Tag Archives: Lisa Raitt

Roundup: The good and the bad of Star Wars Day tweets

Posted on by

It was Star Wars Day yesterday (May the Fourth be with you…), and as happens every year, various government departments put out Star Wars-themed tweets, and some of them are good, and some of them are…not so good. For example:

Some really missed the mark.

As you can imagine, I am a pedant over social media about naming Grogu.

Some of the better ones were these:

As for party leaders, Erin O’Toole’s was…bad. Not quite as bad as last year’s shoddily-animated Grogu video (for which the person who was in charge of it needs to have their ass removed), but still bad, especially because it’s not done in good fun, but is trying to spin the notion that the government is trying to turn the CRTC into a personal Twitter censorship bureau. (There are issues with Bill C-10 – this is not one of them).

Jagmeet Singh’s was painfully earnest.

Justin Trudeau, being a true fan, hit a pitch-perfect note.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Playing chicken with the variants

Posted on by

It’s been such a long and dispiriting week, as many of us in this country live under the rule of murderclown premiers who simply refuse to do their jobs when it comes to this pandemic, and keep trying to blame the federal government for their failures, or to at least distract from their inaction. We’re going through that especially in Ontario right now, where Ford and his ministers keep up this song and dance about the borders, without once recognising their own culpability in the spread of variants.

Dwivedi is absolutely right about the role of the media in this, constantly framing this as “squabbling” or “finger-pointing,” and not “there is clear jurisdictional authority for the province and they refuse to exercise it,” which means that these premiers (and Doug Ford most especially) get to escape being held to account. This is why I object so strenuously whenever I hear another journalist or TV host say “nobody cares about jurisdiction in a pandemic.” Sorry, but that’s not how real life works. There’s a division of powers in the constitution that doesn’t care about your feelings.

Meanwhile, Andrew Leach has a few observations about the situation in Alberta that are just as trenchant as the ones in Ontario.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A cover-up leads to an admission

Posted on by

The day was largely spent fretting over the state of the investigation into downed flight PS752 – particularly given the news that Iranian officials had already bulldozed the site before international investigators could arrive, ensuring a cover-up was underway. The Ukrainian government was insisting to the Iranians that Canadians be involved, and we got word that a mere two visas had been issued for Canadian consular officials so far (though François-Philippe Champagne did say that he was expecting more to be approved soon). Champagne later announced the creation of an international working group, comprised of the countries whose citizens were all killed aboard the flight, to press Iran for answers, while in the back channels, there is talk that Canadian officials are telling the Americans that they should have been informed of their plans to kill the Iranian general, given that we’re coalition partners. Amidst all of this, mourning continued across the country. (The National Post compiles profiles of the victims here).

And then, something surprising happened – Iranian officials, including their president, admitted publicly that it was indeed one of their missiles that shot down the aircraft accidentally, and that it was human error that they plan to prosecute those responsible, as well as profound apologies and expressions of regret (while taking a swipe at American “adventurism” in the process). It was a marked change of tone after days of denial, insisting that it was “impossible” that they could have shot it down, and what looked to be a cover-up in the making. One suspects that this will have a profound shift in the narrative in the days ahead, and that Iran will be prepared to pay some kind of compensation, just as what happened in 1988 when the Americans admitted they accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner.

Meanwhile, Adnan R. Khan walks through how the accidental missile strike could have happened, while Colby Cosh offers more parallels and reminders to the 1988 incident of the Americans shooting down the Iranian plane then, how it is remembered differently in the West than it is in Iran, and how our amnesia to is affects the reactions – particularly from those who are howling about “murder” and demanding the prime minister be angry about it. As if to prove the point, Heather Scoffield demands some righteous indignation from Trudeau, and for some of that to be directed to Trump for what his recklessness has cost us – as though that would help the situation or not cause even more problems for Canada down the road.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Putting Alleslev at the fore

