Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Roundup: A two-fingered fix for fundraising

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After months now of interminable questions about the perfectly legal fundraising practices of the Liberals, it was let known that they will be a tabling a bill in the near future to…do something about it. Not really clamp down. Not really stop. Just add more disclosure, and ensure that events don’t happen in private homes, which many people argue is not really the point, but I think is more of the government giving two fingers to their critics and making some cosmetic changes to shut people up.

Kady O’Malley rather astutely observes that this is really setting a trap for opposition parties, particularly with the proposed provisions around party leaders and leadership candidates being subject to the same new rules, waiting for them to oppose it so that they can be accused of hypocrisy. I would add that there’s an element of payback in here for the way in which the Conservatives and NDP got together in 2006 to screw the Liberals in the middle of their leadership contest by changing the fundraising rules right in the middle of it, meaning that some of those candidates were unable to raise enough money to pay back debts that they would have had little problem doing beforehand.

Of course, it all goes back to the fact that this whole story has been overblown from the very start. These fundraisers were never really “cash for access” as they were billed – they were only termed so because the journalists at the centre of this were trying to piggyback on the kind of mess that was happening in Ontario where cabinet ministers were largely blackmailing companies that were trying to lobby them for tens of thousands of dollars in order to get a hearing, which is absolutely not what was happening in this context, nor, and this bears repeating again and again, can you buy meaningful influence for $1500. And even if you get your five minutes with the PM and want to give your pitch to him, do you honestly think that it would really sway his opinion when he’s got people who want pitch him all the time? I’m not convinced. And, as they’ve said (and as this “listening tour” has again demonstrated), they’ve shown a remarkable degree of openness to regular Canadians and are constantly consulting. It’s not like the only time you can see them is at a fundraiser. But ooh, scary Chinese businessmen! Anyway, I’ll let Howard Anglin take it from here.

Oh, and one more reminder about how overblown this has all been: Transparency International has us as one of the cleanest, least corrupt countries in the world. Given the pearl-clutching you hear from our commentariat, you wouldn’t actually know that.

Incidentally, the Conservatives are already howling at the moon about this, and the NDP’s Alexandre Boulerice says it’s not enough and he’ll table his own bill – except that’s an empty threat since he’s so far down the Order of Precedence that it will never see the light of day.

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Roundup: Is there a regional trade-off?

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Canadian public affairs blog In Due Course published a piece on the weekend wherein Joseph Heath offers a few things to consider with how a Conservative party would deal with Quebec under a proportional representation system where the calculations are different. It’s interesting and he raises a lot of very good points. And predictably, proponents of PR went to question all of his points, particularly about the fortunes of the Bloc Québécois (and to a lesser extent the Reform Party) under the current first-past-the-post system.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/823244412100579328

The problem with cherry-picking individual election results like 1993 is that it doesn’t take a broader view of the system’s resilience as a whole. Over the longer term, regional parties in this country may do well for an election cycle or two at the most, but they have no capacity or room for growth, and that’s why the big-tent brokerage parties will always regain strength and power. What it also does is say that when these kinds of regional movements do take hold, that their grievances and desire to punish parties in power (which some Bloc votes have been about) is illegitimate.

Indeed, as Emmett Macfarlane points out here, focusing on geography misses the point when you look at how the big-tent parties are forced to craft policies that will appeal nationally and won’t explicitly write-off regions.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/823255411595821056

Coyne is also dismissive of “safe” ridings or regions, but I’m sure that we’ve seen time and again that there is almost no such thing as a “safe” seat or riding, particularly when there are swings in the public mood. Again, that’s not a bad thing, and one could argue that in a properly functioning House of Commons, “safe” seats can be a bulwark against too much power in the leadership because MPs with “safe” seats that have no prospect of getting into cabinet are more likely to push back against what they see as intrusions by the leader because they have little to lose. (Granted, this is more keenly demonstrated in Westminster because their leaders don’t have the ability to sign off on nomination forms like they do here, and their leadership selection process has been different until recently, but the point still stands).

