Tag Archives: Maryam Monsef

Roundup: The “brother” meltdown

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Because we’re in an election and it ramps up the absolute stupidity across the board, we had another so-called “gaffe” that made a bunch of people performatively lose their minds, and I can’t even, you guys.

In a press conference about the situation in Afghanistan, Maryam Monsef, the minister responsible for the status of women and gender equality and a former refugee from Afghanistan, who fled when she was a child, made a direct address to the Taliban about letting people out of the country, and used the term “brothers.” And people lost their gods damned minds. She was asked about it and said that the context was cultural and she absolutely considers them to be terrorists, and yet the insinuation persists that, somehow, she was using the term as being sympathetic to a group that is diametrically opposed to everything she is about. WTF.

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And I don’t think it’s beyond the pale to suggest that there was a racist or Islamophobic undercurrent in the media even questioning that she was somehow trying to be sympathetic to the Taliban. Because seriously, you think that somehow Monsef personally, or the Trudeau government, is going to be “soft on terror,” or some other bullshit like this? Are these the tropes by which we will repeatedly fall back into, because we have learned nothing over the past twenty years? Apparently not, especially when it’s all being done to put on a show. It’s pretty gross, you guys. Do better.

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Roundup: Whinging on the way out

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Once again, the brave political culture of Ottawa manifests itself with another column featuring anonymous MPs complaining to credulous columnists about how terrible their lives are, this time courtesy of John Ivison, who transcribes the miseries of Liberal MPs who aren’t running again about how everything is centralized in the PMO, that they’re being placated with busywork in committees, and the humiliation of being forced to memorize softball scripts to read in QP. And it’s all just so tiresome, because the vast majority of this is just learned helplessness.

I have increasingly less patience for this kind of anonymous whinging from MPs because they have all the power to change their situation if they wanted to do anything about it, but they instead learn to simply accept their situation even though they can change it. They don’t have to take the orders from the PMO if they think it’s humiliating or degrading. They don’t have to ask the questions prepared for them by PMO for QP – they can ask their own. The key is that they need their fellow backbenchers to back them up, and behave similarly. If you think the prime minister is going to throw a tantrum and threaten to not sign the nominations of his whole backbench, well, you’d be mistaken. They have this power. But instead they whinge to columnists about how unfair their lot in life is, never mind that they made this bed, and if they really wanted to change things, they would take back their power and stop electing leaders in quasi-presidential primaries that only serves to give them a false sense of “democratic legitimacy” at the expense of MPs. Again, they have the power to change this if they really wanted to.

As for these columnists, I would add that they need to get over this jejune notion that just letting MPs do more private members’ business will solve things. It won’t. In fact, it will probably just make things worse, because it will just bottleneck in the Senate, and MPs will spend more of their time working on these hobby horses rather than doing their actual work of holding government to account. That’s not how Parliament is supposed to work.

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Roundup: A small shuffle

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The practical fallout from Jody Wilson-Raybould’s resignation played out with a minor Cabinet shuffle yesterday morning, but rather than simply picking another backbencher to slot into the veterans affairs portfolio, Justin Trudeau moved Lawrence MacAulay from agriculture to put him in veterans, moved Marie-Claude Bibeau from international development to agriculture, and gave the international development portfolio to Maryam Monsef in addition to her status of women portfolio. There are a couple of calculations here – MacAulay held the veterans file over twenty years ago, so he’s not completely new, and he’s someone who is running again and has held his seat forever, so he looks like a steady hand in the department (and as a bonus, the department headquarters is in Charlottetown, and he’s a PEI MP). Bibeau, meanwhile, gets the distinction of being the country’s first woman agriculture minister, but she herself pointed out that she’s from a rural Quebec riding with a lot of dairy farmers, and she knows their issues well, and that’s a constituency that this government is keen to placate after concessions made in TPP and New NAFTA. And Monsef? She’s got a track record of good work in the portfolio’s she’s held, and can handle the added responsibility, as well as it reinforce the whole “feminist foreign policy” line of the government (not that you’d know it from how they’re funding it, but whatever).

In other SNC-Lavalin/Wilson Raybould Affair news, the opposition parties demanded that Parliament be recalled next week to keep this issue going, but Trudeau refused (and it’s worth remembering that the justice committee will still be meeting over the constituency weeks). Former Conservative and NDP Attorneys General have also written to the RCMP to demand an investigation (no political interference here), while former Liberal ones say there’s no clear criminal case. New Attorney General David Lametti says he wasn’t aware that Wilson-Raybould had already made the decision on the SNC-Lavalin file when he took over the portfolio, and that he’s still getting all of the facts on the situation.

