Tag Archives: GLBT

Roundup: Government vs opposition duties

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While I’ve written on the topic before, comments made by Government House Leader Bardish Chagger on her tabled “discussion paper” on trying to make the House of Commons more “efficient” really rankled over the weekend. In particular, Chagger said the proposals were trying to find the balance between the government’s “duty to pass legislation and the opposition’s right to be heard.”

No. Just no. And here’s Philippe Lagassé to explain why.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/843115014227746816

The whole point of Parliament is not to ensure that government passes legislation. The point is to hold it to account, and that often means slowing it down and ensuring that it doesn’t overstep its bounds, which it is wont to do. Already it’s a problem that government backbenchers don’t do their duty and due diligence when it comes to keeping a check on the government – most are happy to toe the line in order to be considered for a cabinet post, which is a problem in and of itself, and we’ve seen this attitude of being “team players” amplify in the last number of years, particularly after the minority government years, when message discipline became paramount above all else, which is why I worry about how the backbenches will react to this proposition by the government. Will they willingly surrender their responsibilities of accountability because they want to be seen as being onside with Cabinet (particularly after the recent defeats of cabinet on those private members’ bills and Senate public bills?) Maybe.

What worries me more is the way that Chagger phrased the opposition’s “right to be heard.” We’re seeing increasingly that with this government and their insistence on constant broad consultations, they will listen, then go ahead with their original plans. I worry that this is how they are starting to feel about parliament – that they’ll hear the concerns of the opposition or the Senate, and then bully through regardless. Parliament is not a focus group to “consult” with, and I’m not sure that they’re quite getting that, particularly given Chagger’s statement. Accountability is not just politely listening, and the opposition is not there to just deliver an opposing viewpoint. There needs to be a tension and counter-balance, and right now I’m not sure that this government quite gets the need for that tension, particularly when they keep mouthing platitudes about working together collaboratively and whatnot. Then again, I’m not sure that the opposition necessarily gets the extent of their responsibilities either, which is depressing. Regardless, Chagger’s case for these reforms is built on a foundation of sand. Most should be fully opposed and defeated soundly for the sake of the very existential nature of our parliament.

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Roundup: A different debate

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This weekend we finally saw our first NDP leadership debate, which was actually more watchable than pretty much any Conservative debate we’ve had so far, so that’s something. Having only four candidates on stage instead of fourteen makes a difference, as does having everyone already in caucus rather than coming in from the outside, and no one so far seems to be running against their own caucus, so that’s also something. As with any NDP debate, however, it was less “debate” and more statements by which they could vehemently agree with and then say “I agree, and let me take that further and say…”

https://twitter.com/mariedanielles/status/841001462532567043

The only real cleavage that there was over the course of the event was over the role of the resource economy and if there could be a case made for pipelines, and a couple of the candidates were more strident than others. Otherwise, there was a lot of the usual key words and phrases that signal their audience, like the “neoliberal agenda,” the growing one percent (err, except they’re not growing in Canada, and have in fact been shrinking), “unfair trade deals,” and renegotiating NAFTA. If one wasn’t careful, it could be mistaken for a Trump rally.

The format and fewer candidates did allow for a number of non-policy related questions, but some of them were a bit…suspicious, if I can use the word, like they were designed to ensure that they were reinforcing in-group credentials vouching. Maybe it’s just me, but it felt a bit creepy in places.

Meanwhile, I would encourage you to read the very trenchant observations from John Geddes, who nailed pretty much what each of the four candidates are running on out of the gate.

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Roundup: Worst instincts for second-choice votes

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As the Trumpocalypse serves up another “totally not just Muslims” travel ban south of the border, immigration references in the Conservative leadership race are certainly starting to pick up steam. Maxime Bernier started dropping not-so-coded references to “radical proponents of multiculturalism” who want to “forcibly change” the cultural character of the country (no, seriously), while Kellie Leitch offers up some of the questions her “values test” would include. Because you know, it’s totally not like people aren’t going to lie about the obvious answers or anything. Meanwhile, Deepak Obhrai says that statements like Leitch’s is creating an environment that could get immigrants killed, in case you worried that things aren’t getting dramatic. Oh, and to top it off, Andrew Scheer has a “survey” about terrorism that he wants people to weigh in on, and it’s about as well thought-out as you can expect.

https://twitter.com/stephaniecarvin/status/838798221501673473

While John Ibbitson writes about how the Conservative leadership candidates’ anti-immigrant rhetoric is a path to oblivion for the party, I would also add this Twitter thread from Emmett Macfarlane, which offers up a reminder about how our immigration system in this country actually works, because facts should matter in these kinds of debates.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/838879309829967874

