Tag Archives: Dominic LeBlanc

Roundup: Negotiations and narratives

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It was another day of NAFTA developments, or rather the hints thereof, since Chrystia Freeland repeatedly said that they weren’t going to negotiate in public – just that they were making progress, and that they would go all night if they had to. Justin Trudeau said that they could reach a deal by Friday, but kept insisting that Supply Management would not be given up, and on the campaign trail in Quebec, Premier Philippe Couillard warned of “serious political consequences” if it was touched. Trudeau, meanwhile, will have a call with all of the premiers today in order to discuss what’s going down with the deal, so it may actually be getting close. Maybe. Of course, the Friday deadline appears to be more bluster, so we’ll see how it all plays out.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Conservatives have tried to ramp up their narrative, and are insisting that all of the talk about the Canadians having been “sidelined” in NAFTA talks, and that we were now cornered into accepting a bad deal was indicative that Trudeau had “failed” – somehow, based on no information on mostly Trump talking points that don’t match reality.

You’ll notice a couple of things – one is that the “Trudeau” + “failed” in every tweet is part of their overall ham-fisted narrative-building strategy, and I’d imagine that every time they deploy it, campaign director Hamish Marshall gives them a cookie. Scheer is also going to town on this line from his convention speech about needing to be the “grown-ups in charge” again, which is tough to swallow given how little foreign policy depth their bench actually has, or even had in the previous government. And while there is room for the opposition to critique a government’s performance and holding them to account, coming up with false narratives, snide commentary, and shitposts in the middle of trade negotiations don’t exactly scream “grown-ups in charge.” And speaking of false narratives, the data show that the Conservative doomsaying about investment fleeing the Canadian economy isn’t holding water. Shocking, I know.

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Roundup: Mandate letter madness

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Yesterday was the big day that the mandate letters for the new cabinet minister were finally released, and the Cabinet committees got a bit shake-up. You can get an overview of the letters here, and some deeper analysis on what’s being asked of Jim Carr in international trade, Dominic LeBlanc in intergovernmental affairs, and Jonathan Wilkinson in fisheries. Reading through the letters, however, I found that almost all of the new letters – either with established ministries or with the new ones that they are establishing – were all giving them specific direction on which other ministers they should be working with to achieve specific goals. Very few of them were goals that they were to pursue on their own, which I find to be very curious from a governance perspective.

The big question mark remains around Bill Blair and just what he’s supposed to do as Minister of Looking Tough on Stuff – err, “border security and organized crime reduction.” We got no insight as to whether he has any actual operational control over a department or an agency like CBSA. Rather, his list of goals included looking at a ban on handguns and assault rifles as part of the existing Bill C-71, and that as part of his duties in relation to the border, he should have discussions with the Americans about the Safe Third Country agreement, but it was all rather vague. (There was also some talk about opioid smuggling as part of his border security duties, for what it’s worth). Nevertheless, it was another one of those letters that was focused on which other ministers he’s supposed to be working with as opposed to providing oversight of a ministry, which I find weird and a bit unsettling as to what this means for how the machinery of government works under Trudeau.

Meanwhile, the number of Cabinet committees was reduced, and some of the files that certain of these committees were overseeing got shuffled around. We’ll see how this affects governance, but it’s all a peek into the sausage-making of governance (which, it bears reminding, that the Ford government in Ontario refuses to give any insight into as he refuses to release his own ministers’ mandate letters).

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Roundup: Bernier’s dog whistles

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While we’re on the topic of bozo eruptions, we got another one from Maxime Bernier over Twitter on Sunday evening, railing about Justin Trudeau’s declaration that diversity is our strength. While I won’t reproduce all of Bernier’s feed, some of the commentary around it has been interesting, and in particular, just what kinds of dog whistles and language that Bernier employs in his language – and likely not a coincidence that this happened on a day of counter-protests to white supremacists in the United States. Also worth noting that his tweets were in rapid succession and in both official languages, which indicates that they were premeditated and not spur of the moment, and that does mean something as well.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1028812175673094146

