Tag Archives: Kellie Leitch

Roundup: The ricochet into Canada

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I had idly wondered how long the Trump victory in the United States would take to start showing ricochets in Canada, and apparently it was minutes, as in the middle of the night, Kellie Leitch’s campaign was already putting out fundraising emails drawing comparisons, particularly around their mutual bashing of “elites.” Because Leitch, you see, apparently isn’t an elite, never mind the fact that she’s a paediatric orthopaedic surgeon in Muskoka, a university professor, and former cabinet minister whose was the protégé of the finance minister. No sir, nothing elite about that, because she had to compete with the “biggest old boys’ club” out there, being surgeons, so there. Um, okay. (Incidentally, Leitch previously didn’t want to be compared to Trump, which she kept vacillating over during last night’s leadership debate). And that elite-bashing was quickly picked up by bother other leadership candidates, and others in the party like Tony Clement (who apparently also doesn’t think he’s an elite, despite all evidence to the contrary).

Michael Chong, however, rejected Leitch’s move as being antithetical to the “big tent” Conservative movement that the party is trying to become. Chris Alexander also sounded a cautious note, for what it’s worth, but Lisa Raitt’s tone is less decisive.

Michelle Rempel, however, seems cognisant enough about the trap of demagoguery when it comes to dealing with difficult issues and cautions against importing that ethos to Canada. Rempel also relayed some of her experiences of what she saw during her recent visit to the States, and the alarming levels of discontent among the populace.

Meanwhile, here’s Justin Trudeau’s statement on working together with a Trump presidency. Thomas Mulcair, on the other hand, wants Trudeau to call out Trump. And over in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn is taking on that message of public anger about the “governing elite” and trying to make hay of it, so no, this kind of rhetoric is not endemic to the right.

In terms of fallout, we hear from prominent Canadian women like Kim Campbell, Elizabeth May and Michelle Rempel. Shannon Proudfoot writes about how brutally appropriate the end of the campaign ended up being. Bob Fife notes how the Trudeau PMO has had to scramble to adjust to this new reality. Robyn Urback looks at how the Democrats bungled the election, while the Guardian features a column about how liberals helped Trump’s victory. Anne Kingston writes about Trump winning his war against the media. Paul Wells writes about next steps for Trudeau, while Chantal Hébert wonders how much of Trudeau’s agenda is affected by this change, particularly in areas like climate change, or foreign policy (per John Geddes). Both Paul McLeod and Susan Delacourt saw similarities in the way Trump and Trudeau ran their campaigns. Here’s a look at how pundits and pollsters got things wrong, and Andrew Coyne writes a particularly poignant piece about how Trump’s ability to throw out the rules has vindicated some of the worst elements and impulses, and worries what this signals going forward.

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Roundup: Postcards for values

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Yesterday the National Post reported that the government is planning on sending a postcard to every household in the nation and asking them to head to a website to answer questions about their democratic values. Immediately the Twitter-verse went into full-snark mode, wondering why the government would do this rather than hold a referendum, and wondering at the cost of such an exercise, but there were a few phrases that struck me as I read it, and that goes back to the fact that they’re asking Canadians what values they’re looking for in their voting system as opposed to asking them to choose a system. Why does that matter? Because it basically allows the government to justify whatever decision they end up making by selling it as living up to the greatest number of the “values” they got feedback on. And when the committee report comes back a deadlock with several dissenting reports (as it inevitably will), the government will be further empowered to finally suffocate the whole ill-fated enterprise and list all of the ways the current system conforms to the majority of the “values” that they polled Canadians on, and lo, we shall never speak of this again. Or something like that.

Meanwhile, PEI had their plebiscite on electoral reform and with a stunningly low voter turnout of 36 percent even with several days of voting, lowering the age to 16, and giving people a myriad of options to vote including online, it came down to several preferential rounds where Mixed-Member Proportional won a very narrow 52 percent win. This again translated into two very different sets of reactions – elation from the PR crowd for whom this validates their crusading on the topic, never mind that the mandate for said system is really, really weak (between the low turnout and the fact that it took several drop-off rounds to get that bare majority vote), or the fact that the plebiscite was by definition non-binding and there is more than enough opportunity for the government to get out of it (and really, I’m not sure that such a low vote is mandate enough to make such an important change). The other reaction was a sense of somewhat smugness from proponents of a referendum on electoral reform at the federal level, basically telling their opponents (who insist that such a referendum would favour the status quo) that they’re wrong. But if you think about it, such a low turnout and the fact that MMP barely squeaked past may indeed be an indication that there was more of a desire for the status quo than is being acknowledged. Nevertheless, both groups are going to be insufferable for days to come.

