Tag Archives: Euthanasia

Roundup: Conflating the “leader’s courtesy”

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New Green Party leader Annamie Paul is running for a seat in the upcoming Toronto-Centre by-election, and this has already caused a bit of a friction between outgoing leader Elizabeth May and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. Why? Because May argues that Singh should repay the courtesy that the Greens extended him when he was running for his own seat in a by-election in the previous parliament and not run a candidate to oppose him. The problem? That May’s conception of “leader’s courtesy” is not really what she thinks it is.

First of all, “leader’s courtesy” largely only existed when it came to government or official opposition – third, fourth, and fifth-place parties are not really owed any particular courtesies. Second, what this particular courtesy involves is a member of the new leader’s own party voluntarily resigning their seat so that the new leader can run there in order to get into the Commons as soon as possible – it’s generally not about unheld ridings, even if it just happens to coincidentally be the same riding where Paul ran in the last federal election. The Liberals are certainly not obligated to not run to keep their own seat for the sake of giving Paul a seat, no matter if she is a Black woman. Hell, they’re running a Black woman of their own in the riding. Not to mention, less than a year ago, during the election, Paul came in a distant fourth place in the riding with a mere seven percent of the vote-share. Bill Morneau, incidentally, got 57 percent, and the NDP came in second at 22 percent – even if Singh did the “classy” thing, as May demanded, and didn’t run a candidate, it’s still unlikely that Paul would win – especially when she’s running against a legitimate media personality like Liberal candidate Marci Ien.

I would also add that demanding that the other parties surrender their candidates so that Paul can win it because she’s a Black woman leader smacks of tokenism, and is an implicit declaration that she couldn’t win the seat on her own. Not to mention, it deprives the voters of the riding the chance to make the decision on who they want to represent them. Again, the historical “leader’s courtesy” was about a riding that the party held, and it was usually intended to be a short-term measure so that the leader would have a seat, and would then run in their intended seat in the next election and return the riding to the MP who stepped aside for the leader. This is clearly not what is happening in Toronto Centre, so unless May wants to resign her own seat so that Paul can run there, she’s conflating just what exactly this “courtesy” really is.

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Roundup: An admission of systemic racism in Canada

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau’s daily presser was held away from Rideau Cottage yesterday, at a local business that benefitted from the wage subsidy, and it was remarked that it looked to be suspiciously like a campaign stop. Trudeau did his best to try and deflect blame for losing at political chicken – err, Wednesday’s inability to get the government’s latest emergency omnibus bill passed, outlining all of the places where items in the bill matched the demands of opposition parties, while dismissing some of the criticisms – primarily that of the Conservatives in their insistence on having full parliamentary sittings restored. The more memorable moment, however, was when he was asked about RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki’s comments that seem to dismiss systemic racism in the RCMP (though she did cop to unconscious bias), where Trudeau said that of course there is systemic racism in the RCMP, just like there is in all of our institutions, and that systems are not broken, but were in fact built that way. He went on to say that part of why it’s difficult to address is because it’s in the building blocks of these institutions, which should serve as a reminder to everyone that there are no quick fixes to any of this. He also went on to say that Canadian exceptionalism isn’t just that we do well, but that we know we need to do better and are willing to address it. This is probably the first time that a head of government has made this kind of an admission, and an acknowledgment of concepts that many Canadians are still coming to terms with – but he also did say that he had faith in Lucki to do the job of reforming the RCMP, so there’s that.

On the subject of the RCMP, Indigenous services minister Marc Miller is not having any of Commissioner Lucki’s excuses about not understanding systemic racism, and is critical that not enough has been done to combat it over the past two years. AFN National Chief Perry Bellegarde says that the federal government’s complacency allows police violence against Black and Indigenous people, and he’s right. And lo and behold, the dashcam footage of Chief Allan Adam’s arrest has been made public, and it is hard to see how senior RCMP officials could have concluded that the actions were “appropriate,” which is a big flashing indicator of a problem in the ranks.

Meanwhile, as the debate on bringing back Parliament properly progresses with Trudeau’s disingenuous excuses, Conservative House leader Candice Bergen has put forward a number of suggestions for how MPs could safely vote in-person in a returned Parliament – some of which I’m not in favour of, but at least it’s a better solution than the Pandora’s Box of remote or electronic votes, which the government favours – and make no mistake, they are an evil that will be unleashed and there will be no going back. (I have more on this in my weekend column, out later today).

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Roundup: Party positions and individual agency

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The weaponization of private members’ business continues unabated in Parliament, as the Conservatives put out an attack yesterday that claims that the Liberals want to “legalize” hard drugs because maverick backbencher Nathaniel Erskine-Smith tabled a private members’ bill that calls on the decriminalization of small personal amounts in order to better treat addiction as a public health issue and to not criminalize people with addictions – something that has worked in some countries. The lie, of course, is both in claiming that this was official government policy, and that it was calling for legalization – because who cares about truth or facts when there is fear to be mongered?

