Tag Archives: Kellie Leitch

Roundup: No, the LG can’t threaten the premier

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Sometimes you see a terrible column, and sometimes there’s such a piece of hot garbage that you need to don a hazmat suit just to approach it and get hosed off afterward like you just came out of a leaking nuclear reactor. The Toronto Sun’s Christina Blizzard delivered one of those yesterday.

That’s right – this columnist thinks that the lieutenant governor should threaten Kathleen Wynne to shape up or she’ll dismiss her, because 167 years of Responsible Government was just a failed experiment. One lesbian first minister in this province and we’ve decided that it was too much – time to hand power back to the queen and be done with it.

You see! Voters can’t be trusted! Obviously we’d be better off under absolute monarchy again because they won’t let such terrible governments to let themselves get elected and then implement the agendas that they were elected on. It’s like the fanboys in the First Order who remember the good old days of the Galactic Empire and preferred it to the messy democracy of the New Republic.

It’s called confidence. Whichever leader in the legislature or Parliament that can command the confidence of the chamber gets to advise the LG/GG/queen on how to exercise the powers of state. Not a difficult concept.

It is utterly galling that a columnist can be so utterly ignorant of basic civics that this is the kind of utter bilge that they spew onto newsprint. We do have a problem with basic civic literacy in this country, and when you have columnists like this spreading complete nonsense out of some sense of partisanship, it gives a warped impression to people who read this and makes them believe that it’s actually normal and expected that the GG or the LG can boss around a government that you don’t like. No. Absolutely not.

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So let me reiterate that Blizzard’s column is utter hot garbage. If the Sun had any shame, they’d pull it and apologise profusely for putting it out there, and Blizzard would be sent to a remedial civics course, but I doubt that’s going to happen because she’s just passionate about how bad Wynne is, or some bullshit excuse like that. So in the meantime, I’ll just leave this here:

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Roundup: Nuance versus brand damage

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As the Conservatives head to Halifax for their caucus retreat, the Kellie Leitch/Canadian Values question is threatening to expose some of the caucus rifts – particularly as Leitch feels a bit put out that Rona Ambrose decided to distance herself and the party from Leitch’s proposal, and Leitch has been musing openly about filing a formal complaint with the party that Ambrose has essentially involved herself in the leadership campaign in this way. There are a couple of things that I would note from all of this – one is that we place way too much emphasis on caucus solidarity on all things in this country, and blow any disagreement between party members out of all sense of proportion, usually with some variation of “Is [insert party leader here] losing control of their caucus?!” It’s hyperbolic and it’s nonsense, and it enforces the perceived need for everyone to always be in lock-step, which is terrible for democracy. The other thing I would note is that this is that Ambrose was scrambling to prevent damaging the Conservative brand, and Leitch’s inability to grasp nuance is apparently also a sign that she isn’t able to grasp the magnitude of this floodgate that she’s opened. The fact that she keeps insisting that this isn’t what it clearly is – directed toward certain Muslim communities (remember kids, a dog-whistle is a coded message, while this one is right out there in the open) – while saying that it’s about trying to find a “unified Canadian identity” and not about identity politics (no seriously, she said this – you can check the video), continues to highlight that she is completely and utterly tone deaf. Ambrose is being left to pick up the pieces of Leitch crashing around like the proverbial bull in the china shop, because Leitch is too tone deaf to see what she’s doing to the party brand. So sure, there are rifts in the caucus being formed as a result. While we shouldn’t try to pretend that parties need to be uniform in all things, Leitch should also realise that some rifts are bad for the brand you’re trying to build and probably shouldn’t be papered over.

And while we’re on the subject of Leitch, John McCallum calls her anti-Canadian values screening proposal “Orwellian.”

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Roundup: Leitch the desperate, hollow shell

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Apparently we’re still talking about Kellie Leitch and her “anti-Canadian values” screening, because why not? The Canadian Press kicked off the day by putting Leitch’s assertion that it would be akin to “asking some simple questions” to their Baloney Metre™, and lo and behold, the experts they spoke to pretty much laughed it out of the room, earning Leitch’s supposition a rare “full of baloney” rating. It seems that “a few simple questions” just teaches people how to lie to give the “right” answers, and that proper interviews with people trained to know whether people are lying is so prohibitively expensive that it’s never going to happen. So there’s that. Much later in the day, Jason Kenney decided to weigh in from Alberta, and pretty much eviscerated Leitch by saying that this position is a new one for her that she never articulated before in cabinet or caucus, and that she doesn’t understand the nuance around the issue. But then again, we’ve pretty much established that Leitch lacks any real semblance of emotional quotient or self-awareness, so her inability to grasp nuance should not be a surprise to anyone.