https://twitter.com/katemckenna8/status/795799811345842176

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Roundup: The fiscal update’s hidden gem

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The fall fiscal update was delivered yesterday – in the House of Commons, it must be noted – and not unsurprisingly there are deeper deficits projected while the government pledges funds to kickstart an infrastructure bank in the hopes of attracting foreign investment. Oh, and “no path back to balance” is the phrase you’re going to hear an awful lot in the coming weeks. Probably ad nauseum. Oh, and “privatization,” as the NDP now consider the infrastructure banks (because hey, we might have to start paying for the roads and bridges that this bank might fund and we couldn’t have that). That having been said, the debt-to-GDP ratio will be the government’s saving grace when it comes to the size of the deficit, as it should remain relatively stable, while still coming in at the lowest in the G7 by a significant margin. So there’s that.

This all having been said, there were other elements in the update that bear mentioning, and which should not be overlooked, which are some of the changes to the way that Parliament operates. They’re going to make the Parliamentary Budget Officer a full Officer of Parliament (which I have mixed feelings about because this solidifies his status as an unaccountable officer for MPs to fob their homework off onto while hiding behind his analyses as “objective proof” of their partisan accusation), they’re adding new independence to Statistics Canada, and they’re going to open up the Board of Internal Economy. But more important than any of that is they’re going to do something about the Estimates cycle.

Why does this matter? Because MPs are supposed to hold the government to account by controlling the public purse, but over succeeding decades, the ways in which they do that – the Estimates and supply cycle – have become so corrupted that they no longer follow the budget cycle, their accounting methods no longer match the Public Accounts so that they can’t track spending, and in many cases, MPs just vote on the Estimates in a series of votes with zero scrutiny (leaving that job up to the Senate – naturally). So if this government is promising to put the Estimates and Budget cycle back in sync, and to clean up the discrepancies between the Estimates and the Public Accounts, that is a Very Big Deal. It means that it will let MPs do their jobs like they’re supposed to do. (We’ll see if any of them do, especially with an empowered PBO for them to fob that homework off onto, but this will certainly help him too). It’s restoring some of the proper functioning of our parliamentary democracy, and we shouldn’t ignore it.

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/793611413419880448

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Roundup: A new Supreme Court appointment

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The government announced their new pick for the Supreme Court of Canada, and lo and behold, it’s Justice Malcolm Rowe of the Newfoundland & Labrador Court of Appeal. It’s a little unexpected considering what they were signalling in terms of looking for more diversity on the bench, but they managed to find a bilingual justice in Newfoundland & Labrador, and they get to pat themselves on the back for making the first appointment to the top court from that province, so they’ve made history! Also, they’ve respected the constitutional convention around the regional composition of the court, and for that, the Conservatives have declared victory – because it was totally their non-binding supply day motion that forced the government’s hand! (Also, appointment panel head Kim Campbell seemed pleased that this was the choice from the short list that they submitted).

So Atlantic Canada is happy, and the government is making a big deal out of its new process including transparency by publishing the application form that Rowe submitted with his answers to a number of questions around his thoughts on significant decisions that he has been a part of, and his thoughts on the role of the judiciary in the legal system, which is unprecedented. As well, next week both the justice minister and Campbell will face a parliamentary committee to explain their choice (thus preserving the committee role of holding cabinet to account), to be followed by a Q&A session with Rowe to be led by a law professor with both MPs and Senators asking the questions. So transparency without devolving into an American-style “confirmation” process. At this rate, Rowe should be on the top court by early November, which means he’ll have missed about half of the fall session of the court (which isn’t as bad as the vacancy issue caused by the Nadon appointment where the court sat 8 in a number of cases). Of course, Rowe’s answers are already provoking some criticism, though it’s not necessarily shared by all members of the legal community. (Incidentally, you can see Carissima Mathen’s Power Play interview on the appointment here).

