Tag Archives: Maple Crown

Roundup: Exit Meredith, at long last

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It is perhaps not entirely surprising, but it seems that soon-to-be former Senator Don Meredith had the tiniest shred of shame left in him after all, and he announced yesterday that he would be resigning from the Senate. Well, sort of. He wrote a letter where he implied that he was resigning but didn’t actually say it, and made himself out to be a hero for not putting the Senate through a Constitutional challenge around its powers to expel a member. It took calls to Meredith’s lawyer to confirm that yes, he was resigning, and then more calls to confirm that yes, the letter stating that had been sent to the Governor General (who has to get it and then inform the Senate Speaker of that fact) but just hadn’t arrived during the evening political shows.

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So now there are a couple of questions remaining. One of them is what happens to the two ongoing investigations into harassment in his office, which would normally be suspended given that they are considered moot given that he’s no longer there. That could change, however, if the Senate Ethics committee decides to let them continue in order for everything to be aired. Given the current mood, that may still happen.

The other question, and we’ll hear no end of sanctimony about it, is about Meredith’s pension. That’s the one thing that most reporters immediately glommed onto yesterday, because of course they did. Apparently, Treasury Board gets to make this call, and they’ve apparently reached out to PMO on the issue, so I’m sure we’ll get some kind of a political determination around it within a couple of days. At that point, we’ll see if Meredith decides that it’s a fight he wants to take on, despite the fact that he’ll have popular opinion against him. He may, however, have the law on his side, but more to the point, the desire to preserve one’s pension has been a driving force for getting bad actors to resign gracefully. Taking that option away will disincentivise future bad actors to do so, which is a bigger problem long-term than the public outrage about this one public figure.

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Meanwhile, this means that the Senate’s powers to expel one of its own members will remain untested, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’m not sure that it’s preferable for them to have gone ahead with it, even as a test case, given the historical message that it sends. Regardless, here’s James Bowden laying out the case for why the Senate does have the power to expel its own members, should it become necessary once again in the future.

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Roundup: Dragging in the GG

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The performative outrage against Trudeau’s Castro comments reached a new low yesterday with the announcement that the Governor General would be attending the commemoration in Havana as the Canadian representative. Despite not being a leadership candidate (thus far), Conservative MP Michelle Rempel took to Twitter to perform some more outrage, and dropped these particular gems.

It wasn’t so much that my head exploded. More like a piece of my soul died in utter exasperation because I know for a fact that she knows better. Misrepresenting the role of the Governor General is a particularly terrible thing to do, particularly giving the impression that you can write to him (or worse, the Queen) and he’ll somehow override the Prime Minister and the government of the day for your own partisan benefit. No, it doesn’t work that way, and its antithetical to the entire foundation of our system of government. And giving your follows completely the wrong impression about how Responsible Government works for the sake of some temporary passing performative outrage for the issue of the day is particularly heinous because it poisons the well. And this is what trying to stir up populist outrage does – it poisons the well for all of politics, particularly when you misrepresent things for temporary advantage. I get that there is political theatre, and that in the age of social media you need to be performative to a degree, but for the love of all the gods on Olympus stop undermining the whole system. When you stir up this hornet’s nest, it will come and bite you just as much as it does the government of the day, and we will all be left with a giant mess like we’re seeing south of the border. This is not something we want to import or emulate, no matter how many points you think it will win you temporarily. Only madness lies along this path, and the damage is insidious and incalculable, particularly when it comes from people who actually know better. It’s not a game. Stop treating it like it is.

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Roundup: A warning or a betrayal?

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Justin Trudeau made some comments to Le Devoir about the reduced sense of urgency around electoral reform, and a bunch of people – notably the NDP – freaked out. Trudeau said:

Under Stephen Harper, there were so many people unhappy with the government and their approach that people were saying, ‘It will take electoral reform to no longer have a government we don’t like’. But under the current system, they now have a government they’re more satisfied with and the motivation to change the electoral system is less compelling.

And then comes the parsing of the rhetoric – is he trying to walk back on his election promise that 2015 was the last election under first-past-the-post, or is he trying to give signals to the electoral reform committee as they begin to draft their report after their summer of consultations across the country? To the NDP (and Ed Broadbent of his eponymously named Institute), Trudeau’s comments are a betrayal because to them, he can only deliver proportional representation or bust. Their working premise is that Trudeau was saying that because the system elected Liberals it’s fine, but when it elected Conservatives, it was broken. But I’m not sure that’s what Trudeau was actually saying, because the prevailing popular discussion pre-election was that reform was needed because any system that delivered Conservative majorities was deemed illegitimate – one of those kinds of talking points that gives me hives because it presumes that electoral reform needs to be done for partisan reasons. And to that extent, Trudeau is right, that the sense of urgency has decreased because the Conservatives are no longer in power, so there’s less clamour for it to happen. There is also the theory that what Trudeau was signalling was that there are degrees of acceptable change, and that without as much broad support that smaller change like ranked ballots could be something he would push through (seeing as we all know that the committee is going to be deadlocked).