Meanwhile, Peter Loewen reminds us that we’re not as perfectly tolerant as we like to believe, and he has the data to prove it, which is why Leitch’s message will find a home in places. Scott Reid looks over the record of Leitch’s campaign manager, who helped Rob Ford get elected, and notes that by this point, Leitch is less of a candidate than a strategy in human form (which is kind of what Jason Kenney is hinting at when noting that this position is all new for Leitch). Paul Wells notes the low ceiling for the kind of rhetoric that Leitch is now taking on, and while he sees the strategic value in such a position, he also offers some ideas for better choices than Leitch. Tabatha Southey offers her particular acid take on the Leitch situation, and her insistence on digging so much that she is in danger of becoming a mole person. And of course, there’s the At Issue panel looking at Leitch as well.

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Roundup: Stop demanding deployment votes

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While Harjit Sajjan is off in London at a meeting of defence ministers, his critics are back in Ottawa grousing about the shift of focus from peacemaking to peacekeeping – never mind that Sajjan has already said that any upcoming mission is unlikely to be “peacekeeping” in the traditional sense as opposed to what he’s terming “peace operations.” That aside, the other emerging bit of drama is the fact that Sajjan is indicating that the government is unlikely to put such a deployment to a vote in the House of Commons – which is of course the way that things should work, but the Conservatives under Stephen Harper started saying they were going to hold votes starting with the Afghanistan mission extension under the guise of being “more democratic” when their whole point was to publicly divide the Liberals, and hey, that happened. (Remember when Harper crossed the floor to shake Michael Ignatieff’s hand after that vote? Because that wasn’t about trying to put a skewer in the brewing leadership contest, no sir). But beyond the reasons why the practice started, it’s antithetical to the whole point of parliament, which is to hold the government to account. When you put decisions like this to a vote – even if it’s non-binding and worded as “supporting a decision,” it gives the illusion that you’re giving parliament a role in the decision, when that’s not their job. When they are implicated in the decision making, they are not able to effectively hold the government to account because they can turn around and say “the House voted on this,” and shrug it off – and yes, the Conservatives did this on a number of occasions as well. So yes, have debates. Have committees scrutinize the missions as they happen, but don’t insist on votes, even if it’s for symbolic reasons, because that poisons the well.

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On a related note, at the meeting of defence ministers, some of the shortages facing peacekeeping operations in Africa were noted, and one of them is the need for more female peacekeepers on the ground.

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Roundup: Questioning Mulcair’s absence

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The fate of Thomas Mulcair and whether he will continue to stay on as interim leader of his party are suddenly the topic of discussion, as whisperings from the party seems to be that his virtual absence over the summer – particularly from events like St. Jean Baptiste, Canada Day and Pride – is not conducive to staying on as interim leader, and that there is some sort of ultimatum that if he doesn’t start showing up, he’s out. It’s a bit funny that they’re talking that way because there’s not much that they can do to him at this point – he’s already on the way out, slowly but surely, but one has to wonder what they hope to accomplish – except to maybe jumpstart their moribund leadership campaign process. Peter Julian denies there are rumblings (as is expected), and Mulcair insists there’s no problem, but he’s just taking some time off for the first time in nine years, and while I would normally buy that excuse, the fact that he’s missed so many of the big things that MPs are expected to attend (particularly if they’re things, like Pride, that their party purports to stand for), it does make one wonder a little about how seriously they plan to take the job, especially after convincing the party to let him stay in an interim capacity for that long. (In case you’re wondering, the correct answer to all of this is that party caucuses should be doing the selecting, and we would avoid these drawn-out contests and lame-duck interim leadership intervals).

In the midst of this is a “bring back Mulcair” campaign organised by some party members online, who think that the way he was treated in the Edmonton convention was “unfair and unethical.” Erm, really? That’s novel. He ran a disastrous, largely tone-deaf campaign, and was just as tone-deaf when it came to how to convince the membership that he should stay on the job as leader. He failed to do that, and he is paying the consequences. That’s politics. There is nothing “unfair” or “unethical” about that – he was defeated in a membership vote. How that’s unethical boggles the mind.