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1028834166849368064

I might be willing to suspend enough disbelief around Bernier to suppose that he’s really not all that bright and that he really doesn’t know what he’s doing when he tweets stuff like this, but the people who surrounded him in his leadership campaign absolutely knew what they were doing when they tweeted things like red pill memes, and one presumes that they’re still in Bernier’s orbit. But Bernier has consistently demonstrated that he doesn’t have particularly adept political sensibilities (witness his ejection from shadow cabinet), and the fact that he went from going to Pride parades during his leadership campaign to insist that his libertarian values meant that he valued freedom over social conservatism, to becoming a Jordan Peterson convert who was paranoid about “enforced speech” and the bogus fears about being jailed for mis-gendering someone. But as is pointed out below, we are two weeks away from the Conservative policy convention, and it’s possible that this dog whistling is also about Bernier trying to gather support to oppose Scheer in some capacity or other.

Michelle Rempel also put out a tweet thread in response (which again, I’m not going to repeat), and some of the points she made seemed to be refuting Bernier, but at the same time, she makes her own coded appeals about planned migration and the language of pitting groups of newcomers against each other, in very Jason Kenney-esque ways.

Ultimately, however, we are back to the notion of where the adult supervision is with this party, and we recall the reasons why Harper put the party into communications lockdown – before they won in 2006, they went into lockdown because the 2004 election saw them lose because of precisely these kinds of bozo eruptions from the likes of Cheryl Gallant and others. And the strict message discipline seemed to work, but it causes as many problems as it solves (not to mention it’s terrible for democracy). But with this kind of tire fire over the past couple of weeks, you have to imagine that Scheer, whose own Twitter strategy is a lot of lies, obfuscation, narrative building and populist memes, is all for this kind of air war that he thinks will rile the base in ways that appear to have worked for both Trump and Ford. Maybe this kind of “shitposting” (as it is colloquially known) is the message discipline, in which case, we’re probably all doomed.

https://twitter.com/aradwanski/status/1028816033610575872

https://twitter.com/aradwanski/status/1028816045262307328

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1028416748331126785

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QP: Conflicts, subsidies, and elections

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While Justin Trudeau was off in Charlevoix, and Andrew Scheer in Laval as part of his “listening to Quebeckers” tour, there were no leaders in the Commons today except for Elizabeth May. Candice Bergen led off, raising new allegations from the Globe and Mail about the Arctic surf clam fishery, to which Dominic LeBlanc assured her the allegation was false, before reminding her that they included Indigenous people in the fishery when the previous government didn’t. Bergen reiterated the previous allegations about the process including the accusation that his family will benefit, and this time LeBlanc was a little more sharp in his reiteration that the allegations are false, and the fact that he has no family connection in the case. Bergen demanded that the prime minister remove him from the file, and LeBlanc assured her that he would cooperate with the Ethics Commissioner, but pointedly reminded her that she should stick to the facts. Jacques Gourde took over to ask the same again in French, and LeBlanc called out the fact that they were simply reiterating the same falsehoods in French. After a second round of the same, Ruth Ellen Brosseau led off for the NDP, demanding an end to fossil fuel subsidies by 2019 and to know how much would be given to Kinder Morgan. Bill Morneau got up to say that they were on track to phase out subsidies by 2020, and that they were still talking with Kinder Morgan. Nathan Cullen reiterated the same in English, with a heap of added sanctimony, to which Morneau repeated his same answer. Cullen then got up to moralise about  getting multi-party support for the elections bill, to which Karina Gould praised it going to committee to get the “study and interrogation” that it deserves. Brosseau repeated the same in French, and got the same response.

