Tag Archives: Kevin O’Leary

Roundup: Butchered applause lines

Posted on by

Now that the French “debate” has passed, it looks like today is the day that Kevin O’Leary will announce his candidacy for the Conservative leadership – something most of the other candidates will probably welcome given that it will divert everyone’s attention from the embarrassing debacle that was the “debate,” and I do use the term loosely. As with previous events in this contest, there was no debate, just a line-up of talking points, only this time it was mostly in mangled French, some of which was utterly incomprehensible.

Not to say that there wasn’t some artificial drama during the horror show. Kellie Leitch in full butchered French and Steven Blaney both had their sight set on Maxime Bernier and attacked him out of the gate (while Erin O’Toole, in very slow sentences, pleaded with them not to fight), and for the first 45 minutes at least, all anyone could talk about was supply management, before the moved onto softwood lumber – because apparently dairy and forestry are Quebec’s only two industries. And then when it came to questions of national security, it was all manner of fumbled pearl-clutching (and it was like you could watch them grasping for that strand of pearls and missing it every time) as a number of them insisted that they were for immigration but wanted to ensure that they weren’t letting in terrorists. Brad Trost decided to go full-Trump and declare that we ban immigration from “pro-radical Islamist” regions (but don’t worry, he doesn’t hate all immigrants – he married one!).

https://twitter.com/stephaniecarvin/status/821520113786621953

If you’re looking for a professional evaluation of everyone’s proficiency in French, CBC assembled an expert panel to grade everyone, and based on my own personal observations, Lisa Raitt did better than most expectations (but was still mostly reading her responses), and Chris Alexander, for all of his other weaknesses in this race, had one of the best grasps of the language of any of them. Rick Petersen, the other also-ran who doesn’t have a seat, also had a really great grasp of French and was one of the only people speaking off the cuff – doubly impressive given that he’s an Anglo and not Francophone. And as for Deepak Obhrai, people keep saying “points for trying!” or “At least he showed up, unlike O’Leary!” well, there were actual times when he was just uttering phonetic gibberish – and pointing while doing it.

But, as Martin Patriquin writes, none of this is going to matter after a few hours today because once O’Leary is in the race, none of it is going to matter.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The business of selling seats

Posted on by

Kevin O’Leary went on television on the weekend, because of course he did, and then said a bunch of nonsense. Because of course he did. This time, it was to whine about how it’s not fair that rich people can’t fund their own campaigns, and to say that he thinks that the Senate should be a profit centre rather than a cost, and charging people $100K to $200K per year for the privilege of sitting there. No, seriously. He has said he thinks it’s fine to sell seats in a house of Parliament, and nobody challenged him on that point of the fact that it’s grossly unconstitutional. (Only a later update of the story added quotes from Emmett Macfarlane that appeared to be what he tweeted on the subject).

Not only that, but you immediately had a bunch of chuckleheads showing up on the Twitter Machine going “a plain reading of the constitution would say this is allowed” without any hint that they are being ironic. Before Leonid Sirota beat me to the punch, I was going to remind everyone that the idea of selling Senate seats came up during the Supreme Court of Canada hearing on the Senate reference, where Justice Cromwell cornered the government’s lawyers on the question of “consultative elections” and how they wouldn’t require a change in the constitution. “If consultative elections are allowed, then why not a consultative auction?” asked Justice Cromwell, and well, the government lawyer had to basically swallow that one. (To remind you, they ruled that consultative elections are not allowed without a change to the constitution).

I would also add that for as much as we’ve (rightfully) lambasted O’Leary on this ludicrous idea, the NDP and others have been floating around a similar idea in the past about defunding the Senate and making it a volunteer position – you know, so that just like O’Leary’s plan, it becomes available to only the super-rich who have the time and resources to devote to doing the work. Because that’s exactly the kinds of people we want to fill those seats. Not to mention, if O’Leary thinks that Senate seats should be up for sale, why not any other federally appointed position – judges, heads of tribunals, Commissioner of the RCMP? All profit generators instead of a drain on the taxpayer, right? Yeah, no.