For context, here’s a profile of Wilson-Raybould’s former chief of staff, Jessica Prince. Here’s a look at whether the Ethics Commissioner can really look into the whole matter. Here’s a look at the government’s reconciliation agenda in the lens of Wilson-Raybould’s demotion and resignation, and why her Indigenous world-view may have informed her decision not to go ahead with insisting on a deferred prosecution agreement for SNC-Lavalin. Here’s a look back at the measures the Conservatives put in 13 years ago to separate the role of the Crown Prosecutor from the Department of Justice, creating the Public Prosecution Service, which was one of their measures when they rode in on the white horse of accountability. In light of Michael Wernick’s testimony, here’s a look back reforms Brian Mulroney made to the role of Clerk of the Privy Council, which may create untenable contradictions in his role. Here are five possible scenarios for the future of SNC-Lavalin if the trial goes ahead, which includes decamping for the UK, or a foreign takeover.

And for pundit comment, Chantal Hébert has four questions about the ongoing situation. Andrew Coyne is not convinced it’s time for a prime ministerial resignation or an RCMP investigation, but that a rethink of our governing culture nevertheless is what will ultimately be needed. My weekend column contemplates the damage to Brand Trudeau™ after the SNC-Lavalin/Wilson-Raybould Affair.

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Roundup: Asylum claimant dust-up

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So there was a bit of a testy exchange yesterday as federal and provincial immigration ministers met in Winnipeg, and Ahmed Hussen got into a bit of a spat with Ontario’s new minister, Lisa MacLeod. Hussen objected to MacLeod (and Doug Ford) using the rhetoric of “illegal border crossers” and ginning up the same rhetoric of the Federal Conservatives that somehow refugee claimants take make it harder for legal immigrants (despite the fact that they’re separate processes and systems). This objection is not new either – Hussen has been saying this for weeks, so for MacLeod to get offended about it yesterday is being performative in the extreme – which is what she wants. With Kathleen Wynne no longer in the picture for her party to pit themselves against, they now need to make Trudeau their straw man. And when Hussen called the behaviour “un-Canadian,” MacLeod and her defenders accused Hussen of “bullying,” which is childish. But wait – it gets better. MacLeod loudly announced that the federal government should pay for these asylum claimants, while Hussen has been saying for weeks that they need Ontario to step up and find places elsewhere in the province than just Toronto to house them, and hey, they’re providing money to do just that. And then, because this wasn’t theatrical enough, Saskatchewan’s minister also refused to sign onto the communiqué from the meeting and demanded that the federal government not only pay for these asylum seekers (of which Saskatchewan has received zero), but that they should pay the full cost of all other government-sponsored refugees. Couple of things: 1) This is starting to get alarmingly close to the kinds of xenophobic populist rhetoric we’re seeing south of the border, and we should be very alarmed by that; and 2) Remember how the federal Conservatives just a few years ago cut refugee health benefits as a “deterrence” mechanism (which the courts later called “cruel and unusual”), which simply downloaded those costs onto the provinces? These are your political brethren.

Also released yesterday were the latest figures for the number of irregular border crossers, and it has plunged again. Because it’s a “crisis” that the government has “done nothing about.” Err, except they have been doing something about it, trying to stem the migrant flow at the source, and lo and behold, it seems to be working. For now, in any case. But the Conservatives continue to press for a meeting of the Commons’ immigration committee next week to rail about it.

Meanwhile, Martin Patriquin calls out the divisive and inflammatory language because it misses the actual issue at play, treating it as a permanent burden rather than a temporary state of affairs.

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Roundup: PBO confirmations on tax changes

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The Parliamentary Budget Officer came out with a report yesterday on the proposed tax changes around passive income, and all of the headlines screamed that they could net the federal government $6 billion. “Oh, but it’s not a cash grab,” opposition MPs said sarcastically in return, including during QP yesterday. The problem, of course, is that if they read, that $6 billion would be over two decades, and more importantly, that the PBO confirmed that three percent of personal corporation holders generate some 90 percent of passive income, which confirms that the point of the measures is to target those who incorporate for the sole purpose of investing and taking advantage of the lower rates as a part of that.