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Senate QP recap: Fisheries under the microscope

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For the first ministerial Senate Question Period of the year, fisheries minister Dominic LeBlanc was the special guest star. Leading off as always was Senator Larry Smith, who first wished LeBlanc well given his cancer treatment, and then asked about the impact of the Phoenix pay problem on the Coast Guard. LeBlanc noted that this was a problem and he was working with the senior management of the Coast Guard on the problem, he acknowledged that it was an unacceptable situation that was costing them personnel that had a cascading effect on their capacity, which is why they were trying to deal with it. Smith asked if there was a timeframe to sort it out, and LeBlanc said that because previous timeframes have slid, they were simply continuing to do the work to deal with the most urgent cases and working toward stabilising the system. Smith asked if this message was relayed personally to the Coast Guard members, and LeBlanc said that he had every time he visited a Coast Guard facility. Continue reading →

Roundup: A revealing confession

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When I saw the initial tweet, I can’t tell you how hard my eyes rolled, precisely because this sort of shtick is David Akin’s specialty – asking non-sequitur questions at inappropriate moments to try and generate a different headline, oftentimes to manufacture outrage (and oftentimes to the detriment of other reporters who had serious questions to ask when questions were limited). And some of the reactions to said tweet were pretty great too.

https://twitter.com/davidakin/status/937918915987906560

But reading Trudeau’s response, it was a bit of a warning klaxon for me, because of how this has been quietly playing out over the course of the past couple of years in the ways that Trudeau and his government has been trying to “reform” the way that business happens in the House of Commons – you know, to “modernize” the way that it functions.

…As we look at electoral structures, which is one of the questions that was specifically asked, we’ve had a certain level of discussions around electoral and democratic reform in Canada that leave me looking to the mother of all parliaments. Obviously, the U.K. does a significantly better job than us in programming legislation and getting that through the House. I think there is issue to admire on that. On the other hand, we were glad to adopt the prime minister’s question period model from the U.K. I think there’s lots to draw on when you look at our democratic structures from the mother of all parliaments.

The two key takeaways there are programming legislation, and prime minister’s questions. This isn’t the first time that programming motions have come up – back in the spring, the opposition filibustered the government over a proposal to include programming motions as part of Bardish Chagger’s “discussion paper” on suggested changes to procedure, and it seems that Trudeau hasn’t given up on the notion. I know that some people like programming motions because it helps create more orderly debates, and helps to move legislation though the chamber a lot more swiftly. But that’s partially why I’m not a huge fan of it, because creates the default assumption that the Commons is there to process legislation instead of holding government to account. Granted, we’ve gotten a bit dysfunctional in our parliament because opposition parties (and the NDP in particular) have an inability to let debate collapse in a reasonable timeframe which brings up the need for time allocation, and programming motions are just that – time allocation for all stages of a debate as it gets tabled. We should be trying to get parliament back to a better state of debate rather than resorting to programming, because that will help snuff out what little life remains in our parliament – it will make the speeches that much more rote and pro forma rather than having a miniscule chance for actual debate. As for PMQs, Trudeau’s grand experiment with it here has not proven to be that illuminating, and has instead created a perverse incentive for the Conservatives to instead bombard him with the same question eleventy times than to use it productively, and even when backbenchers do ask varied questions, they get mere platitude responses rather than substantive ones. It’s not like the UK’s, and so I find Trudeau’s response to Akin far more dubious as a result.

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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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Roundup: Counter-radicalism and reality checks

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In the wake of the Aaron Driver near-miss last week, public safety minister Ralph Goodale is set to announce that the government is moving ahead with a counter-radicalization programme, but it looks like the details are still a little ways out. That said, Goodale has been pretty frank that our current counter-radicalisation programmes have little coherence and that’s what he aims to fix over the course of this year. And while we get the musings about what kind of leader Trudeau will be in the face of terrorism, we get his former foreign policy advisor Roland Paris reminding us of what he has done to date (which is not nothing, as his critics have stated). More importantly, however, we need to remind ourselves of the reality of the situation, and for that, I would turn your attention to Stephanie Carvin’s piece in this weekend’s Globe and Mail, which explains why counter-terrorism and counter-radicalism is not as easy as you might think, and provides a good reality check for the kinds of rhetoric out there, and why saying things like “connecting the dots” isn’t actually helpful to any kind of conversation around the subject.

