Tag Archives: Michael Chong

Roundup: The rot Chong won’t address

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Conservative MP Michael Chong took to Policy Options yesterday to decry that the unilateral expulsions of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from the Liberal caucus was indicative of a “deeper rot” in our parliamentary culture. His solution? Just make some amendments to his garbage legislation Reform Act to better enforce the called-for votes to implement at the beginning of each parliament, or to do away with the voting entirely (which was a compromise to make the bill palatable), and ensure that the measures in the bill are fully enforceable regardless. And I just can’t even.

Chong keeps insisting that his garbage bill was going to “rebalance” the power between MPs and party leaders, but it does nothing of the sort – much like this omnibus motion that Liberal MP Frank Bayliss is proposing to amend the Standing Orders (which Chong is a co-sponsor of). These kinds of measures don’t actually attack the root of the problems facing our parliament, and in the creation of new rules, they simply create avenues for unintended consequences that make things worse. (For more on the Bayliss motion and why it’s a problem, see my weekend column). The solution is not, and will never be, more rules. The solution is to do away with the rules that have made things progressively worse, and to start rolling back the changes that our MPs keep making in the vain hopes of improving their lot when all they need to do is assert the powers that they already have.

I fear I am getting repetitive about this point, but until people start listening, I will keep saying it – the biggest root cause of the problems in our system, particularly where it concerns the “balancing” of powers of MPs vis-à-vis the party leader, is the party leadership selection system. Unless caucus members can select the leader, any attempt made by them to remove the leader, garbage Reform Act or no, will be seen as illegitimate precisely because the current selection system insulates leaders with a false notion of “democratic legitimacy.” And Chong knows this, but keeps trying to burnish his garbage bill in the hopes that it will somehow shine. It’s not going to happen, and MPs telling themselves that the solution is more rules are simply deluding themselves. More rules got us in this situation. More rules keeps taking power away from MPs under the guise of “rebalancing” or “restoring” that power, and this cycle keeps repeating. It needs to stop, and it means MPs (and the pundit class of this country) need to stop believing this mythology. The only solution is caucus selection of leaders. Anything else is a mirage.

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Roundup: Trying to make a garbage bill relevant

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Over the past couple of weeks, Conservative MP Michael Chong has been trying to make “Fetch” happen – or rather, trying to make his Reform Act relevant again, first by taking to the Twitter Machine to outline the process outlined in the Act for ousting a party leader (as though the Liberals were seriously considering dumping Justin Trudeau), and later to insist that it laid out a process for expelling MPs from caucus. The problem? Well, there are several, but the most immediate one is that the Act requires each party to vote at the beginning of each parliament whether they will adhere to the provisions or not – and lo, none of the parties voted to. Not even Chong’s. It was always a garbage bill – I wrote a stack of columns on that very point at the time it was being debated – and it made things worse for parties, not better, and ironically would have made it even harder to remove a party leader by setting a public high bar that the pressure created by a handful of vocal dissidents or resignations would have done on its own. It also has no enforcement mechanisms, which the Speaker confirmed when Erin Weir tried to complain that it wasn’t being adhered to. But why did this garbage bill pass? Because it gave MPs a warm feeling that they were doing something to “fix” Parliament (and in the context of doing something about the “dictatorial” style of Stephen Harper under the mistaken belief that his caucus was searching for some way to get rid of him, which was never the case).  It had so neutered it in order to be palatable enough to vote on that it was a sham bill at best, but really it did actual harm to the system, but Chong was stubborn in determining that it should pass in its bastardized form rather than abandoning it for the steaming hot garbage bill that it was.

And now, with Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott’s ouster from caucus, Chong has been trying to make the rounds to claim that the move was illegal without a vote – err, except no party voted to adopt the provisions, which is pretty embarrassing. And yet he keeps trying to sell it to the public as though this were a done deal.

