Today was the day that MP Mauril Bélanger was given the role of honorary Speaker, his plans to have run for the post cut short by his ALS diagnosis. Bélanger has since lost the ability to Speak, but thanks to modern technology, he has been using an iPad with a speech emulator, and it was this that allowed him to preside over the Commons after a slow procession to the Chamber. Bélanger oversaw some rather well-behaved (though still somewhat partisan) Members’ Statements, and the first couple of questions. Rona Ambrose led off and recalled the Ice Bucket Challenge, and asked the PM for research dollars for ALS. Justin Trudeau saluted Bélanger first, and urged Canadians to give time and support in finding a cure. Normally Ambrose would get four more questions, but instead Mulcair was up next, and asked about minority francophone rights — a passion of Bélanger’s. Trudeau paid tribute to Bélanger’s efforts over the year. Bélanger then made a statement of thanks through his voice emulator, before Speaker Regan resumed the chair, while the Chamber thundered applause.
Tag Archives: Keystone XL
QP: Women ask the questions
It being International Women’s Day, one could be sure that outside of the leader’s round, we would see a majority of women MPs asking questions, and lo and behold, that was the case. Rona Ambrose led off, mini-lectern on Scheer’s neighbouring desk, and she asked about the Yazidi women targeted by ISIS and bringing them over as refugees. Justin Trudeau reminded her of the commitments they made to bring over refugees, and that they achieved their goal of 25,000 Syrian refugees . Ambrose repeated yesterday’s question about his visit to the Centre for American Progress, to which Trudeau responded that when he was there two years ago, he spoke out in favour of Keystone XL. Ambrose then tried to insist that Trudeau help Bombardier by agreeing to their supply day motion on the Toronto Island airport. Trudeau asked her not to pit region against region for political gain. Kelley Block was up next, and insisted that the Liberals let the Toronto Island airport expand so that Porter can buy Bombardier C-series jets (as though the tens that they would buy would totally make the difference). Marc Garneau praised Air Canada’s intent to purchase those jets, and when Block asked again, Garneau chastised her for not respecting the tripartite agreement with the city and provincial governments. Thomas Mulcair was up next, and demanded a childcare plan. Trudeau hit back that Mulcair would be deciding what to cut if he had been elected in order to balance the budget. Mulcair then used women’s access to EI to badger the government for defeating their opposition day motion. Trudeau responded that they were taking action, and there would be more to come in the budget. Mulcair raised the issue of tax cheats getting amnesty deals, and Trudeau noted it was under the previous government and they would investigate if need be. Mulcair demanded action, citing special treatment for the rich, and Trudeau reminded him of his pledge to give childcare dollars to millionaires.
"Stop protecting a tax system that's fair for all," Mulcair demands, mixing up his lines. #QP
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) March 8, 2016
QP: Thanks for your pre-arranged meeting
Tuesday, and it was the first regular QP not attended by the new prime minister. Rona Ambrose led off, reading her thanks for Trudeau taking her advice and meeting with Denis Coderre — you know, the meeting he had already had planned before QP yesterday. Ambrose suggested that if he wanted to create other jobs, the government could permit the extension of the Toronto Island Airport, which would hopefully help Bombardier sell more jets. Marc Garneau responded by saying they took an undertaking to respect Toronto’s waterfront plans. Ambrose then raised the spectre of ISIS, and conflated the AQIM attack in Burkina Faso with the other conflict. Stephane Dion insisted that Canada was part of the fight against ISIS. Ambrose then called ISIS the greatest threat to women and GLBT rights, to which Sajjan insisted that ISIS was a threat that he was taking seriously. Gérard Deltell then repeated Ambrose’s first question with the spin of other Quebec industry, and got a response from Jim Carr about the importance of resource development, and took a a second question on Deltell in the same vein. Thomas Mulcair was up next, and demanded that the government not appeal the Human Rights Tribunal decision on First Nations child welfare, to which Jody Raybould-Wilson assured him that they would reform the child welfare system, but did leave the door open for judicial review. Mulcair then turned to the issue of existing pipeline approval processes, to which Catherine McKenna spoke about rebuilding trust with stakeholders. Mulcair demanded that the assessments be redone, but McKenna’s answer didn’t waver. Mulcair thundered about broken promises before pivoting to his scripted question about EI eligibility, to which MaryAnn Mihychuk assured him that they were conducting a comprehensive review.
