Tag Archives: Electoral Reform

QP: Not one but two MPs being censured

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Both the prime minister and his deputy were away—Trudeau hobnobbing at the opening of the Liberal convention—while most of the other leaders were absent as well, and boy did the day start off in a raucous manner.

Michael Chong led off, and demanded the record be corrected that he had not been briefed about threats to him and his family two years ago, as two Liberal MPs had asserted in debate earlier in the day. Mendicino didn’t really correct the record, but praised the CSIS annual report being released. After an outburst from Chris Warkentin and an intervention from the Speaker, Chong said that he was informed from the National Security Advisor that the report about that Chinese diplomat who was involved in the threats against him did circulate to her two years ago in contradiction to what the prime minister said, and Mendicino thanked him for the update, but reiterated that they only found out on Monday, and took action then. Chong demanded to know why the government wasn’t following CSIS’ advice around the Chinese diplomat, and Mendicino recited that the ambassador had been summoned. Luc Berthold took over in French accused the government of spreading disinformation about their members, and Mendicino recited the lines about briefings being offered. Berthold called this disinformation, and repeated Chong’s update about the diplomat, and this time Mélanie Joly said that she empathises, and that they have summoned the Chinese ambassador.

Christine Normandin led for the Bloc, and quoted Richard Fadden’s belief that ministers did get the briefing about Chong, and Mendicino insisted that they only learned about it on Monday. Normandin accused the government of blaming CSIS for their failures, and raised the alleged warning ahead of the 2019 election about Han Dong. Mendicino called on all MPs to stand in solidarity against foreign interference. 

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, raised the fact that the prime minster has been Liberal leader for ten years, and blamed him for the housing crisis. Soraya Martinez Ferrada recited taking points about the their plans to help increase supply. Singh repeated the accusation in French, and got much the same reply.

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Roundup: Allegations of political interference amidst other errors and omissions

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It’s now around day one-hundred-and-nineteen of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and while the fighting continues at Severodonetsk, the people of Kharkiv are emerging from the subways and underground shelters they were in when Russian forces bombarded their city, and are finding so much of it shelled and burned. Meanwhile, we’re learning more about the Ukrainian helicopter pilots who were flying rescue missions from the steel plant in Mariupol, getting some of the wounded soldiers to safety.

Closer to home, allegations emerged from documents made public in the mass shooting inquiry in Nova Scotia that a superintendent’s notes said that RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki said she felt she had been disobeyed because he had not released any information about the weapons used, citing that she had promised PMO and Public Safety the information because it was tied to pending gun control legislation, while he said he didn’t want to release it because it would interfere in their investigation into how the weapons were acquired. In a separate interview, the director of communications for the Nova Scotia RCMP was expressing frustration that Lucki’s statements did not match what the department was putting out, and blamed that on political interference. The government immediately denied having made any orders or applied any pressure, and Lucki put out a statement a few hours later which she too denied interfering, but said she should have been more sensitive in her approach to the meeting.

This, of course, touched off a round of outrage and insistence that if the allegations of interference were true that there would need to be heads rolling, but I will confess to having a hard time sorting through this, because what I’ve read of these same documents shows a lot of errors and omissions in the statements the RCMP was putting out, and there is an imperative for RCMP brass and the government to have details and facts that the media are demanding from them. And the RCMP in the province seem to have been self-satisfied that they were putting out false or misleading information throughout the event, which is hard for the Commissioner or the government to deal with when they know there are other facts that aren’t being released. Was there an element of crassness in wanting to know what kinds of weapons were used? I mean, it sounds like it was a legitimate question that media would be asking, so it’s hard to say. I will say that the demands for an emergency committee meeting is unlikely to solve anything more than what we’ve already learned from all involved, and that this is just an excuse for more theatrics at the start of summer that Conservatives want to be able to fundraise off of, but they’ll probably get their wish because all MPs can’t resist putting on a show—especially if it gets unhinged as these meetings inevitably will.