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Roundup: Caucus drama and another vote-a-thon

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Yesterday was another non-stop day of shenanigans and ongoing fallout from the interminable Double-Hyphen Affair, so let’s walk through it. The day began with caucus meetings, and on the way into Liberal caucus, Justin Trudeau stated that he was satisfied that Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott wanted to still work for the Liberal cause, so he would let them stay in caucus – though apparently Philpott got something of a rough ride from her fellow Liberals, according to various sources. Nearby, Andrew Scheer opened the door to the media for a speech about how terrible the budget was, except it was the same kind of jejune talking points that we’ve come to expect, such as how these deficits were terrible, unsustainable, and would lead to future tax increases – all of which are objectively untrue given that the deficit is actually small, sustainable, and with a declining debt-to-GDP ratio, will not require future tax increases. Because remember, a federal budget is nothing like a household budget, and people should be smacked for comparing them. Scheer also told some complete falsehoods about the deficit (detailed in this thread by Josh Wingrove), and it wouldn’t be his first lie of the day – his whole shtick during QP was another complete falsehood about parliamentary procedure.

Just before QP, there were more developments – Liberal MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes decided to quit caucus, and later cited that her tweet and subsequent interview about her tense meetings with the PM around her departure led to unintended consequences “for those she cares about,” and she felt it best to sit as an independent for the remainder of the session. Also, the CEO of SNC-Lavalin said that he never said that 9000 jobs were in danger – but if you also recall the testimony from committee, that seemed to stem from a memo from the department of finance, and there is also a hell of a lot of nuance to this figure of the 9000 jobs and what is at stake for SNC-Lavalin (thread here). And then not long after QP, the Conservatives started their vote-a-thon as a “protest” about the handling of the Double-Hyphen Affair, during which they again made the tactically inept decision to vote against all of them, opening themselves up to all manner of Liberal social media about all the good and necessary funding that they “threatened.” The Liberals, meanwhile, went into full drama queen mode and got cots put into the space behind the House of Commons so that MPs rotating off of votes can nap (which the Conservatives tried to mock in their own tweets). It’s all so very stupid.

In related news, Bill Morneau’s chief of staff, Ben Chin, denies he did anything wrong in talking to Jody Wilson-Raybould’s chief of staff at the time, saying there’s nothing wrong with staffers talking to staffers. Michael Chong is also trying to keep his hot garbage Reform Act in the news by saying that it would be illegal for Justin Trudeau to kick anyone out of caucus without a vote (though that doesn’t appear to be an issue any longer). Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column looks at how the procedural shenanigans could play out over the next few days.

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Roundup: Crawling to the finish line

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It’s finally here! The end of the interminable Conservative leadership contest, and its byzantine rules and its ongoing bastardization of the Westminster system’s actual method of selecting party leaders that ensures accountability. No, we are due for yet another presidentalizing leader who has been campaigning on policy planks inappropriately (that is the grassroots membership’s job), and one who could very well have very little caucus support and all of the associated problems that come with that.

But before we get to that final vote tabulation, here we got with all of the pre-analysis and last-minute profiles. Éric Grenier traces the path to victory for the various Conservative leadership candidates, Andrew Coyne remarks that the lack of star power meant debates over ideas (err, not really). Kevin O’Leary’s campaign chair, Mike Coates, walks us through what happened during those five months and why O’Leary dropping out was the best for all involved. Susan Delacourt wonders if the Conservatives will emerge from their time with an interim leader having learned any lessons that the Liberals took almost a decade in opposition to learn.

And then there are the last-minute analyses of the various candidates. John Ivison notes Bernier’s capacity to come back from a past of blunders, along with the lack of policy from candidates like Scheer and Raitt, and Chong’s playing the role of Cassandra. Chris Selley takes a look at O’Leary and Leitch and notes that there wasn’t an appetite for a Canadian Trump-like figure, while Anne Kingston wonders if Leitch’s campaign didn’t actually reveal true Canadian values, that rejected her particular brand of messaging.