The bigger problem here? What it does to how private members’ business is treated in the House of Commons, and more to the point, there is a very big potential for this to blow up in Scheer’s face because of Cathay Wagantall’s sex-selective abortion bill currently on the Order Paper. And yes, let’s not be obtuse about this – the media feeds this particular weaponization, both in how they made this kind of abortion bill an Issue during the election, and how we both demand that MPs be both independent and yet castigate the leader for “losing control” when any MP shows any glimmer of independence. (And for the record, Scheer has not said anything about Wagantall’s bill, other than to have his spokesperson say that he “discouraged” such bills).

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I know that everyone is going to be cute about these bills, and how if they get tabled the party “must” support the position because everything is so centrally controlled, and so on, but this is part of what poisons the system. Insisting that everyone be marching in lockstep from other parties ensures that the same insistence is made about your own party, and it removes any agency from MPs. They’re MPs, not gods damned battle droids. If we want drones to simply read speeches into the record and vote according the leader’s office, then why do we even bother with MPs? Why bother with parliament at all? The Conservatives’ release is embarrassing, and they should be ashamed of themselves for it (which of course would imply that they’re capable of shame, but I have my doubts about that one too).

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Roundup: Rights, title, and ratification

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We got a few more details yesterday about the agreement reached with the Wet’sutwet’en hereditary chiefs on Sunday, despite a few TV hosts somewhat obtusely demanding to know what it meant for the Coastal GasLink pipeline – despite the fact that it was stated over and over again that this agreement did not have anything to do with that, and that the matter was unresolved. The crux of the agreement was an agreement on how rights and title would be extended for the Wet’suwet’en going forward, meaning that with any future projects, there would be clarity as to who would need to be consulted – which means the hereditary chiefs – and given the new impact assessment process that the Liberals instituted (under the infamous Bill C-69), those consultations begin at the earliest possible moment for these project proposals so that affected First Nations can be brought in from the get-go. What I found especially interesting was that Carolyn Bennett said that this was in accordance with UNDRIP principles, as free, prior and informed consent (which again she stressed was not a veto). And one imagines that this kind of agreement would be a template for others when it comes to unceded territory across the country.

As for Coastal GasLink, work apparently resumed on aspects of the project, but given that some of their permits were pulled by the province’s environmental assessment agency with a demand for more consultations, one supposes that the work is on areas that are outside of Wet’suwet’en territory. Meanwhile, one of the elected chiefs who is in favour of the project was doing the media rounds in Ottawa yesterday, and he said that while his people were discussing the ratification of the new agreement, he said that he was also willing to give up the economic benefits of the pipeline is that was what his people decided that they wanted as part of those discussions. We do know that matriarchs who were in support of the project were also in the meeting between Bennett, her BC counterpart and those hereditary chiefs, so the discussion within the community is very much alive, and we’ll see in a couple of weeks when the ratification process is supposed to be concluded, what the future holds for the pipeline.

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Roundup: An agreement, and a start to further discussions

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On the fourth day of negotiations, federal Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett, her BC counterpart, and the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs have come to an agreement regarding land title rights for Wet’suwet’en territory, which has been an open issue for decades. It will need to be ratified by the Wet’suwet’en nation after a period of consultation, but it is a step. This does not, however, completely solve the issue with the proposed Coastal GasLink pipeline – the vocal group of hereditary chiefs remain opposed (while those in the community who support the project feel they aren’t being heard), but this remains an issue where the community needs to come together and use the feast system under their laws to resolve these disputes, which hasn’t been happening. It will also require further discussions with the RCMP about their operations in their territory, but again, there seems to be some progress made.

Meanwhile, a discussion among legal experts is ongoing regarding the efficacy of using legal injunctions when there are land rights protests going on, because they can be too much of a blunt instrument. Some are suggesting that the injunctions be structured to allow for mediated consultation instead of heavy-handed orders to stop their protests, as has been done in some provinces when it comes to labour disputes. And a prime example of something unhelpful is the bill recently tabled in Alberta to further penalize protesters with heavy fines (which is already likely unconstitutional), but there does seem to be a definite mindset behind that kind of legislation.

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Roundup: A failed attempt at fundamental reform

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Fair warning that this is going to be super wonky and a dive into parliamentary nerdery, but it’s important to how our democracy functions. It seems that the government’s attempt to better reconcile our budget cycle and Estimates process has been declared a failure, and the deeply flawed system that has grown up over a number of years has once again returned, and that’s a huge disappointment because it was an important change that they were attempting.