Pretty sure the Catholic Church is a bigger threat to global GLBT rights than ISIS. #QP
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) January 26, 2016
Roundup: The problem with private members’ bills
I’ve written a lot about the problems with private members’ bills, and in my column this week over at Loonie Politics, it came up again given that the lottery for the Order of Precedence was posted. I wrote about it back in the spring when there were a number of problematic ones that the Senate was possibly going to kill (and in some cases did when the clock ran out on them) for good reason – because they were bad bills. While interviewing Liberal Senator George Baker yesterday for a story I was writing, he offered this, which I unfortunately wasn’t able to include in the piece, but every MP should nevertheless read it and take it to heart:
“Here’s a real problem with these private member’s bills: if there’s a fault in the bill, if there’s a word out of place, if there’s an error in the wording or in the intent of a sentence of paragraph – if it’s a private member’s bill, then the Senate is in a quandary because if they amend the bill, then they will in all likelihood be defeating the bill. If you amend a bill in the Senate, if it’s a private member’s bill, it goes back to the Commons and it goes to the bottom of the list for consideration, and then the private member will come to the Senate committee and say you’re going to pass this bill. We had it happen three times in the past two years. They say you’re going to defeat the bill, so the Senate turned around and passed the bill, given the tradition of not defeating something that’s legitimately passed in the House of Commons, and Senate ignored the necessary amendments and they passed bad legislation.”
Baker is absolutely right in that there is a problem – MPs don’t have them drafted very well, and then don’t do their due diligence because these bills are automatically time-allocated by design. That a number of these bills died on the Order Paper in the Senate one hopes might be an object lesson to MPs that they need to do better, but unfortunately, the lesson too many MPs took is that the “unelected and unaccountable Senate” didn’t just rubber-stamp a bill because it passed the Commons. Except, of course, it’s not their job to rubber stamp, and we’ve had an increasing number of bad bills getting through the cracks based on these emotive arguments, and not a few hissy fits along the way *cough*Reform Act*cough*. And now we have bad laws on the books because of it, apparently content to let the courts handle it instead. It’s sad and a little pathetic, to be perfectly honest. We should be demanding out MPs do better, and when they screw up, they need to take their lumps so that they’ll do better next time. Otherwise they won’t learn – or worse, they will take the wrong lesson, and our system will be worse off.
Roundup: Caution on the veto
The particular bugaboos of electoral reform and the role of the Senate have been colliding increasingly in the past number of days, as there have been threats coming that certain Conservative senators have been threatening to use their majority to vote down any legislation on changes to the electoral system unless there’s a referendum first. And then this particular op-ed in the Citizen by a Université de Montréal law professor urging them to do just that makes me want to just take a moment to talk it all through. First, a few things to keep in mind – the senator who went to the media about this threat was Don Plett, who is, well, singular on some issues. He’s broken ranks before, and is willing to stick to his guns on others, but I wouldn’t ever quote him as the voice of the Conservatives in the Senate, even though he is now the caucus whip. The other thing to keep in mind is that the Senate of Canada, being probably the most powerful Upper Chamber in the democratic world, does indeed have the power of unlimited veto – there is no overriding it if the Senate decides that they want something to die. It’s a power that they very rarely use, particularly when it comes to government bills – it’s kind of like the nuclear deterrent for legislation. No, they’d rather make amendments and send it back, with few exceptions. The reason it’s treated with such caution is that they know they don’t have the democratic mandate to exercise these powers except in rare circumstances. In those rare circumstances, they will do it because it’s their job to have a check on a majority government, and be empowered to speak truth to power, which is why they are afforded the kind of institutional independence that they have. So with this in mind, I will hold up a big caution sign when it comes to encouraging them to overturn any theoretical bill on electoral reform. This all dredges up memories of the Free Trade Agreement, and when the Senate held up that bill from the Mulroney government until it could be put to the people, seeing as this deal was hugely contentious at the time, and it was believed that it was going to be selling out our sovereignty to the Americans. The election was fought on this issue, Mulroney won, and the bill passed, and lo and behold, the sky didn’t fall. But while there was merit in putting that question to the people, it was part of the chain of events that started to polarise the Senate, which prior to 1984, was said to have operated on a much less partisan basis. Tit-for-tat games ramped up the partisanship there, until things became so bad that Mulroney exercised the emergency powers of appealing to the Queen to appoint an additional eight senators in order to get the GST passed. The Senate is currently in a vulnerable spot, and while I wouldn’t ask them not to do their jobs because they are in a period of intense scrutiny and this would get blown completely out of proportion by an ignorant pundit class and MPs with agendas harmful to the independence of the Senate – but it would hurt them. That’s why this discussion needs to be approached extremely cautiously, and rash actions scrupulously avoided at all costs.