Meanwhile, at the “convention” itself, the Conservatives have decided to be petulant and make Liberal observers pay for tickets rather than follow tradition and allow a small number in, in exchange for similar rights at Liberal Party conventions. (The NDP, incidentally, still got free admission for their observers, proving that complete dickishness is still alive and well in the post-Harper era.) Here’s a look at Maxime Bernier’s riding, which is not as big-C Conservative as people might think. Bernier’s campaign took on some of Kevin O’Leary’s campaign staff, and it cost them a lot more money because of the rates they were being paid. Andrew MacDougall wonders if the Liberals will deploy attack ads against the new leader right away just like the Conservatives did to them.

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Roundup: Your quarterly QP hand-wringing

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After QP started getting rowdy and loud again in the past week, both in the feigned outrage over the calculated overblowing of the Sajjan situation and Trudeau’s Wednesday proto-PMQs that have given the opposition the chance to be extra vocal in expressing their displeasure of him, we have seen the return of the navel-gazing about what to do about QP. Aaron Wherry muses about the lack of answers despite more questions directed to the PM, while Penny Collenette compares the QP flaying of Sajjan to Senator Don Meredith hiding from the public eye to prove the point about how QP is better because it’s public.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/861224628114661376

Lagassé raises an important point here – Sajjan is a minister and QP is a forum to hold him to account. Meredith is a senator and not a representative of the government in that chamber. Just as we don’t hold backbenchers up to scrutiny in QP, we also don’t hold individual senators up to the same scrutiny in that Chamber’s version, which is an important distinction. As well, the process around Meredith has been quite public, from the release of the Ethics Officer’s report, to the Ethics Committee’s response and their own report recommending his expulsion (including the legal advice of the Senate Law Clerk). While Sajjan has been exposed to questions about his apparent self-aggrandisement (which, I will remind you, is not actually “stolen valour” as the Conservatives would term it, as that is largely reserved for those who put on a uniform or medals that they didn’t earn – something Sajjan certainly has earned), there has been nothing public in the way of an explanation from Sajjan – only a series of apologies (which, I will grant you, have taken personal responsibility, which not everyone in politics does). While I have a great deal of respect for Collenette, she is comparing apples to hedgehogs.

As for the latest bout of hand-wringing about the state of QP and the terrible decorum in the place, I will point to something that John Ibbitson said on CBC News Network’s Sunday Scrum yesterday – that while MPs could certainly empower the Speaker to crack down harder on it and have him start naming MPs and expelling them from the chamber for their behaviour, MPs don’t actually want to do that. QP is the way it is because that’s what MPs want. I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing either – politics needs some theatre, but what we need in this country is some good theatre, rather than this scripted junior high gymnasium play that the history teacher wrote. There are changes that need to happen to make QP better, like eliminating scripts and speaking lists, loosening the clock, and empowering the Speaker to police answers, but so far, MPs have been deaf to those suggestions. So long as they remain so, things will continue in their sad state.

https://youtu.be/Ajd2nNaHgKs?t=13m49s

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Roundup: An unconstitutional motion

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As stated for their upcoming Supply Day motion (currently scheduled for Monday, the Conservatives have drafted a resolution that would see the House of Commons express non-confidence in Minister Sajjan and Minister Sajjan alone. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to bash my head into a wall before my head explodes because it’s so very boneheaded from start to finish.

First of all, you should read this post by James Bowden, who takes apart the motion to and shows that it is unconstitutional. What is more interesting is the fact that the NDP tried this tactic before when Rona Ambrose was minister of the environment, and the Speaker ruled it out of order then, just as Speaker Regan should this time. Why? Because one of the fundamental tenets of Responsible Government is that of Cabinet solidarity. Cabinet lives and dies as a single body – there is no dispensation given to ministers we like, or to simply cull the prime minister from the rest of them in these kinds of votes. It’s an important feature of why the system works the way it does, and trying to cherry pick it for the sake of political tactics makes one a bit queasy because this is our very system of government that we’re talking about and they should bloody well know better.