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/788201168585560064

So what of the signals the government was sending that they wanted an Indigenous judge, preferably a woman? Well I do think reality did set in when they faced pressure from their Atlantic caucus and the premiers to ensure that the seat remained an Atlantic one. It may well have been them floating a trial balloon about abandoning the convention, but it may also have been a warning. There are two more seats opening up in the next few years (barring deaths or retirements), being Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin (a Western seat) and Justice Rosalie Abella (an Ontario seat), and in both of those cases, the government is saying to the legal community that there had damn well better be some more diverse, bilingual candidates ready to fill those seats when the time comes – something that was more difficult to find in Atlantic Canada owing to their demographics. We’ll see in the next few years, of course, but I think the warning has been delivered.

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Roundup: A dying brand of politics

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As tributes to Jim Prentice continue to roll in, we see one in particular from Michael Den Tandt, who says that the particular blend of civility and competence that Prentice had is becoming a fading quality in politics, not only looking south of the border to the giant tire fire that they call their presidential election, but also toward the Conservative leadership race in this country. Why is it fading? Because that kind of politics isn’t selling to the angry populist wave that seems to have captured so many imaginations, and in that race, it’s less Maxime Bernier who is capturing that angry populism (despite his claiming the “Mad Max” label by being “mad” about so many government problems) than it is by Kellie Leitch and her campaign manager, Nick Kouvalis. And case in point, Leitch officially launched her campaign on the weekend (remember, it was just an exploration beforehand), and lo, was it full of angry populist rhetoric that doesn’t make a lot of sense when you actually listen to it. Leitch continues to insist that she’s not anti-immigrant – she just goes about completely mischaracterising this country’s immigration system (you know, which the government that she was a part of had an opportunity to apparently do something about over the last decade and apparently didn’t), and pits “good” immigrants against “bad” ones – which, to be fair, is something Jason Kenney got really good at over his time as the cultural outreach guy in the Conservative party. Suffice to say, here are Justin Ling’s tweet’s from Leitch’s launch, and if it sounds like her going down the angry populist checklist, it’s because that’s what it pretty much is – which lends a little more credence to what Den Tandt was saying about Prentice’s breed of politician fading away.

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Roundup: Poisoning the expenses well

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With the story out yesterday morning about Rona Ambrose’s expenses claimed while staying in Stornoway, I think we’re starting to approach peak ridiculousness with the growing war over expenses, and accusations of poor judgment across the board. That the Conservatives have spent the past two days pushing a non-story about Dominic LeBlanc giving a speech at an event sponsored by a law firm with Irving connections, claiming poor judgment and a conflict of interest where clearly none actually exists (it’s not a fundraiser, no decisions are being made, it’s a speech, FFS), it’s desperation and grasping at straws.

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The bigger problem, however, is the corrosive effect this continues to have, fuelling not only the cheap, petty outrage that voters are being encouraged to feel anytime government spends money, but it is starting to burn the very real bridges for why we have expense regimes in the first place.

https://twitter.com/aaronwherry/status/781863718799941632

Like Rob Silver above, Wherry may be exhibiting his trademark sarcasm, he’s got a point – we are rapidly approaching the point where We The Media have stoked such public opposition to legitimate expense claims by clutching our pearls at seemingly large numbers presented without context while crying “Judgment!” and “Taxpayers’ money!” that people are developing the wrong impression. We had NDP MPs last parliament declaring that if we’re to have senators, then they should all work as volunteers, and lately I’ve had jackasses barking at me on the Twitter Machine saying that senior political staff should also be volunteers. We’re half-a-step away from people demanding it of MPs.

Which gets back to the whole point of expense regimes in the first place – so that it acts as an equaliser, so that you don’t have to be inordinately wealthy in the first place in order to participate in political life, be it as an MP or senator (or senior political staffer, apparently). Do we really think it’s for the best that we return to an era where only the wealthy can afford to participate in political life and let them dictate policy for us? Or where a lack of an expense regime would encourage actual graft (as opposed to this nonsense we’re currently getting the vapours over with moving expenses and whatnot) from politicians to help make themselves financially whole from the expense of doing their jobs? Seriously, we need to grow up and stop poisoning the well because we don’t want to go where this road leads. Only certain doom lies that way.