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/823245496953114625

Part of the problem here, which Coyne does admit, is that defenders of different systems are approaching the issues in different ways. But defenders of the current system don’t necessarily foresee a future dystopia as warning that if you’re looking for changes to the electoral system to fix what is perceived to be broken here, you’re going to find that it’s not actually going to fix things, and it certainly won’t result in this kind of democratic utopianism that most PR advocates proclaim.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/823248806468685824

There is also the fact, and I cannot stress this enough, that Canada is not the same as most other countries. While we are not Israel in terms of its politics, we are also not a Scandinavian country either, so expecting their results to translate here is just as much of an over-reach and a fiction.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/823256309755772929

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/823257579170172928

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/823257712351911937

That’s why we need to approach this very carefully. (Well, I say we need to smother the electoral reform consultations entirely, but that’s just me). Too many people are simply pointing to Norway or Sweden and saying “Look! See how great it is!” when they should also look at the vast dysfunction of Belgium (which is a far better analogy if you look at our systems and cultures), or even Australia, where their proportionally-elected Senate is an utter gong show. But cherry-picking data – on both sides – doesn’t actually help further the debate.

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Roundup: Entering the Trumpocalypse

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So, this is the Trumpocalypse. I didn’t really want to write anything about it, but that’s all anyone can talk about, so here’s the roundup. There have been a few different looks at how Trudeau’s cabinet shuffle was supposed to retool for the Trump era, but I will say that Maclean’s has one of the best ones, particularly because it doesn’t just focus on the shuffled ministers but also how Trudeau is redeploying his other ministers based on fascinations that the Americans have.

While people like Newt Gingrich have been saying that Canada will be “least affected” by changes to trade, what he seems to forget is that we’re as much a part of NAFTA as Mexico is, and that we’re likely to be hit with all manner of unintended blowback from other changes – especially on things like the “border tax” that Trump keeps talking about, and in places like our energy sector. Mind you, given the complexity of the problem, economist Jack Mintz doesn’t think that Trump’s border tax will actually end up happening.

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/822544617195393024

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/822546358515142661

https://twitter.com/rolandparis/status/822538848576143360

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/822537014167928837

And then there was the speech, with its talk of “American carnage” and “America First.” Colby Cosh questions some of the reviews given how terrible most inaugural speeches tend to be as they are geared more toward political signalling rather than oration. Andrew Coyne was struck by how paranoid and inward-looking it was. Scott Feschuk, meanwhile, gives you his satirical annotation of the speech.

Meanwhile, Stephen Saideman looks at how Trump’s real-estate agent behaviour will have great consequences internationally, while Ian Brodie reminds us that America had better do well under Trump or Canada will suffer. Patricia Treble finds a number of curious (if disturbing) parallels between Trump and Edward VIII. Paul Wells notes that the genius of the American Republic is that it won’t let one person accumulate too much power and that may yet save us all, while Scott Gilmore reminds us that America already went through this in the 1850s with populist demagogues, and that it will endure again.

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Roundup: “Prominent” Canadians demand unicorns

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Yesterday, the “Every Voter Counts Alliance,” which is a proportional representation umbrella group that includes our friends at Fair Vote Canada got a group of “prominent Canadians” to call on the government to implement a “made-in-Canada” PR system. And while most of these “prominent Canadians” are the usual suspects, they got a few added names including a former Chief Electoral Officer (whom I will note has tried promoting a “rural-urban proportional system” that the Supreme Court would immediately frown upon). Meanwhile, here are a few reminders about just what a “made-in-Canada” PR system is referring to.

Handwavey. Nonsense.

The reason why people like these keep going back to his notion that there’s a “made-in-Canada” system that we can somehow devise that will somehow manage to overcome the constitutional obstacles and at the same time providing their precious proportionality and will somehow deliver all of the supposed goodness that comes along with it despite the fact that we’re a vast country with a sparse population and fairly entrenched regional divisions, is because they don’t actually know how it will look. They just expect someone to figure it out and then present it to them, and it will be so wonderful that there will be no unintended consequences, we won’t wind up with thirty splinter parties, that it won’t give rise to far-right parties like pretty much every other PR system has, that it will lead to stable coalition governments that won’t have big policy “swings” every few years, and there will be no problems. No actual trade-offs. Just a new golden age of democracy.

But if they’re trying to pin their hopes on the Electoral Reform committee and its work, well, I wouldn’t hold my breath. As I’ve discussed elsewhere about why it’s a bad idea from a governance and accountability point of view, and as Kady O’Malley reminds us that the committee never actually came to any kind of consensus, and as I will remind you yet again, their report was a steaming pile of hot garbage. It’s not going to happen. What they’re asking for is magic. Unicorns and gumdrops, and not reality.

It’s time to let the demands for proportionality go. They won’t actually improve governance or representation, because it’s built solely on the emotional response of sore-loserism. We have a system that functions (and would function even better if we undid the “reforms” that were supposed to improve things but only made them worse). Trying to break it even further to satisfy this emotional need for perceived “fairness” which is not actually a Thing is only going to do just that – break it. Time to grow up and actually learn how the system works.