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QP: Gathering outrage clips about gas prices

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The prime minister was away in meetings, but his deputy was present, so that was something, though no other leader was present either. Luc Berthold led off in French, and he proclaimed that masks came off in Quebec, but pivoted this toward a question on gas prices and inflation, demanding a break be given to people. Chrystia Freeland recited that they sympathised with the families, which was why they had measures in the budget like dental care. Berthold railed that the Liberals liked high prices, and invited Freeland to join him at a gas station. Freeland reminded him that Canadians are smart and know this is a global issue, caused by Putin’s war in Ukraine. Berthold then raised Friday’s Supreme Court of Canada ruling and the invitation to bring forward new legislation around extreme intoxication. David Lametti got up to read that they are closely studying the ruling, and specified that Friday’s ruling does not apply to most cases where intoxication is a factor. Karen Vecchio took over in English and read a hugely torqued reading of the decision and demanded action, and Lametti read the English version of the same response. Vecchio carried on building a moral panic around the ruling, and Lametti reiterated that the ruling came out on Friday, so they wanted to examine their options.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and he complained that a number of Liberal MPs attended a protest in Quebec against the province’s proposed (draconian) language laws, to which Pablo Rodriguez said that Liberal MPs were not handcuffed, and the government had their own official languages legislation. Therrien was outraged by this, and Rodriguez continued to needle him that Liberal MPs were no less Quebeckers than Bloc MPs. 

Peter Julian rose for the NDP, and in French, he railed that gas prices were increasing while the government subsidised the fossil fuel sector, hitting Canadians twice. Freeland replied that they were phasing out those subsidies, and carbon capture was part of the way forward. Rachel Blaney appeared by video to repeat the question in English, and Freeland reiterated her points, with some added emphasis on the efficacy of carbon prices.

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Roundup: Feeling like March 2020 all over again

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It’s definitely starting to feel like March 2020, as provinces all started increasing restrictions in advance of Christmas—some of them insufficient, and too late, but they are taking some actions nevertheless. (That, and they’re not all honest about what has been happening with rapid tests—looking most especially at the incompetent murderclown Doug Ford). Federally, the border measures are getting even tougher with negative PCR tests being required even for trips that are less than 72 hours in duration (and those PRC tests need to have been done out-of-country), while the travel ban on those ten African countries is now lifted as omicron has already achieved community spread in Canada and such a ban is now useless.

Prime minister Justin Trudeau is trying to offer some reassurances that we have the benefit of knowledge that we didn’t have during the first wave, and that Canadians know enough to do what it takes to curb the spread of the virus. I suspect that may be a bit overly optimistic considering that too many people will do what the government allows them to, so don’t take all of the precautions necessary to actually curb the spread.

Meanwhile, here’s an exploration of some of the psychological reactions that are being seen and felt to the rapid onset of omicron, where fatigue of the “new normal” is starting to overtake compliance to health measures, and the need to start thinking about what the world looks like if we have COVID forever now.

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Roundup: Misleading to the point of misinformation

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As they tend to do after every election concludes, Power & Politics had David Meslin on to talk about electoral reform, because apparently, we are going to re-litigate it once again. (The saving grace is that this time they didn’t have Meslin using his LEGO to show different PR results). The problem? The graphic that the show produced as an example of how the results of this election would be under PR was essentially misinformation.

https://twitter.com/Catelli2Oh/status/1440818668217135110

The assumptions made to produce said chart is that Canada would employ a system of pure proportional representation, and then allocate seats in that regard. But this would be a PR system that nobody is actually asking for, and which would be unconstitutional because seats are allocated on a provincial basis, while such a system would be unable to take that into account under the current 338 seat model. That’s a pretty big deal. Most people advocate for some form of mixed-member proportional, where you vote for a local MP, and then vote a second time for a party, which will then allocate someone from a list into a number of seats designed as “top-ups” to make the seats more closely resemble the “popular vote” (even though such a thing is a logical fallacy under our current vote construction). Furthermore, it would assume that we’d have the same parties, which is unlikely (and Meslin went at great length about how great it would be for the big tent parties to break up), and even more to the point, under a different voting system, voting behaviours would be different. With all of this in mind, the fact that the gods damned CBC produced an infographic with a misleading characterisation of what Monday’s vote might have looked like under PR is not just irresponsible – it’s downright misinformation.

It’s also concerning that Meslin thinks that as many as 21 seats for the People’s Party under such a system is no big deal, and he thinks we should have more radical parties for the sake of “innovation.” The notion of a far-right party getting 21 seats and putting them in the potential position to be kingmakers in a coalition government is frightening to say the least, but we’ve also seen in other countries that use PR, such as Germany and the Netherlands, that when far-right parties breach the threshold to attain seats, they grow in popularity because they are given respectability and a platform to espouse their views. One of the great strengths of big-tent parties, that Meslin completely ignored, is that they moderate extremes, which is actually a good thing in politics. Big tent parties build coalitions of regions and factions within themselves, rather than having smaller parties building the coalitions externally post-election. It’s one reason why radical parties are short-lived, and why disruptive parties tend to “self-correct” within a couple of election cycles, because they can’t maintain the necessary organisation that Canada requires. These are features of our system – not bugs, and it would be great if CBC didn’t turn to the same guy every election to make the same misleading points, time and again.

