Tag Archives: Jason Kenney

Roundup: Mandate letters and the minister for everything

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Yesterday was the day that Justin Trudeau released the mandate letters for his ministers, giving us a glimpse as to what their marching orders will be (which is still a fairly novel transparency and accountability measure in this country, it needs to be said). The National Post counted up some 288 projects listed in those mandates, some of them holdovers from the previous parliament (which isn’t surprising considering that  many of them were fairly ambitious and transformational and were not achievable within four years). But there were also a number of things missing from several of those letters that should have been dealt with – particularly on the justice file.

As with the previous parliament, each of the letters has an identical preamble, advising the ministers to “govern in a positive, open and collaborative way,” because it’s a hung parliament and all of that. In terms of specific points in the letters, there are issues like discussions with province over pharmacare, shortening wait times for airport screenings, tax cuts for green tech companies, reforming the medical assistance in dying laws, advancing international efforts to ban “killer robots,” procuring new fighter jets and modernizing NORAD. One of the more alarming mentions was in Bill Morneau’s letter, advising him to review and possibly modify the financial stress test applied to mortgages, which is a Very Bad Thing, and means that the real estate lobby is winning its air war over the good common sense of the Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. (Seriously – there is no excuse for encouraging bad debt).

And then there is Chrystia Freeland’s letter, which is expansive and makes her in essence a “minister of everything” who is assigned to basically work with a number of other ministers to advance their priorities, whether it’s carbon pricing, getting resources to market, breaking down internal trade barriers, facilitating pharmacare talks, working on pan-Canadian childcare, gun control, regional economic development agencies, and advancing reconciliation. This leaves questions as to what exactly Trudeau will be doing while Freeland does all the work – leaving her to either take the fall while Trudeau gets to take the credit. This having been said, it’s just as likely that she wanted a full plate of projects rather than simply spending her weeks heading to provincial capitals to meet with premiers once the New NAFTA is ratified, but she certainly has her work cut out for her, ensuring that enough of these promises are fulfilled before the inevitable early election call that comes in a hung parliament.

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Roundup: A promise weaselled out on

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A very important bill has been introduced in the Senate, that has been attempted on more than a few occasions now, and it’s a sign of a promise that the Liberals weaselled out on in the past. The bill? To restore Parliament’s ability to control government borrowing by way of votes – you know, like Parliament is supposed to do as part of their job of holding government to account by means of controlling the public purse. You see, back in the Harper era, they hid the change in one of their massive omnibus budget bills that stripped Parliament of the ability to vote on new borrowing, and instead turned it over to Cabinet. Senators caught it too late, and the bill passed, and whoops, no more ability for Parliament to hold government to account for it any longer. Senator Wilfred Moore introduced a bill to revert this practice on a couple of occasions, and Senator Joseph Day carried on with it in the previous Parliament, and has just reintroduced it in this one.

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The Liberals were all in favour of this back when they were in opposition, and made a big show about promising to restore this to Parliament – and then they weaselled out on it. What they did instead was introduced a debt ceiling of $1.168 trillion, after which Parliament would need to vote to extend it, and said that Cabinet only needed to report to Parliament every three years about the money it has borrowed, starting in 2020. Let me reiterate – they weaselled out of this promise, and at least there are senators who are alive to why this is important for Parliament.

These are principles that go back to Runnymede, and the Magna Carta in 1215, and made more explicit in 1688 when the king wasn’t able to borrow money without Parliament’s consent. The Conservatives broke this important principle of Parliament for their convenience. That the Liberals have refused to act on their promise to restore it is a black mark against them.

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Roundup: Kenney’s shock-and-awe tour

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Jason Kenney is in town on his shock-and-awe tour, with eight ministers and countless staff in tow, intent on making the province’s “Fair Deal” case to their federal counterparts – while those federal ministers smile and nod and say “yes, dear.” Meanwhile, certain credulous journalists and columnists are swallowing Kenney’s presentation whole, as he brings charts and graphs and rattles off figures that they don’t bother to question, never mind that he has a well-known and well documented propensity for lying with these very same facts and figures – and then gets terribly indignant if you call him on it, and will keep reiterating them, bulldozing over his doubters. And we’re going to get even more of that during the media rounds later today – mark my words.

