Tag Archives: Lawful Access

QP: The non-existent plan for a non-existent tax

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Despite it being a Thursday, the only leader in the Commons was Elizabeth May — because reasons. Candice Bergen led off, demanding an admission that the government ignored American warnings about the Norsat sale. Navdeep Bains assured her that they followed the process and took the advice of our security agencies, who did consult. Bergen wasn’t buying it, but Bains reiterated his point about the process before touting improved economic progress thanks to their being open to trade. Bergen then accused the government of proposing an internet tax, which was entirely disingenuous because it wasn’t the government who floated the idea — it was a committee of backbenchers. Mélanie Joly assured her they would not levy such a tax. Alain Rayes asked the same again in French, got the same answer, and then reiterated the Norsat question in French. Bains repeated his previous points in French, reading from a prepared response. Matthew Dubé led for the NDP, wondering when reforms to the Anti-terrorism Act would finally be tabled. Ralph Goodale assured him that new legislation was on the way. Dubé switched to English to ask again, adding in a clause about lawful access. Goodale accused him of trying to spook people with innuendo, and that the legislation would keep Canadians safe while protecting their privacy rights. Brian Masse raised the Norsat sale, and Bains repeated his same answer. Alexandre Boulerice then raised a question of an EI case, and Jean-Yves Duclos asked him to forward him the details so that he could look into it.

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Roundup: Top-down incentives

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To the excitement of certain federal MPs, the New Brunswick government has decided that in order to encourage more women to run for the provincial legislature (currently there are a pathetic eight out of 49 MLAs), they are going to offer richer per-vote subsidies for parties for women candidates over male ones. While there is a school of thought that insists that this is a great way to get parties to put more women on the ballot, I remain unconvinced.

Part of the problem is that this is trying to impose a top-down solution, which defeats part of the purpose of how our system is supposed to work. Candidates are supposed to come from the ground-up, and candidates should be chosen by the local grassroots, which means giving them tools to help recruit more women (and other minorities). That means removing barriers on the ground, whether it’s being persistent in asking them to run (there is research that shows that you need to ask women an average of five times before they’ll say yes – a strategy the federal Liberals successfully adopted before the last election), or arranging childcare, or ensuring that your local fundraising networks aren’t excluding them because many women candidates don’t have access to the same kinds of networks. It means organizing on the ground, not simply naming or nominating women candidates from on high and expecting people to vote for them.

I will grant you that the New Brunswick Liberals think they’re being clever by tying the increased per-vote subsidy to women as a tactic that would incentive parties to run them in ridings where they’ll get more votes rather than in no-hope ridings (because it’s true that simply offering financial incentives or penalties based on the percentage of women running often results in women carrying those no-hope ridings), but it still smacks of a top-down solution that will result in accusations of tokenism – that they’re only running women so that the party gets more money rather than because she’s the best person for the job. Top-down impositions based on perverse incentives can’t and shouldn’t be the answer. The answer should be proper grassroots engagement and understanding the barriers women face so that they can be removed at the ground level. If we can do that, combined with getting a greater number of straight white male incumbents to step aside to give more space to women and minority candidates to take their places, we’ll find a better and more sustainable engagement with the system.

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Roundup: Annotating the 2016 Senate look back

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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.

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Roundup: Chagger on fundraising

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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.

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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?

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Roundup: Two yays and a nay

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The government announced its decisions on three pipelines yesterday – no to Northern Gateway (and a tanker ban on the north coast of BC was also reaffirmed), but yes to Kinder Morgan expansion and Line 3 to the United States. There are a lot of people not happy on either side – the Conservatives are upset that Northern Gateway also didn’t get approved, saying this was just a political decision, and the NDP and Greens (and the mayor of Vancouver) unhappy about the Kinder Morgan announcement, Elizabeth May going so far as to say that she’s willing to go to jail for protesting it.