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Roundup: Private islands and tall poppies

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Another day, another excuse found for the Twitter-verse to light their hair on fire over something Justin Trudeau did. In this case, it was the fact that it was disclosed that he spent his holidays in the Bahamas at the private island of the Aga Khan, citing that he is a long-time personal family friend and yes, he repaid the costs of flying the Challenger to Nassau. And boom, they were off. The fact that successive governments have funded initiatives from the Aga Khan Foundation is suddenly “proof” that this is some kind of conflict of interest, and of course at least one Conservative leadership candidate is citing this as some kind of proof of broken rules and violated ethics, other Conservatives going one step further to crying that this is some kind of slap in the face to all of those out of work Albertans.

Are you serious?

While you have some columnists like Chris Selley going “See! See! This is why we need to know where the PM goes on holiday!” I’m still not seeing where the actual conflict of interest is here. The Aga Khan does not get money from the government – his Foundation does, and that’s not the same thing. Assuming he were to lobby Trudeau while he was there, what would the result be? Some more money for a maternal and child health programme? Some more school books for Syrian refugee children? Wait, let me clutch my pearls over that. The only thing that did pique my curiosity in the slightest was that this was not run by the Ethics Commissioner, as seems to be the thing to do these days, but again, not actually seeing where there’s a real conflict here.

Part of what I suspect is at work here, particularly around comments like Rempel’s, is the reflexive pettiness that Canadian journalism stokes around any kind of conscious display of wealth or privilege by our political class. Yes, Trudeau has a foot in the world of the global jet set, owing in part to his upbringing and father’s international celebrity (which he has since adopted), and it’s been a long time since we’ve had a PM like that. The last guy was so hell-bent on curating this image of being a boring minivan-driving hockey dad (despite the fact that he never drove a minivan, always worked a job that was either in politics or political advocacy and as far as I can tell, his kids never actually played hockey), and was part of a political crew who thought that doing more than serving Ritz crackers and ginger ale for a diplomatic reception was some kind of affront, that it’s seeped into our political discourse to ill effect. Couple that with this ethos in the journalism community that has tried to preserve this somewhat faux blue-collar anti-elitist aesthetic that they jump to participating in this kind of tearing down, pretty much proving the rule of tall poppy syndrome that exists in this country, and add in a dose of the lazy drive to push cheap outrage stories, and we get more of this tiresome concern trolling. Once again, the details of this story are fairly academic, but I’m not seeing either the smoke or the fire. Except for where they’ve set their own hair ablaze yet again, of course.

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Roundup: Dragging in the GG

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The performative outrage against Trudeau’s Castro comments reached a new low yesterday with the announcement that the Governor General would be attending the commemoration in Havana as the Canadian representative. Despite not being a leadership candidate (thus far), Conservative MP Michelle Rempel took to Twitter to perform some more outrage, and dropped these particular gems.

It wasn’t so much that my head exploded. More like a piece of my soul died in utter exasperation because I know for a fact that she knows better. Misrepresenting the role of the Governor General is a particularly terrible thing to do, particularly giving the impression that you can write to him (or worse, the Queen) and he’ll somehow override the Prime Minister and the government of the day for your own partisan benefit. No, it doesn’t work that way, and its antithetical to the entire foundation of our system of government. And giving your follows completely the wrong impression about how Responsible Government works for the sake of some temporary passing performative outrage for the issue of the day is particularly heinous because it poisons the well. And this is what trying to stir up populist outrage does – it poisons the well for all of politics, particularly when you misrepresent things for temporary advantage. I get that there is political theatre, and that in the age of social media you need to be performative to a degree, but for the love of all the gods on Olympus stop undermining the whole system. When you stir up this hornet’s nest, it will come and bite you just as much as it does the government of the day, and we will all be left with a giant mess like we’re seeing south of the border. This is not something we want to import or emulate, no matter how many points you think it will win you temporarily. Only madness lies along this path, and the damage is insidious and incalculable, particularly when it comes from people who actually know better. It’s not a game. Stop treating it like it is.