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Roundup: The new Senate hurdles

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Just how MPs should deal with an increasingly independent – and assertive – Senate is the question posed by former MP Bryon Wilfert and his firm partner Paul Hillier, and it’s a question that I’m really not sure that Justin Trudeau adequate considered when he embarked on this path to modernization. While they note that no longer having senators in caucus limits the closed-door opportunity to hear and debate government proposals, I will state that they overplay the concern about the ability to whip those votes. There has never been any formal power to whip senators’ votes, but they relied primarily on sentimentality or affiliation, and sometimes senators went along, and sometimes they very much didn’t. That’s one of the reasons why there remains a bit of a taint around the post-2008 Harper appointees, because most of them came in being told that they could be whipped, and they behaved as though they could – up until fracture points around the contentious bill C-377, and then they rebelled against their Senate leadership (and it’s not a coincidence that Marjory LeBreton resigned as Government Leader shortly thereafter). They also point to the very real problem that with so many new MPs, and with the Liberal senators no longer in caucus, the personal relationships between parliamentarians that would normally exist no longer do, and that does start to exacerbate the problem of driving legislation through the Senate.

Where I see their proposed solution as being problematic is the suggestion that committee chairs be the new agents to set the legislative pace and of trying to build consensus. Why I think this is a problem is that the point of committees is to hold the government to account, which is why ministers are so frequently called to appear before them. If the chair is acting as the agent of the government, rather than of the committee itself, it creates something of a conflict in their roles. As well, many of the committee chairs are from the Conservatives (not that the Senate Liberals are the same party as the government, but there is an assumption of greater sympathy despite the fact that the relationship has been pretty testy to date). Trying to co-opt those chairs into being government agents to drive consensus would seem to be antithetical to the purposes of having an opposition, and its accountability functions. It also puts those chairs in the awkward position of having stakeholder groups trying to court them in order to get their support in rounding up senators to support the bills – groups that would also want to come before committee to plead their cases when the bills get to said committees, which again presents a bit of a conflict. If anything, I do think this highlights the value of having caucuses for organisational purposes, and arranging these meetings – and yes, the Independent Senators Group could possibly host these same kinds of stakeholder discussions without trying to come to an internal consensus, allowing their members to make their own minds up (and to date, they have operated on a rule that anyone trying to get support does so outside of their meeting room). It will continue to take getting used to, but it will continue to take some serious thought about what roles we’re asking people to take on within the chamber in order to get bills passed.

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Roundup: Begin Royal Tour 2016!

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The Royal Tour has begun, which means we’re already being inundated with a bunch of ridiculous stories about “is it worth the price,” or treating the Canadian Royal Family as foreign curiosities when the Canadian Crown is a separate and distinct legal entity from the British Crown (well, unless you happen to follow the logic of the previous government, whose changes to the Royal Succession Act without going the constitutional amendment route put us on par with Tuvalu in terms of making our relationship with the Crown a subordinate one, but we’ll see if that survives the court challenges). Suffice to say, yes it’s entirely worth it because it’s a very small amount of money, and their touring for a week costs us less than it does for Obama to visit for an afternoon, they draw a lot of attention to a number of worthwhile causes that the Governor General never could, and hey, we’re a constitutional monarchy so it pays for us to act like one from time to time. And to all of those pundits who insist that it’s time that we “grow up” as a nation and “leave the Queen’s basement,” how’s that republic to the south of us doing when it comes to selecting a head of state? Yeah, I thought so.

Meanwhile, here are some photos from the arrival, along with a look at the symbolism of what Kate was wearing. The tour promises to focus on social issues like the environment, young families, and mental health issues. Sunday, they met with young mothers in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side battling addiction issues, before visiting the re-opened Coast Guard base at Kitsilano (which isn’t a dig at the previous government that closed the base at all). Later this week, they’ll visit the town of Bella Bella, which has managed to basically solve its suicide crisis.

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Roundup: A few more partial concessions

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I’m about at the end of my patience with stories about moving expenses, just as news comes down that two more senior ministerial staffers have offered to partially reimburse their own expenses. This while we continue the smarmy remarks by the Conservatives who can’t decide if the perpetrators are cronies or millionaire BFFs, and the NDP perch on their sanctimony, and pundits across the nation clutch their pearls about how it doesn’t actually matter that all of these expenses were within the rules, that it’s all a matter of perception (which they incidentally are fuelling by the way in which these stories and columns are framed). Indeed, we have moralising columns mentioning entitlement, corruption, and how this puts things back on a “war footing.”

