Six new senators had just been sworn in, and other senators in the chamber had been shuffle around, making for a fuller chamber. This week’s special ministerial guest star was employment minister MaryAnn Mihychuk (and I can’t recall if she’s been here before). Senator Carignan led off, asking about union certification and secret ballots, taking a shot at Senator Bellemare while he was at it. Mihychuk, after getting him to repeat the question, said there was no real reason to move away from the card check system, and noted that while intimidation does exist, they are returning to a system that worked well for years.
Tag Archives: MaryAnn Mihychuk
Roundup: The price of everything and the value of nothing
We’re into that part of summer where the news is so thin that we’ve turned to cheap outrage to get to some headlines. Combing through expense reports, many a reporter is simply putting a big number up on a headline and clutching their pearls about it, never mind that there’s no context around those figures, and that in most cases they’re actually reasonable. And lo, we look small town cheap, like backwater rubes as we continue to insist that our politicians subsist on stale bread and shaving water lest they look like they’re too good for the rest of us.
https://twitter.com/lazin_ryder/status/767957004820242432
What is possibly worse is the fact that there is constant apology rather than defending any of the spending. Was the cost of Jane Philpott’s car service unreasonable? That’s debatable, and I’m dubious that the fact that the owner of the service was a campaign volunteer will gain much traction with the Ethics Commissioner. Catherine McKenna at least defended the use of a photographer at COP21 (and no, it’s not the media’s job to take photos that the government can later use for their own promotional need), but instead of media questioning the return that they got for them (Jen Gerson noted on Power & Politics that the quality of the photos she’d seen were questionable and the photographer hired had credentials that may not have been suitable for the task), we just get performed outrage at the dollar value.
https://twitter.com/will__murray/status/768206012113416198
https://twitter.com/will__murray/status/768207303455768580
In this he’s exactly right – this is made worse by politicians essentially cannibalizing one another to score points rather than saying “Whoa there, let’s stop and think about this for a minute. Maybe these are reasonable expenses.” No. Instead it’s this game of tit-for-tat, Conservatives getting back at the Liberals for pointing out their own spending excesses when they were in government, and the NDP simply being sanctimonious and smug. The Globe and Mail’s editorial on the subject is right – we are spending too much time on the nickel-and-diming and the cheap theatre of performed outrage rather than on the actual scrutiny of government spending, and this may be related to the absolute dysfunction of the Estimates process in parliament (noting that parliamentarians themselves let it get this bad rather than push back on successive governments that caused this problem, and performing cheap outrage is easier). On the other hand, we’ve reached the point where we are living out that Oscar Wilde quote about a cynic being “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Reporters rushing to put up that headline number with no context attached have done the system a disservice. Insisting that everyone post receipts will only make things worse, and will only hasten the race to the bottom where MPs will be fighting for re-election on the backs of what brand of toilet paper they bought for the constituency office and whether it was on sale that week or not. We need to draw a line somewhere, before we both paralyze the discourse and make politics so unattractive to anyone who wants to serve the public that they won’t bother. We’re our own worst enemies, and we help nobody in feeding this populist noise.
Roundup: Another incoming mass appointment
The government’s permanent Senate appointment board is set to get underway “within days” to get to work on filling the remaining 19 vacant Senate seats, but if you listen very carefully, you can hear my alarm going of that the way they appear to be planning to do this is a Very Bad Idea. Specifically, it certainly looks like the plan is to appoint all 19 in one fell swoop by the fall, and I cannot stress enough how much of a really, really bad thing this is. It’s like nobody learned any of the lessons from the glut of 18 panic appointments in 2008, and how badly that stressed the Senate in its ability to absorb that many new members at once, and the fact that it had a negative effect on their independence because it meant that the government at the time pretty much controlled them and exercised a heavy whip hand because there wasn’t time to let them integrate at their own pace. The seven appointments made this spring, without a government or caucus to guide them, put them on a steep learning curve and left them with little in the way of logistical support for setting up their offices, which isn’t exactly ideal either. That Peter Harder has now created for himself a new quasi-whip (ahem, styled “government liaison”) that has the capacity to help them with some logistics issues, barring the Independent Working Group being in a position to offer that support as well if they are in a position to do so, may wind up being one less stressor for the individual appointees, but that still doesn’t neglect the fact that mass appointments are bad for the system. Because of the nature of the Senate, it works best when individual vacancies are filled as they happen, and that those new senators gradually get up to speed, given the unique way that the chamber operates, and that really is a process that can take two or three years to get fully into it. But the government sitting on the appointment process as long as it has, in order to do these appointments in one fell swoop, is a problem, and it’s yet another problem of their own making, which is a consistent pattern when it comes to the Senate. It’s one thing I hope that does come out of this Federal Court challenge to Senate vacancies – that there is a declaration that sets a time limit for when vacancies must be filled, so that it cuts down on future mass appointments, on top of ensuring that those regions have their proper representation as they are guaranteed under the Constitution, because yes, these things do matter.