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/838879524888670208

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/838879901725900800

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/838881353940750339

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Roundup: The spectre of a Leitch Party

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A rather remarkable exchange happened during Trudeau’s visit to Nunavut when he was pressed about his electoral reform promise. Trudeau responded to his questioner “Do you think Kellie Leitch should have her own party?” and laid out a realistic case where parties like that can hold enough seats to affect the balance of power in a parliament. His questioner was taken aback and “respectfully disagreed,” which isn’t surprising because the narrative we are always given when it comes to proportional representation is that it will give us nice left-wing coalition governments forever, which is certainly not the case, and we need to challenge that particular narrative more often, and to point to what’s happening in Europe right now. And to be honest, I’m glad that Trudeau is being a bit more forceful on this point about the potential rise of extreme parties and that such a system would be bad for Canada. Big tent parties have done a lot for this country, and have moderated a lot of regional tensions within them.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/829903477773971456

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/829906382396624896

Of course, Trudeau bringing up Leitch in such a manner could have unintended consequences of its own.

In a not unrelated note, Michelle Rempel was at an immigration conference in Montreal, and she noted her frustrations in bashing her head against her own party as much as she was with the Liberals that she is critiquing. And she made some very salient points in here about how we can’t pretend that we’re immune to populist rhetoric in this country, because we have a history of it bubbling up (hello 1993 election) and the sentiments still exist here where you have groups of disenfranchised people looking to blame Others. And this brings us back to why changing our electoral system to give incentives to these elements to form their own parties and try to win seats that they can use to leverage power is a very real and present danger. Add to that, there are concerns from experts in the field that the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the States is bubbling up here and fuelling a rise of racism in this country because it’s being seen as more socially acceptable.

So do we change our system to incentivise these voices to better organise and try to win themselves political leverage? Or do we do we maintain institutions and practices that have been successful in dispersing these elements because they know that there is no pathway to victory by pursuing it? It seems to me that it’s a fairly simple answer.

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Roundup: For fear of extremists rising

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In damage control mode, the Liberals have sent out senior sources to talk about why they pulled the plug on electoral reform, and have brought up the relatively new talking point about concerns for the rise of extremist parties, while cabinet was opposed to a referendum (not surprisingly given the referenda we’ve seen globally lately) and to a PR system in general. I say relatively new talking point because it was raised as part of the MyDemocracy survey, but as Paul Wells stated on Power & Politics last night, for a government that purports to be eloquent, they never made the case. I also suspect there was the added problem that in making it known that he was open to being convinced, Justin Trudeau allowed Nathan Cullen and others to steal the narrative away from him, which is a big reason why the Liberals completely lost the plot on that file.

Colby Cosh goes through the promise and given the choice as to whether Trudeau was being sleazy or stupid in making that promise, Cosh goes on the side of stupid – for which I would agree – and notes that a retreat was the best he could hope for rather than some truly unsavoury outcomes, particularly with regard to a referendum or a more purely proportional system. And here we get back to the rise of extremist parties.

Canada is not immune to this rabid and toxic populism that is going around globally, and we’ve seen examples of it manifesting in this country, from the election of Rob Ford, to some of the identity politics being attempted in previous elections both federally and provincially. Just because it has been relatively contained and not entirely successful doesn’t mean it can’t succeed in the future, particularly with its proponents feeling emboldened by what’s happening south of the border. And while Nathan Cullen insists that the rise of alt-right parties is “a load of crap,” he is blinkered by this notion, primarily coming from the left-wing, that a PR system would incentivise all of these left-wing and progressive parties that would somehow always form nice coalition governments. Right now we’re seeing something very different playing out in Europe, with all of their myriad of PR systems producing growing hard-right parties on the verge of winning power in several countries. Trudeau has every right to be concerned about that in Canada, and we have demonstrated proof that our current system has blunted their growth because they can’t command enough broad-based support to dominate our big-tent brokerage parties. That’s not a bad thing.

https://twitter.com/benjaminokinsey/status/827582598109069312

Oh, PR proponents claim. We’ll just raise thresholds so that these parties can’t get seats! But that’s just as problematic because if the thresholds are too low – say below three percent – you’re likely to cut off the Greens and the Bloc, for which they would cry bloody murder. (Their self-interested insistence that more people would vote for them if they knew they were guaranteed PR seats doesn’t help their case). It’s also another way of saying that you want to game the system to produce party configurations that you like, which again is self-interested, and doesn’t make the case for how it makes the system better.