Look, I get that they’re trying to exploit what they see as low-hanging fruit with Sajjan, but along the way, they’ve been dangerously blurring the lines of civil-military relations by asserting that the troops want him gone (do they aside from a few cranks? Never mind that it’s not these soldiers’ call), and by referencing Sajjan’s actions in military terms rather than political ones. Trying to use the term “stolen valour” is also offensive, not only because it’s generally reserved for someone who dons a uniform or medals without having been in combat (which is not the case with Sajjan), but because they’re co-opting it from the military for political benefit. But now they’re trying to go against the fundamentals of Responsible Government to score what they hope will be a cheap win.

That Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is trying to burn the system to the ground to score a couple of points is a very serious problem, and one indicative of a party that is more focused on populist spin than they are in being principled. It’s  a disturbing pattern, and one that they should knock off before they go too far down this garden path.

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Roundup: Exit O’Leary

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So the big news, in case you missed it, was that Kevin O’Leary dropped out of the Conservative leadership race hours before the final debate, and endorsed Maxime Bernier (never mind that Berier just weeks ago referred to him as a “loser”). And that they came to a late-night agreement, but O’Leary’s team still sent out fundraising pleas the next morning, hours before the announcement. Oh, and the ballots have already been mailed out with O’Leary’s name on them (and any votes he gets will just fall off and second choices will be counted instead, given that this is a ranked ballot). O’Leary cites winnability, and the fact that he can’t win Quebec (just like everyone has been saying the whole time), so that’s why he’s going to Bernier (who, incidentally, may also not be able to win more than his particular corner of Quebec given his ideological hostility to much of what they seem to hold dear).

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/857287321372291073

https://twitter.com/aaronwherry/status/857306842334203906

In the wake of the departure, here is some reaction from O’Leary’s campaign manager, Michael Chong, CBC’s poll analyst Éric Grenier, and Paul Wells delivers a signature thumping that you really need to read.

As for that debate, or “debate” as it should more properly be known (as with any of them held in this leadership contest), it was a weird mix of pointed attacks on perceived rivals, along with sucking up to others to try and win second-place support on those ranked ballots, because they very well know that it could be their path to victory. Some of the pointed attacks were expected – toward Kellie Leitch for fostering the image that the party is intolerant to the immigrants in suburban ridings that they rely on for electoral victory, and toward perceived front-runner Maxime Bernier. The one that was most surprising – and galling, to be frank – was Erin O’Toole going after Andrew Scheer because he became Speaker in 2011 and was apparently too busy “hosting functions at Kingsmere” than being “in the trenches” with the rest of the party (never mind that O’Toole wasn’t even an MP yet at the time).

The one thing that did irritate me the most, however, was the continued fetishism of private sector experience as somehow being a qualifier for political leadership, never mind that there is zero crossover between the two. With O’Leary now gone from the race, you had this mad scramble to try and claim this particular tin crown, and it was pretty sad. Rick Peterson was loudest – having never stood for office before – while Andrew Saxton, O’Toole and Bernier all tried to pile onto claiming their own experience. Government and business do not operate the same way. You cannot run a government like a business because there is no “bottom line.” Trying to claim some kind of credit for “making payroll” is meaningless noise in politics. The sooner you realise this, the sooner you can have a proper debate about issues.

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Roundup: What to do about Beyak?

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The CBC caught up with Senator Lynn Beyak yesterday, and she essentially doubled down on her insistence that she’s said nothing wrong about residential schools, and then compounded the whole thing by insisting that she’s been “suffering with” these residential school survivors because she lives in the area with them and she once went on double dates with an Aboriginal fellow. The mind boggles.

So with this having been said, and Beyak insisting that she’s not going anywhere, people are starting to wonder what’s next (as they demand her resignation, if not from the Senate then at least the Aboriginal Peoples committee). Let’s deconstruct this a little first, shall we?