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Kady O’Malley, on the other hand, thinks that Trudeau is signalling to the NDP and Greens that they should be willing to compromise on PR during the committee deliberations, or he’ll deem it a stalemate and either walk away or put it to a referendum, where it would almost certainly be doomed. Rona Ambrose says that it could signal that Trudeau is backing down, which the Conservatives would like (and to be perfectly honest, I would too because the system is not broken and electoral reform is a solution in search of a problem). That he may have found the excuse to back down and admit this election promise is a failure – and then move on – would be the ideal move in my most humble opinion.

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Roundup: Laying the groundwork for deadlock

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Over the past couple of days, we’ve seen the markers being placed, and the groundwork is now being laid for the likely deadlock that will be the committee report on electoral reform. With the last of the cross-country consultations taking place this week, the parties started marking their turf this week – the NDP with their vacant report showing “overwhelming” support for proportional voting – along with demands for local representation, which means that they’re going to demand Mixed-Member Proportional, which was their intention all along. The Conservatives, meanwhile, have no position other than they demand a referendum, and yesterday they released the results of their surveys which came back “overwhelmingly” in favour of such a thing. (Never mind that both the Conservatives and the NDP had pretty much zero rigour when it comes to how they achieved those results, and the selection bias was pretty evident, they’re only interested in shock-and-awe headline results). Oh, and the Conservatives insist that they’re willing to find a consensus on a system – really! – but without a referendum, it’s no way no how.

In the middle of this, the Liberals are all going to start turning in the reports from their town hall meetings, all of which focused on “values” rather than specific systems, in the likely hopes that they too will have enough loose data that they can fudge into justifying whatever system they want – or, in the likely event of a deadlock, to justify that the current system already reflects those values (except of course for proportionality, but we all know that demand is based on a logical fallacy, and it would be great if they would actually admit that), so they can wiggle out of their commitment to reforming said system wholesale. Kady O’Malley thinks that this will really come down to the NDP deciding on whether to stick to their guns on proportionality or if they’ll put some water in their wine and accept ranked ballots, but given their completely specious rhetoric on the subject to date (“First-past-the-post on steroids!”), I think that’ll be too hard of a pill for them to swallow.

So, with any luck, this whole thing will blow up in everyone’s faces, and the government will have to swallow their pride, admit defeat, and move onto other, more important issues. One can always hope, anyway.

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Roundup: Trudeau plays hardball

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Yesterday was the day that Justin Trudeau decided to start playing hardball. Under the backdrop of the debate on ratification of the Paris Agreement on GHG emissions, he dropped the hammer on a minimum national carbon price, starting at $10 per tonne in 2018, rising to $50 per tonne by 2022, and provinces would keep the revenue with the intention that it be revenue neutral, so as not to ensure this is a federal “tax grab.” Any province that doesn’t comply will have the price imposed and the revenues returned to them. Stéphane Dion feels vindicated by this development, incidentally. Oh, and Trudeau probably isn’t going to meet with the premiers about their demands around the health transfer escalator either.

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Some of the provinces were immediately incensed. At the environment ministers’ meeting in Montreal, ministers from Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador walked out of the meeting, and true to his diva self, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall declared the “level of disrespect” to be “stunning” – never mind that Trudeau has been telegraphing this move ever since the Vancouver premier’s meeting. Alberta, incidentally, whose own plans surpass Trudeau’s, say that they won’t support it unless there’s a commitment for more pipelines, while Manitoba is non-committal for the moment. (Other provincial positions here).

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Brad Wall, for his part, is threatening to take the government to court over carbon pricing, but it’s not likely to get anywhere.

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In terms of analysis, economist Trevor Tombe reminds us why pricing carbon is the most effective market mechanism to deal with climate change, while John Ivison says that Trudeau may have outsmarted his opponents, and Andrew Coyne notes the one-sidedness of any federal-provincial negotiations.

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Roundup: Poisoning the expenses well

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With the story out yesterday morning about Rona Ambrose’s expenses claimed while staying in Stornoway, I think we’re starting to approach peak ridiculousness with the growing war over expenses, and accusations of poor judgment across the board. That the Conservatives have spent the past two days pushing a non-story about Dominic LeBlanc giving a speech at an event sponsored by a law firm with Irving connections, claiming poor judgment and a conflict of interest where clearly none actually exists (it’s not a fundraiser, no decisions are being made, it’s a speech, FFS), it’s desperation and grasping at straws.