To that end, Kenney’s ever-evolving list of demands continue to be largely unreasonable (as said credulous journalists and pundits nod and say “They’re perfectly reasonable” when they’re not) – things like demanding a solid timeline for the completion of the Trans Mountain pipeline (impossible if there are further court challenges, and Kenney is lying when he says there are mechanisms), along with bringing in First Nations as equity partners (there is little point until the project is completed, which was the whole point of buying the pipeline in the first place – to adequately de-risk it); his $2.4 billion demand for “fiscal stabilization,” some of which he plans to put into remediating orphan wells (never mind the Supreme Court has ruled that these are the responsibility of the companies who owned them); substantial repeals of environmental legislation (because the failed system under Harper that only resulted in litigation worked so well); changing rules so that oil and gas companies can raise revenues (reminder: flow-through shares are de facto federal subsidies); and recognising Alberta’s efforts at methane reduction (I’m going with “trust, but verify” on this one, because Kenney likes to lie about the province’s other carbon reduction efforts). So yeah – “perfectly reasonable.” Sure, Jan.

Bill Morneau, for his part, says he’s willing to talk to his provincial counterparts at their upcoming meeting about fiscal stabilization, but isn’t making promises. While the premiers all signed onto this notion at the Council of the Federation meeting last week, it was because it’s federal dollars and not dealing with equalization which could affect their bottom lines – and Kenney’s supposedly “conciliatory” tone in which he says he’s willing to accept fiscal stabilization changes over equalization is likely a combination of the realization that he’s getting to traction from the other premiers, whose support he would need to make any changes, and the fact that Trudeau publicly called Scott Moe’s bluff on equalization reform when he said that if Moe can bring a proposal forward signed off on by all of the premiers then they would discuss it – something that isn’t going to happen. This all having been said, it also sounds a lot like Kenney wants the rest of Canada to bankroll the province for their decision not to implement a modest sales tax which would not only have solved their deficit but would have provided them with the fiscal stability to help weather the current economic hard times – but that’s an inconvenient narrative. Better to drum up a fake separatist threat and try to play the hero instead.

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Roundup: Enter the QP scolds

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With the return of Parliament comes the inevitable return of the sanctimonious commentary around the behaviour of MPs in the House of Commons. Already we had Scott Gilmore insisting that MPs “not be assholes,” and this eyeroll-inducing plea from Tamara Miller that goes on about grade eight students. What Miller seems to forget is that the House of Commons is not a classroom. Question Period is not a lecture or a seminar course where all sides discuss this week’s assigned reading. It’s political theatre, and it’s an exercise in holding government to account, and that isn’t always done with dry recitations of scripts and polite golf claps.

The other thing that I keep needing to drill into people is that Question Period is not the totality of what happens in the Commons. The rest of the day you are more likely to be in danger of narcolepsy than you are of hearing heckling or other boorish behaviour. Committees are generally fairly well behaved, but if there’s a contentious issue then parties will send in their ringers to put on a show when they know people are watching. It’s political theatre. Is it always pleasant? No. But most of the hours of the day aren’t anywhere near what happens in QP, and that’s fine. There is also nothing wrong with heckling per se – some of it is very legitimate, whether it’s cross-talk when ministers are saying things that aren’t true, or when they’re not answering the question but rather just reading non sequitur talking points – as happens too often. I don’t think that MPs should just sit on their hands and be silent when they’re being spun or insulted to their faces by some of what governments – regardless of stripe – pull. Does this mean that all behaviour is acceptable? No – there is a lot of behaviour that is more akin to jeering, hooting baboons than to parliamentarians, and yes, some of it is sexist and bullying, but not all of it, but it should be incumbent upon parties and the Speaker to police the excesses, but the constant tut-tutting about any heckling is frankly gag-inducing.

This having been said, should MPs behave better in QP? Sure. The clapping ban the Liberals instituted helps tremendously (when it’s obeyed – it had pretty much broken down toward the end of the last parliament), and frankly, it makes Scheer and Singh look terribly insecure by comparison if they require ovations every time they stand up to speak when Trudeau doesn’t. But honestly, I can’t think of anything worse than the way that these scolds imagine that QP should be.

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Roundup: Payette’s personal contributions

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With some adjustments to the pomp and ceremony to accommodate Parliament’s new dual-building status, the Speech from the Throne went ahead yesterday, and the speech itself was not all that exciting. There was a big focus on the environment and climate change, a whole section on reconciliation with Indigenous people, and this government’s watch words of “middle class prosperity,” and the government sprinkled just enough hints that could mollify the other opposition parties if they were looking for something to justify their support, though both Andrew Scheer and Jagmeet Singh came out to puff their chests out and declare that they weren’t happy with what was in the speech.