On a related note, O’Leary said that if he does win the leadership, he wouldn’t be in any rush to run in a by-election but would spend time crossing the country to gather support. Because this is what happens when you don’t insist that the leadership be from caucus. It elevates the position above what it should be, and diminishes the role of caucus and the value of a seat in parliament. Leadership races should be by caucus selection, not membership vote. We’ve bastardized our system enough, and we need to reign it in.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Cullen’s silver-tongued swindle

Posted on by

It should not surprise me, but Nathan Cullen’s capacity for deceptive stunts continues to both amaze and gall me at the same time. Previously it was conning Maryam Monsef into his “proportional” electoral reform committee composition (which was not proportional, but a racket that was designed to merely look more “fair” but was in fact a calculated gambit to give the opposition a disproportionate say in the process), for which we got a report that was a steaming pile of hot garbage. With Karina Gould now in the portfolio again, Cullen now proposes that they “co-draft” an electoral reform bill.

No, seriously.

I cannot stress how bad of an idea this is for both of their sakes. For Gould, this is Cullen trying to swindle her like he did Monsef. He played her – and the public – in trying to push proportional representation and ended up recommending (along with Elizabeth May’s whole-hearted endorsement) one of the absolute worst possible electoral systems possible. And now he’s trying to ensure that she puts it into legislation for his party’s benefit. This has nothing to do with bills being drafted secretly “backrooms” (otherwise known as the Department of Justice under the cone of Cabinet confidence) or with the spirit of bipartisanship. This is about Cullen trying to manipulate the process.

If that weren’t bad enough, what is especially galling is that he’s undermining his own role as an opposition critic in the process. He is not a minister of the Crown. His role, therefore, is not to govern, but to hold those to account who do (–William Ewart Gladstone). This is an important job because parliament depends upon accountability. That’s the whole purpose behind having a parliament – to hold government to account. And it would be great if our opposition critics would actually take that job seriously rather than pretend they were ministers with their faux-bipartisanship and private members’ bills that cross the line when it comes to acceptable bounds of setting policy. It would be great if MPs actually did their jobs. Perhaps most troublesome in all of this is that Cullen is his party’s democratic reform critic. If he can’t grasp this most basic fundamental point of Responsible Government, then can we actually trust him on attempting to find a different voting system? I’m pretty sure the answer to that is no.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Chong’s solutions seeking problems

Posted on by

While Conservative leadership hopeful Michael Chong is trying to run a campaign based on actual ideas rather than cheap slogans, it needs to be pointed out that not all of his ideas are good ones. The latest example is his plans to stop the “abuse of parliament,” taking a few gratuitous swipes at the legacy of Stephen Harper along the way. The problem is that, like his ill-fated Reform Act of 2014, Chong has a bunch of solutions in search of problems. In this case, he wants to look at the issue of prorogation.

https://twitter.com/michaelchongmp/status/818523622126026752

Did Stephen Harper abuse prorogation to avoid a confidence vote? Yes. Did he later abuse it in a much more cavalier fashion by phoning up the GG on New Year’s Eve in order to prorogue parliament for the duration of the Vancouver Olympics? Absolutely. Is changing the rules, or “establishing a new constitutional convention” the answer to what happened? Absolutely not. (Also, I’m trying to think of when Liberal governments prorogued parliament to avoid non-confidence votes or debates over scandals at the federal level, as he alleges, but I’m drawing a blank).

The problem with trying to ensure that a PM can’t shut down parliament to avoid a vote of non-confidence is that the alternatives are always worse. Chong proposes that Parliament sit an additional two days to deal with unfinished business and votes before dissolution or prorogation is granted, but this is inherently problematic. Aside from the fact that it gives no time for bills to pass with proper scrutiny, it sets up a situation where a government that has lost the confidence of the chamber has a grace period for pushing through legislation, regulation, or Orders in Council. That’s a problem. The demand that Parliament meet two weeks after a general election (rather than six to eight weeks) is also mystifying. I know that Mark Jarvis and company thought it was a swell idea in their Democratizing the Constitution book, but what problem is it solving? It’s a major logistical challenge to get 338 MPs to Ottawa in two weeks, get them offices, orientation sessions, oaths sworn, and a cabinet chosen and sworn in, not to mention the entire transition of a government and writing a Throne Speech in two weeks. The rush to test the confidence of the new chamber is a bit of a false premise considering that barring the formation of a coalition government, it’s a pro forma exercise. If the GG is genuinely concerned that the PM won’t have confidence, he or she either won’t appoint them as PM, or he or she won’t start signing Orders-in-Council or making appointments until that confidence is tested. It does absolutely nothing to rein in the power of the PMO or to hold a government more accountable. If anything, it would lead to bigger problems because as the saying goes, haste makes waste, and this is a lot of unnecessary haste.