Roundup: Good riddance, Reform Act
The past couple of days, we’ve had yet more attention paid to the Reform Act, and with any luck, it’ll be the last time we pay attention to it, as the three major parties all have largely voted down – or ignored – the law after their first caucus meetings. And really, it’s for the best – it was a terrible law that did nothing like it promised. It did not help to “rebalance” the powers of MPs in the face of their leaders, and it didn’t increase the accountability of leaders, despite people claiming it would. While the original version of the bill would have made the necessary change of taking away the leader’s veto power over a nomination and replace it with a different mechanism, but that got watered down to uselessness. The rest of it was meaningless noise because the problem is less the removal of the leader than the selection. Giving the caucus the power to remove the leader in writing is ridiculous because they really can do it anytime they like and have the gonads enough to do so – Chong’s laying out percentages made it more difficult because it became a dare to get enough open supporters, rather than having one or two courageous people to go forward to the media (witness Alison Redford or Kathy Dunderdale’s resignations). So long as we select leaders by party membership, any attempt by caucus to remove a leader, no matter how justified, becomes seen as a snub to the grassroots by elites, which is the trap that Chong walked into. Party selection of leaders is what created the unaccountable situation, and the larger the membership base that selected them, the less accountable they get. And it annoys the crap out of me that political scientists everywhere don’t take the selection problem into account when they insist that the Reform Act is better than nothing. No, it wasn’t. And as Kady O’Malley quite rightly points out, it was a colossal waste of time. I would go further to add that it was a colossal, cynical waste of time. Chong had tried to move these changes at party policy conventions several times and failed, so he tried in the Commons to exert pressure there. And a number of different voices in the party have told me that this is all building to a leadership bid by Chong, and one has no doubt that he’ll try to come in as the Great Reformer, and build his brand that way. For him to use that much parliamentary time and media airtime to build this profile leaves a bad taste.
Roundup: A really new cabinet
So, that’s the new cabinet. For all of the concern trolling over “merit” when it comes to women being appointed in such numbers, Trudeau and the Liberals found an impressively credentialed group of Canadians that will do the country well. There is no one on that list that one could reasonably say got there for the sake of tokenism, which is not something you could argue with the previous government, where there was a lot of dead weight that was simply there to tick some boxes (and quite obviously so). The full list is here, and the Maclean’s annotated group photo is here. While they all did some quick media scrums after their first cabinet meeting, there weren’t a lot of answers yet because they haven’t had a chance to get their departmental briefings. Within a week or two, hopefully we’ll start getting some scrums with some answers (another huge change from the previous government). There may be some entrails to be sorted through in terms of those who didn’t make cabinet, but given that cabinet making is a delicate art, and there are many factors to consider, I would hope that nobody reads too much into the so-called “snubs,” particularly given that the commitment to parliament mattering more should prove that there are plenty of great roles for each of those “stars” that didn’t get a seat at the cabinet table. Maclean’s even went so far as to build a whole second cabinet out of those who didn’t make it this time. As for reaction, Susan Delacourt looks at what messages the picks send, while Andrew Coyne notes that despite the pledge for gender parity, that was not demonstrated in the make-up of cabinet committees.
If there`s a clunker in today`s cabinet announcement, it`s the cringe-worthy titles given to some of the cabinet committees.
