Tag Archives: Healthcare

Roundup: No health deal with the provinces

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So that was that. The federal government came to the table yesterday with some more money for health transfers plus another $11.5 billion over ten years for targeted priorities, and the provinces balked, so there’s no deal and the federal government is sticking to the existing 3 percent or GDP growth (whichever is higher) escalator. But really, the whole thing was a bit of a charade to begin with.

Andrew Coyne pretty much savaged the whole affair over the Twitter Machine all day, and he’s certainly not wrong about any of it.

So both Bill Morneau and Jane Philpott say that they’re willing to work on ways to help the provinces, but Morneau went into it basically saying they’re in the middle of writing the budget, so now is the time. They said no, so that may be it. Well, except that New Brunswick is saying they’re open to a bilateral deal, because with their stagnant population growth, the current escalator is a lot of money for them. Will this shame other provinces into signing on, or at least enough that the rest will start looking foolish for rejecting it out of their ritualized Busting of the Gaskets? I guess the next couple of weeks will tell. Incidentally, Justin Trudeau seems to be having difficulty in remembering just what was promised on funding during the election, for what it’s worth.

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Roundup: The problem with measuring parliamentary productivity

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Every year around this time, we get the series of articles trying to measure just how “productive” parliament has been, and it uses metrics like how many votes passed – as though that were the sole function of an MP.  And while Aaron Wherry tried to challenge this particular metric of parliamentary productivity, I thought that I would add a few added bits of context. For starters, a number of the bills passed by the Conservatives late in any parliamentary sitting would be some small and very narrow bills to do with something like legislating changes to a particular federal park whose boundaries they expanded (and called it an environmental programme), or specific one-off changes that deal with particular First Nations. They would introduce these bills, let them languish on the Order Paper, and then just before the Commons was set to rise for either winter or summer break, they would pass them at all stages with pretty much no debate or committee hearing, citing them as uncontroversial, and off they would go to the Senate, where they tended to at least get a few hours of debate. Bills like these helped to inflate the numbers that the Conservatives would then cite to “prove” just how productive they had been, when in reality, so much debate time got swallowed up by the need to constantly debate and vote on time allocation motions.

Meanwhile, has this particular government been slow on their legislative agenda? Hell, yes. The fact that Bill C-7 on RCMP labour relations went the entire fall sitting without being brought back for debate after the Senate amended the bill last June is concerning. This was a bill that was in response to a Supreme Court of Canada decision that was granted a brief extension by the Court (around the same time as the assisted dying legislation) and the fact that said deadline expired months ago is a problem. I really don’t know why Bill C-32 (equalising the age of consent for gay sex) hasn’t been brought up for debate yet because the bill is a no-brainer and could (and should) pass with a mere few hours of debate, and yet it’s been sitting there for a month. There are customs and pre-clearance bills that have been sitting on the Order Paper since June, which you think would be important to a government that is looking to try to eliminate barriers to trade with the United States. I’m not sure why the House Leaders are having difficulty in getting these bills moved forward. So while I do think that trying to measure the effectiveness of a parliament by the number of bills passed is a bogus measure, it doesn’t mean that there still aren’t bills that they should have moved on months ago.

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Roundup: Not offering excuses

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Justin Trudeau has been making the media rounds over the past few days, and some of the highlights of yesterday’s interviews were how he warned the now-former Italian prime minister that referendums were a bad idea because they give people a licence to lash out at institutions – and they did in that case, and said PM resigned. He also spoke about his “friendly-ish” phone conversation with Donald Trump, the inedible lunch served at a Paris climate conference event, and that he hasn’t yet decided if RCAF001 will be replaced anytime soon. And then there are the fundraising questions. His response was that he’s followed all of the rules, and that this hysteria (my word, not his) is largely a result of opposition and media frenzy than anything substantive. And he’s not really wrong.

And as if summoned, former advisor to Stephen Harper, Tom Flanagan, appeared in the Globe and Mail to remind everyone that these kinds of fundraisers are the exact same thing that Harper and company did when they were in office. The problem, of course, is that Trudeau promised not to have the “appearance” of conflict, but I always bring it back to defining what the appearance is, because I am still waiting for any evidence that would lead one to actually think there is an appearance of conflict and I remain unconvinced. Indeed, when the Globe came out with yesterday’s screaming headline that Liberal donors were invited to a dinner for the Chinese premier, I’m not seeing any evidence that they were invited solely because they were donors – indeed, most of the names highlighted seemed to be invited because they have business interests with China than there being proof of quid pro quo. And as someone else pointed out on Twitter, did anyone thought to compare how many of the people that Stephen Harper took on his trip to Israel were Conservative donors? Or do they not count because when Stephen Harper rode into power in 2006 on the white horse of accountability that he didn’t make the promise of “appearance” of conflict that is being generously interpreted? Have we not finished hoisting Trudeau on his own petard long enough, or do we need to go full Yellow Peril with all of the insinuations about Chinese connections, while continuing to poison the well when it comes to our faith in political institutions?

