Roundup: Warning about possible Senate frustration

There’s the Senate bat-signal, so here we go again. On Evan Solomon’s radio show, Liberal Senator David Smith suggested that if Trudeau does not appoint a Government Leader in the Senate that it will create frustration in the Chamber if they have no means by which to hold the government to account, and that they could – if it got that far – start to stall or even vote against the government’s legislation as a protest. Mind you, as these things do, the headlines hype it up, but it does point to problems that I outlined in my National Post piece earlier this week. And because I know that some people have suggested it, no, just calling ministers before committee is not enough as it robs the daily exercise of accountability that is Senate Question Period of meaning (as Smith suggested), and those appearances might happen every couple of months. The existing protocol is for the Government Leader to have access to the same briefing books as the Prime Minister. If senators are to do their job of sober second thought and accountability, they need access to information on a timely basis, and the government leader, if he or she can’t provide that answer immediately, takes it under advisement and gets a written response as soon as possible. They have a job to do and they need information to do it. The threats over the past couple of weeks, as overhyped as they have been, have awakened Andrew Coyne’s concern trolling over the Senate’s veto powers, because he apparently doesn’t believe they should have enough power to push back against a majority government when necessary, and would rather the courts do it years down the road. Meanwhile, Senate Speaker Housakos has said that he plans to propose the creation of an arm’s length spending oversight body to give guidance to the Internal Economy Committee, but we have no details on this yet. I would once again caution that we need to ensure that the Senate remains self-governing for the sake of parliamentary supremacy (argued here). I would still like to see Senator McCoy’s proposal for a Senate audit committee comprised of three senators, an auditor and a former judge as the best solution, but I guess we’ll wait to see what Housakos’ proposition is.

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Roundup: May already has a job

In the wake of Monday’s election results, a number of people have been trying to circulate a few petitions calling on Justin Trudeau to appoint Elizabeth May as environment minster. It’s so ridiculous I barely know where to begin. First of all, why would she cross the floor? There is no need for a coalition government, and for her to abandon the Green Party to join the Liberals would be a bit of a repudiation of what she stands for. It also demonstrates a lack of awareness of what it means to be in a cabinet, which means solidarity with the government’s decisions as a whole. If you don’t agree with all of the cabinet’s decisions, you resign, because cabinet solidarity is part of our system of government. With her many strident positions on various policy files, it’s hard, if not impossible, to see May agreeing with the Liberal positions on so many files. Most of all, this call demonstrates a complete inability for people to appreciate the role that the opposition plays in our system of government. It’s vital, because it holds the government to account – and why wouldn’t you want May to be holding the government to account over their environmental policies? Why would it be a lesser job for her to be doing the holding to account? In the romantic notion that people have that everything should somehow be done by consensus, they don’t appreciate that there is a role for accountability when there is disagreement. It doesn’t need to be nasty – which is unfortunately where we’ve wound up in recent years because of the kinds of culture that has been allowed to breed in parliament – but it can be principled and fair, and certainly May is providing that kind of opposition. Trudeau is making other inroads, such as inviting her and other opposition members to the Paris climate summit – former practice that Harper abandoned when he decided that only his ministers should be allowed to attend these kinds of things. Can May play a role in the system? Absolutely, and she does? That doesn’t mean that she needs to be given a seat at the cabinet table. That’s just ridiculous.

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Roundup: May’s magical thinking

It was Elizabeth May’s turn to go before Peter Mansbridge last night, and as with all other leaders, she too got the basics of government formation wrong – but unlike the others, May just got it wrong in a different way. She insisted that if Harper got a minority government, the opposition parties should be able to call the Governor General to insist that they get a chance to form government before Harper. Nope, that’s not how it works, because the incumbent remains the Prime Minister until he or she resigns. That’s because the position can never be vacant. Ever. Her Majesty must always have a government in place, and it’s the GG’s job to ensure that happens. So really, no matter the result on election night, the leader whose party wins the most seats isn’t invited to form government – the incumbent is still the government until they choose to resign, which may or may not involve testing the confidence of the Chamber first. May also revealed that she has the GG’s number and will make that call herself, as though he is obligated to take it. Remember of course that May has also previously written the Queen about issues, and treated form letter responses as vindication. It’s part of her particular problem of over-reading her mandate – she’s hugely conflated her role as an MP with that of being in government in the past, and it’s a problem with how she interacts with the system. It’s also part of her curious insistence that somehow, a handful of Green MPs sitting in opposition and not in a coalition cabinet would magically make a minority parliament a less fractious place. How, exactly? Did none of the proponents of more minority governments learn any lessons from the three minority parliaments prior to 2011? Apparently not, because the magical thinking prevails.