In related news, Paul Wells looks at Karina Gould’s new mandate of cyber-security for our electoral system now that electoral reform is out of the question, and no, it’s not a trivial matter even if we don’t use any kind of electronic ballots in this country. Both Elections Canada and the various parties all have databases, and the party databases most especially are vulnerable, in part because they aren’t subject to any federal legislation which deals with privacy or information security, and that could prove to be a problem in the future.

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QP: Electoral reform apoplexy

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After the howls of outrage by the NDP and Elizabeth May in the Foyer about announcement that the government was abandoning its plans for electoral reform, it was promising to be a rowdy QP. Rona Ambrose led off, worrying about the state of the deficit on future generations. Justin Trudeau responded by reminding her that the Canada Child Benefit was giving direct aid to the middle class. Ambrose worried about the bogey man of taxes on medical and dental benefits, and Trudeau started off with the usual points about the middle class tax cut before saying that he would not raise those taxes. Ambrose was a bit thrown from her points, and asked something vague about youth, and Trudeau noted the various programs they’ve implemented. Denis Lebel was up next, and clearly having prepared a question on the benefit taxes, he wanted Trudeau to repeat the answer in French, and Trudeau dutifully did so. Lebel then asked about softwood lumber, and Trudeau listed the many files they had worked on with the Americans and softwood lumber was on that list. Thomas Mulcair was up next, and wanted Trudeau to admit that he lied on electoral reform. Trudeau listed the many positions out there, said there was no consensus and didn’t want to harm country’s stability at this time. Mulcair went another round, got the same response. Mulcair hounded Trudeau on the topic, but Trudeau said he wasn’t going to just check off a item on a list if it was the wrong thing to do.

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Roundup: And the Tony for outrage goes to…

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I really didn’t want to have to write about this, but it managed to suck up all of the oxygen in the news cycle this weekend, and I feel compelled to once again say something that I really didn’t want to, but lately this seems to be my lot in life. I’m talking about the whole Trudeau/Castro statement, and how very tiresome that pile-on soon became. Forgetting of course that nobody’s hand are clean in the game of international diplomacy, and for some reason nobody is allowed to speak ill of the dead unless it’s Fidel Castro, Trudeau’s comments weren’t sufficiently scolding enough of his legacy – never mind that he has a personal family connection there, and he has to be pragmatic about relations as he walks the line between needing new markets with American protectionism on the rise and economic liberalisation slowly happening in that country. And when pressed, Trudeau made no bones about the fact that Castro was a dictator while still explaining making the statement that he did. Nevertheless, I will hasten to add that Trudeau’s statement has nothing on the leftist paeans being sung to Castro that I’m finding all over my Facebook timeline, praising his stand against Imperialism and how the love of his people protected him from CIA assassins, and so on. (And these are from the same kinds of people who considered Stephen Harper a dictator, so seriously, chill out). And then there was the digging up of statements that Stephen Harper had made after the deaths of the likes of the King of Saudi Arabia (“desired peace”) and Hugo Chavez, and lo, no outright condemnations in either of those statements. Should Trudeau have said something more? Probably. But I do get that he’s trying to walk a very fine line.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, people took to social media to bombard us with endlessly with the instantly tiresome meme of #Trudeaueulogies, while the whole of the Conservative leadership race decided that they too needed to take to social media to perform some outrage for us, demanding that Trudeau not go to the funeral, and beating at their breasts, wailing and gnashing their teeth about how terrible it was that he didn’t mention the executions or the persecution of gays, and it was like every single one of them was vying for a Tony award. And then they all emailed party members trying to crassly try to fundraise on this issue. Honestly, it’s just so tiresome because it’s just so transparently performative.

https://twitter.com/cfhorgan/status/802593401107611650

Meanwhile, John Geddes talks to a historian about the legacy of Pierre Trudeau and Castro with Canada-Cuba relations. Terry Glavin thinks that this proves that Trudeau is as vacuous as most people seem to think, while Charlie Gilles calls Trudeau’s statement “egregious whitewashing.”

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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: Peter Harder is trying to bamboozle you

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Behold Senator Peter Harder, the “government representative” in the Senate. Faced with attacks from his (mostly) partisan detractors, he bravely mounted his steed, and galloped out to the webpages of Policy Options where he oh so bravely slew a straw man to defend his particular moves in modernising the Senate. And in case this wasn’t clear enough, let me spell it out for you – Peter Harder is trying to bamboozle you.