Part of the problem here is that we don’t have a fixed budget date, but the Estimates cycle operates by a fixed calendar. What this has tended to mean is that the budget can be pushed back after the Main Estimates, which means that all of the spending that Parliament is supposed to approve winds up being reflective of the previous year’s budget, and then it’s up to the Supplementary Estimates later in the year to update the spending to what was in this year’s budget – a system that makes it difficult if not impossible to track spending, particularly as the accounting used in the Public Accounts at the end of the fiscal year is different still from both the budget and Estimates. If Parliament’s key function is to study these spending plans and expenditures and hold the government to account over them, it is a nigh-impossible task (which is one more reason why MPs have given up on doing it, and simply turned it over to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, which is a Very Bad Thing). It was Scott Brison’s pet project when he was at Treasury Board to try and better align these cycles, but that was easier said than done, particularly given some of the sclerotic processes within our civil service, and their attempt to try and get some money out the door faster with a $7 billion fund (derided by the Conservatives as a “slush fund” despite there being a list of approved items that accompanied it) never wound up actually working, and much of that money went unspent even though it was supposed to mean things happened faster. It’s a failure all around – both with this government and within the broader civil service.

I am hoping that the Liberals have taken what lessons they can from this and take more steps to rectify some of the problems, including assigning a fixed budget date so that the civil service can adjust their own cycles and processes to reflect this and the Estimates cycle can then reflect what is in the budget (and aligning the Public Accounts with these cycles would also help). This is at the very heart of how our parliament is supposed to operate, and if we can’t get this right, it’s a very, very bad sign for the health of our system.

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Roundup: Reverberations and court references

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The fallout from the Teck Frontier decision reverberated yesterday, whether it was with disappointed local First Nations, or industry groups giving the usual lamentations about investor confidence. More blame was thrown around, most of it at Justin Trudeau’s direction which seems to be in direct contradiction to what the company’s CEO said in his withdrawal letter, which talked about partisan bickering between levels of government, while also talking about how they supported carbon pricing and the emissions caps – in other words, largely siding with the federal government as the provincial government tore up the comprehensive and reasonable plan that the former NDP government had put into place with a great deal of thought and consultation, which introduced all manner of uncertainty into the market and put them into direct conflict with the federal government unnecessarily – but they also made the gamble that Andrew Scheer would win the last federal election and they wouldn’t have to worry about carbon pricing or strict regulations any longer, and well, that didn’t happen. Of course, it didn’t stop Kenney, Scheer or others from making up things wholesale in order to keep the blame on Trudeau, after they already overly raised expectations for the project (in part by lying about what its promises actually were). In conversation yesterday, a fellow journalist made the supposition that Teck may have been afraid of federal approval at this point because the expectations for it had been built so high when they knew they couldn’t deliver on it, in large part because the price of oil is simply far too low for the project to be viable, not to mention that it’s hard to attract financing as global investors are looking for climate-friendly projects these days.

In pundit response, Heather Scoffield points to the lack of the next stages of the federal climate plans, combined with Alberta’s battling those plans, as factors making us unattractive to investors. Scoffield also blames a lack of leadership for why it’s taking so long to get those needed plans in place. Max Fawcett considers Teck Frontier a metaphor for an Alberta past that won’t come back, and that the withdrawal of the application should be a wake-up call for those who are trying to bring that past back. Kevin Carmichael calls out Teck’s CEO for playing martyr while sabotaging the kind of conversation over energy and the environment that the country needs to have, but now won’t because the deadline is off the table and we have degenerated into assigning blame.

And then, as if things couldn’t get any more interesting, the Alberta Court of Appeal released their 4-1 decision that said that the federal carbon price was unconstitutional, in direct opposition to the decisions from Ontario and Saskatchewan (both of which will head to the Supreme Court of Canada next month). But that being said, there is a curious amount of overtly political editorialising within said judgement, from one of the concurring judges in particular, which I am assured by a law professor will be a field day for the Supreme Court of Canada when this ruling makes it to them.

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Roundup: An emergency clip-gathering

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Sympathetic protests continue across the country as Justin Trudeau and several Cabinet ministers convened the Incidence Response Group yesterday, but had little to say as they emerged, other than dialogue remains the best option to resolve the situation as opposed to sending in the police to crack heads. Some new protests included demonstrations that closed Bloor Street in Toronto, and another blockade on the Thousand Islands international bridge (which was short-lived). Carolyn Bennett is still waiting on more meetings, apparently, while the CBC got a leaked recording from Marc Miller’s meeting with the Mohawks in Ontario on Sunday, so there’s that. And amidst this, police associations are grousing that they’re caught in the middle of all of this, criticized for both being too aggressige and not doing enough at the same time.