If you want something that will have a more meaningful impact on the practice of prorogation, then restore the tradition of a prorogation speech, which forces a government to justify why it’s doing so in a public manner and to explain their accomplishments rather than just being able to phone up the GG when Parliament isn’t sitting. (More on this in my forthcoming book). It will have a greater impact than anything that Chong suggests with this plan.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Annotating the 2016 Senate look back

Posted on by

The National Post had a look back over the changes made to the Senate over the past year, and a look at what’s coming up, so I figured I’d offer a few annotations along the way, because this is what we do here.

First of all, yes most of the new appointments came with small-l liberal values, and yes, that is a problem for the broader diversity of the chamber, which should have broad philosophical differences in it so that a more effective opposition to government policy can be offered. And as one Senator also said to me, it would be great if the next round didn’t all come from the social sciences. Because yeah, that too is another noticeable similarity. The Independent Senators’ Group also says that they won’t all vote together unless it’s an issue of Senate rules or logistics. This immediately prompted one of the most partisan of partisan defenders to leap to the attack.

I’m going to give some of these votes a pass because the bulk of the new senators are just that – new, and they haven’t had enough time to study up on the bills to come up with enough reasons to vote against them, other than perhaps for the sake of voting against them to show displeasure with the government. That these were mostly budget bills doesn’t really help Batters’ critique either because the Senate has to be careful with money bills, defeating them only on the most critical of issues which these budget bills were not. The rule of thumb is also that most senators become more independent with time, and these ones have barely managed to get their offices sorted, let alone figure out opposition stances.

There is but a brief mention under logistics that the Government Leader – err, “government representative” Senator Peter Harder says the “chamber will no longer be home to the government-versus-opposition Westminster-model,” but then leaves it at that. This is a very big deal, and one of the reasons why Peter Harder needs to be stopped. Throwing out the Westminster model in favour of 101 “loose fish” is a Very Bad Thing because it guts the effectiveness of the Senate as an accountability body, forcing it to rely either on subject-matter experts in the Chamber that may not disagree with the government, or by leaving independent senators vulnerable to the machinations of either Harder or government ministers promising favours. This, let me repeat, is a Very Bad Thing.

Finally, while it points out that senators have been more active in amending government bills, it requires a bit more context. Two of those bills, assisted dying and RCMP unionization, were born of Supreme Court of Canada decisions that the government of the day didn’t do a particularly thrilling job of drafting. The consumer protection aspects of Bill C-29? That was as much pressure from the Quebec Government as it was the Senate committee. And Bill S-3 on gender discrimination in Indian Act registration? Another bill stemming from a Supreme Court of Canada decision that was poorly drafted, but the fact that the government tabled the bill in the Senate instead of the Commons means that those flaws were exposed there first, and is not indicative of an overly aggressive Senate as it was a bad bill. Context matters, which this article doesn’t really get right.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A bit of NDP Kremlinology

Posted on by

On New Year’s Day, the leader of the provincial NDP in New Brunswick resigned and quit the party altogether, citing party infighting, and more curiously, took a few swipes at the federal party along the way.

Why is this interesting? Because the federal NDP are in the midst of a leadership race that will double as some soul-searching about the party’s direction. This while the leftist parties in the States saw the “success” of Bernie Sanders (and I use the term loosely but his followers are totally serious about it), and the selection and re-election of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, where there is a definite shift in tone that follwos these leaders. And with that in mind, we saw a series of tweets from former federal NDP (and prior to that, UK Labour) staffer Lauren Dobson-Hughes which helps to put the New Brunswick and general NPD dynamic into context.

https://twitter.com/ldobsonhughes/status/815620894991196160

https://twitter.com/ldobsonhughes/status/815621424786341893

https://twitter.com/ldobsonhughes/status/815622197062619136

https://twitter.com/ldobsonhughes/status/815622765520781312

https://twitter.com/ldobsonhughes/status/815623274608599040

https://twitter.com/ldobsonhughes/status/815623837442310145

https://twitter.com/ldobsonhughes/status/815624631038214144

https://twitter.com/ldobsonhughes/status/815625236204883968

https://twitter.com/ldobsonhughes/status/815626448618799104

https://twitter.com/ldobsonhughes/status/815627188871561216

What Dobson-Hughes says here I think will have a lot of impact on the NDP leadership contest, and I think explains a little as to why the party wasn’t willing to give Thomas Mulcair another chance in his leadership review post-election. It’s also what the (eventual) leadership hopefuls will be navigating, so I don’t think this is the last of the internal power-struggles in the party that we’ve heard of. And while Cardy’s critics continue to grouse about him in the media, there are tensions at play that we should be cognisant of, and that will matter as the party goes forward.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Harder’s wrongheaded impatience

Posted on by

Our good friend Senator Peter Harder is at it again, going to the media about his frustrations that Senate modernization isn’t going his way. The current complaint is twofold – one, that they haven’t adopted all of the Auditor General’s recommendations; and two, that the rules allow for senators to delay debating bills for lengthy periods. So, let’s break it down.