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Roundup: Items left undebated

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With the Commons now having risen for the holidays, there is another day or two left of work left in the Senate before they too head off for their holidays, but as Kady O’Malley points out, they are having a bit of a problem getting any bills that aren’t supply-related passed in any reasonable timeframe. The extent to which this is an actual problem just yet is up in the air – yes, fewer bills have passed to date in this current parliament, but some of them have been pretty major issues (like assisted dying), while we’ve also seen far less use of procedural tools like time allocation to ram through bills without sufficient time for debate or committee study. (We’re also not seeing massive omnibus bills being rammed through either, so points for that).

Part of the problem is simply that senators are letting items stand on the Order Paper in their name for weeks at a time, which is not uncommon in the Senate, but there has been little effort to move some of these pieces forward, and I’m not entirely sure why. In my own estimation, part of it has to do with the new normal in the Senate, where there is no longer a government caucus, and the Government Leader – sorry, “government representative” thus far hasn’t really been communicating much urgency on any particular bills so far as I can tell. Maybe I’m wrong, as I’m not privy to any discussions that he is having with other caucus leaders. Some of it I would imagine is delay engineered by some Conservative senators because they feel that measures were adopted too quickly by the House of Commons without what they would consider to be adequate scrutiny (which I would imagine the ostensible reason on holding up debate on the trans rights bill would be), while some of it is partisan stubbornness (like the bill to undo changes the previous government made to unions or citizenship revocation). Senator Peter Harder could start to invoke time allocation on those bills if he so chose, and with there now being enough non-aligned senators having been appointed to surpass the votes of the Conservatives in the Chamber, he may now be in a position to convince them that this is the way to go.

Time allocation is a tricky beast in the Senate, however, and while the previous government did not hesitate to use it in the Senate when they felt they needed to, it is a blunt instrument and Senators need to be careful that they’re not putting themselves in a position of being treated like backbenchers in the Commons. Part of what needs to happen is clear lines of communication between the government and senators who want to speak to bills so that they have timelines in mind (and to be fair, some of them may have a lot on their plates right now). But there shouldn’t be an expectation that bills need to be sped through the Senate just because they’re government bills – they already get priority in all aspects of the Senate process, but if there is a sense of urgency, that needs to be communicated.

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QP: These are not the fundraisers you’re looking for

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The PM was present for a second day in a row, the benches were starting to empty out, with stacks of holiday cards on the desks of the other MPs present. Rona Ambrose led off, noting the visit of Joe Biden later in the day, but worried that with Trump about to slash taxes, and that Trudeau was too busy with photo ops and fundraisers. Trudeau responded by listing off the various things that this government has done to lower taxes and help families. Ambrose demanded a “real” low-tax plan, and Trudeau noted more things his government did like getting pipelines to tidewater approved. Ambrose switched to French to ask again, and Trudeau listed the many investments that he has attracted to the country. Ambrose changed back to English to pivot to the fundraising question, and Trudeau fell back to the rules talking points. For her last question, Ambrose accused him of breaking conflict of interest laws, and Trudeau assured her that he followed the rules. Thomas Mulcair was up next, accusing the PM of having become what he accused the Conservatives were doing, and Trudeau returned to his talking points on the rules. Mulcair wondered where the PM was last night, and when Trudeau only answered with his points about the rules, Mulcair prefaced his next question by saying that Trudeau was at a “cash-for-access” event. Mulcair moved onto the electoral reform file and worried that the government would unilaterally impose a system that would benefit their party. Trudeau responded with a plug for for MyDemocracy. Mulcair asked about the banking provisions in C-29, but Trudeau deflected with talks about tax cuts and benefits.

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Roundup: The importance of measuring outcomes

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The MyDemocracy.ca site went live yesterday, and immediately it became the subject of mockery because it asked questions related to outcomes rather than simplistic questions about which system of counting votes one preferred. Of course, focusing on the proportionality of votes to seats fixates on a facile notion of “representation” while ignoring the substance of what those votes actually mean, the effect on accountability, and the effect on our overall system of government. No, it won’t mean that whoever gets 50 percent of the votes will get 50 percent of the power. That’s a wrong-headed notion that ignores the ways in which our system operates currently, and the various roles that MPs have versus ministers.