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Roundup: Incendiary headlines and endorsements

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There were a couple of items on the campaign trail that I wanted to mention. One is that a reporter asked Justin Trudeau about electoral reform today, for the first time since the election began, apparently, and he said that if there was consensus he’d consider re-opening it, but he remained in favour of ranked ballots. This was put under a headline of “Trudeau says he remains ‘open’ to electoral reform if Liberals re-elected,” and Twitter had a gods damned field day over it, and lo, the issue was re-litigated yet again, even though that headline didn’t really reflect his comments. (The CBC headline for the same Canadian Press wire story was more reflective of his comments). But writing up what he said isn’t incendiary and won’t make it look like he made a promise that he really didn’t make wouldn’t drive clicks now, would it?

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1439267428786221066

The other item of note was that two former military figures endorsed Erin O’Toole yesterday – retired Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, and retired General Rick Hillier. In both cases, it’s a bit icky because we generally don’t like to have the practice of military endorsements in Canada because our Forces are a far less partisan organisation, as well they should be. There are a couple of additional wrinkles here. With Norman, it has the ability of looking petty and score-settling because of the blame to go around the investigation that led to the charges of breach-of-trust with Norman (that were ultimately stayed). Hillier is also fairly dubious – not only because he is now tainted goods after the gong show of a vaccine rollout that he was in charge of in Ontario, but as a former Chief of Defence Staff, he should remain far more scrupulous in wading into partisan politics. This is not a trend that we want to encourage.

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Roundup: Evidence-based dumping a promise

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Because we’re going to re-litigate this issue yet again over the course of the campaign, I’m going to remind you all that Trudeau’s decision to abandon electoral reform was a result of evidence-based policy as opposed to a lie or false promise. The issue was studied. They engaged in polling that was output-based, meaning what people wanted for outcomes rather than simply asking them which system they preferred, because that conditions people who are rote in their responses about what system they think they prefer, without necessarily understanding their outcomes. And the outcomes they were looking for had a lot more to do with status quo than most people like to believe.

Beyond that, the special committee that studied the issue in the House of Commons returned a report that was hot garbage. Its conclusions were to call on the government to design a bespoke version of proportional representation that fell below a certain threshold of what they consider vote percentages to seat allocations which would require a massive number of new seats to be even remotely possible, that also had to have a simple ballot and retained the ability to elect individual MPs who had a connection to the riding as opposed to choosing MPs from party lists. Such a thing is a virtual impossibility. The common talking point is that Trudeau killed it because it didn’t advance ranked ballots, which he preferred (never mind that the Liberals on the committee didn’t advance study of this system in any meaningful way), and both the committee and the media were caught up in one bullshit analysis that relied on a single poll of second choices that declared that the Liberals would have won more seats under such a system, where there is actually no evidence of that. (Seriously, look at how politics works in Australia’s House of Representatives, which is elected by ranked ballot). That was the dominant narrative, which made it poisonous for Trudeau to advance.

But we’re going to get a bunch of people continue to moan about that in this election, including some ridiculous assertions that if the Conservatives form government that it’s because Trudeau didn’t implement proportional representation. (Seriously, if you favour a voting system because you think it’ll keep a certain party out, then you’re a sore loser, not actually interested in democratic outcomes). And no doubt, we’ll see some more garbage journalism like this CBC piece which is obtuse about things like the Conservative platform, and getting comment from a single political scientist who favours reform. Seriously? That’s not how you do your job.

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Roundup: Profiles in courage

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After avoiding the media for over a week while questions about his personal positions on abortion and LGBT rights were being debated, Andrew Scheer called a press conference yesterday to say that Justin Trudeau was lacking in courage for not agreeing to the Maclean’s and Munk debates (well, he hasn’t agreed yet, but he also hasn’t said no). Mind you, the guy talking about courage and showing up has been avoiding the media for the past week, so that’s no small amount of irony. Oh, and he also accused the Liberals of trying to deflect from their record by dredging up Scheer’s statements on “divisive social issues.” That said, Scheer hewed strictly to talking points that continued to make cute distinctions between a hypothetical future Conservative government and backbenchers, and essentially said that they could put forward any bill they wanted and he wouldn’t stop them – only he wouldn’t say so in as many words. To that end, it’s also worth reminding people that as Speaker, Scheer went out of his way to ensure that anti-abortion MPs got speaking slots when the Conservative leadership was trying to keep them under wraps, so that might be a clue as to how he’d treat possible future private members’ bills.