About the only salient bit of analysis that has been Robyn Urback’s (otherwise sarcastic) look at the Liberal damage control strategy pattern, which tends to be “ignore, defend, project, concede partial defeat.” And we did see elements of all of these, including the final two simultaneously as they not only had the partial concession of the repayments, but also the projection of looking at similar expenses within the Harper PMO, which they obviously spent Thursday night digging up from PCO records. And let’s be honest – as her first test, Bardish Chagger didn’t do much to help her cause when she would try to deflect with protestations that they were trying to help the middle class or building a strong team. (I will add that it may have been unfair for We The Media to castigate Trudeau for not giving the names of who the staffers were, given privacy considerations).

There was plenty of evidence or fact that Chagger could have used, from being more specific in pointing out the policies, or contextualising them as being a reflection of policies collectively negotiated with senior public servants (where changing policies could affect them), and most especially when the Conservatives were making cheap shots about the “personalised cash payments,” noting what those referred to precisely, which is not a payment in a brown envelope.

But no, we didn’t get that, and instead of having a discussion based on fact, we got pabulum, and it feeds into this ugly and petty narrative that We The Media love to perpetuate, where we must reflect a nation that is so cheap that we must be mean-spirited about it (and I deeply suspect is part of our collective tendency toward tall poppy syndrome). I defy you find a single person who wouldn’t claim moving expenses that they were legitimately entitled to. But instead, I’m getting people barking at me over the Twitter Machine that these staffers should be volunteers, and that it’s some kind of awful crime that they get reasonably well compensated for doing a damned difficult job that most people wouldn’t want to go anywhere near. This is the kind of nonsense that we shouldn’t be feeding, and yet we can’t help ourselves because cheap outrage is such a quick and easy high, but like most highs, it leaves us empty and worse off in the long run.

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Roundup: Precious conformity

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Conservative MP Garnett Genuis penned an analysis piece for Policy Options that tried to explain why MPs vote in lockstep, and it’s just so precious you can barely stand it. Genuis dismisses the talk of heavy-handed PMO and whips offices, and after some lengthy discussion, concludes that it’s the human nature of conformity that’s at play. His mode of analysis was the voting record on C-14, the highly contentious medical assistance in dying bill.

It’s not that Genuis doesn’t have some good – if somewhat infuriating points – in the piece, talking about how MPs are so busy with their constituency work that they just don’t have the time to sit down and study the legislation that they were elected to be considering. That one nearly made me blow a gasket, considering that constituency work isn’t actually part of an MP’s job description and its growing importance has come at the expense of their actual jobs of holding government to account. That Genuis uses it as an excuse for having MPs let the “experts” in their leaders’ offices tell them how to vote is utterly galling. I can see why they would use this excuse, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good one or one that we should let them get away with (but then again, almost nobody knows what an MP’s actual job description is, least of all the MPs themselves, and yes, that is a Very Big Problem. His better points, however, included that sometimes it’s good for local nominations to see that an MP will be willing to break ranks from time to time, but it’s a mixed bag when they also need to be seen to have a united front with the party. It is a tension that he doesn’t delve deeply enough into.

But so much of his thinking is flawed, in part because he relies on the data of votes on a single contentious bill rather than a broader sample, which would produce a more thoughtful discussion, and also because he ignores the other incentives for why MPs will vote in lock-step. For some parties, like the NDP, the need for solidarity in all things means a much more conformist voting pattern in all things, and there is an internal culture of bullying to keep MPs in line so as not to be unseemly with dissent. With government backbenchers, there is the hope that toeing the line enough will earn you a post in cabinet or as a parliamentary secretary, because the ratio of cabinet-to-backbench seats is still too low in Canada to encourage a culture of more independent backbenchers in safer seats willing to do their job of holding government to account. There is also the pressure – which We The Media shamefully perpetuate – that you don’t want to be seen as breaking ranks lest it reflect poorly on the leader (though this seems to be a bit less so under Trudeau who has been vocal about encouraging more free votes). There is no discussion about the blackmail of a leader that can withhold their signature from an MP’s nomination papers during the next election (or whatever the mechanism is post-Reform Act, because there is no actual clarity in law there any longer). So yes, while there is a human tendency to conformity, it is informed by a whole lot of other factors that Genuis ignores, and that taints his analysis to a pretty fatal degree.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/776734642225475584

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