One of the big things that emerged from the Duffy trial yesterday was a raft of new emails released from Nigel Wright, along with Wright’s testimony. While none of it was particularly damning to the prime minister, a number of pundits and journalists were baying over the Twitterverse and elsewhere that “this proves that the PMO is controlling the Senate! Where’s the independence?” and so on, I’m going to get everyone to take a deep breath and calm down. Yes, the PMO has been playing the Senate leadership – not the Senate itself – like its own private pawn. I’m not going to dispute that fact. But I am going to offer some context. First of all, Stephen Harper broke the Senate with his petulant refusal to make appointments from 2006 to 2008, and then made mass appointments, which damaged the chamber. (Refresher read here). He had a Senate leader who did his bidding without question, which is a problem. Because said Senate leader had so many newbie senators under her wing who did her bidding without question, it set up a power dynamic that allowed the PMO to exercise power levers that don’t actually exist. Wright complained about this lack of levers at times in his correspondence, and we also know that the Senate staff, including committee clerks, were pushing back against this PMO control, even to the point of threatening legal action. (And to that point, this BuzzFeed headline is wrong – they weren’t “rogue staffers,” they were Senate staffers instead of political ones). This makes it a problem of actors instead of institutions. As it is designed, the Senate is already a bastion of institutional independence – appointed Senators have absolutely nothing preventing them from speaking truth to power, because they are protected right up to a retirement age of 75, which in turn protects them from needing to curry favour with the PM to get a post-Senate appointment to a board or tribunal. The system is designed to ensure that they can be fully independent – the problem is that the current crop of Conservative senators has chosen not to be, whether it’s out of ignorance of their role, sentimentality for the prime minister who appointed them, or the fact that they sincerely believe he knows what’s best, so they’ll do what he asks. I can’t think of any way to tinker with the system to prevent that. As a rule, senators get better with age, and when a party leadership changes, they tend to get really independent in a hurry, but until that point, this remains a problem of political actors instead of institutions.
Tag Archives: Manon Perreault
Roundup: The R-word
With all of this bad economic news coming out lately, the R-word has been bandied about – recession, or technical recession, in the event that we get two quarters of negative growth. After all, we had negative growth in the first quarter, and we’ve already had one US bank say that we’re headed for recession and a 77-cent dollar (note: This was misreported as a 70-cent dollar the day before yesterday). Oh, but don’t worry, Joe Oliver says – we won’t go into recession. His forecasters still show growth, and Harper insists that the oil patch is going to bounce back, while they send out MPs saying that certain sectors of the economy are going to do better with a lower dollar – except no, the manufacturing sector isn’t ramping up on a lower dollar this time because that burned them before, and they had already retooled a lot of their operations to service oil and gas demand rather than export demand. So there’s that. One also can’t help but be reminded of the 2008 election, when Harper insisted that if a recession was going to happen, it would have happened already, and hey, look at all of these great buying opportunities. And then the “Great Recession” happened (a ridiculous name considering that the recession in the early 80s was actually worse), and the government drove us into deficit with a badly planned stimulus programme. Now that the campaign has begun, all of the leaders are plugging their messages – Harper insisting that things are going to bounce back and hey, look over there – terrorists!; Mulcair talking about manufacturing jobs without saying how he’ll encourage them (that miniscule innovation tax credit isn’t going to cut it) while also falsely decrying that “all of our eggs” were in the resource basket (not even remotely true); while Trudeau is making points about the current way the government is treating the economy and environment in an oppositional framework when it needn’t be, and talking about ramping up infrastructure spending but also trying to be clever about how to do it without more deficit spending. We’ll know by September 1st if we’re really in a recession or not, but it could make for a long two months of campaigning on the economy in the meantime.