This having been said, I now wonder if the strategy for the Liberals isn’t to just bring social progressives and Red Tories to their side, but to try and goad Scheer into painting himself in enough of a corner with trying to assure Canadians that no, he would squelch any anti-abortion or anti-GLBT private members’ bills – really! – in the hopes that it would discourage the social conservatives in Scheer’s base into staying home, thus driving down their voter turnout. It would be novel if that’s what it was, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives put out a fundraising video yesterday featuring Stephen Harper, which is kind of ironic considering that they keep accusing the Liberals of dredging up Harper, only for them to do the very same thing. And with this in mind, I will often note that political parties these days have pretty much all hollowed themselves out into personality cults for their leaders, but with the Conservatives, they remain a personality cult for their former leader, Harper – that Scheer has had such a lack of personality or willpower to change the party to reflect him (though he did campaign on being Harper with a smile in the leadership, so that’s not too unsurprising). Nevertheless, bringing out the old leader in advance of the election is an odd bit of strategy that can’t speak too highly of the current leader.

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Roundup: The source of the complaints

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Carrying on with yesterday’s theme, Bill Morneau decided he would try and be too cute by half and release an open letter of his own, questioning Andrew Scheer’s promise to premiers to maintain the current health and social transfer system, and claimed that he was still advocating a cut. I’m not sure that it was quite right, but it was a novel attempt – and something Morneau rarely does, so there’s that. Scheer, meanwhile, keeps on his affordability message, claiming that he’s the only one worried about it while the Liberals keep raising taxes, etc.

The thing is, Scheer is wrong about that. He is fond of citing that Fraser Institute report that treats the cancellation of boutique tax credits as “raising taxes” – as it also ignores the tax-free Canada Child Benefit offered to most families as a replacement, and a more targeted one that will actually benefit low-income households at that – much like he’s fond of ignoring that the climate rebates will make most households better off in jurisdictions under the federal carbon pricing system. But beyond that, the data clearly shows that the federal taxes as a share of federal revenues also continues to decline under the Liberals. Scheer’s affordability narrative as it comes to taxes is bogus. Well, except for one particular group, who is not better off under the changes that the Liberals have made. And yet, as Kevin Milligan demonstrates with data and receipts below, it’s certainly not the average Canadians that Scheer claims to be fighting for. But then again, illiberal populists claiming to be looking out for average people while benefitting the wealthiest is getting to be a tired game by this point – and yet people still keep falling for it.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1157388641385062401

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1157390752697085952

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1157394371806785536

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1157396798412976128

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1157439654120923136

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Roundup: Enumerating promises

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CTV had a two-part look at the government’s record yesterday, both in terms of what they accomplished that changed Canada, and what they did not accomplish as promised. The accomplished list is not quite as interesting – gender balance, more refugee resettlement, restoring the long-form census, legalising cannabis – I’m not sure their “reforms” to the Senate are as much of an accomplishment as people may think given the broader unintended consequences.

The other list, however, strikes me as requiring a bit more nuance than was really offered in some cases. For example, not balancing the budget was in part because there was an oil crash at the beginning of their mandate that affected their figures, and it wasn’t really balanced when the Conservatives lost power (particularly given that they booked a bunch of fictitious savings for things like the Phoenix pay system and Shared Services Canada, which the Liberals had to clean up). That said, they did increase spending once revenues increased, so it is a bit more complex than the piece offered. Electoral reform? It wasn’t one of their biggest campaign promises, but one of a myriad that was simply overblown in many instances, but that aside, it again doesn’t quite capture that the attempt to explore consequences resulted in a hot garbage report that was unworkable at best, and was based on a stupid promise that evidence showed was not feasible (leaving aside that the Liberals stupidly didn’t bother to promote their own preferred system until it was too late). The Indigenous file is still rocky? If anyone thinks that centuries of colonisation can be reversed in four years, well, that’s fantasyland, but it’s not as though there hasn’t been significant progress. The final, more nebulous point about scandals and “doing politics differently” is one of those unicorn promises that lets people’s imaginations run wild. For the most part, he did things differently than Stephen Harper did, but it wasn’t different enough or utopian enough for some people, and it qualifies as a failure, which I’m not sure is fair to anyone.

Speaking of stupid promises, the Ontario government is having to walk back on their promise to end “hallway medicine” in twelve months, and yeah, that’s not going to happen and it’s hey, it’s a complex and intractable problem that not even shovelling money at the problem is likely to solve. But it’s not like people believed anything Ford promised because it was only about their anger at Kathleen Wynne, right? But that’s what you get with populist blowhards – snake oil promises pulled out of their asses with no ability to implement them, but hey, so long as you keep them angry about the other guy/woman, then that’s all that matters, right? And nobody ever seems to learn.

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