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Roundup: Stacking the panel

The government has unveiled how they’re going to respond to the Supreme Court’s ruling on doctor-assisted dying, and it could not be any more spineless if they tried. Having first ignored the issue in Parliament for decades, they waited for the courts to tell them to do something, and by something, they decided to appoint a three-person panel to hold more consultations and come up with recommendations. In other words, outsourcing their response. But wait – it gets better. Two of the three members of this panel are opponents to doctor-assisted dying, and testified on the government’s behalf during the court cases. The third member, a former Quebec cabinet minister, is vested in the issue of provincial jurisdiction. In other words, the government has decided on the outcome they want, and stacked the panel in such a way as to deliver it. We shouldn’t be surprised by this response, considering how closely it mirrors what happened with the Bedford decision on prostitution. Rather than actually heed the decision and what it said about safety and security for sex workers, the government stacked their consultations in favour of opponents and religious institutions, dismissed as much expert testimony as they could in committee hearings, and drafted a bill that substantively does not change the situation for those sex workers when it comes to their safety, and will in fact just drive the industry further underground by criminalising buyers, and all the while touting that they were listening to the responses from their consultations. Watching them do the same with the assisted dying issue is proof positive that this is a government that refuses to make any hard decisions. (On a related note, here’s an interesting analysis of the Court’s decision in the case from Michael Plaxton and Carissima Mathen).

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Roundup: Not the safe space you’re looking for

Over in the National Post, Ashley Csanady found that the student council at the University of Waterloo has taken to abusing the concept of “safe spaces” to try and move their council meetings behind closed doors. Apparently student leaders have argued – with a straight face – that these closed-door meetings would foster a “safe environment, and less scrutiny results in better decision-making.” All of which is complete and utter nonsense because as political actors, they have obligations to transparency in order that they may be held to account. If they’re uncomfortable being challenged in public, then they shouldn’t run for office (which is an issue I have with people who run for office at any level of government, particularly federally – if you can’t so much as ask or answer a thirty-second question in QP without relying on a script and having your hand held, why are you there?) Now, there is a time and a place for closed-door meetings, and in camera discussions in grown-up politics, but it’s not all the time, and it’s not so that they can feel “safe.” Sometimes it takes a while to come up with suitable language when you’re putting together a report, and there is a case that some of the Board of Internal Economy’s decisions do happen better behind closed doors because some MPs can actually behave like adults when no one else is around, and I’m not sure it helps when they’re not using it as an excuse to play up the partisan drama for the cameras – again. (Also, BOIE deals with a lot of personnel issues that have legitimate privacy considerations). Yes, there has been an alarming trend in federal politics to move all considerations of committee business behind closed doors, likely because the Conservatives on the committee don’t want to be seen being irrationally partisan when they deny opposition motions, but they’re not using – or rather abusing – the notion of a safe space, or saying that they feel threatened by the exposure. Not wanting to look like jerks on TV is not a reason to meet in camera, and yet they do it anyway, and we the public should hold them to account for said behaviour. Hopefully the students at Waterloo will also see thought this charade, and vote this council out next year as well.