First of all, the AG’s recommendation that the Senate require an external audit committee to provide some kind of “external validation” was a Very Bad Recommendation. I’ve argued this time and again, and I’ll say it again right here – the Senate cannot be put under external oversight because parliament is self-governing. This is a very important consideration that the AG doesn’t understand. I don’t care how many government departments and private companies use this external validation – they are not parliament and parliament is self-governing. That means that the Senate must police itself, no matter how much the AG seems to find that to be a problem (and considering how very little his audit found for how much it cost, as problematic and arbitrary as it was). And yes, an audit committee is an idea that could include external members but must have a majority of members from the Senate on it, non-negotiable. If Parliament cannot govern itself, then we might as well just declare that the past 148 years of Responsible Government were just a failed experiment and we might as well tell the Queen to take over and rule us directly again. I’m not even kidding. If Harder can’t grasp this fundamental concept, then that is a problem.

The other point, about delays, is as much Harder’s own failing as Government Leader – err, “government representative” than anything. If government bills need swift passage, he needs to make the case to the Senate, and if there are delays, then he has tools at his disposal including time allocation, which he must again, make the case for swift passage. And there are a lot of bills that the Senate does dispose of relatively quickly, particularly because the Commons likes to dump them on the Senate shortly before Parliament rises for either the holidays or summer, and implore that they get passed post-haste, and most of the time, they are. And just like with the Senate’s veto, there are sometimes cases where delay is warranted for any number of reasons, including that it’s a bad bill (such as the single sports betting bill in the previous parliament). The Senate is not a rubber stamp; changing the rules to force them to be more “disciplined” in how they debate is seriously close to curtailing the privileges of parliamentarians to suit the government’s agenda. Parliament is there to keep a check on the government, not simply nod everything through. This is one more piece in the concerning pattern that Harder is looking to make changes to an institution that he doesn’t understand and will cause lasting damage if he’s not reined in.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Chagger on fundraising

Posted on by

Government House Leader Bardish Chagger talked to the Huffington Post, and the headline had all of my media colleagues grasping for their pearls as she declared that the House of Commons was not the place to discuss Liberal fundraisers. And if I’m going to go full pedant on this, she’s right – to an extent. On its face, fundraising is party business and really nothing to do with the administrative responsibility of the government. Why this current round of eye-rolling nonsense around so-called “cash for access” fundraising (which isn’t actually cash for access in the sense that we got used to talking about with Ontario) is because the opposition is trying to link those fundraisers with conflicts of interest from the government, all based on insinuation with no actual proof of quid pro quo. But because there is this tenuous connection, the questions are being allowed, and they get to make all manner of accusations that would otherwise be considered libellous before the cameras under the protection of parliamentary privilege. Indeed, when Ambrose accused the government of acting illegally with those fundraisers, Chagger invited her to step outside of the Chamber to repeat those accusations. Ambrose wouldn’t, for the record.

Where this might resonate are with memories of the previous parliament, with endless questions about the ClusterDuff affair, and the operations of the Senate, and those various and sundry questions that came up time and again, and which were rarely actually about things that were the administrative responsibility of the government. And every now and again, Speaker Andrew Scheer would say so. But contrary to the opinions of some, this wasn’t something that Scheer made up out of thin air.

https://twitter.com/MichaelSona/status/811242072288141316

https://twitter.com/MichaelSona/status/811242862373388288

In fact, Scheer was too lenient for many of these questions, and there are sometimes that I think that Regan is even more so. Most of the NDP questions asked during the height of the ClusterDuff affair were blatantly out of order, asked for the sake of grandstanding. That the questions with the current fundraising contretemps have made this tenuous link to government operations and decisions is the only thing that makes them marginally relevant to QP. That said, the hope that this will somehow tarnish the government or grind down their ethical sheen generally depends on there being actual rules broken or actual impropriety, which there hasn’t been. Meanwhile, a bunch of issues that the opposition should be holding the government to account for are languishing because they need to put up six MPs a day on this. But hey, at least they’re providing clips to the media as opposed to doing their jobs, right?

Continue reading →

Roundup: The problem with measuring parliamentary productivity

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Not offering excuses

Posted on by

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?

Continue reading →