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The bigger problem, however, is the corrosive effect this continues to have, fuelling not only the cheap, petty outrage that voters are being encouraged to feel anytime government spends money, but it is starting to burn the very real bridges for why we have expense regimes in the first place.

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Like Rob Silver above, Wherry may be exhibiting his trademark sarcasm, he’s got a point – we are rapidly approaching the point where We The Media have stoked such public opposition to legitimate expense claims by clutching our pearls at seemingly large numbers presented without context while crying “Judgment!” and “Taxpayers’ money!” that people are developing the wrong impression. We had NDP MPs last parliament declaring that if we’re to have senators, then they should all work as volunteers, and lately I’ve had jackasses barking at me on the Twitter Machine saying that senior political staff should also be volunteers. We’re half-a-step away from people demanding it of MPs.

Which gets back to the whole point of expense regimes in the first place – so that it acts as an equaliser, so that you don’t have to be inordinately wealthy in the first place in order to participate in political life, be it as an MP or senator (or senior political staffer, apparently). Do we really think it’s for the best that we return to an era where only the wealthy can afford to participate in political life and let them dictate policy for us? Or where a lack of an expense regime would encourage actual graft (as opposed to this nonsense we’re currently getting the vapours over with moving expenses and whatnot) from politicians to help make themselves financially whole from the expense of doing their jobs? Seriously, we need to grow up and stop poisoning the well because we don’t want to go where this road leads. Only certain doom lies that way.

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Roundup: The new Senate hurdles

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Just how MPs should deal with an increasingly independent – and assertive – Senate is the question posed by former MP Bryon Wilfert and his firm partner Paul Hillier, and it’s a question that I’m really not sure that Justin Trudeau adequate considered when he embarked on this path to modernization. While they note that no longer having senators in caucus limits the closed-door opportunity to hear and debate government proposals, I will state that they overplay the concern about the ability to whip those votes. There has never been any formal power to whip senators’ votes, but they relied primarily on sentimentality or affiliation, and sometimes senators went along, and sometimes they very much didn’t. That’s one of the reasons why there remains a bit of a taint around the post-2008 Harper appointees, because most of them came in being told that they could be whipped, and they behaved as though they could – up until fracture points around the contentious bill C-377, and then they rebelled against their Senate leadership (and it’s not a coincidence that Marjory LeBreton resigned as Government Leader shortly thereafter). They also point to the very real problem that with so many new MPs, and with the Liberal senators no longer in caucus, the personal relationships between parliamentarians that would normally exist no longer do, and that does start to exacerbate the problem of driving legislation through the Senate.

Where I see their proposed solution as being problematic is the suggestion that committee chairs be the new agents to set the legislative pace and of trying to build consensus. Why I think this is a problem is that the point of committees is to hold the government to account, which is why ministers are so frequently called to appear before them. If the chair is acting as the agent of the government, rather than of the committee itself, it creates something of a conflict in their roles. As well, many of the committee chairs are from the Conservatives (not that the Senate Liberals are the same party as the government, but there is an assumption of greater sympathy despite the fact that the relationship has been pretty testy to date). Trying to co-opt those chairs into being government agents to drive consensus would seem to be antithetical to the purposes of having an opposition, and its accountability functions. It also puts those chairs in the awkward position of having stakeholder groups trying to court them in order to get their support in rounding up senators to support the bills – groups that would also want to come before committee to plead their cases when the bills get to said committees, which again presents a bit of a conflict. If anything, I do think this highlights the value of having caucuses for organisational purposes, and arranging these meetings – and yes, the Independent Senators Group could possibly host these same kinds of stakeholder discussions without trying to come to an internal consensus, allowing their members to make their own minds up (and to date, they have operated on a rule that anyone trying to get support does so outside of their meeting room). It will continue to take getting used to, but it will continue to take some serious thought about what roles we’re asking people to take on within the chamber in order to get bills passed.

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Roundup: Harder’s arrogant dismissal

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It is probably not without a certain amount of chutzpah that Senator Peter Harder went before the Senate’s modernisation committee yesterday, and not only lectured to them about what the Senate does, but offered his particular thoughts on how the institution should be reformed, and most of all, having the gall to suggest that there was nothing that could be learned from the House of Lords and their integration of crossbenchers. Harder, with his mere couple of months of experience, has taken it upon himself to declare that the Senate should comprise of the government representative (a creature which does not actually appear in convention, statute or logic) and independents who will loosely affiliate on an ad hoc basis – no government, no opposition, no parties, no partisanship.

Give. Me. A. Break.

