Tag Archives: Mark Norman

Roundup: Getting mad at algorithms

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While the Conservatives spent their day in the House of Commons using their Supply Day motion to lay an unsubtle trap for the Liberals – demanding that they table a balanced budget and a written pledge to not raise any taxes, certain that the Liberals would defeat it so that they could turn around and say “See! Look! Trudeau is planning to raise your taxes!” – Andrew Scheer spent his afternoon getting angry at Google’s search algorithms.

The problem (other than the dangerous level of computer illiteracy) is that this was something that originated on a reddit thread that Scheer immediately latched onto.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1090332359650672641

https://twitter.com/cfhorgan/status/1090326614536146944

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1090333969319641089

Despite the afternoon of tweets pillorying Scheer and mock Google searches that put his image up for searches like “People who will never be prime minister,” it does actually score a deeper underlying point about this kind of virtue signalling over social media.

And this is part of the problem – we’ve seen this before with the issue of the UN global compact on migration, that Scheer started adopting tinfoil hat conspiracy theories to try and reclaim those votes that are suddenly gravitating toward Maxime Bernier. (I’m also not unconvinced that part of this Google search panic is some leftover James Damore “Google is full of social justice warriors!” drama that inhabits certain corners of the internet). The creation of this kind of alternate reality of conspiracies and lies that that they then turn into attack campaigns against media who fact-check and debunk their false claims, is them playing with fire. Making people believe disinformation may seem like a good idea to win a few votes in the short run, it has very long-term negative consequences that they seem utterly blind to. And yet, this is their current strategic vision. No good can come of this.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1090370788694192128

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1090361590858371075

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QP: Demanding a tax pledge

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Another snowy day in Ottawa, and things got back underway in the new Chamber, with numerous statements of remembrance for the Quebec City Mosque shooting two years ago. While Justin Trudeau was present today, Andrew Scheer was not, preferring to tweet instead about Google search results he didn’t like. That left Lisa Raitt to lead off, raising the case of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, and allegations that Scott Brison was withholding personal emails from the courts. Trudeau stood up to read that they were respecting judicial independence and would not comment. Raitt tried again, calling it a “concerning cover-up,” but Trudeau’s response did not change, only he recited the lines from memory. Raitt then moved on to a homily about affordability and wanted assurances that the government wouldn’t raise taxes. Trudeau assured her that they were cutting taxes for the Middle Class™ while they were growing the economy. Alain Rayes took over in French to demand a balanced budget with no tax hikes. Trudeau deployed his lines about growing the economy and helping the Middle Class™. Rayes tried again, and this time Trudeau insisted that they lowered taxes and would not raise them, while the Conservatives preferred tax cuts for the rich, when “trickle down economics doesn’t work.” Peter Julian led off for the NDP, accusing the PM of misleading the House on housing stats. Trudeau delivered some pat lines about their National Housing Strategy that has helped a million Canadians so far. Julian name-dropped the riding of Burnaby to demand new affordable housing, to which Trudeau cautioned him against maligning the refurbishment of existing housing which ensures Canadians have safe and affordable places to live, which is what they were ensuring. Brigitte Sansoucy went into a paean about personal debt and affordable housing, and Trudeau deployed more talking points about the investments they made. Sansoucy then said that he didn’t consider seniors in his response, to which Trudeau deployed his standard talking points about increasing the GIS.

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Roundup: McCallum out

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On Friday night, Justin Trudeau asked for and accepted John McCallum’s resignation as the ambassador to China, not offering specifics as to why, but offering praise of his years of service. The narrative emerged a little later over the weekend that his comments were “unhelpful” in releasing those Canadians detained in the country, and some said that it sent “inconsistent” messages to China (though I’m not sure that’s entirely true – we may be following the rule of law, but if the Americans withdraw their extradition request, that would resolve the situation, and we can’t pretend that extradition requests in Canada aren’t inherently political). Of course, this is also that whole dynamic of what can be said in private versus public, but there you go. Choosing a replacement will also be tricky business, and there are those who say it needs to be a senior bureaucrat who speaks Mandarin, but we’ll see if Trudeau seems to think another political appointee is his preferred route.

Andrew Scheer was quick to rush out and say that it was too late, that he should have been fired at the first instance, which is a bit rich considering that Stephen Harper’s usual practice was to conspicuously ignore these kinds of eruptions, shrug them off, and only months later would he quietly shuffle that person out of whatever job they were in, so that he didn’t look like he made a mistake in appointing them to the job in the first place.