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Roundup: Senate theatre a distraction

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In the event that you haven’t been paying attention to the Senate this past week, some Conservative senators took it upon themselves to amend the government’s legislation regarding their much-vaunted “middle-class tax cut,” and changes the various tax brackets therein to deliver bigger savings to some, less to others, and supposedly closes the $1.7 billion gap that kept the Liberal bill from being “revenue neutral.” It’s an unusual move, and one that may be beyond the Senate’s powers given that the Senate is not allowed to initiate money bills, and this might qualify as treading up on that restriction, though they claim an early twentieth-century precedent that would allow it. While this is interesting in and of itself, what it demonstrates is the way in which the Conservatives are using this manoeuvre to try and take one last partisan kick at the can to try and “prove” the worth of organised opposition in the Upper Chamber as “government representative” Senator Peter Harder is manoeuvring to try and eliminate the official opposition designation in order to do away with parties in their entirely in the Upper Chamber.

While John Ivison rightly calls this a bit of convoluted political theatre, what the calculation the Conservatives in the Senate are likely going for is for those amendments to be defeated in the Senate as a whole (as all amendments get reported back from the committee in the form of a report that the full Senate then votes to either adopt or not in the aptly-named Report Stage vote) with the strength of the new independent senators. At this point, they can go “Aha! See! I told you these new ‘independent’ senators were all just Liberal stooges!” and pat themselves on the back for being oh, so clever. Unfortunately, while there is a lot of merit in the pushback against Harder and company’s attempts to eliminate the role of parties in the Senate as part of modernisation, the Conservatives insist on shooting themselves in the foot and undermining their own efforts by trying to prove that the new independent appointments are all closet Liberals. Instead, they should work with the Senate Liberals to expose Harder’s ambitions and efforts to build a personal power base out of the independents, and maybe they’d catch the attention of the rest of my journalist colleagues, who dismiss this as partisan antics and turf protection while they continue to dwell on the non-issue of committee assignments (that can’t be reconstituted until a prorogation happens anyway). This petty theatre is distracting from the actual issues and dangers of undermining the role of the Senate, and proves that the Conservatives haven’t learned enough lessons from the last election.

Meanwhile, the trans rights bill is headed to the Senate, and all eyes are turning to see what kinds of shenanigans that Conservative Senator Don Plett will get up to in order to slow or hamper the bill’s progress. Of course, because it’s now a government bill and not a private members’ bill, his avenues for obstruction are much diminished, and the political climate has changed meaning that he won’t likely find too many allies to back him up, and Harder will have tools to shut down any obstructing tactics if they carry on too long, so I doubt it will be much of an issue, but it’s another last kick at a can that won’t get too much more traction.

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Roundup: Suck it up and fix 24 Sussex

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Since this is apparently my week for being cranky about stuff, I’ll turn my ire today on the various naysayers regarding renovations to 24 Sussex. And I’m going to say off the bat that they need to basically shut it and just fork out the money because guess what, we have obligations in this country to both official residences and heritage buildings, and we have to stop being so petty about it. What becomes clear in the more detailed breakdown of the options available that was posted in The Huffington Post was that a lot of these additional costs are not about the building, but rather they are about security. That’s part of why I find the demands that they have a residence that will be open to tourists to be boggling, because I’m not sure what purpose that serves. Of the other official residences, only Rideau Hall and the Citadel are partially open to the public, and even then in fairly controlled circumstances, and those are also working residences – something that 24 Sussex, Stornoway, the Farm and Harrington Lake are not. And why 24 Sussex should have the capacity for state dinners is also a bit baffling because the PM doesn’t host state dinners – the Governor General does. That’s his job as representative of our head of state (being the Queen). Can some official dinners be held at 24 Sussex? Sure. But not state dinners. I also find the fact that they’re even exploring the possibility of turning 24 Sussex into a working residence to be boggling, right up to including a $562 million option of abandoning 24 Sussex in favour of taking over the National Research Council’s headquarters at 100 Sussex and turning that into a Canadian White House with PMO offices on top of an official residence. Baffling, really.

So while the calls to bulldoze 24 Sussex return in force thanks to performative cheap outrage, and we clutch our pearls at the ongoing maintenance costs of the building being vacant while the property itself doesn’t increase in value, I say we stop trying to turn this into a tourist trap or working residence, which means not building an annex over the pool house to turn it into an apartment so the main house becomes something they don’t live in, and instead just focus on renovating the house itself and keeping it strictly as an official residence. And no, we can’t just bulldoze it because it is an important heritage property, and would still be even if it didn’t house prime ministers, but it does, so now we are obligated to deal with it the right way. In fact, I say we restore its façade to its original, pre-1950s features to better respect its heritage and history. Add to that, we should not only better empower the NCC to protect our official residences and heritage properties so as to let successive prime ministers (and opposition leaders and Speakers) know that it’s not up to their discretion when renovations need to be done to these properties, but we should also empower them to go after the previous inhabitants for negligence in allowing the property to decay this much. Maybe that will send a message.