To help walk us through the report and its findings, here are Kevin Milligan and Lindsay Tedds:

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Roundup: Not seeing the cannon fodder

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After thinking a bit more about it, and seeing some of the reaction over the Twitter Machine over the weekend, I find myself coming back to Chantal Hébert’s weekend column about Trudeau treating his rookie ministers like cannon fodder, and I really have a hard time with it. Part of why I have difficulty is because it ignores some of the actual day-to-day realities as to why there were so many rookies in cabinet, which was that there were not a lot of veterans to choose from, and in order to maintain regional and gender balance, while still ensuring that you had enough veterans to do the other jobs of being a party in power, like having committee chairs who had some experience, then of course you were going to have rookies in cabinet. As well, the fact that Trudeau is behaving far more in the ethos of government by cabinet than his predecessor means that some of these rookies are going to be saddled with responsibility (and yes, this is a far less centrally-controlled cabinet, as I’ve spoken to staffers who used to work at Queen’s Park and have regaled us with the vast differences between how things operated between them).

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I also find the implicit notion that it’s young women ministers being thrown under the bus to be a problem, because I’m not so sure we’d hear the same complaints if it were a male minister who has been handed a tough file and it doesn’t go according to the expectations of the pundit class. Yes, Joly made a bad call with Madeleine Meilleur, but I would hardly call Joly incapable, and she is juggling a lot of other files on her plate at the moment. She’s not incompetent, and Trudeau hasn’t thrown her under any bus. Maryam Monsef? She handled a file that was basically a flaming bag of dog excrement and managed to come out intact with a promotion to a line department with a hefty agenda (whereas “Democratic institutions” is a make-work project with staff assigned from PCO). Monsef did her job, better than most people give her credit for, and the fact that the Rosemary’s Baby that was electoral reform got smothered in the cradle is not a black mark on her because she didn’t micromanage the committee. The fact that the Liberals on that committee dropped the ball and didn’t make their own case, and in fact let themselves be railroaded by the other parties is not Monsef’s fault (though one has to wonder how much blame to assign to her for letting Nathan Cullen manipulate her into accepting the “proportional” nonsense in committee make-up that doomed it). If anyone blames Karina Gould for electoral reform being cancelled, they’re the ones at fault – not Gould. Trudeau made that call (rightfully), and has taken his lumps for it. And if Hébert or anyone else (like Ed Broadbent for one) thinks that these poor young women should have been either kept out of cabinet instead of being given difficult files and a chance to prove themselves because they’re women, then I think that’s a bigger problem. I’m not seeing any cannon fodder – just some ministers doing their best with some of the problems handed to them.

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Roundup: MyDemocracy survey says…

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The results of the MyDemocracy.ca survey got published yesterday, and it’s full of some fairly contradictory results about people generally being reasonably satisfied with our system (or at least not wildly dissatisfied), preferring constituency connections and accountability (but also co-operation, which makes accountability difficult), while also wanting more diversity of views (unless it lets in radicals and extremists). Also, no mandatory voting, online voting, or lowering the voting age. (Full report here). So yeah. And already you’ve got Nathan Cullen sore that it doesn’t say “Canadians want PR” because that’s not what it was asking. Anyway, Philippe Lagassé is best positioned to weigh in on it, so here we go:

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Reading through the methodology and the reasoning behind the questions was fairly illuminating and something the detractors of the survey should probably want to actually do before they scroll ahead to where they go “Why doesn’t it say that Canadians really want proportional representation? Stupid biased survey” because we know that’s what they want to hear.

Of course, if you ask me, this should provide enough justification for them to smother this whole thing in the cradle and wash their hands of it, saying it turns out that Canadians aren’t too concerned with reform and hey, it turns out it’s way more complex than we thought so yeah, bad promise, we’ll do better next time, and then move onto some actual topics of importance than just trying to appease a few sore losers.

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Roundup: Cullen’s silver-tongued swindle

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It should not surprise me, but Nathan Cullen’s capacity for deceptive stunts continues to both amaze and gall me at the same time. Previously it was conning Maryam Monsef into his “proportional” electoral reform committee composition (which was not proportional, but a racket that was designed to merely look more “fair” but was in fact a calculated gambit to give the opposition a disproportionate say in the process), for which we got a report that was a steaming pile of hot garbage. With Karina Gould now in the portfolio again, Cullen now proposes that they “co-draft” an electoral reform bill.

No, seriously.

I cannot stress how bad of an idea this is for both of their sakes. For Gould, this is Cullen trying to swindle her like he did Monsef. He played her – and the public – in trying to push proportional representation and ended up recommending (along with Elizabeth May’s whole-hearted endorsement) one of the absolute worst possible electoral systems possible. And now he’s trying to ensure that she puts it into legislation for his party’s benefit. This has nothing to do with bills being drafted secretly “backrooms” (otherwise known as the Department of Justice under the cone of Cabinet confidence) or with the spirit of bipartisanship. This is about Cullen trying to manipulate the process.