None of this should be a surprise to anyone, as Trudeau has pretty much telegraphed these plans for weeks, if not months. And as for the critics, well, Robyn Urback makes the point that I do believe that Trudeau was going for:

In fact, Trudeau said as much yesterday in QP when he noted that they were sitting between a party demanding blanket approvals on everything, and another party opposed to approving anything, so that was where he preferred to be. He’s spending some political capital on this decision, including with some of his own caucus members who are not fans of the Kinder Morgan expansion, but he has some to spare, so we’ll see whether he’s picked up any support in the west, or lost any on the west coast when this all blows over.

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Roundup: Action on assisted dying

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We’re now less than a week away from the opening of Parliament, and there’s a lot for the Liberals to do. One of those things is deciding what to do about the assisted dying file, and it looks like the Liberals have planned to strike a special joint committee of MPs and senators to quickly examine the issue and provide some legislative recommendations to the government. Remember that the deadline the Supreme Court gave the government is February 6th, and they haven’t decided if they will as the Court for an extension – one they may not be granted, and one where that extension will be a burden to those on the ground who may actually need the law in a timely fashion. There are a couple of reasons why the inclusion of senators in the process is noteworthy – one is that it can help to speed up the process of passing the inevitable legislation, because it can be like a bit of pre-study, getting them involved earlier in the process in order to speed up their own deliberations on the bill when it arrives. The other reason is that the Senate was debating a bill on doctor-assisted dying in the last parliament, which had been sponsored by Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth, based on her consultations with former MP Stephen Fletcher, and had workable solutions to some of the issues raised in protecting the vulnerable. That bill was debated over several days at second reading, but never was voted on to send to committee, likely because of some foot-dragging, but that debate happened, and those same senators are still there. If it’s something that can help speed the process, it’s not a bad idea that they’re in the loop and participating in solving the problem, which could potentially get legislation in the system before that Supreme Court deadline, and with a little luck, they won’t need to ask for an extension.

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Roundup: A plea without merit

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At a security and defence conference in Ottawa yesterday, RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson gave a plea for warrantless access to people’s Internet subscriber data. Trust us, Paulson said – we won’t abuse it or violate the Charter. Never mind that every privacy expert ever, as well as the Supreme Court of Canada, has said that no, they don’t need this kind of information without a warrant. At one point, Paulson made the comparison of getting a warrant to run license plates, which is patently ridiculous because you can’t get nearly the same information from a license plate that you can from someone’s browser history. Paulson raised all manner of bogeymen by which he needs warrantless access, from cyber-attacks to child pornographers, but the funny thing is that after the Supreme Court’s decision against warrantless access to subscriber data, RCMP data shows that forcing the police to get a warrant to see your IP history hasn’t hampered investigations, which makes Paulson’s plea all the more problematic. Trying to get this particularly dangerous power is not a surprise, but it is perhaps a little unbecoming knowing coming from a Commissioner who should know better.

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Roundup: An questionable call to the Governor

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While I often cringe about the media’s reluctance to refer to Stephen Harper as prime minister during the writ period (as he remains prime minister and will until he offers the Governor General his resignation) out of an exaggerated sense of fairness, there was an incident yesterday where Harper himself blurred that line between being prime minister, and being the Conservative leader campaigning for his own ends. For the first time that I can recall, we got a press release that mentioned that the Prime Minister called up the Governor of the Bank of Canada. While the text was pretty banal, talking about “ongoing developments” in the global economy and the recent declines in the markets, it was still unusual because we never get these kinds of releases. Ever. There is a very clear separation between government fiscal policy and the monetary policy set by the Bank of Canada, and the two should never meet – in fact, there is an issue in Canadian history where the Prime Minister tried to interfere with the Bank of Canada, and the Governor of the day ended up resigning in protest as a result. While the purpose of Harper’s call to Governor Poloz is not mentioned, the fact that it came on the day where Harper’s campaign message was all about how only his party could be trusted to weather this global economic turbulence, well, it’s pretty icky. Harper subtly politicizes Poloz by using him as a campaign prop – look at my economic credentials! I’m talking to the Bank of Canada Governor, like an economic boss! For all we know, Harper and Poloz have a weekly call where they talk trends and forecasts, and so on, but if that’s the case, we never hear about it. This time, Harper made sure that we knew about it. I’m having a hard time trying to see how this is acceptable in any way.

