In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court has struck down the laws around prostitution that related to keeping a bawdy house, living off the avails, and communication for the purposes of prostitution (ruling here). They have given Parliament a year to come up with a new legislative regime before the laws are struck down entirely. Justice Minister Peter MacKay said that he’s disappointed by the finding that the existing laws were unconstitutional, while other Conservatives like Shelly Glover continue to say that these women are now without the “protection” that those laws offered – though the whole point of the ruling was that the laws were not protecting them, but were rather putting them in harm’s way. Part of the debate now moves to the question of how this will affect First Nations women in the sex trade in particular, but it would seem that harm reduction is a good step, particularly if the criminalization made them afraid to go to the police. Emmett Macfarlane writes about the significance of the finding and the way in which the Justices framed their concerns. David Akin looks at how the ruling will affect the various factions of the Conservative base, though it is likely to be more wailing and gnashing of teeth around supposed “judicial activism.” Brenda Cossman worries that the discussion will move toward how to criminalise prostitution rather than how to best regulate a decriminalised environment. Carissima Mathen points out that this court decision is in part because Parliament was negligent over the past three decades when they left these laws in place when they knew that a more comprehensive framework was needed. Andrew Coyne writes about just how very reasonable the decisions is, and how regulation and licensing may be the best choice going forward.
Tag Archives: John Baird
Roundup: Mourani renounces separatism
Pauline Marois has managed to do something particularly spectacular – she turned Maria Mourani from a dyed-in-the-wool separatist who ran for the leadership of the Bloc Québécois, into an avowed federalist. Indeed, Mourani announced yesterday that she is renouncing separatism and embracing Canada, because the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is the best way to protect minorities and Quebeckers as a whole, as opposed to the proposed Charter of Quebec Values. There remains no word if Mourani will seek to join another party – Thomas Mulcair said that she’d need to run as an NDP candidate before she could sit in their caucus – but it is a pretty big blow for the separatist movement.
Roundup: No CPP deal (for now)
The provincial and territorial finance minsters met with Jim Flaherty at Meech Lake yesterday, only for Flaherty to turn down the proposal that they were had a fair degree of consensus on. Flaherty insisted that that the global economy was still too fragile to implement this plan (though he did sound like maybe one day in the future he’d be more amenable), which left Ontario talking about going it alone. Ontario was also upset that in the transfer payment listings released that they were the one province destined to take a hit, which seems unprecedented as usually provinces are protected. Oh, but don’t worry, Flaherty says – their economy is growing. Um, okay. Manitoba also says that they may be out some $500 million because the last census took lace during major floods and up to 18,000 residents may have been missed, though StatsCan says that they double-checked their numbers. Going into the discussions were three different models on CPP expansion that were being discussed in the media, for the record.
Roundup: Duffy’s scorched earth policy
Well, that was…interesting. After Senator Carignan, the leader of the government in the Senate, spent over an hour laying out the case against Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau, and after a couple of other Senators from all sides expressed their reservations about this move and the lack of due process – let alone the setting of dubious precedents – the real bombshell dropped. Senator Duffy got up to speak to his defence, and he took the scorched earth approach, crying that he didn’t want to go along with this conspiracy “foisted” upon him, that he should have said no, that his livelihood was threatened, and that it all led back to Harper and the Senate leadership. If anything, it made it harder for Harper’s version of events to stand up to scrutiny, which the NDP spent the evening gleefully putting press release after press release about. It’s also going to make QP later today to be quite the show. Of course, what Duffy neglected to mention was his own wrongdoing. He protested that he hadn’t done anything wrong – which is not the case. Both the Deloitte audit and the subsequent RCMP investigation have shown that his residence is not, in fact, PEI, and that’s a constitutional requirement, no matter what LeBreton or Wright told him. A retired constitutional law professor from PEI says that Duffy never actually met the residency criteria, given that when the constitution says a Senator “shall be a resident of the province for which he is appointed,” and that shall means “must” in legal terms, Duffy’s qualification never was valid to begin with, which is how this whole sordid affair got started in the first place. While Duffy may be trying to play the victim, he is still under investigation, no matter that the cover-up has now become worse than the alleged crimes. The same with Brazeau, though there wasn’t really much cover-up there. We shouldn’t forget that, no matter the speeches they gave.
Roundup: Special rules to punish Justin Trudeau
Because they are never short of such ideas, the NDP held yet another press conference yesterday to announced new proposals to make Parliament “more accountable.” What that really was code for was “let’s try to punish some Liberals, and in particular, Justin Trudeau.” You see, of their three proposals, the main one was to ban MPs and Senators from “double-dipping by banning payment for work that is part of their job as an MP or Senator.” Which is news to me because nowhere in any legal or constitutional text does it say that it’s part of a Parliamentarian’s job to be a motivational speaker. In fact, that’s the reason why certain MPs and Senators sign up to speaker’s bureaux – in order to do these kinds of gigs without having to expend their parliamentary resources on it, and because they’re not talking about matters that are related to their parliamentary duties, but usually their careers before they were in public life (Marc Garneau’s astronaut career, or Larry Smith’s football commissioner career for example), it makes sense not to treat it as part of their duties. Oh, but Justin Trudeau was able to make a successful living at this and still accepted speaking gigs after he got elected, therefore it must be awful and should be banned. Never mind that he almost always made money for the organisations that he was invited to speak at (with that one notable exception, where it was a case of organisational failure), or that the Conflict of Interest and Ethics commissioner cleared these gigs – this is strictly a case of cheap punitive politics. There can be cases made for the other two suggestions – banning parliamentarians from being on corporate boards (but family businesses are okay), and strengthening the powers of the aforementioned Commissioner – but they are less about scandals than perception. Parliamentarians have any corporate board work cleared by an ethics regime, and sure it could be strengthened, but there has yet to be a demonstrated case of any kind of influence peddling, and one suspects it’s simply a case of “corporations bad!” at work. And as for strengthening the role of the Commissioner, well, it seems to me that it’s the NDP who are in charge of the Commons Ethics committee and this has yet to make it onto the agenda when the review of her legislation is a year overdue. Perhaps if they made an effort to actually focus on that rather than play partisan silly buggers and constantly demanding investigations into the wrongdoing of individual MPs, then perhaps they might make progress on such a change.