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Roundup: Crying wolf on fundraising

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I’m starting to feel like a bit of history repeating again as I get cranky over yet more clutched pearls about so-called “cash for access” or “pay to play” fundraisers, which are nothing of the sort. Cabinet ministers are not soliciting stakeholders for tens of thousands of dollars of donations to meet fundraising targets. This is a government whose penchant for consultation means that there are multiple avenues of access for said stakeholders that they need not pony up to ministerial shakedowns in order to get meetings. And this latest allegation, that somehow “communist billionaires” from China got preferential access for $1500 (they didn’t pay as they can’t donate since they aren’t Canadian citizens) stretches credulity, and taking the cake is this hysteria about a donation made to the Trudeau Foundation. You know, a foundation that the Prime Minister is not a part of, and is a registered charity, which the PM sees no enrichment from in the slightest. That wealthy donors also contributed to the foundation, a statue of Trudeau’s father (again, where is the actual enrichment?) and to law school scholarship at McGill (Trudeau did not go to McGill law school) doesn’t have any particular relevance to him or government business, so even on the face of it, where is the conflict of interest? And don’t tell me that there’s a “perception” because if you actually look at the facts and not just go “Hmm, Justin Trudeau…Trudeau Foundation… Yup, sounds fishy to me,” then you’d realise that this is bunk. But no. Here we are, yet again, trying to make hay over activities that are reported, above board, and not actual conflicts of interest beyond people yelling “smell test!” and “appearance!” with no actual facts. And let me again remind you that the Chief Electoral Officer himself noted that our current donation levels are fine, and lowering them will mean money starts to move underground, which we do not want. And if you bring up the Ethics Commissioner calling these events “unsavoury,” let me also remind you that she wants all gifts to MPs registered at an extremely low threshold, meaning a massive amount of more compliance paperwork which MPs themselves have balked at, and the Lobbying Commissioner’s investigation is because people have brought this to her attention, and it doesn’t mean that she has found anything amiss. Honestly, stop lighting your hair on fire over innuendo. You’re currently crying wolf, and when any real impropriety happens, you risk it being shrugged off after any number of previous false alarms.

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Roundup: Expat voting just fine as is

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Democratic institutions minister Maryam Monsef is saying that she plans to table new legislation around expat voting by the end of the year, and I’m going to come right out and say that while I know it’s not really popular to say so, I’m actually not sure that a five-year time limit for expats is so bad, because of the way that our voting system operates. To be more specific, our electoral system depends on your voting in one of 338 ridings to elect a local representative. You’ve not voting for the party banner or the party leader – you’re voting for the representative, regardless of what your particular electoral calculation is when you’re in the voting booth. And as an expat who has been out of the country – and in particular that riding – for more than five years, does it really make sense for you to continue to cast a ballot in said riding if you don’t actually live there?

And this is the part where people start shouting about their right to vote, which is all well and good, but again I go back to the central premise – how can you vote for a representative in a riding if you don’t live there, and almost certainly don’t know who is actually on the ballot? And don’t tell me that it doesn’t matter, that the majority of people vote based on the party or the leader, because it actually does matter. Our system is constructed in a way that ensures maximum accountability (and that accountability is currently wounded by the rules around party leadership selection, but that’s another story for another day), and that means accountability for the MP who was selected in that riding election for that seat (and yes, each riding is a separate election), and later in the House of Commons, when the government is responsible to the whole of the Chamber to maintain confidence to continue governing. And this is where expat voting gets complicated. How can someone who doesn’t live in the riding know what is going on, and whether the MP is doing a good job or not? Sure, a few expats maintain close enough ties, but I would venture that the vast majority don’t, and that the vast majority are looking to cast a special ballot based solely on party or leader preference, but that’s not how the system works, and yes, that’s important because democracy is process. The vote has to have a proper meaning, and that meaning is for the individual MP to fill the individual seat. This is not the United States where people ostensibly cast a direct ballot for the presidency (which again is complicated by their electoral college), but that makes a special ballot for expats a simpler affair. (They also impose taxes on expats, which Canada doesn’t). What about the voter rolls, where expats would ostensibly be listed at an address where they no longer live? How does that actually work in practical terms without creating yet more headaches for Elections Canada? Unless Maryam Monsef can thread the needle to demonstrate how expats can still vote within our current system in an effective manner which means voting for a candidate in a riding, I’m having a hard time seeing how dropping the five-year rule is either beneficial, practical, or even responsible. (And yes, I’m sure that I’m a monster for thinking so).

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