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Roundup: Overreading mandates

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In the wake of Tuesday’s election victory in Alberta, there has been no shortage of jubilation and outright triumphalism amongst NDP-types here in Ottawa, who have rushed to claim their own share of the victory – or at least the reflected glory – while mouthing trite sayings like “only New Democrats can defeat Conservatives!” without actually understanding the actual facts on the ground. There was no shortage of congratulations for either Thomas Mulcair – who future Alberta premier Rachel Notley quite explicitly distanced herself from during the campaign – or Linda Duncan, their only federal MP, as though she was somehow a key player in that victory. But amidst all of this self-congratulation comes to mind a warning that Bob Rae made after the last federal election – be careful not to over-read your mandate, advice that applies not only to the federal, but also the provincial NDP. To wit, I would posit that Tuesday night was not so much a victory for the NDP as it was a defeat for Jim Prentice and the Progressive Conservatives in Alberta, which Notley was able to capitalise on. It’s not like there was much else in the way of alternatives – she was articulate and had some experience as an MLA, whereas the Alberta Liberals were rudderless and in a tailspin after the departure of Raj Sherman, and the Wildrose had Brian Jean for a leader for all of five minutes before the election was called. Absolutely none of this has to do with some great leftward shift in the province. No, Virginia, Alberta did not suddenly become a bastion of socialists. Quite the opposite, as Notley has run on a relatively centrist, populist platform that has all but repudiated a number of planks of her federal cousins, and she will live in constant awareness that it could all be gone by the next election if the political right’s vote coalesces around Wildrose, or the centrist vote in the province fragments once again around a hypothetical renewed Alberta Liberal brand, or gains by the Alberta Party to replace them. None of this leaves a lot of room for Mulcair and the federal NDP to make gains, particularly as their particular brand is much more hostile to the oilsands and pipelines than Notley is. Alberta may have had a desire for change, but there are no guarantees as to how that translates federally. Meanwhile, federal NDP MPs are giving advice to their new rookie provincial cousins. Paul Wells sets up the eventual victory by Notley, while Colby Cosh cautions about some of the lessons to take from the election. Kathleen Petty gives us a reminder of some of the political demographics and history that has played out in Alberta over the length of the PC dynasty there, most especially that the party was built on centrism.

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Roundup: The hardest working appointment

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Day three was much like day two in the Duffy trial – more trying to assert that there were no residency rules in the Senate, so as to absolve Duffy of having broken them under the letter of the law. Things later moved onto partisan activities, and the big feature everyone was talking about was the autographed photo of Harper and Duffy together, where Harper wrote that Duffy was his hardest-working and best appointment. Well, if he was hardest working, it was for party activities and not Senate business, as Duffy had a pretty lax attendance record for the two committees he sat on – a mere 55 percent, while a fellow PEI senator had 100 percent. So there’s that. It speaks to a willingness on Duffy’s part to do the Prime Minister’s bidding at the detriment of his own constitutional obligations as a senator, unlike other fundraisers that Harper appointed, such as Irving Gerstein, who chair committees and take those duties fairly seriously. And if Duffy couldn’t say “No, I have work to do,” when asked to do yet another party fundraisers, well, that reflects badly on him, doesn’t it? Rather unexpectedly, Patrick Brazeau and his lawyer showed up to watch, apparently taking notes on the proceedings, likely for the benefit of their own upcoming trial. Elsewhere, here’s a look at some of the other findings in the Duffy Diaries, including some backroom machinations in the caucus, some of the other observations of the day, and Nicholas Köhler’s write-up.

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