And with Parliament back again today, the request has been made for an emergency debate on the situation – but I can tell you right now that it’s going to be nothing shy of a five-alarm clown show. If the Speaker decides to grant it, it’ll happen after the close of regular business, so somewhere between 6 and 7 PM, and designated to run until midnight, unless debate collapses sooner. But you can bet that the most that can come of it – and the parties bloody well know it – is that they’ll simply be gathering clips for their social media of their righteous indignation for their side of the debate, whether it’s that the economy is being affected, that police are supposedly not enforcing the rule of law (hint – that’s not what “rule of law” means), or that this government has failed in its goals of reconciliation (as though that could happen in the space of four years). And if it’s outraged clips they want, well, isn’t that what Question Period has devolved into? In other words, I see zero actual utility in the exercise, but then again, I’m cynical (or realistic) like that.

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Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt tries to evaluate this government’s communications around the current situation after they handled the previous two (Flight PS752 and COVID-19) fairly well, and outlines the difference between complex and complicated problems. But being unable to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag is this government’s usual schtick, so that should be no surprise.

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Roundup: Stop proposing bad rule changes

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Sound the alarm, because MPs – and Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux in particular – are talking about changing the Standing Orders again. Lamoureux has apparently committed to bringing back Frank Baylis’ package of reforms, most of which were are either half-measures, or wrong-headed and will have unintended consequences that will simply make things worse. But as with anything, as soon as it’s been proposed, it becomes the politician syllogism – “Something must be done. This is something. Therefor we must do this.” Apparently, nobody learned a gods damned thing after Michael Chong’s garbage Reform Act, and we’re about to go through yet another attempted exercise that will wind up going badly. (I wrote about Baylis’ proposals last year).

There are a few things in the Lamoureux interview that I did want to highlight first, which is the talk about eliminating votes on Mondays and Fridays – that’s pretty much a given considering that they already don’t have votes on Fridays, barring exceptional circumstances like a vote-a-thon, and they rarely have them on Mondays either, and when they do, it’s usually in the evening, by which time most MPs should have arrived in Ottawa. I’m also going to give some major side-eye to MPs who complain that they could be doing more work in their ridings, because their jobs are in Ottawa. Their jobs are to hold the government to account by doing the work of things like scrutinizing the estimates, going through the Public Accounts, and studying legislation in committee. Their jobs are not actually about doing “casework” with constituents, most of which should be done by the civil service. An MP’s office is not supposed to be a Service Canada desk, and I wish that they would stop pretending that it was.

The other part that I’m getting increasingly irate with is the talk about developing a parallel chamber for the House of Commons, and dressing it up as “efficiency.” No. There is no reason for us to have one. It makes more sense in Westminster where they have 650 MPs, and there are fewer opportunities for them to have take-note debates on things in the main chamber, but we really don’t have either the need, or frankly the bodies to do it, because we already have enough of our MPs assigned to more than one committee outside of House Duty, so there are already not enough hours in the day for most of them. We also don’t need the hours for added “debate” on government bills – we need to reform how we’re structuring debate period. We don’t need additional time for private members’ business because it will only bottleneck in the Senate and die on the Order Paper anyway. There is zero rationale for it – but there is currently a romance with the notion, and so they keep proposing it. No. Stop it.

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Roundup: The reality of negotiation

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As was ever thus, the Twitter Machine erupted with fury and disingenuous outrage when health minister Patty Hajdu told reporters that she couldn’t guarantee that a national pharmacare programme would be in place at the end of the current parliament (for which we don’t know when that will be, as a hung parliament rarely lasts beyond two years.

“Some of that will be predicted by, predicated by, the responses of the provinces and territories,” said Hajdu, because *mind blown* healthcare is largely the domain of the provinces and any pharmacare system would have to be negotiated with them – in particular, a national formulary, which is going to be extremely complicated to ensure that existing plans don’t get left behind or that the new national plan isn’t worse off than any existing ones that it would replace.

What is especially irritating are all of the voices crying out that this just means the Liberals were lying on the campaign trail, which is false and ridiculous – Trudeau spent the campaign not overpromising on this file, but rather kept saying that it was contingent on negotiation with provinces, which is why their fiscal plan only called for a “down payment” on such a programme rather than the whole thing, but nevertheless, the promise was to go by the principles of the Hoskins Report, which they have bene doing thus far. The NDP, by contrast, insisted that this could be done by 2020, and whenever anyone brought up the fact that the provinces may object, the line was largely that why would anyone say no to federal dollars? It’s absurd, of course, because provinces are rightfully afraid that they would be stuck with an expensive programme to run if the federal government suddenly cut out transfers or funds to it because they suddenly had other priorities (which has happened in the past).

And to that end, we have a bunch of premiers who are balking at it, Quebec and Alberta want to be able to opt-out with compensation, and Ontario is instead insisting that the federal government pay for drugs to treat rare diseases – the most expensive kind, and the ones where costs are rapidly escalating. So of course they want the federal government to pay for them rather than to share the burden. It’s predictable, and for anyone to be shocked and appalled that the Liberals have to deal with this reality is really, really tiresome.

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