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Roundup: Leitch keeps digging

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So many hot takes on Kellie Leitch and her need to keep digging when it comes to her “Canadian values” test proposal. Leitch continued to insist that this is a topic worthy of discussion, and proposed yet more “Canadian values” to back up her claim, and this time, those values include “equality of opportunity, hard work, generosity, freedom and tolerance,” with a focus especially on the tolerance part. She also denies that this targets Muslims in any way and doesn’t think that characterisation is fair. So there’s that. Oh, and you can add Deepak Obhrai to the list of leadership candidates opposing Leitch’s position, and Maxime Bernier gave a somewhat muddled response that he believes there are Canadian values but you just can’t test for them.

In terms of pundit reaction, Michael Den Tandt seems to think that Leitch is going nativist for the sake of deepening her fundraising coffers, while Matt Gurney sees Leitch’s proposal as unworkable, but not really offensive per se. Susan Delacourt sees problems for Leitch from the perspective of a party that doesn’t seem to want to embrace a young female leader, though she may have tapped into an anti-immigrant sentiment within the ranks, while Madeline Ashby looks at the inherent contradictions in Leitch’s position. My own Loonie Politics column on Leitch’s campaign looks at the ways in which she and some of her fellow campaigners are picking and choosing which intolerances to run on, and her own tone-deafness about it (which, given today’s added comments, seem to really fit the bill).

In other Conservative leadership news, Brad Trost thinks that he can unite the party around his economic ideas while still running as a social conservative, and Deepak Obhari has filed his papers and is officially in the race.

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Roundup: The cynicism of Kellie Leitch

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As it turns out, would-be Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch has opted not to recant her survey question on “screening” immigrants and refugees for anti-Canadian values, and has doubled down on it by insisting that there is a conversation to be had, and suggested that there was merit to the “barbaric cultural practices” tip line, but that it had simply been communicated poorly. Thus far, only Michael Chong has bothered to respond and refute the narrative that Leitch is putting forward.

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Objectively, Leitch’s concerns about keeping Canada safe are nonsense because all of our domestic terror incidents have been home-grown and self-radicalizing lone wolves. That she thinks there are unified “Canadian values” are also hugely problematic because there are plenty of Canadians who are intolerant of other religions and cultures (particularly of Muslims), sexual orientations (hell, two of her other putative leadership candidates are running on socially conservative platforms that are downright homophobic), violence and misogynistic behaviour is prevalent if not endemic in our own culture, and the embrace of personal and economic freedoms is a dubious metric, especially as her own government was perfectly willing to curtail personal freedoms in the name of national security. The myth of shared values is nothing new, however, but it is just that – a myth. Add to that the notion that these values are something that can be tested or screened. Is Leitch somehow proposing polygraphing all prospective immigrants or refugees on these issues? Or, as I was not even really joking yesterday, hiring a bunch of telepaths to find out if they’re hiding something. It’s not even that this is dog whistle politics, it’s that the country repudiated this kind of thinking in the last election in a pretty big way. Leitch trying to adopt the language of Donald Trump to try and bring together her party’s base is deeply cynical and Leitch should know better (presuming she has the EQ to realize it, which I suspect she doesn’t).

In other Conservative leadership news, anti-abortionists are ready to back Pierre Lemieux and Brad Trost, and probably Andrew Scheer if he winds up running again. Martin Patriquin in Maclean’s argued why these kinds of leadership candidates will continue to hurt the party’s brand.

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Roundup: An imaginary crisis

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The summer hearings of the electoral reform committee have ended, and now they move to cross-country hearings before they begin their deliberations. The optimistic among them think they can achieve consensus. The remarkably optimistic insist that it’s going to be some form of proportional representation. And the Conservatives say that any consensus would be contingent upon a referendum, while some Liberals say that if they can get consensus there would be no need for one. So, with any luck, that means it’ll all go down in flames. That said, there was still more eye-rolling testimony yesterday that should be commented upon.

There’s this existential drama going on where a Liberal MP on the committee noted that they’re not in a crisis situation, so is this the best time to have the debate, and Elizabeth May, true to form, prompts a witness to say that we should change the system now before there’s a crisis. But what crisis are we talking about?

