertheless, both groups are going to be insufferable for days to come.

https://twitter.com/katemckenna8/status/795799811345842176

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Roundup: No need for a turf war

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The possibility of committee allocations in the Senate turning into a turf war is something that I’m not sure is an imminent issue, but Kady O’Malley nevertheless faithfully explores in her weekend column, including some potential procedural manoeuvres that Senator Peter Harder could attempt to employ to force the modernization committee report to come to fruition as government business (which it currently is not), but as is not unexpected, she got some pushback from Senator Leo Housakos.

Just to add my own two cents, I have indeed heard some concerns from both the Conservatives and Senate Liberals that the Non-Aligned Senators have not yet been able to fill their committee spots, which may also have been why Senator Peter Harder has been organizing to “help” the new independent senators out, essentially big footing the efforts of the Independent Senators Group, but one has to add that they’re building their own processes and organization from scratch.

So we’ll see. I still think that the newly appointed 21 senators shouldn’t be in any hurry to get committee spots, but take the time to get adjusted to their new environment as the committees are currently operating okay and we aren’t seeing a lot of cases where senators are doing triple duty just to keep committees filled (as was the case with the Conservatives pre-2008, when Harper was obstinately refusing to fill seats the first time around). And as I’ve said previously, they can spend some time participating in committees as they have the right to now – they just can’t be voting members, which is probably just as well in terms of getting them acquainted to the place. So everyone should relax because there is no actual crisis.

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QP: Wounded by your cynicism

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The Liberal front bench was pretty empty as QP got underway, and Thomas Mulcair was the only leader present today, for whatever the reason. Trudeau in particular had no real excuse as he was just at an event with students in the precinct just a couple of hours before. Candice Bergen led off for the Conservatives, lamenting the lack of new jobs produced by the previous budget. Scott a Brison responded, lamenting the lack of attention the Conservatives were paying to the international investment that they had drawn, such as Thompson Reuters and Amazon. Bergen moved onto fundraising issues and Bardish Chagger gave her usual “federal rules” replies. Bergen demanded the Ethics Commissioner police this issue (not really per place to, which is an issue), and Chagger repeated her response. Gérard Deltell lamented the lack of a date for a return to budgetary balance, but Brison reminded him of their middle class tax cuts and the Canada Child Benefit. Deltell then demanded to know which other tax credits the government planned to eliminate, but Brison dodged and praised their investments in economic growth. Thomas Mulcair was up next, demanding to know which electoral system that the Minister of Democratic Institutions favoured, but with Monsef absent, Brison praised their consultative process and to let the committee do its work. Mulcair decried that those statements undercut the committee’s work, and Brison lamented Mulcair’s cynicism. Mulcair then changed topics and demanded to know now how many journalists were being signed on at the federal level, Ralph Goodale said that the situation in Quebec wasn’t applicable to the federal level but he wouldn’t comment on any ongoing operations. Mulcair pressed, and Goodale reminded him that the Commission told a committee that the answer was zero.

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Roundup: Six more makes a full chamber

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The final six Senate appointments have been made, all from Québec, and all were very much in the same pattern that we’ve seen to date from this government – well qualified, certainly, but without much in the way of ideological diversity, and as of yet, no new openly LGBT senators (that are very much needed). There could very well be some selection bias at play here, which is part of why asking people to apply rather than seeking to nominate people continues to be a problem, and promises of transparency would mean some kind of a statistical breakdown of the short lists presented to the PM, but one doubts that will ever happen.

Now this all having been said, the performative outrage by a number of Conservative senators is getting to be really tiresome. I am also failing to see the logic in how appointing a bunch of partisans and telling them that they are to be whipped (which no, senators are not supposed to be) is somehow preferable and “transparent” than it is to appoint a number of ideological similar individuals who aren’t assigned a party label, nor are they being told that they’re subject to a whip. It really makes no sense, particularly when there are all manner of other perfectly legitimate criticisms that can be levelled at the nomination process and the pattern that has emerged from the appointments, but to insist that it’s all a “con job” is really, really rich. It’s bad if they all vote for the PM who appointed them if they are “independent,” but it’s a-okay to vote under an illegitimate whip by the PM who appointed them so long as it’s under a party banner? Huh? (Also, to correct Senator Housakos, nothing stops any of these new senators from joining a caucus of their choice).

Meanwhile, we’re going to get more grousing about committee slots and research budgets, but honestly, that’ll work itself out within a few weeks and bellyaching won’t actually help make the process work faster or better. There is also some grumbling right now that the current crop of independent senators haven’t managed to fill the two slots per committee they’ve been allotted as is, so why give them yet more seats? It will happen, but the rules don’t really allow committee reconstitution until a prorogation anyway, so I’m not sure why there’s such a rush. Better to let the process take the time it needs rather than going too fast and ballsing it up and creating room for unintended consequence.

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