Tag Archives: Don Meredith

Roundup: Resurrecting the “barbaric” issue

Posted on by

Not content to ratchet up the niqab issue alone, the Conservatives decided yesterday to go full-on culture war, and dredge up their Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices legislation from the previous parliament, and not only tout what it does (almost all of which is duplicative and unnecessarily antagonistic), but they added the promise of setting up a “tip line” for when people suspect these “barbaric cultural practices” like child brides, polygamy or female genital mutilation are taking place. Never mind that there’s already a tip line in place – it’s called 911 – it seems ripe for reporting on neighbours as a general xenophobic policy that ties up police resources that are already stretched thin. While the Twitter lit up with an attempt to turn the #BarbaricCulturalPractices into an exercise in sarcasm, there are more serious issues underlying the Conservatives’ use of the word. Back when the bill was being debated, Senator Mobina Jaffer, herself a Muslim woman and a lawyer, utterly dismantled the bill from its use of the loaded term “barbaric” to its hypocrisy in targeting polygamy by foreigners but not the community of Bountiful in BC, to the way in which it actually denies the protection of those who were forced into marriages, to the way in which the government improperly uses the defence of “provocation” to try and make a point about honour killings. It’s a masterful bit of legislative scrutiny that deserves to be read again in light of what the Conservatives are trotting out for electoral gain, and in order to put the whole issue into proper context. (That it also demonstrates the value of the work that senators can do its an added bonus).

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/649992456377765889

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/650004567241961472

Continue reading →

Roundup: Constitutionally untenable declarations

Posted on by

One of those tangential sub-plots in the whole ClusterDuff affair reared its head in the testimony of Ben Perrin yesterday, which is the issue of the test of residency for a senator. Given that the issue had blown up during Perrin’s time in PMO, thanks to Stephen Harper’s panic appointments in 2008 where he named senators to provinces where those individuals did not currently reside but rather had originated from, they found themselves in trouble when a certain Senator Duffy was found to have been treating his long-time Ottawa home as a secondary residence that he could claim per diems with while his summer cottage in PEI was being treated as a primary residence, never mind that he rarely spent any time there, none of it in the winter. Perrin’s advice was to come up with several indicators, but that ultimately it would be up to the Senate to come up with those indicators for themselves. Stephen Harper disagreed, and said that as far as he was concerned, they were resident if they owned $4000 in real property in said province – a position Perrin found to be constitutionally and legally untenable. But the constitutionally untenable has become Harper’s stock in trade, particularly where the Senate is concerned, first with his unconstitutional reform bills, to his present policy of not making any appointments in defiance of his constitutional obligation to do so. (And no, Thomas Mulcair is no better with is own promise not to appoint any senators either). And we also know from the Duffy documents that Harper blocked an attempt by the Senate to strike a committee that would deal with the residency issue once and for all – because Harper wanted to protect those improper appointments he made. The rather sad thing is that if hadn’t made those appointments in haste, he could have ensured that they had their ducks in a row before they got appointed, to show that they had enough proof of residency to pass a smell test. He didn’t, constitution be damned – or at least be subverted on bogus “plain reading” arguments that don’t hold water the moment you think critically about them. And yet We The Media aren’t driving this point home to the voters, that the constitution does and should matter. (Aaron Wherry delves more into the residency issue here).

Continue reading →

Roundup: In danger of losing the plot

Posted on by

As Nigel Wright’s testimony wrapped up in the Duffy trial yesterday, I am going to confess that I have pretty much lost the plot at this point. I’m having a hard time seeing what the point of Donald Bayne’s cross-examination was, and how anything Wright did somehow excused Duffy either claiming those expenses, or accepting the cheque in the end. Trying to establish a broad conspiracy that may or may not include the prime minister’s current chief of staff is salacious political gossip, which may or may not go to the prime minister’s judgement in the people he surrounds himself with, but for the life of me, I can’t see how this is relevant to the trial. Yes, people lied and covered up what happened – politically relevant, perhaps, but legally? I’m still having a hard time following where Bayne is going in this. Meanwhile, Aaron Wherry offers some ideas about what may constitute political scandal in the whole ClusterDuff affair – seeing as some are starting to express doubts that there is one – while Andrew Coyne expresses faux sympathy for Harper, who has been deceived by those closest to him for so long.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The Economist Party fact-checks