The particular straw man that Harder bravely faced was the notion that those who defend the Westminster model in the Senate are trying to keep it a mirror of the House of Lords. This, incidentally, is complete malarkey. Nobody has ever made this argument. The Senate of Canada has never borne any resemblance to the Lords (aside from the fact that each is an appointed upper body), and nobody has advanced an argument to make that claim. But Harder went on at length to prove how different the two chambers were (again, nobody claimed otherwise), and then went on to showcase all of the other upper chambers in Westminster countries and how different they were too. Look at how flexible the Westminster model is! Harder proclaims. And it’s all very “Father knows best,” as he schools everybody on parliamentary democracy. And then he starts his subtle subversion. Look at Nunavut, he suggests – they don’t have parties there! It’s a consensus legislature.

And this is the point where I want to punch someone in the throat. But I have that urge everyone someone brings up the Nunavut legislature.

The Nunavut legislature works (more or less) on a party-less consensus model because a) it has a mere 22 members; and b) it operates within the cultural context of its Inuit residents for whom consensus-making is a norm. The Nunavut legislature model is neither scalable nor portable, and anyone who tries to suggest otherwise requires a smack upside the head. The other part, which escapes Harder’s point, is that it still has an executive council and an ostensible opposition whose job it is to hold said Cabinet to account. And that’s the basis of the Westminster model that Harder quite carefully ignores in his defence of said model’s mutability. You see, the real basis of the Westminster model is that of Responsible Government, and the exercise thereof needs both a government and an opposition to hold it to account, and that can replace the government when they lose confidence. Oh, but wait – the Senate isn’t a confidence chamber, you might be saying. And that’s right. But they still have a part to play in the exercise of accountability, whether it’s asking questions of the government in their own QP (which is why the Leader of the Government is supposed to be a cabinet minister), and why they have an absolute veto, which is a necessary check on executive power.

Harder’s other suggestion – that perhaps instead of an official opposition, there instead be an “opposition representative” to mirror his role as “government representative,” is as much about undermining the ability of senators to organise opposition to the government agenda as it is about extending his own power base among the independents. 101 loose fish cannot be an effective opposition force just as much as they cannot be a consensus body (not that the Senate’s role is consensus). Harder’s attempt to delegitimise the role of partisanship in the Senate has nothing to do with trying to respect the chamber’s constitutional role (which he uses revisionist history to assert) and everything to do with his own ambitions, and he’s willing to slay as many straw men along the way as it takes to convince everyone that he’s on the right path. Don’t let him get away with it.

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Roundup: A badly needed review

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The Criminal Code is a mess. The government knows it, and the judicial system knows it, but the question is whether anyone has the guts to do anything about it – particularly because it’s been a particularly easy target to do one-off laws without worrying about the broader consequences. The number of private members’ bills dealing with singular tweaks to the Criminal Code are innumerable, because it’s seen as something that individual MPs can use to take a stand on some issue or another while at the same time considering it to be something that won’t impose a cost on the government as no dedicated spending must be attached to it that would otherwise require a Royal Recommendation. (This is wrong – there are tremendous costs attached to it, but it’s a loophole in the rules that there is no appetite to plug either). And when governments want to increase sentencing to look tough on an issue, they pass new laws to “crack down,” to the point where there is no semblance of a logical sentencing grid any longer. I remember sitting in on a Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee meeting during the Harper years when they were passing another marijuana bill and the Liberal senators were expressing frustration that things were such a mess that these new pot offences were giving more jail time than some child sex offences.

The government’s recent move to repeal some archaic laws around gay sex (including an unequal age of consent) is an example of one place where the government is doing something about a “zombie law” – one that has been struck down by the courts, but remains on the books because Parliament has yet to take the time to actually repeal it. (This was another case were the Conservatives outright refused to when given the opportunity when they were raising the age of consent for hetero teens). But there are plenty of zombie laws still sitting on the books and nothing is being done about them. The CBC has a look here at some of those laws, and expert urging to deal with them – particularly given that murder trial in Edmonton where the judge accidentally handed down a verdict that was predicated on a “zombie” law and he had to go back and give a lesser verdict after the fact to correct the mistake. Clearly this is a problem, but the government isn’t promising much action beyond vague assurances that these sorts of things will be part of their broader criminal justice review – the same review that will be looking at doing away with a number of mandatory minimum sentences. But this is something that they really do need to get cracking on, not only dealing with “zombie” laws, but also sentencing reform so that there is a coherent sentencing grid once again. Part of the problem, however, is that the justice minister and her office are moving at a glacial pace. Everything they’ve been doing, from judicial appointments to moving on certain bills, is taking far longer than it reasonably should, and that’s concerning especially when this criminal justice review is so badly needed. Let’s hope we hear more about it sooner rather than later.

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