Roundup: Yet another Duffy revelation
Oh, Mike Duffy. As soon as RCMP investigators started digging through his financial records, something else caught their eye – some $65,000 paid out to one of Duffy’s friends as a consultant for which the friend admits to doing little or no work. (Insert all of the wise-asses of the world joking about how that’s all a Senator does – and those wise-asses would be wrong, but I digress). But more curious is that the money that was paid out seems to also have vanished, because that friend is also on disability and couldn’t take the money without losing his benefits, and his wife and son, listed as president and director of his company, aren’t talking. Add to all of this is the look into Patrick Brazeau’s housing claims, for which his Gatineau neighbours thought he worked from home because he was there so often. They’re also investigating his tax filings, as he listed his address on his former father-in-law’s reserve even though he didn’t live there. Kady O’Malley’s search through the court affidavits and comparing them to the timeline turns up what she thinks may be references to those emails being turned over to the RCMP along with some redacted diaries.
Roundup: Abusing the PBO’s mandate
It’s official – MPs are now abusing the mandate of the Parliamentary Budget Officer. A report was released from his office yesterday, which announced the costing of the Conservatives’ election promise to create a fitness tax credit for older adults once the budget was balanced. That’s right – MPs were getting him to check on an election promise that is years away from seeing the light – probably not until after the next election. Strange, but this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with independent budget forecasts or help in deciphering the supply cycle. In fact, this is little more than MPs fobbing off their homework to the PBO so that they can wrap themselves in his independent-and-therefore-credible analysis. Because math is hard! Is it any wonder that the government has become suspicious of the way in which the PBO has been operating, when opposition MPs are using it in such a way? It doesn’t matter that this particular report came from a Conservative MP either, because it’s still dealing with election promises rather than forecasts or the estimates and it still plays the independent-and-therefore-credible game. It also shouldn’t be a personal calculation service, as Galipeau was using the PBO in that manner before he “brought a recommendation” to Flaherty in advance of the budget – he has a caucus research bureau for these sorts of things. This is also an argument for not making the PBO an independent officer of parliament, because he would have no accountability to anyone at that point. When this kind of abuse by MPs for partisan gain becomes his modus operandi rather than the actual work he’s supposed to be doing then it’s hard to see how this won’t become a major problem for the way that our system of government functions.
Roundup: Victory for the Media Party
Toronto Centre Liberals and New Democrats have spoken, and the Media Party has won out! Journalists Linda McQuaig and Chrystia Freeland have won their respective nominations for the NDP and Liberals respectively. As both have written about income inequality, and both want to muscle in on the debate over the “plight” of the middle class (which may not really exist, if the economic data is to be believed, but shh, don’t tell anyone because you’re trying to win those votes), but it will set up for an interesting by-election once it is finally called, and it will make for even more of an interesting 2015 when Toronto Centre gets split into two, and their challengers can try to claim one of the other nominations in the redistribution. Pundit’s Guide looks when those by-elections might be called, especially now that the Conservatives have set themselves up for acclaimed candidates in up to three of the ridings up for grabs.
Roundup: Pamela Wallin’s questionable claims
So, that was the audit report into Senator Pamela Wallin’s expenses – that she had a pattern of claims that were questionable even though she said that she was told they were acceptable (such as for attending functions at Guelph University, where she served as chancellor), that she had retroactively tried to change her calendar – supposedly on the advice of Senator Tkachuk, which he denied – and her belief that they applied rules retroactively is bunk. In fact, it’s addressed directly in the report that they didn’t, and there are even handy charts as to what rules were in place at what point, where they overlap, and so on. (That hasn’t stopped her few defenders, including Senator Hugh Segal, from trying to repeat this fiction in the hopes that it will become a truism). Oh, and Wallin spends most of her time in Toronto, for what it’s worth. It was enough that the Internal Economy committee has decided to forward this to the RCMP to let them sort out the discrepancies to see if there was anything untoward or deliberate, which now makes it all four embattled senators under RCMP scrutiny. Other Senators are taking exception to Wallin describing herself as a “different kind of Senator” who’s more “activist,” which let’s face it, is pretty self-aggrandising, given that most of them are active in their communities and in promoting causes. (I muse more about that here). PostMedia offers a primer on Senate expenses. And while some critics are (finally) pointing to the fact that this should affect the credibility of the Prime Minister given that three of the four are his appointees, it has been sadly pointed out that the focus remains on the Chamber itself and not the PM, which is a problem, as he is person who is supposed to be held to account.
Roundup: Mulcair’s summer tour
While in St. John’s, NL, Thomas Mulcair claimed that he won’t raise personal taxes (because apparently people don’t pay for corporate taxes) and that nobody had ever asked him that before (not true). He also pointed to a graveyard on a map and said that the Liberals are headed there – because that’s classy and raises the tone of debate! He then moved onto PEI to kick off his summer tour of constitutional vandalism (aka advocating Senate abolition) and offered nothing but bluster and misleading characterisations.
The Senate’s internal economy committee promises that they won’t “monkey around” with Pamela Wallin’s audit, but it may be damaging enough that they might consider recalling the full Senate shortly to deal with it.