If that weren’t bad enough, what is especially galling is that he’s undermining his own role as an opposition critic in the process. He is not a minister of the Crown. His role, therefore, is not to govern, but to hold those to account who do (–William Ewart Gladstone). This is an important job because parliament depends upon accountability. That’s the whole purpose behind having a parliament – to hold government to account. And it would be great if our opposition critics would actually take that job seriously rather than pretend they were ministers with their faux-bipartisanship and private members’ bills that cross the line when it comes to acceptable bounds of setting policy. It would be great if MPs actually did their jobs. Perhaps most troublesome in all of this is that Cullen is his party’s democratic reform critic. If he can’t grasp this most basic fundamental point of Responsible Government, then can we actually trust him on attempting to find a different voting system? I’m pretty sure the answer to that is no.

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Roundup: Not a council of elders

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As his retirement date fast approaches, outgoing Liberal Senator James Cowan is once again warning against Peter Harder’s plans to disband partisan caucuses in the Senate, fearing that trying to make it “council of elders” or advisory body will make it less effective as a body. He’s right, of course, but I would refine that a little more in saying that it would make the Senate less effective in holding the government to account, which is one of its key features, and in fact, one of the features that defines a Westminster-style parliament.

There are other ways in which effectiveness might be blunted in that any kinds of legislation, inquiries or studies that Senators might otherwise champion could be more easily diffused and go nowhere given that there would be little in the way or organizational capacity to have like-minded senators help move it forward. Having 101 loose fish is a poor way to run an effective body, and yet that is what some people think that an “independent” chamber means, rather than focusing on one that is less partisan and that far more easily works across party lines to get the work done that is being asked of them. And it totally wouldn’t have to do with a Government Leader – err, “government representative” would would rather have a body of independent senators that he can manipulate and manoeuvre as he and his political masters wish. Perish the thought.

This having all been said, we’ll miss Senator Cowan greatly. He’s been a credit to the institution and provided a great deal of leadership during a difficult few years for his caucus.

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Roundup: No, Monsef was not demoted

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So, cabinet shuffle, and while everyone keeps saying this is somehow Trump-focused, I’m not sure what labour, status of women, or democratic institutions has to do with Trump. There will be all manner of hot takes, and yes, you’ll get mine too. It was striking in that just barely over a year into the new government, two of the most senior hands have not only been bounced from cabinet, but from parliament as a whole – John McCallum headed to China as our new ambassador, and Stéphane Dion to parts unknown in what is likely to be a diplomatic posting of some variety, but what we’re not quite sure just yet. In a government that has very few experienced hands, this is something that does give me some pause. MaryAnn Mihychuk’s ouster, however, was not a great surprise given the stuff that came out when she had a number of duties taken away from her portfolio, particularly around her attitude and her ambition to be a regional political minister in a cabinet that has largely eschewed them. Chrystia Freeland to foreign affairs is not a surprise (making her the first Liberal woman foreign affairs minister in the country’s history – previous ones had been Conservatives), Patty Hajdu to labour seems a natural next step for the job she has been doing, and François-Philippe Champagne to trade is ambitious but he proved himself as Bill Morneau’s parliamentary secretary over the past year. Another first in Cabinet is Ahmed Hussen to immigration, who is Somali-born (and while some have said he’s the first Black cabinet minister, that would actually be Lincoln Alexander).

And then there’s Maryam Monsef. She’s off to Status of Women, which people keep insisting is a demotion, but I have a hard time accepting that notion. She carried a file that is the equivalent of a flaming bag of excrement and smiled all the way through. Sure, she’s no longer the person to finish trying to smother that file as elegantly as possible (so good luck with that, Karina Gould), but a demotion would have been getting the Mihychuk treatment. Status of Women is not a demotion. People went on TV scratching their heads about what challenges are in that department, apparently having not paid attention to the big files in that department, including sorting pay equity, ensuring that all government departments actually implement gender-based analysis, and that tiny little file about the plan to combat gender-based violence. You know, no challenges at all. Plus, she’s gone from a make-work portfolio that didn’t have an actual department – just a handful of PCO staffers to support her – to an actual line-department. It’s not a demotion. And did I mention good luck to Gould because yeah, now she gets to try to stick handle trying to find a way to kill the electoral reform election promise as gracefully as possible (despite Kady O’Malley’s belief that the PM thinks that all hope is not yet lost). Because seriously – this is a file that needs to be put out of its misery before it can cause actual damage to our democratic system.

Meanwhile, if you want hot takes on the cabinet shuffle, there are plenty here from Michael Den Tandt on Freeland, Andrew Potter on Dion, Susan Delacourt susses out the dynamics, while Paul Wells adds both some global perspective and insight into what it says about Trudeau.

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