This I can’t figure out. We’ve had 149 years post-Confederation of free and fair elections, and reasonably good governance, and do I keep needing to remind everyone that the system isn’t broken? Because it’s not. And people who tend to talk “crisis” have been the ones from whom that crisis is that the party they favour didn’t win. “Oh, but Stephen Harper!” the exclaim. To which I remind them that he wasn’t a Bond villain. Yes, he bent the rules of Parliament to their breaking point, but that had absolutely nothing to do with our electoral system and everything to do with all of the other tinkering that we’ve done to our system in the name of making things “more democratic,” like changing the way we select leaders. Harper had a “democratic mandate” from his party members, the cachet of having united the party, and an immense amount of goodwill among the party members for that. But he was also unchallenged by his own party members for his going too far and his excesses because the party members let him, in large part because of civic illiteracy on their part in not knowing they had agency enough to push back, and their accountability measures having been weakened by successive generations of ways in which people tinkered with the system. This whole electoral reform exercise is just tinkering with the system on a more massive scale, and I have zero confidence that things will end up better because (to quote Colby Cosh), it’s a contrived moral panic over a solution in search of a problem. There is no crisis. There will not be a crisis, and it will certainly not be over the perceived legitimacy of a so-called “false majority” (which doesn’t exist because it’s a sore loser term to try to make a Thing out of a logical fallacy). The crisis is one of civic literacy – not the electoral system. Attempts to cast it as such are disingenuous in the extreme.

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Roundup: The exoneration of Mike Duffy

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It was rather a stunning result, where Senator Mike Duffy was acquitted of all 31 charges against him for fraud, breach of trust and bribery. The judge ruled that he found Duffy to be a credible witness, and said largely ruled that Duffy followed what few rules there were in place at the time, a fact that many would contest – there were rules that Duffy indeed skirted, but not to the degree of criminality, according to the judge. In fact, it goes against the very ruling of former Justice Ian Binnie in his arbitration report, who noted that there were rules and there was also common sense in determining the eligibility of expenses, and while he didn’t rule on criminality, it does contradict some of the judge’s reasoning in the Duffy verdict. That the judge singled out the PMO for scathing words is of very little comfort, particularly because of his belief that they somehow overrode Duffy’s free will in “forcing” him to accept that $90,000 cheque. Duffy is now free to return to work in the Senate, but he may not find it a very welcoming place, given his direct culpability to the hits on the institution’s credibility. That, and there will be eyes on his spending at all times, particularly by those senators who knew that there were rules in place – despite what Bayne and eventually the judge felt – and those rules have only become more stringent since. More from Köhler, Harper and Reevely, while Reevely had a few other thoughts over Twitter that also bear repeating.

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Roundup: Fair Vote Canada’s shambolic release

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It’s not everyday that you get a completely unhinged press release in your inbox, but holy cow did Fair Vote Canada come out with a doozy yesterday. It’s hard to know where to start with such a work of “shambolic genius,” as Colby Cosh put it.

You see, according to the geniuses at Fair Vote Canada, they have cleverly parsed that when Trudeau pledged to “make every vote count” (a boneheaded statement because every vote already counts), he was referring to their slogan, and therefore he must really advocate for Proportional Representation, and because Trudeau has said he has no pre-conceived ideas about what the outcome of the consultations on electoral reform would be, he must really mean that he’s just trying to figure out which proportional representation system to use, because that’s what he’s signalled by using their slogan. Genius, I tell you. Genius!

But Wait… There’s More!™

While referring to Parliament as “the law factory” (Seriously? Seriously?!), they started invoking the Charter to claim that “equal treatment and equal benefit under the law” must mean that Canadian citizens are entitled to having their votes represented in direct proportion to the votes cast. Which is insane and ridiculous because that’s not how our system works at all, and is completely wrong when it comes to jurisprudence. You see, the Supreme Court of Canada has already rejected this line of reasoning, both in terms of the deviation of voting power (i.e. unequal riding sizes) for the purposes of better governance, but also with attempted challenges to the First-Past-The-Post system in the Quebec courts, which were roundly rejected and which the Supreme Court of Canada refused to grant leave to appeal. That means that as far as they’re concerned, the law is settled, and for Fair Vote Canada to try and advance this line of argument is futile and wrong. Because the law is settled. But considering that the whole basis for their advocacy of PR is rooted in sore loserism at the ballot box, it makes complete sense that they are also sore losers when it comes to the judicial system as well.

Moral of the story: Fair Vote Canada has long used falsehoods and logical fallacies to advance their case. This ridiculous and completely specious release is just one more in a dishonest string of arguments they’ve made and will continue to make as this debate heats up in the coming months.

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