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Roundup: The Senate should strangle Chong’s bill

There has been a sudden flurry of concern regarding the state of Michael Chong’s Reform Act, currently in the Senate, because the bill is likely to die there. In fact, if there were any sense in the world, it would, but not before the pundit class starts wailing and gnashing their teeth about how terrible it is that the unelected Senate would defeat a wildly popular bill from the Commons. Of course, that’s immediately where my head hits the desk, because that’s exactly why we have the Senate we do – because sometimes MPs overwhelmingly vote in dumb things, and cooler heads in the Senate can talk them down and defeat them without fear of electoral repercussion. You know, sober second thought, the raison d’etre of the Upper Chamber. And let’s face it – the Reform Act is a spectacularly terrible bill that will undermine Responsible Government and our system of Westminster-style democracy pretty much permanently. And if you think the gong show that just happened with the leadership review in Manitoba was an exception, well, Chong’s bill would see to it that those become somewhat more the norm across the country. The bill will do nothing to “empower” MPs. It will do the opposite by disincentivising them from rebelling against their leaders, as has successfully overturned bad leaders in many instances (most recently Alison Redford comes to mind). What will empower MPs is for them to actually stiffen their spines and do their jobs, because they have all the power that they need already – a lesson that Senator Fraser reiterated in her speech against Chong’s bill. But contrary to Andrew Coyne’s assertion, the Conservative leadership in the Senate has been inclined to pass the bill, but there are a number of Conservative senators who have wised up to the fact that the bill is terrible and they would do well to kill it in one way or another. Other senators are keenly aware that even MPs who voted for the bill know it’s terrible but didn’t think they could be seen to vote against it, so they sent it to the Senate, where it could be killed there, and they could use it as political cover (and denounce those terrible, awfully, unelected and unaccountable senators for killing a bill that passed the Commons even though MPs knew it was terrible). The “pass it off to the other chamber” game is not a new phenomenon (second only to “let’s pass it off to the Supreme Court”), but it’s another sign of how spineless MPs have become. Not that Chong’s bill would do anything about that spinelessness, ironically. Instead, it looks like it will be up to the Senate to save MPs from themselves yet again, and MPs won’t learn their lessons about taking their responsibilities seriously.

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Roundup: Speaker Housakos’ telling silence

It was with some interest that I listened to the first major interview with new Senate Speaker Leo Housakos over the weekend, and in it, there was the requisite amount of tough talk with regards to the recent spending allegations that some senators face. To wit, Speaker Housakos spoke of recognising their problems internally, bringing in the Auditor General on their own, the willingness to name any names that the AG does in his report, and as far as the three suspended senators are concerned, those suspensions are likely to continue into the next parliament until their legal situations have been resolved one way or another. Where Housakos did not talk tough, but instead shied away from answering, was regarding questions of the complicity of some senators in changing the internal audit to protect Mike Duffy. Housakos mumbled about it being before the courts, but as the Speaker and the new head of the Internal Economy committee, he had an opportunity to make a statement about past practices that will no longer be tolerated, or the staking a claim about Senate independence and severing the ties to the PMO, or anything like that. He didn’t, and it’s not too surprising to me because Housakos is known as someone who is close to the PMO, in with a tight cabal that surrounds the current Government Leader in the Senate, Claude Carignan. In other words, Housakos is no Pierre-Claude Nolin, who had some fairly high-minded ideals about the Senate and its independence, particularly after the Supreme Court’s reference decision. The fact that Housakos did not make any claims for institutional independence is telling, and reminds us that he bears watching so as to ensure that he personally does not become implicated in more of the PMO machinations into the Upper Chamber and its workings. The Senate needs an independent Speaker, and I’m not sure that Housakos is it. Meanwhileback in the Commons, the government refuses to answer questions on residency requirements for appointing senators.

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Roundup: Nolin’s passing a blow to the Senate