Posted on by

As expected, Andrew Scheer named Leona Alleslev as his new deputy leader yesterday, but left the majority of his House leadership team in place. Alleslev is a bit of a curious choice, given that she was a Liberal until a little over a year ago until she crossed the floor in a huff (and in conversation with MPs, it seems that a large part of her reason for crossing was because she was essentially being ignored by the PMO when she was trying to step up, and she felt unappreciated for her efforts, which is fair enough). There were plenty of sarcastic responses from long-time Conservatives over Twitter, given how she campaigned against Stephen Harper in 2015. Others Conservatives – Scheer loyalists in particular – were trying to insist that Alleslev represented the way the party needed to bring Blue Liberals into the fold – but this assertion is fairly problematic given that the Venn Diagram of Blue Liberals and Red Tories would show a fairly significant crossover in areas of being socially progressive, which is partly where the Conservatives are having problems right now. As well, it’s hard to qualify Alleslev as reaching out to those voters when she goes on TV and just parrots all of Scheer’s talking points, particularly around the environment, to the point where she was contradicting her previous statements and trying to walk them back when called on them. I’m not sure how demonstrating groupthink is reaching out to new voters. It’s also hard not to be cynical about Alleslev’s appointment as a box-ticking exercise about her being both a woman and from the GTA as the political reasons as to why she was chosen.

Scheer also took the opportunity to vow that he was staying on as leader, and insisted that the party needed to pull together behind him. This while Stephen Harper’s former campaign manager, Jenni Byrne, also called for his ouster, and there also talk about how Conservatives in Alberta are angry that he wasn’t able to defeat Trudeau in spite of Trudeau doing his level best to defeat himself in some cases.

In amidst this, Lisa Raitt was also keeping herself in the media, putting out the supposition into the public sphere that the more xenophobic populism that reared its head during the party’s last leadership campaign branded them during the election, and that it changed the perceptions around the party. (Raitt is also defending Scheer and saying that his weakness is that he doesn’t come off as a “strong man” on any particular area). And while Raitt is trying to insist that the likes of Kellie Leitch (and eventually Maxime Bernier’s Twitter persona) were somehow isolated incidents, she ignores the fact that Scheer himself promulgated far-right conspiracy theories about the UN Compact on Global Migration, that his comms team spread racist memes about irregular border crossings, that he offered succour to avowed racists because he thought he could use them to “own the Libs,” and that even though he knew that the xenophobia and far-right element of the “yellow vesters” had taken over that so-called “convoy” to Ottawa, he nevertheless still met with them – in full view of their xenophobic signs and symbols – and then took weeks to actually denounce white supremacy when called on it. So I’m having a hard time giving Raitt the benefit of the doubt for this theory of hers.

Meanwhile, Matt Gurney posits that Scheer’s ability to survive now turns on whether he can convince enough people that he can actually do better in the next election – and that’s becoming harder to do. Paul Wells poses more questions that the Conservatives need to consider regarding Scheer, the direction of the party, and their ability to build a winning coalition internally that has proved fairly elusive in recent decades.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Judicially-determined science

Posted on by

One of the lesser-reported stories yesterday was the fact that a group of youths “launched” a lawsuit in Federal Court against the government to claim that their Charter rights to life, liberty and security of the person are being violated by the lack of climate change action, and want the courts to mandate the government implement a climate plan “using the best available science.” Well, it wasn’t really the youths themselves, but a group of lawyers and activists who are using a group of children and teens as the face of their campaign, because teen climate prophetesses are so hot right now.

The problem with this tactic, however, is the two-fold – one, that it’s going to be an exceedingly difficult argument that just because these specific youth had contracted ailments that could be climate-related (such as Lyme disease), it’s hard to make a generalized Section 7 argument as it relates to climate change; and two, this is public policy and should not be justiciable in the same way that Criminal Code provisions are where they touch social issues. Why? Because it shouldn’t be up to the courts to determine whether or not the government is living up to their climate change obligations. Are judges also climate scientists, or economists specializing in this area? The whole “best available science” line sounds good, but it’s hugely subjective as to how you reach those goals mandated by “science,” particularly when it comes to not devastating the economy and the livelihoods of millions of Canadians. How does a judge determine what the correct public policy should be? They don’t, but that’s what is being asked of them to determine here.