— Stephen Gordon (@stephenfgordon) November 5, 2015
Of note: There is no Leader of the Government in the Senate in cabinet. This will start making things very interesting going forward. #SenCA
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) November 4, 2015
First day back will be December 3rd for Speaker election, Speech from the Throne December 4th. #cdnpoli
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) November 4, 2015
Roundup: New Cabinet Eve
Welcome to Stephen Harper’s last day as Prime Minister. Tomorrow is the big day, and if you’re in Ottawa and want to take part, well, Rideau Hall is getting it all set, with big screens on the grounds, and helpful hints on attending (like you can’t park there and you’d better wear comfortable shoes, because you might be standing from 10 am to 1 pm). The cabinet will also apparently arrive by bus rather than everyone in their own individual cars, and it sounds like there will be some sort of interaction with the crowds, so I guess we’ll see how that all goes when it happens. Suffice to say, it again marks a change in tone from the last guy. If you’ve missed the others so far, Kady O’Malley gives a good primer on how to form a cabinet, while Nick Taylor-Vaisey fills you in on some more of the background details, like just what is a cabinet, and what are the oaths you need to sign? And no, I’m not going to engage in any cabinet speculation, because it’s a bit of a mug’s game at this point. I also don’t really want to get into the “gender quota versus merit” debate because it’s not a debate. There have always been quotas, be it linguistic, regional or even religious (when that mattered), more than merit, and I can’t believe that this is even a conversation, but whatever. The real question is how many women get into the “big” portfolios of finance, foreign affairs, justice, or defence.
Want to watch the cabinet swearing-in at Rideau Hall on Wednesday? Here are the guidelines. #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/sOqOxkhGc4
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) November 2, 2015
https://twitter.com/ashleycsanady/status/661179686009962497
https://twitter.com/ashleycsanady/status/661180078185775104
https://twitter.com/ashleycsanady/status/661180363868278784
https://twitter.com/laura_payton/status/661291352769064961
Roundup: Aspirational job targets
Stephen Harper’s election pledge du jour was a target of 1.3 million net new jobs by 2020, which sounds terribly impressive, but if you listen to the economists talk about it, there are a few caveats. Of course, we should note first that really, government’s don’t create jobs as such, but they can provide the environment that is conducive to investment and hiring. The question for Harper really is a) how many of these jobs would be created regardless of whatever you do, and b) what measures exactly are you proposing to create these jobs, considering that it’s becoming ever more clear that we’re moving into an era of really low growth. And no, just signing trade agreements isn’t enough, nor is just lowering taxes and calling it a day. The Conservatives asked Mike Moffatt and Kevin Milligan to check their figures, and both say that sure, it’s plausible – but it’s going to depend on strong global growth, immigration, and older workers staying in the workforce longer (as in not retiring). Mike Moffatt gives his analysis here, while Milligan (and others) have tweeted their comments.
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/646353978452668416
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/646354120912187392
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/646357137124257792
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/646359832807649280
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/646360403753041920
https://twitter.com/lindsaytedds/status/646347682307411968
https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/646347416493363200
https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/646355410262323200
I believe 1.3 million jobs by 2020 is achievable given increased labour force attachment by older workers. #elxn42
— Dr. Jack Mintz (@jackmintz) September 22, 2015
https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/646355705893662720
https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/646360723707293697
Roundup: A surprise visit
Stephen Harper took everyone (and most especially assignment editors across the country) off-guard by taking a surprise trip to Iraq while headed to V-E commemoration ceremonies in the Netherlands. While in Iraq, he met with that country’s prime minister and announced $167 million in aid and security equipment promises ($139 million of which is actually for the region, including Lebanon and Jordan). Politically, he also gained the advantage of being in theatre, getting photos and video of him being near the front lines, and talking tough about terrorism and national security, which he sees as vote-getters and poll-movers after weeks where his messaging has been thrown off track by both the distraction that is the Duffy trial, and the pushback to the budget, which was only balanced by raiding the contingency reserve and EI fund. In other words, he needs to remind people why they should vote for him, and looking prominent in a place where we’ve sent troops is one way to do it. While there, it was also said that the investigation into the friendly fire death of Sgt. Doiron is complete, and was likely due to fatigue among Peshmerga fighters. That report is supposed to be released publicly back in Canada within a month.