More concerning was the fact that the Governor General herself contributed to writing the speech, which is unusual, and dare I say a problem. Her role is to read the speech on behalf of the government, and there are centuries of parliamentary evolution as to why this is the case, but her having an active hand in writing the speech – even if it’s the introduction (and in particular the notions of everyone being in the same space-time continuum on our planetary spaceship), it’s highly irregular and problematic because it means that Payette is once again overreaching as to what her role in things actually is, and that she’s unhappy with it being ceremonial (a failure of this government doing their due diligence in appointing her when she is not suited to the task). While one of my fellow journalists speculated that this may have been what was offered in exchange for her having to read a prepared speech (something she does not like to do), it’s still a problem with lines being crossed.

And then there was the reporting afterward. When Andrew Scheer said that he was going to propose an amendment to the Speech during debate, Power & Politics in particular ran with it as though this was novel or unusual, and kept hammering on the fact that Scheer is going to propose an amendment! The problem? Amendments are how Speech from the Throne debates actually work. It’s part of the rules that over the course of the debate, the Official Opposition will move an amendment (usually something to effect of “delete everything after this point and let’s call this government garbage”) to the Address in Reply to the Speech, and the third party will propose their own sub-amendment, and most of the time, they all get voted on, and the government carries the day – because no government is going to fall on the Throne Speech. There is nothing novel or special about this, and yet “Ooh, he’s going to move an amendment!” Get. A. Grip.

And now, the hot takes on the Speech, starting with Heather Scoffield, who calls out that the Speech neglected anything around economic growth. Susan Delacourt makes note of how inward-focused this Speech is compared to its predecessor. Chris Selley lays out some of Trudeau’s improbable tasks in the Speech, as well as the one outside of it which is to play a supporting role to Freeland and her task at hand. Paul Wells clocks the vagueness in the Speech, but also the fact that they are setting up for games of political chicken in the months and years ahead.

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Roundup: Contemplating compromised committees

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As the summoning of the new Parliament draws ever closer, we’re seeing more stories about the procedural intricacies of the first few sitting days, and the coming confidence vote on or before the 10th because of the Supply cycle and the need to pass the Supplementary Estimates before that date. Fair enough – those can be expected to pass pretty handily because nobody is going to want to head right back to the polls (and I wouldn’t expect the Governor General to grant an immediate election either – the developing convention is waiting at least six months, providing there is another viable governing party, though that would be the real trick given the current seat maths).

This all having been said, there was something in this interview with Pablo Rodriguez, the new Government House Leader, which sticks in my craw, and that’s the talk about possibly undoing the rule changes that prevent parliamentary secretaries from being voting members on Commons committees, and I. Just. Cannot. Even.

While the chances of this happening are fairly slim, given that it would require opposition support and they are unlikely to get it, it’s still crazy-making. This reflex to go super political in a hung parliament is understandable but deeply frustrating because it undermines the whole raison d’être of Parliament, which is to hold the government to account, and committees are one very big piece of the accountability puzzle. Parliamentary secretaries should have no business even being near committees because it undermines their independence. It’s bad enough that under the previous parliament, they were still on the committee in a non-voting capacity, but it still allowed ministers’ offices to attempt to stage manage what went on (to varying degrees, depending on which committee it was). Having the parliamentary secretaries as voting members simply turns committees into the branch plants of ministers’ offices, and we saw this play out for the better part of a decade under Stephen Harper. Committees are not there to simply take orders from the minister and waste everyone’s time, and it would be hugely disappointing if the Liberals returned to that way of thinking simply because it’s a hung parliament. If we think that the only time to let Parliament function properly is if there’s a majority for the government, then it’s a sad state of affairs for our democracy.

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Roundup: Poisoning the free market well

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Last week, former Reform Party leader Preston Manning stated that conservatives across the country need to get their acts together when it comes to real environmental plans – but then made the boggling case that the Liberals and NDP had “poisoned” the notion of carbon prices, so those were off the table. I can barely even. Stephen Harper called for carbon pricing in the form of a cap-and-trade system when Stéphane Dion was calling for a carbon tax, until Harper decided that doing nothing was preferable to the actual decent plan that he had a hand in developing. For Manning to blame the Liberals and NDP for poisoning the well is more than a little rich – particularly considering that you have a center-left party adopting free market principles in carbon pricing, which you would think would overjoy a small-c conservative. But no.