More to the point, this is yet another example of people trying to going to the courts when they lose at politics. Why I’m not surprised by this tactic being used by climate activists is because that Extinction Rebellion group is demanding the suspension of democracy to deal with the climate crisis, which should be alarming to anyone who follows their rhetoric. Trying to get judges to make policy determinations is just as much of a problem, and I eagerly await the Federal Court telling them to go drop on their heads.

Continue reading →

Roundup: It’s a Liberal-led minority

Posted on by

A hung parliament is not a big surprise, with the Liberals remaining in power, but the seat math is perhaps a bit closer than some had anticipated. The Conservatives only gained a handful of seats, and probably not enough for Andrew Scheer to quell any discontent that will start bubbling up in the ranks after such an uninspiring campaign. The NDP have lost almost half of their seats, meaning all the supposed “momentum” and the “upriSingh” that they kept touting didn’t translate into votes – but that’s what happens when you don’t have the organization capable of mobilizing your votes. The Greens only picked up an extra seat (at the time of this writing), one in Fredericton, where they had provincial strength, but it was certainly not the “Green wave” that they kept boasting about (not a surprise there either). The Bloc is now the third party in the Commons, meaning they’ll have a bigger role to play on committees – something they used to be very good at, once upon a time – but we’ll also see if any of the other parties will start to cope with the “new” block that is far more about Quebec nationalism than it is sovereignty, and that they are the federal voice of François Legault. And Maxime Bernier has lost his seat, so hopefully the fan club that he masqueraded as a party will dissolve entirely rather than solidify into a far-right movement.

To that end, Jack Harris won for the NDP in St. John’s, and he was a good MP in previous parliaments, so he’ll have to carry a lot of weight now that their ranks are diminished. Ralph Goodale was defeated in Saskatchewan, which is a huge loss of capacity for the Cabinet, because he did so much of the heavy lifting. The Liberals lost their Alberta seats, Amarjeet Sohi losing to Tim Uppal, who lives in Ottawa and has no plans to move back to the riding; Kent Hehr also losing the only Liberal seat in Calgary. Also, Lisa Raitt lost her seat to Adam van Koeverden, which will also hurt the Conservatives.

Trudeau’s loss of representation in the West is going to be a big problem for him, particularly because he ejected all of his senators from his caucus, and it was not unheard of for the Liberals to fill in the gaps in their representation with their Senators, and now they don’t have that. People have suggested that maybe Trudeau could appoint Goodale to the Senate in order to fill that gap (and there is a vacant Senate seat from Saskatchewan), but that will involve him eating a whole lot of crow, and possibly forcing him to rethink some of his ham-fisted moves around the Senate. It’s possible, but I’m not hopeful for that change of heart. But now we’re going to get a bunch of really bad hot takes about Alberta talking about separation or other such ridiculous nonsense, because Jason Kenney still has his punching bag and scapegoat.

https://twitter.com/maxfawcett/status/1186353921800863744

And now we’re already getting a lot of really dumb hot takes on hung parliaments, with ridiculous statements like “Canadians voted for a minority,” which no, they did not do, and “Canadians are forcing cooperation because they couldn’t get proportional representation,” which again is not how this goes. As for the seat math, because the Liberals are so close to majority territory, it means that they are unlikely to have to form any kind of form agreement with any other party, but will be able to cobble together votes on an issue-by-issue basis, which makes all of the talk about red-lines and demands beforehand kind of dumb (as I pointed out in this column).