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Roundup: Send in the narcissistic clowns

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It happened on Thursday, but I’m still fuming about it. Power & Politics interviewed a couple of would-be Senate candidates based solely on what I’m guessing is the sheer power of their narcissism, and not once was the actual Senate itself brought up for discussion. It was pretty much inevitable that this would happen – the moment the government announced that they would allow their advisory committee to allow self-applicants into the process, you were guaranteed to find a bunch of people who felt that somehow they had the right stuff to be a senator, and lo and behold, these people have been making themselves known, like the one guy from PEI who is going around and door knocking to get people to sign a petition about how swell he would be as a senator, never mind that a) it’s not how this works, and b) if he’s so keen about knocking on doors, maybe he should seek a party nomination to run to be an MP. Just maybe. Or the woman in Nova Scotia who thinks that just because she’s championed a couple of petitions to twin highways that she has the right stuff to be in the Senate. Never mind that neither of them have any particular policy expertise that they want to bring to the job. Never mind that both of these clowns are way too young to even be contemplating a position that is generally seen as a way that allows people who have excelled in their fields to contribute to public service as their careers are winding down. They feel that because they’re honest and have integrity (and really, who doesn’t think that they do), that makes them good material for the Senate. Okay, then.

What burns me the most, however, is the way that the media treats the narcissistic clowns and uses this as some kind of human interest story rather than to demonstrate that the Senate is actually pretty serious business. Not once were these wannabes asked what they think the Senate actually does, and how exactly they plan to contribute to a chamber that is full of subject-matter experts. None of them were asked if they know how the legislative process works, though they seemed to think that they had ample time for on-the-job training (and to a certain extent yes, that may be the case, but generally you would have some kind of other expertise going into this rather than you think you’ve got a good character). And by treating the Senate seriously in that you’re not asking people who think they should populate it about the chamber itself, it betrays the fact that We The Media seem to have learned nothing about it despite all the stories about it over the past two or three years, from the ClusterDuff fiasco to the solid debates that were had over the assisted dying bill. And that’s really sad, because you would have hoped that we would have learned something about how interesting and vital a place it is in our democratic process, but no, we remain fixated on spending scandals (for whose coverage and pearl-clutching was hugely out or proportion to what had actually taken place for most senators), and not on the actual work of the chamber, and we are all poorer for it.

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Roundup: Big tent divisions

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There was an interesting and perhaps somewhat revealing interview in The Hill Times yesterday where openly gay MP Rob Oliphant let it be known that despite the outward acceptance of LGBT issues in the Liberal Party, it is not a universally held opinion, and that there are still undercurrents of the “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude that still reside within some of its members. As an example, MP John McKay – a noted evangelical Christian – was quoted as saying that his feelings about same-sex marriage haven’t changed, even though he considers the issue settled. It’s that line between tolerance and acceptance, and Oliphant rather adroitly points out that the line is still there within his own caucus. It also seems to me to be a kind of oblique explanation for why the government wound up taking such a tough line on the assisted dying bill – to the point that they would rather see it go back to the Supreme Court of Canada in order to suffer a defeat and be “forced” to deal with the issue as it was originally laid out in the Carter decision rather than to go along with it on their own. There are other lines within the party where Trudeau has forced the issue with his candidates and caucus, such as abortion (McKay being an opponent, as was Lawrence MacAulay until Trudeau’s edict), and it would seem that the same line is being threaded with the assisted dying issue. The difference is that with this one, Trudeau did not force the issue with his caucus and insist that this is a Charter issue that they will be whipped on (never mind that the Carter decision very clearly stated that yes, this is a Charter issue and this is why the current law is not adequately ensuring access for these Canadians with grievous and irremediable suffering). And it did seem that it was originally going to be the case where this was going to be a whipped vote on Charter lines, but he backed away from that under some public pressure from the media. How much of that was from push-back from the caucus and the broader party membership remains to be seen, but it would seem that the attempt to create the broadest possible tent is forcing some uncomfortable compromises, and in this case, Trudeau made the calculation that this wasn’t a battle he was willing to fight within his own base, never mind that he had the Charter argument right there. Instead, we are left with an inadequate law that will be challenged again (and one hopes not at the expense of another suffering family), and the reminder that while the public face of the Liberal Party is one of progressivity, there remains a social conservative undercurrent of the party that the leader’s declarations haven’t entirely done away with.

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