This declared allergy to partisanship in the upper chamber has reached the point of being utterly ridiculous. Parties exist for a reason. No one is arguing that the current power structure in the Senate needs to be broken apart and for independents to be given more power and resources, but blowing up parties is not the way to go, nor is assiduously screening nominees for any past hint of partisanship because there is nothing inherently wrong with partisanship. If Harder thinks that 105 individuals can sufficiently organise themselves for debates without any kind of structure – that his office doesn’t impose anyway – is lunacy. And it does concern me that Harder is making a bit of a power grab, especially considering that his office is already poised to start offering staffing services for the incoming batch of senators, which is not only unseemly but once again looks to bigfoot the work that the Independent Senators Group has been doing to come up with a bottom-up approach to organising unaligned senators in a manner consistent with the operation of the Chamber while working to give them caucus-like powers for committee assignments and with any luck, research dollars and support. But this isn’t the first time that Harder has attempted to bigfoot this nascent group, and I think that’s a very real problem. His attitude towards the modernisation committee – and in particular his arrogant dismissal of the crossbencher model (which the Independent Senate Group has been looking toward) – is a worrying sign.

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne not only unhelpfully endorses the Segal-Kirby call for the Senate to limit its veto to a suspensive one (because hey, it’s not like we might need an option to stop a prime minister with a majority from passing really terrible legislation), but goes one step further and proposes that any bill in the Senate that has not been passed in six months is deemed to have passed, so that when they can’t procedurally speed through certain bills that get bottlenecked in committees (like any private member’s bill, many of which are objectively terrible), or when they demand more time and attention, they should just be passed anyway? Seriously? What a way to run a parliament.

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Roundup: Non-binding unanimous support

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Supply day motions – also known as opposition day motions – can be tricky business, and unless the opposition party that moves it isn’t careful, they can wind up giving the government a free pass on supporting said motions without fear of consequence. Never mind that the point of supply day motions is to debate why the government should be denied supply (and hence confidence), these have largely turned into take-note debates on topics of the opposition’s choosing. These free pass motions happened with surprising regularity in the previous parliament, with the NDP frequently offering up mom-and-apple-pie motions that the Conservatives would obviously support the intent of, despite never having the intention to follow through with substantive action on, because hey, the motions are non-binding, and why not look like they support the idea of the motion? And lo and behold, the Conservatives offered up just such a motion around the Supreme Court of Canada, imploring the government to “respect the custom of regional representation” when making appointments to that court, “in particular, when replacing the retiring Justice Thomas Cromwell, who is Atlantic Canada’s representative on the Supreme Court.” While I will quibble with their use of “custom” as opposed to “constitutional convention” (which it really is at this point), this was one of those motions worded just loosely enough that the government could vote for it (and it did pass unanimously, as these kinds of motions often do), and should they go ahead and appoint a non-Atlantic justice to the court, they have room enough to turn around and give some kind of a nonsense excuse like “Oh, we felt that such-and-such diversity requirement was more needed at this point,” or “we felt that the Atlantic nominees were insufficiently bilingual,” or what have you. Or, as the talking points have been turning to, they will point to the number of Atlantic nominees on the short-list and said that they got equal opportunity and were not prejudiced against or some such, and make the merit argument. Suffice to say, there is more than enough wiggle room, and for a party that was so recently in government, the Conservative should have known better than to word a motion in a way that the government can support and later wiggle out of. This having been said, the government has been under enormous political pressure from the premiers regarding this Atlantic seat, so it is not inconceivable that this as a step in walking back from having the nominations being too open, but that remains to be seen.

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Roundup: Say no to a Charter Rights Officer

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The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is leading a push for the creation of an independent Charter Rights Officer for Parliament, and that sound you hear is my head hitting my desk over and over again. Because no. We don’t need yet another officer of parliament. We really, really don’t.

What we need is for MPs – particularly the opposition – to stand up and actually do their jobs, rather than fobbing off their homework onto yet another officer, who is accountable to nobody, whose reports they can then wield like some kind of a cudgel while not actually fulfilling their own responsibilities as parliamentarians (which, I will remind you once again, is to hold the government to account). The proliferation of officers of parliament has so diminished the capacity of the opposition to do their gods damned jobs in this country that it’s embarrassing, and since the inception of the Parliamentary Budget Office, it’s only become so much more egregious because now they can ignore the Estimates cycle entirely (despite controlling the public purse being the inherent definition of what MPs are supposed to do, and how they hold governments to account).

Oh, but it’s hard! Oh, but why not cede this to subject matter experts like lawyers and judges? Oh, why don’t we just start pre-referring all bills to the Supreme Court of Canada while we’re at it and turn the dialogue between the Court and Parliament into a game of “Mother May I?” Honestly, would it kill MPs to actually debate policy, which Charter compliance is a big part of? Parliament has responsibilities to fulfil. Why don’t we actually make them do their jobs rather than finding yet another excuse for them to avoid doing it?

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