Continue reading →

Roundup: Protected nominations and the suffocation of the grassroots

Posted on by

Oh, Liberals. You’ve really gone and done it again, haven’t you? All of your grand talk about respecting parliament, and now you’ve decided that you’re going to go and protect the nominations of your incumbent MPs, so long as they meet a set of criteria that, while better than nothing, is not all that onerous. Never mind that four years ago, it was all about how open nominations were about community leaders devoted to community service, but now? Now it’s about ensuring that your MPs simply have a big enough war chest and participate in a bare minimum of door knocking over the course of a year. You’d think that with this list of requirements, ensuring that there still remains an actual nomination process wouldn’t be too difficult – after all, if the excuse is that they’re so busy in Ottawa that they can’t be also running for their old jobs, then ensuring that they’re still doing the work that would be associated with a nomination process seems like a pointless self-inflicted black eye, no?

I’m not going to re-litigate this too much, but I wrote about why protected nominations are a Bad Thing in Maclean’s last year, but it really boils down to one basic concept – accountability. The biggest reason to ensure that there are open nominations is to ensure that a riding can hold their incumbent to account without needing to vote for another party to do so. Protecting nominations removes more power from the grassroots party members and enshrines it in the leader’s office, which is exactly the opposite of what should be happening. (And yes, Trudeau has centralized a hell of a lot of power, especially after pushing through the changes to the party’s constitution). And by imposing those thresholds to ensure that the nomination is protected, it creates incentive for the incumbent MP to treat that riding association like a personal re-election machine, rather than a body that holds that MP to account at the riding level.

To be clear, this isn’t just a Liberal problem. The Conservatives also set a fairly high bar to challenge incumbent nominations, some of which we’ve seen in recent weeks, but that’s been accompanied by rumblings that some of these challenges have been stickhandled out of the leader’s office, which is even more distressing for grassroots democracy. The erosion of grassroots democracy is a very real crisis in our political system, but most people don’t understand what these changes mean, more content to chide the Liberals for broken promises about open nominations than be alarmed at what the bigger picture result is. It’s a pretty serious problem, and it’s bigger than just a broken promise.

Continue reading →

Roundup: On leaders, interim or “parliamentary”

Posted on by

In the wake of the Patrick Brown resignation, the Ontario PC caucus gathered behind closed doors to name Vic Fedeli as their “parliamentary leader,” a term that irks me to no end. Fedeli came out and called himself “party leader” rather than “interim” or “parliamentary,” clearly signalling that he wanted this to be permanent going into the election, but within hours, the party insisted that they would indeed hold a full leadership contest to be concluded by March 31st, where the party membership would vote on a leader (and yes, Fedeli will be running while still acting as the interim/“parliamentary” leader).

The adoption of the term “parliamentary leader” is recent, and as far as I know was only first used by the NDP to give a name to what Guy Caron is doing as Jagmeet Singh’s proxy inside the Commons while Singh refuses to get his own seat, and generally avoids being in Ottawa as much as possible. Caron is left to be the de facto leader, even going so far as to make key decisions around staffing in the leader’s office in Ottawa, which would seem to make him de jure leader as well and Singh to be some kind of figurehead, wandering the land. But why it’s offensive as a concept is because it attempts to normalize this notion that the leader isn’t in the parliamentary caucus – something that is an affront to our Westminster system. The Ontario PC party using this term both affirms the use of this term, and opens up the notion of a similar arrangement where a new leader could be chosen by the membership while not having a seat, further taking us down this road to debasing our system.

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/956958255129006081

Mike Moffatt, meanwhile, has the right idea – all leaders should be considered “interim,” because they should be able to be removed at a moment’s notice by the caucus (given that the caucus should select the leader, and that the leader should live in fear of the caucus). What happens instead with electing leaders by the membership is that they feel they have a sense of “democratic legitimacy,” which they feel insulates them from accountability, and they wield their imagined authority over the caucus, meaning that it’s the caucus who has to fear the leader instead of the other way around – especially if the rules persist that the leader signs their nomination papers. That’s not the way our system was designed to function, and it’s caused great damage to our system, and it gets worse as time goes on, with each iteration trying to turn it more and more into a quasi-presidential primary. The way the Ontario PC party has had to deal with this Patrick Brown situation within the context of their bastardized rules (and fetishizing the 200,000 members signed up in their last leadership contest, the bulk of them by Brown and his team) is utterly debasing to Westminster parliaments. More than anything, the events of the past week should be an object lesson in why we should restore caucus selection, should anyone be listening.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Appointment backlog woes