The passing of Senate Speaker Pierre-Claude Nolin leaves the institution in a pretty vulnerable place. In light of the Duffy/Wallin/Brazeau affairs, Nolin was on a mission to bring some internal reform to the Chamber, both in terms of financial controls and the like, but also with ensuring that senators themselves were better educated as to their own roles. When Nolin was first named Speaker, he invited reporters to the Chamber for a Q&A, and before he took questions, he gave us a little talk, brandishing a copy of the Supreme Court reference decision on Senate reform, and made note of some key passages about the roles of a Senator. His message to his fellow senators was pretty frank – here are some things that you’re not doing, and we need to improve on that. Long-time readers of mine will know the root of some of these problems – not just a few poor appointments by the current Prime Minister, but the fact that appointments happened in large numbers. The Chamber works best absorbing one or two new members at a time, and they can find their feet and generally get on with feeling out their sense of institutional independence. When a fifth of the chamber is brought in all at once, they are more pliant and susceptible to control from the top, which is what happened. Nolin, always an independent thinker and someone not afraid to go against the current government, whose caucus he was a member of, wanted more of that from his fellow senators, and he probably would have done a lot to get them to a better place, institutionally speaking, if he’d had more time. Now, I’m not sure who will be able to take his place. The Speaker Pro Tempore (equivalent of the Deputy Speaker in the Commons) is not exactly an independent thinker, and is part of a cabal of players around the Senate Leader’s office, who in turn are supine to the PMO for a variety of reasons. That group is not going to continue Nolin’s work of trying to make the chamber a more independent place. We’ll have to see who the PM will ultimately choose, but Nolin has set a high bar that will be difficult to match. Elsewhere, here are some highlights of Nolin’s career. On Power Play, Mercedes Stephenson spoke to the man who appointed Nolin, Brian Mulroney (and a correction to Stephenson – Nolin was not elected to the Speaker position, as it’s a prime ministerial appointment. The praise for him was unanimous, however).

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/591589139079892993

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Roundup: Laying out their C-51 positions

Not that it was any surprise what they were, but the opposition parties laid out their explicit positions on the new anti-terror bill in advance of the start of debate yesterday – the NDP firmly opposed, the Liberals walking the line by listing the things they support in the bill and the things they don’t, and vowing to make it an election issue if the Conservatives don’t make the necessary amendments. But while it’s certainly within the right of the NDP, as official opposition, to call for the bill’s defeat, if you scratch beneath the surface a little, much of their messaging on it is a mess. At his press conference yesterday, Mulcair was simultaneously saying that they want the bill defeated writ large and voted down at second reading (agreement in principle), while saying that it needs more debate and amendments at committee, and then reiterating that it’s beyond saving, that there were no amendments that could make them live with it. From a procedural standpoint, that’s all over the map. And then there’s the conspiracy theory aspect, where Mulcair is going on about how a government could use CSIS to spy on their political adversaries under these broad definitions, and then to the Francophone media, he goes full-bore on re-fighting 1970, and it’s all October Crisis and the War Measures Act. That, of course, has to do with his Quebec voter base, which is polling its support for stronger anti-terror measures, discomfited by the terror-inspired hit-and-run last October, and probably the Charter of Values xenophobia around Muslims that is still an undercurrent. Suffice to say, the scattershot of arguments against make it hard to follow the plot. For her part, Elizabeth May is going full-on conspiracy theory, insisting the bill will turn CSIS into a “secret police” – err, except that they have no arrest powers, and then tried to say that such a bill would basically turn Rosa Parks into a terrorist in CSIS’ eyes. I’m not sure that’s helpful. Terry Glavin makes the point that while there are alarming things in the bill, hysteria doesn’t really help the debate. As for Peter MacKay, whose use of “cultural” causes with relation to the not-really-would-be-terror-attack in Halifax, when asked what he thought the definition of terrorism was, MacKay told reporters to “look it up.” He’s all class.

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Roundup: Some context around the defection

While Danielle Smith continues to declare victory as she defends her defection, insisting that the Wildrose had held two premiers to account and that they had managed to shift the PCs to their position under Prentice, there are one or two things worth noting. While I spoke to other day about the problems with calling this defection a “reunification” of conservatives in the province, I think there are a couple of other facts to consider that the pundit classes keep overlooking in their handwringing about the state of democracy in Alberta now that the official opposition has been decimated. The first is that even in a Westminster democracy, there are no guidelines about the strength of the opposition. We’ve even had cases (New Brunswick, I believe) where there were no opposition parties elected, and they had to find a way of including that balance. The other fact is that nowhere in the country is there an opposition so closely aligned ideologically with the government of the day, where you have a nominally right-wing government and an even more right-wing official opposition. That puts a whole lot of context into the unprecedented move of an official opposition leader crossing to join the government ranks, as there is less of a gap to actually cross.

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