Susan Delacourt hears from her PMO sources that nobody was happy with McCallum’s ouster, and that while they could walk back on comments once, they couldn’t do it a second time. Paul Wells goes through all of the other questions that McCallum’s ouster raises, not only with the state of the Meng incident, but also on the broader foreign policy objectives of this government, and what is left standing from the vision they outlined two years ago.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1089321523926786048

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Roundup: A few notes on the state of the Brexit drama

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Given the state of the drama in Westminster right now, I thought I’d make a couple of points about why we’re here now. It’s pretty unprecedented for a government to lose a vote – badly – on a major foreign policy plank without automatically losing confidence, and yet, thanks to the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, that’s exactly the case. And because Theresa May squeaked out a confidence vote, that leaves her in something of a precarious situation about not really having a mandate to continue on the path she was on, while not being able to take anything to the people in a general election, as might ordinarily be the case under our share Westminster system. The FTPA has made Parliament untenable, and enables bad actors to game the system, which would ordinarily have been avoided by the sheer fact that they would have been keen to avoid shenanigans that the Queen would need to be involved in.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1085530081768857600

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1085531738971897858

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1085270260498886656

It seems to me that if the Westminster parliament were functioning normally, then May could have taken the question of proceeding with Brexit to the people in an election, given that she lost the vote of confidence. Of course that would necessitate Labour to come up with a coherent position (and perhaps a more coherent leader, which their current bastardised leadership selection process also gave them). That would have given the winning government a popular mandate to overtake the referendum if need be, but again, that’s now off the table because of the way the FTPA has distorted the Westminster system. With the practice of Responsible Government being blunted by this statute, it’s clear that it must go.

Meanwhile, Chantal Hébert looks at the Brexit omnishambles and compares it to the plans for Quebec sovereignty back in the day, and how this seems to be dampening any sovereigntist sentiment in the province even further (while getting in a few jabs about Andrew Scheer’s Brexit boosterism along the way). Andrew Coyne likewise looks to the Brexit drama as an object lesson in how seccession from any union is far from painless.

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Roundup: Brison’s long farewell

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It was a bit of a surprise yesterday morning, as Treasury Board president Scott Brison announced that he was resigning his cabinet position because he decided that after 22 years in elected politics, he had decided he wasn’t going to run again this fall. His reasons were mostly that it was time for something new, and the fact that he now has a young family – something that was largely inconceivable when he first got into politics, then as a Progressive Conservative – though that hasn’t stopped everyone from speculating that this has something to do with the upcoming trial of VADM Mark Norman, given that Norman’s lawyers are trying to insinuate that Brison had tried to politically interfere with the procurement process for the interim naval supply ship. (Brison denies this, and he’s not the one on trial, but here’s a thread on what this decision means on his ability to testify). One can’t also help but noting that this will be a bit of a blow for Trudeau as well, as one of his most experienced and competent ministers will be leaving the Cabinet table, and that will matter given the fact that there are still too many ministers that haven’t quite grown into their responsibilities yet.

This, of course, means that we’re now fully into Cabinet shuffle speculation, given that there is one coming on Monday to replace Brison. Every other member of Cabinet, save Jody Wilson-Raybould, has confirmed that they plan to run again in the next election (and Wilson-Raybould likely will as well – she was out of the country and didn’t respond to questions), so it’s unlikely that anyone else will be dropped at this point, particularly given the last shuffle wasn’t too long ago, so it’s an open question as to who will be tapped to replace Brison, and who will take the Treasury Board file.

On a personal note, Brison played a big part in my early days on the Hill, when I was writing primarily for LGBT outlets. When I was the Ottawa correspondent – and later political editor – for the now defunct Outlooks magazine, I had a monthly segment where I would ask Brison, Senator Nancy Ruth, and NDP MP Bill Siksay (later Randall Garrison after Siksay retired) a question every month to get queer perspectives from the three main parties, and that helped me to grow into the journalist that I am today. He was always generous with his time, and incredibly patient with my rookie status, and I will forever be grateful for that.

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Roundup: A victory for the status quo

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Christmas came a few days early, courtesy of British Columbia, which rejected the referendum to change their voting system. A decisive 61.3 percent of British Columbians voted to keep First Past the Post, which one hopes would shut up the proportional representation Kool-Aid drinkers for some time – not that it will. They’ve already begun the ritual grousing over Twitter about how a) the referendum was the problem and people rejected it and not PR; and b) that voters are just too stupid to get that “PR is lit,” to coin a phrase. The provincial Green Party leader, Andrew Weaver, says that he gets the message and that they won’t be raising it “anytime soon” – but he also didn’t want a referendum in the first place and wanted it imposed, so we’ll see how long before he starts agitating for that option.