Posted on by

The National Post has a really good piece looking into the current backlog of appointments and the effect it’s having on the functioning of government. It’s something that has been talked about a lot, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a good breakdown of those vacancies, and the effect that it’s having. It’s one of those subjects that sounds pretty easy to grumble about, but it’s also something that we should take a step back and realise that to a certain extent, the goals of reforming the appointments process has been laudable, and in many cases, overdue when it comes to increasing the level of diversity into these positions. Over the course of my reporting, a lot of civil society actors have praised the move (while still being concerned at the timeframe it took for getting the processes up and running) because they all know that the outcomes will inevitably be better over the longer term now that the bulk of positions aren’t simply being filled by straight white men.

That said, I also wanted to just put a bit of additional context around some of this backlog in saying that as much as the Conservatives are baying at the moon about some of these appointments right now, that they were no saints when it came to this sort of thing either, and reformed the appointment process for some of these positions themselves, creating massive backlogs in the process. The two that come to mind immediately are the Immigration and Refugee Board, where they took a functioning system and drove it to dysfunction when they changed that process to “de-politicise it” (with plenty of accusations that they just made the system easier to put their own cronies in) and turning a system where the optimal number of files was churning through into a massive backlog that they tried to blame their predecessors on (sound familiar?). The other was the Social Security Tribunal, which they completely revamped as part of their changes to the system overall, and I’m not sure it ever got fixed before they lost the election, only for the Liberals to turn around to reform the appointment process yet again. So yes, some of the backlogs are bad, but in some cases, ‘twas ever thus, and we should keep that in mind.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The curious PCO-PBO turf war

Posted on by

There is an interesting piece out from Kathryn May on iPolitics about the turf war going on between the Privy Council Office and the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and how that is playing out in the provisions of the budget implementation bill that would create an independent PBO. The PBO blames senior bureaucrats for trying to hobble its future role, and much of it seems to be down to an existential difference of opinion, between whether or not the PBO should exist to give advice to parliamentarians, or to be a watchdog of the government. PCO takes the view that the PBO was designed to offer advice and independent analysis, while the first PBO, Kevin Page, was certainly taking the latter view, which his successor has largely followed suit with. One of the other interesting notes was that the public service would rather the PBO act in more of a fashion like the Auditor General, where he goes back to departments with his figures to check for factual errors, and that it gives them a chance to respond to the report, rather than feeling like they are being constantly “ambushed.”

I am of the view that we run the risk of creating bigger problems if we continue to give the PBO too broad of a mandate, while being unaccountable and only able to be terminated for cause, meaning seven year terms by which they can self-initiate all manner of investigations with no constraints. That will be a problem, given that we already have at least one Independent Officer of Parliament who is going about making problematic declarations and giving reports of dubious quality without anyone calling him to task on it (and by this I mean the Auditor General). And I do think that PCO has a point in that the intent of the PBO was to give independent analysis, particularly of economic forecasts, and I do think that there is some merit to the criticisms that Kevin Page had become something of a showboat and was far exceeding his mandate before his term was not renewed. We have a serious problem in our parliament where we are handing too much power to these independent officers (and other appointed bodies for that matter) while MPs are doing less and less actual work – especially the work that they’re supposed to be doing.

While PCO says that the provisions in the budget bill were to try to “strike a balance” with the role of the PBO, I fear that he’s already become too popular with the media – and by extension the general public – to try and constrain his role, and the government will be forced to back down. Because We The Media are too keen to be deferential to watchdogs (like the Auditor General) and not call them out when they go wrong (like the AG did with the Senate report), I fear that the pattern will repeat itself with the PBO, as it already is with the demands from the pundit class that he be given overly broad powers with his new office. Because why let Parliament do the job it’s supposed to do when we can have Independent Officers do it for them?

Continue reading →