Anyway, here’s Phil Lagassé explaining why the questions are the way they are (which are not some kind of People magazine pop-psychology quiz like Nathan Cullen constantly derides them as), and no, it’s not about ensuring that the fix is in for whatever the Liberals want – it’s designed to see what kinds of outcomes people are looking for and then working backwards to find an electoral system that favours those outcomes, and anyone who thinks that you can focus on electoral reform without looking at outcomes is deluding themselves.

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Roundup: Two yays and a nay

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The government announced its decisions on three pipelines yesterday – no to Northern Gateway (and a tanker ban on the north coast of BC was also reaffirmed), but yes to Kinder Morgan expansion and Line 3 to the United States. There are a lot of people not happy on either side – the Conservatives are upset that Northern Gateway also didn’t get approved, saying this was just a political decision, and the NDP and Greens (and the mayor of Vancouver) unhappy about the Kinder Morgan announcement, Elizabeth May going so far as to say that she’s willing to go to jail for protesting it.

None of this should be a surprise to anyone, as Trudeau has pretty much telegraphed these plans for weeks, if not months. And as for the critics, well, Robyn Urback makes the point that I do believe that Trudeau was going for:

In fact, Trudeau said as much yesterday in QP when he noted that they were sitting between a party demanding blanket approvals on everything, and another party opposed to approving anything, so that was where he preferred to be. He’s spending some political capital on this decision, including with some of his own caucus members who are not fans of the Kinder Morgan expansion, but he has some to spare, so we’ll see whether he’s picked up any support in the west, or lost any on the west coast when this all blows over.

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Senate QP: Opioids and bovine TB

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Today’s special guest star for Senate Question Period was Health Minister Jane Philpott, whose birthday it also happened to be. Senator Ogilvie led off, and he raised the social affairs committee’s report on dementia, which the full Senate endorsed last night, and he wanted to know if she was aware of its contents. Philpott said that she has had a preliminary briefing on the report and she personally has experience with the file, given her own father suffers from it and she was looking to working on the file together.

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QP: Demanding adult supervision

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Despite the fact that it was a Monday, none of the leaders save Elizabeth May were present in the Commons. Denis Lebel led off, blaming Chrystia Freeland for being unable to conclude the Canada-EU trade agreement, or any other trade agreement. Freeland insisted that Canada had done its job, but this was an internal dispute for the EU to resolve and then come back to Canada, and that she remained committed to it. Lebel repeated the question in English word-for-word, and Freeland elaborated on her answer. Lebel demanded that the PM head to Europe to salvage the deal — as though that was how negotiations work, and Freeland started getting feistier about the previous government’s record. Gerry Ritz picked up the torch, and took on a more bullying tone with a pair of questions that belittled Freeland for her visible emotion in Brussels, and saying that she needed the “adult supervision” of the Prime Minister. Freeland had none of it, and hit back on the previous government’s record on the stalled agreement and expensive signing ceremonies for a deal that wasn’t done. Murray Rankin led off for the NDP, and kept up the same topic, but from the angle that they needed to drop the investor-state dispute resolution mechanism. Freeland listed socialist governments in Europe who had signed onto the deal, trying to prove it’s not just an ideological divide. Niki Ashton then got up to decry the comments from the Finance Minister about “job churn,” decrying precarious work. MaryAnn Mihychuk said that the new work environment had a lot to do with technology but they were helping Canadians. Ashton demanded that Morneau and the PM attend their precarious job summit, to which Mihychuk reminded her that they have a youth workers council.

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Roundup: Fundraising fears

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It’s been a curious thing the last few days, watching in QP as the Conservatives are tearing their hair out over this Bill Morneau fundraiser in Halifax and raising the spectre of the wealthy contributing to politics, and calling Bill Morneau a millionaire like it’s a bad thing. As though suddenly the Conservative Party of Canada has become overrun by socialists or something. Really, it’s just their cheap populism run amok, trying to cast themselves as champions of ordinary Canadians (never mind that their policies disproportionately aided wealthier Canadians during their decade in power), and if they really were the champions of the working class, you would think the rest of their policies to date would be different (such as around labour unions or the Canada Pension Plan, or anything like that), but no. And if you think this is really a question about ethics or conflicts of interest, well, no, the Ethics Commissioner herself has stated that this fundraiser was above board, but hey, if they wanted to tighten the rules around fundraising, she’s been asking them to do that for years and after a decade in power, they wouldn’t do that either. So here we are, with a desperate attempt to frame perfectly above-board fundraising as “cash for access” and somehow comparable to the situation in Ontario, which it’s not. Meanwhile, Howard Anglin had a perfectly apropos tweet storm on this, so I’ll let him finish off here.

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