Next up for attempts at electoral reform are Quebec – where François Legault promised it sans-referendum with the support of other party leaders – and PEI, where PR narrowly “won” a poorly attended plebiscite, on the late round of a ranked ballot, hence the government plans to run another referendum during the next provincial election.
But seriously, guys. We need to stop this mythmaking about the current system, and this belief that PR is the only “good” system. Most of the gripes about the current system stem from ignorance and disengagement with the process that has allowed bad actors to co-opt the system to their own ends (and this is especially because of the bastardised leadership selection system that we have gravitated toward despite is demonstrated toxic effect on our system). PR doesn’t solve these problems – if anything, most PR systems simply exacerbate them and create whole new problems. Time to focus our efforts toward civic literacy and using grassroots engagement to fix the problems that we’ve allowed to creep into our system. And hey, I wrote a book on this as a primer for you.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1075903388187910145

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1075906692880068608

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1075956069082386432

Meanwhile, Shachi Kurl of the Angus Reid institute breaks down the polling around the referendum, and should put to bed a few of the myths.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1075928443865292800

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Roundup: $1.6 Billion instead of a magic wand

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Yesterday, the federal government announced $1.6 billion in help for the Alberta energy sector – but insisted it’s not a subsidy. $1 billion of it was in loans for exporters to invest in technologies and address working capital needs or exploring new markets; $500 million from to help smaller oil and gas businesses weather the uncertainty, $50 million from the Clean Growth Program, and $100 million in economic diversification projects. It wasn’t something like federal funding for companies to remediate orphan wells, for example. And predictably, Rachel Notley and various other Conservatives immediately dismissed this as not asking for money but wanting “the handcuffs removed,” which seems to me to be code for waving a magic wand to get pipelines built immediately, despite the fact that unless they plan to bulldoze through the Indigenous consultation process, is something the government can’t do. And Andrew Scheer? He went full drama queen with a petulant press release that accused Trudeau of trying to destroy Alberta, sounding very much like a jealous suitor wailing “He can’t love you like I will!”

More to the point, the federal government can’t just ram through the approvals for Trans Mountain, given that the last time they tried to cut corners, the Federal Court of Appeal objected and rescinded their approvals and would do so again, hence why they’re going the route of doing what the court laid out, and that takes time. There is no magic wand. Killing Bill C-69 won’t solve anything because the current system isn’t working, and while the bill is flawed and open to amendment at the Senate, Conservative senators have not consented to any committee hearings before the Senate’s slated (late) return in February (and I have heard various reasons for this, both in opposition to the bill, and because they are pushing back against the committee chair, who they accuse of doing the bidding of Senator Peter Harder). The tanker ban on BC’s north coast? That’s demanded by many of the coastal First Nations. Scrapping the carbon tax? Won’t change anything because it has nothing to do with the oil price differential and oil companies have been asking for a carbon price so that they can have predictability when it comes to climate demands. And then there’s the bogeyman about foreign funded “paid protesters” that the Conservatives blame for everything, despite the fact that they don’t control the courts or the economics of projects. That won’t stop Scheer or Jason Kenney from offering the people of Alberta another vial of snake oil, promising quick approval on pipelines that they can’t actually deliver on.

Meanwhile, amidst more lies and grievance narratives around the federal equalisation programme, Trevor Tombe drops a reality bomb about how the system works and why. Because amidst the demands for magic wands and offering snake oil, the Jason Kenneys of this country will continue to lie about how equalisation works to keep people angry in the hopes of getting electoral advantage for it. We need more people to tell the truth about the system if we’re to keep a lid on the anger and try to do something meaningful to address it rather than simply bow to grievance culture and fabrications.

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Roundup: Salaries are not cement

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As the debate over the proposed changes to the Parliament of Canada Act continues to roll along, some of us are struck by the fact that the whole framing of the debate continues to be utterly wrong – that the wrong headline on the Canadian Press piece about prime minister Justin Trudeau looking to “cement” the changes in order to make it harder for a future prime minister to roll them back is completely wrong, given that the PCA has nothing to do with the appointment process. And yet, here we are, once again debating the independent appointments commission, when the actual changes to the Act involve salaries for caucus leaders and some organisational issues. Virtually all of these have been extended to the Independent Senators Group, from committee chairs and assignments, to a role on the Internal Economy Committee, budget allocations for their leadership’s office (aka the “secretariat”), and so on. The only thing they can’t get currently, which they need changes to the PCA for is a higher salary for their leadership team. Fair enough, one might say, but considering that they eschew the label of a caucus, and the roles of both government and opposition, preferring to be neither fish nor fowl, it does make it a bit harder to justify that they should be on equal footing to them. In practice, they are very much a caucus, but this is what the changes they are asking for boil down to – it has nothing to do with “cementing” the changes to the institution, and it would be great if the pundits and journalists talking about this issue could grasp that basic fact.