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Meanwhile, the story about those conservative premiers who signed a Memorandum of Understanding about developing Small Modular Reactors? Well, it turns out that the MOU is basically about declaring interest in the hopes of forcing the federal government to invest in their research and development – so that they don’t have to put any of their own dollars up front. Add to that the temptation for them to treat this as a form of technosalvation – that they can cite it as the excuse for why they’re not doing more to reduce emissions in the short-term – and it all looks very much to be a big PR exercise. (Look surprised!)

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Roundup: Pride vs St. Patrick’s Day

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Andrew Scheer’s new deputy leader, Leona Alleslev, started off her new role with a bang this weekend by doing the media rounds, and when asked about Scheer’s continued refusal to attend Pride parades, Alleslev responded with “Have we asked anybody if they marched in a St. Patrick’s Day parade?”

Oh no she better don’t!

Alleslev apologised several hours later, but by then you had a lot of Conservatives completely outraged that this was the kind of thing that was going to lose them the next election (and renewing the calls for Scheer’s resignation). While the point was made that she shouldn’t have needed to apologise because it was Scheer’s lines she was parroting, it’s difficult to imagine how anyone would have even for a second thought that there was an equivalence to the two. And Scheer’s own campaign communications director started a lengthy tweet thread to show all the various ways in which Scheer paid lip service to every religious and cultural event out there – except Pride, which is something that speaks volumes.

Alleslev also went on to insinuate that those who raised questions about Scheer’s leadership – and the numbers are growing, as are the profile of raising those questions – are somehow being “disloyal” to the party. And this irritates me, because this notion that parties are supposed to be personality cults for leaders is toxic and antithetical to how our system operates. The leader is not the party. The party is more than the person who leads it at any one moment, and it would be great if everyone could get on the same page about this because it’s kind of embarrassing for everyone who is carrying on otherwise.

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Roundup: Lowest cost and least economically-damaging

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The Ecofiscal Commission released their final report yesterday, and said that Canada will have to increase carbon prices to $210 per tonne by 2030 is the cheapest and most effective way to reach our climate targets, though certainly not the only way – regulation or subsidies are also possible, but less effective and far more costly. Increasing carbon prices would also mean increased rebates under the current federal backstop (but provinces could certainly recycle revenues in other ways, and some provinces could entirely eliminate their income taxes with said revenue), which would have other knock-on economic effects, but for simplicity and cost, they point toward carbon prices. (It’s worth noting that this analysis didn’t cover the output-based pricing system for large emitters, which helps take things like trade-exposure into account to provide those industries more time to adjust).

Predictably, the Conservatives freaked out and started a new round of social media shitposts about how this was the Liberal plan all along, and they would prevent the cost of everything from going up, etcetera, etcetera, but that’s a dishonest position because other models, like regulation and subsidies, drive up the costs just as much, but they tend to be passed onto consumers in a hidden way, whereas straight-up carbon pricing is transparent and makes it easier for consumers to make better choices (which addresses the demand-side of carbon emissions).

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To that end, here is the Ecofiscal Commission’s Chris Ragan making the case in his own words, while Heather Scoffield suggests that premiers Kenney and Ford should be thanking Trudeau for imposing the federal carbon backstop because it’s a less economically damaging way of reducing emissions than their plans to date have been.

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Roundup: More knives for Scheer

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Even more knives have come out for Andrew Scheer – on a couple of different flanks. From the social conservatives, Scheer didn’t defend their interests strongly enough in the election and now they want him gone. This in the face of more moderate conservatives looking for him to join the twenty-first century on issues like support for LGBT rights. And then, on Power & Politics, Kory Teneycke – one-time director of communications to Stephen Harper and maestro behind Sun TV – said that Scheer should resign and if he wants his job back, to run for it again in a full-blown leadership contest. What was even more interesting in those comments was his contention that a leadership review is not enough because those are easily enough manipulated by those loyal to the current leader – and he’s right.

The problem, of course, is that so long as we continue to insist on running our leadership contests in this bastardized model, leaders will continue to claim democratic legitimacy to marginalize their caucus, ignore the grassroots, and not face any meaningful accountability, so it’s hard to see how the outcome of such a contest could be any different in the broader scheme of things. There are deep problems that need to be addressed in our parties, but nobody wants to actually say so.

Meanwhile, not only has Scheer fired his chief of staff and his director of communications, but Hamish Marshall, his campaign manager, has come to the end of his contract and it doesn’t sound like he’s interested in renewing it anytime soon. It remains to be seen if this kind of house-cleaning is enough bloodletting for the caucus that remains frustrated by their election loss, but it may not be given the knives that have been out for Scheer in a number of different directions.

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