Tag Archives: Marc Gold

Roundup: The “failure of negotiations” is nonsense

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It appears that the lack of seriousness around getting Bill C-6, which would ostensibly ban conversion therapy in Canada, through the Senate has reached its peak, as the Government Leader in the Senate, Senator Marc Gold, claims that negotiations have collapsed and he can’t bring the Senate back to deal with it. Which is nonsense. He has the power to petition the Speaker to recall the Chamber, and that request would almost certainly be granted. They can sit as long as necessary to pass the bill, and if they can’t get unanimous consent for hybrid sittings, well, by now most if not all Senators should be double-vaxxed and can attend in person. There are no actual impediments to them actually doing this.

Part of the problem is Gold himself – he doesn’t seem to grasp how the Senate works procedurally, and that he has a lot more power than he claims to. He also, for no good reason, proposed a date for the Senate to rise at the end of June when he could have kept it sitting into July with no actual problem. He also seems to be enamoured with the idea of agreeing on a timeline to pass the bill, which he doesn’t need, but ever since the Senate agreed to timelines around some major pieces of legislation in the previous parliament, there is a romance with doing this all the time in the Senate, which is unnecessary and in some cases counter-productive.

The other part of the problem is Justin Trudeau. And while it has been suggested that he has ordered Gold to let the bill die so that he can use it as a wedge in the election – frankly, the dynamics in the Senate don’t really support this line of reasoning – it’s more that Trudeau has a case of not-so-benign neglect when it comes to the Senate. By cutting it loose, so to speak, he gives it no mind rather than making it part of his strategy. There’s no reason why Gold is not a Cabinet minister who can answer for the government in the Chamber, rather than his current half-pregnant quasi-governmental role while still claiming independence, which doesn’t work in theory or practice. He clearly needs the support of PCO because he’s not able to do a reasonable enough job as it stands with what support he does get, and there frankly needs to be an actual government (meaning Cabinet) voice in the Chamber. But in insisting on “Senate independence,” Trudeau simply expects things to go through the Chamber and he can forget about it, which is a mistake.

Gold needs to fix this situation, and fast. If that means recalling the Senate in person, so be it. But claiming negotiations “collapsed” and he can’t do it is both untrue and against procedure. This is on him.

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Roundup: Checking Scheer’s privilege

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The solidarity protests with the Coastal GasLink protesters continue across the country, and police continue to hold off on enforcement while dialogue continues – Carolyn Bennett is slated to meet with chiefs in BC, while Marc Miller will be meeting with the Mohawk protesters in Ontario today using the protocols of the covenant chain. And amidst this, Andrew Scheer decided he needed to get involved. It didn’t go well.

Scheer’s tone deafness over the “privilege” remarks likely stem from the belief that the Conservatives have convinced themselves of, that it’s just rich, foreign-funded radicals who are protesting while the First Nations want the projects to proceed because jobs – which some do, but it delegitimizes the legitimate grievances and differences of opinion within Indigenous communities (even if all of the protesters aren’t themselves Indigenous). Add to that, Scheer’s insistence that ministers should be directing the operations of the police is wrong-headed (and dangerous – this is how police states happen), which forgets that even if Bill Blair could get on the phone and direct RCMP to enforce injunctions, the ones in Ontario that have shut down the rail network are squarely within the jurisdiction of the OPP. Oops. There may be some debate over how much authority that governments have to direct enforcement in cases like these, but Scheer (and Scott Moe, who has also been echoing his comments) should know better. That they don’t is a bad sign for the governance of this country.

Meanwhile, Chris Selley decries the ongoing blockades but makes some interesting points about the way in which the male hereditary Wet’suwet’en chiefs displaced the female hereditary chiefs who were in support of the project. Colby Cosh is bemused at how threatening commuters in Central Canada is the kind of leverage that Alberta could only dream of having. Matt Gurney recalls Christie Blatchford’s book on the Caledonia crisis, and how the Ontario Progressive Conservatives apparently didn’t learn anything from what happened then, given their absolute silence over what is happening under their jurisdiction.

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Roundup: The glitter of Gold in the Senate

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At long last – and indeed, at virtually the last possible minute – prime minister Justin Trudeau finally – finally! – named a new Leader of the Government in the Senate yesterday, independent Quebec senator Marc Gold. This wasn’t actually a surprise to those of us who’ve had our ears to the ground, but amidst the speculation of who Trudeau would name, many of them allegedly said no when they were asked (or at least said they did). The next question is who Gold can convince to come aboard as his deputy and whip (or “liaison” as they like to call themselves), because he won’t be able to replicate Senator Peter Harder’s too-clever-by-half trick of getting a former Conservative as his deputy and a former Liberal as his whip, so that he could insist that look, he was so non-partisan and independent in the middle of the two. Gold does sound like he plans to continue Harder’s half-pregnant fiction that he can be both independent and government “representative,” and has repeated the eye-rolling line that he “represents the government in the Senate and the Senate to the government.” Because no, that’s not actually how this works.

In an interview with CTV’s Power Play, Gold largely stuck to platitudes when asked how he will get big pieces of legislation through the Senate, insisting that the Senate will “rise to the occasion” and have “lively debate,” but would not say anything about things like, oh, negotiation. I will note that it was heartening to see that he did understand that the role of the Senate was to have a longer-range view and the less-partisan perspective, and kept insisting that it was a complementary body to the House of Commons, but his talk about the danger of it being an “echo chamber” of the Commons was a bit more off the mark. But countering this was the fact that he also seems to accept the false notion that these so-called reforms that Trudeau has been pushing somehow “returns” it to its raison d’être, which is not true in the slightest. It was never supposed to be non-partisan, and the more that people keep saying it is, misreading both the original debates on Confederation and the Supreme Court of Canada reference decision, the more it shows that we have an uphill struggle to keep these would-be reformers from doing lasting damage to the institution out of their well-meaning ignorance.

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