Posted on by

With the Liberals casting the NDP federal minimum wage proposal as a mirage, and the NDP insisting that they haven’t deceived anyone (never mind that the Huffington Post did a piece asking ordinary people about what they thought of the pledge, only to learn it applies to federally-regulated industries, which won’t affect most people, and lo and behold, the people asked felt deceived. Imagine that!) While the NDP claim it will affect over 100,000 people, the Economist Party crunched the numbers, and found them lacking.

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/632627804119547904

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/632627978648731648

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/632629540762685440

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/632629836889001984

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/632640839819264000

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/632641381207404544

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/632642099620376576

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/632642436439736320

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/632645758894735360

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/632654353233383424

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/632654456883036160

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/632942778721284096

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/632943035039420417

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/632951157674086401

Continue reading →

Roundup: Farewells and self-awareness

Posted on by

With 54 MPs not running again in the next election, we’re hearing a lot of teary farewells, and a number of them talking about their regrets for all kinds of things, particularly about some of the nastiness and the more toxic aspects of their career in politics. It’s more of what we saw in the Samara Canada series of exit interviews with MPs from previous parliaments, which culminated in the book Tragedy in the Commons, where MPs all bemoaned how terrible it was, and how the parties controlled everything, and how everyone else was nasty and partisan (but not them – even when you pointed to examples where they were engaging in that behaviour). What strikes me is that pretty much no MP you’ll speak to will take any responsibility for their own actions, whether it’s boorish partisan behaviour, letting the leader’s office dictate to them, or as is now commonplace, dutifully reading the scripts that are placed in front of them with no critical capacity to say no, I won’t demean myself in this way. (The obvious exception to all of this is Irwin Cotler, who has been a pretty exemplary class act throughout his time as a parliamentarian, but for pretty much everyone else this applies). When we listen to MPs get all teary and expressing their regrets, we should start asking them why they didn’t do something differently. And that’s really it – we elect MPs directly under our electoral system, and that empowers them to be the masters of their own destiny within the Commons (with the obvious exception of whips on things like confidence votes). They don’t need the Reform Act for things to change – they just need to take responsibility for their own behaviour and act like grown-ups. Sadly, the vast majority don’t and then blame everyone else, which is a sad state of affairs.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Good questions about Trudeau’s proposals

Posted on by

There have been a few good responses to Trudeau’s big announcement on Tuesday, including by Emmett Macfarlane and to an extent Andrew Coyne (though I have some respectful disagreements on points he’s made). But two of the best came in the form of Twitter essays, so I’m just going to post them here for your benefit, because they were that good.

https://twitter.com/jandrewpotter/status/611170331756138497

https://twitter.com/jandrewpotter/status/611170765392642048

https://twitter.com/jandrewpotter/status/611171120985706496

https://twitter.com/jandrewpotter/status/611171784683991041

https://twitter.com/jandrewpotter/status/611172117275521025

https://twitter.com/jandrewpotter/status/611172270812205056

https://twitter.com/jandrewpotter/status/611172430577471489

https://twitter.com/jandrewpotter/status/611172648702193664

https://twitter.com/jandrewpotter/status/611172838297329665

https://twitter.com/jandrewpotter/status/611173239570608128

https://twitter.com/jandrewpotter/status/611173399008706560

https://twitter.com/jandrewpotter/status/611173665888010240

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/611187983883083776

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/611188306441842689

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/611188371168305152

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/611193729186156544

Continue reading →