With that in mind, Colby Cosh penned a fairly (deservedly) harsh piece about the changes to the Upper Chamber, and the fact that Trudeau is creating a Frankenstein’s monster that has more to do with his trying to absolve himself of his responsibility for the Chamber than anything. And Cosh is absolutely right – this has been about Trudeau washing his hands of any whiff of scandal in the Upper Chamber since he became leader, consequences be damned. And there have been real consequences – Trudeau centralised power within his caucus because he got rid of the voices with the most experience who could push back against him without consequences (it’s not like he can threaten not to sign their nomination papers), and got rid of the bulk of his party’s institutional memory in one fell swoop. He’s also losing his ability to get his legislation through the Chamber because he named someone inept as his “representative” (who should be a full-fledged Cabinet minister in order to ensure proper lines of accountability) who refuses to negotiate timelines on bills in the manner in which the Senate operates.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1074845188210622465

This having been said, I will again reiterate that what we should strive for is for the ISG to become like the crossbenchers in the Lords, but that depends on a strong enough Liberal and Conservative contingent to provide balance, and this prime minister has no interest in that, preferring to continue with this experiment in Frankenstein’s Monster until he gets burned by it. And while I’m sure that there will come a reckoning, that the ISG will fracture, and eventually some of its members will drift to an established caucus, it may be some time before that happens and sanity starts to prevail in the Chamber. I just wouldn’t count on this prime minister to provide any of it.

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Roundup: Duffy v privilege

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As expected, the Ontario Superior Court dismissed Senator Mike Duffy’s attempt to sue the Senate for their disciplining him because the Senate is protected by parliamentary privilege. Privilege is what allows the Senate to be self-governing and as a body that is focused on holding government to account, it has complete institutional independence for very good reason – so that they can speak truth to power without fear of dismissal or reprisal. So imagine the utter gall of Duffy’s response to this ruling.

“The Charter of Rights applies to all Canadians, but the Court decision states that because of the centuries old concept of Parliamentary Privilege, the Charter doesn’t apply to Senators.” Oh dear me. No. You see, the only reason that Duffy still has a job in the Senate is because of parliamentary privilege. If he didn’t have the privilege afforded to him, he couldn’t have made the myriad of accusations about Stephen Harper and his operatives in the Senate Chamber on the eve of his suspension – not without fear of reprisal, particularly a lawsuit. That the Senate is self-governing and has institutional independence saved him from being summarily dismissed by the prime minister of the day when Duffy caused him a great deal of embarrassment. While I don’t dispute that Duffy was subjected to a flawed process that denied him the benefit of due process due to political expediency because, the fact that he received a suspension without pay that was eventually lifted, allowing him to resume his duties with full pay and serving enough time for his pension to kick in, means that he has pretty much escaped consequence for actions that he very likely would have been fired for in any other circumstance. That he then accuses the concept of privilege as stripping him of his Charter rights, when it has in fact protected him in every conceivable way, is utterly boggling.

Meanwhile, it seems clear that between this bit of self-pitying and the decision to pose with Senators Brazeau and Wallin while Brazeau tweeted that they “survived the unjustifiable bs [sic]” (since deleted), that there seems to be an insufficient amount of self-reflection at play, and that perhaps the three should continue to keep their heads down and not draw attention to themselves, because the public has not forgotten them.

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Roundup: Starting the Big Move

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Yesterday was the final day that Centre Block was officially in operation. As of today, the big move starts happening, starting with the House of Commons chamber, and will be followed by the other major offices, like the Speaker, the prime minister and leader of the opposition, with the heritage furniture that will continue to be in use. And once that’s done and the building is empty, they can start to open up walls and ceilings to figure out the state of the building, and determine what needs to be done in terms of renovations and restorations, and from that point determine a price tag and timeline. At present, everything is just a guess, so we’ll have to stay tuned. (Here’s a photo gallery of the current House of Commons and Senate, and the new Commons).

The Senate, however, is a different story. Recent testing of the new chamber brought to light the fact that there are acoustic problems related to sound leakage that were first identified two years ago, and despite assurances from Public Works, it wasn’t addressed. That means they have to install new sound baffles which will delay the move by several weeks, which means that there will be even fewer weeks for the Senate to address its full Order Paper in the New Year. Committees can still meet in the meantime, but it seems the Conservatives have decided to engage in some gamesmanship over Bill C-69, which has the Independent senators are complaining about stall tactics.

Meanwhile, here is a lengthy thread looking at the new Senate building, and six facts about the building, its history, and the new renovations.

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