To start off with, as a member of the committee, Beyak is not really making decisions around Indigenous policy in this country, as some people are suggesting. The government – meaning Cabinet – still makes that policy, and the Senate and in particular the committee does their due diligence in holding them to account. They’re not actually making policy themselves. Add to that, Beyak is one vote out of fifteen (remember that committees in this current session are now oversized because that was how to add in new independent members without a prorogation to reset committee selection), so her vote is even more diluted than it would be in a regular parliamentary session. And given that her views are off-side with her own party’s, it’s not like she’s really going to be the swing-vote in any case. So let’s calm down about that. While the committee chair has suggested that Beyak step aside, it’s not really her call as to whether Beyak is a member or not – that’s up to caucus leadership (or in the case of the Independent Senators’ Group, they volunteered for committee assignments), and there’s nothing the Chair can do about it. But if the Conservative Senate leadership is aware that Beyak being on that committee is a problem, they can probably arrange to have her rotated off of it (if not right away, then certainly when the committees reset at the next prorogation).

Some people has suggested that Beyak be kicked out of Conservative caucus, but I’m less certain that that’s a good idea. For one, her being in caucus allows the Conservative leadership to maintain some level of control over her, and if she’s forced out, where is she going to go? The ISG, where she can look at Senator Murray Sinclair every organizing meeting?

As for the comparisons between Beyak and Senator Don Meredith – because people have been making them – it’s a specious comparison that needs to stop. He’s broken ethics rules (and possibly the law), whereas Beyak’s crime is wilful ignorance. That’s not actually illegal or against the ethics code, and no, you can’t expel her for it. What they can do, however, is maybe consider a policy of phasing her out – making it as unrewarding as possible for her to be there that she eventually leaves. It’s an inexact science, particularly for someone as clueless as Beyak, and this whole episode should serve as one more reminder as to why it’s important to take some care in choosing who to appoint, because they’ll be there for a long time with little recourse for removal (and Stephen Harper quite obviously was not taking care).

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Roundup: The vacuous pleas to change the Standing Orders

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As the procedural warfare over the government’s proposed changes to the Standing Orders drags on, my patience for the government’s digging in their heels and insisting on “modernizing” things are increasingly absurd. To wit, Liberal MP Scott Simms – who is behind the motion to fast track this study, which touched off this warfare in the first place – tried to defend his positon last night, and I just want to bang my head into a wall for a while over the vacuousness of his justifications.

You say that now, but Trudeau has long promised that he wants to be out glad-handing among Canadians instead of being in the Ottawa bubble, so you’ll excuse me if I treat this with suspicion. Meanwhile, there’s nothing stopping him from answering all of the questions one day a week if he wants without needing to change the Standing Orders to do it.

If there is one bit of discourse that I would ban from Canadian politics, it’s the insistence that we can always come up with some new Made in Canada Solution™ to any problem that vexes us. It’s a bullshit sentiment, especially because in this case, the system is already made in Canada and fits the unique circumstances of our parliament as it differs from Westminster. Trying to import other Westminster-isms and mapping them onto our parliament and calling it “Made in Canada” is a fool’s game at best, because our political cultures are quite different. Sure, PMQs sounds like a good idea, but they don’t have desks, don’t use scripts, have a more generous timer, and they have a debating culture that can use wit and self-deprecating humour rather than constant unctuous sanctimony and robotic reliance on scripted talking points like we get here. You can’t just map PMQs here without recognizing the cultural changes. That likely applies to their scheduling motions, while the problem in Canada is more that we have House Leaders of dubious competence as opposed to unworkable rules.

This is specious. If government wants to get their bills passed, they need to convince the Commons. That’s how it works. Meanwhile, the fact that they didn’t get much passed without time allocation (which is not closure, and I want to smack people who confuse the two) is again due to inept House Leadership, not the rules.

Meanwhile, as the Conservatives froth at the mouth at the idea of a once-a-week PMQs, they not only forget that it was all Harper could bother to show up for toward the end of his mandate, and the fact that they voted for Michael Chong’s proposals around exploring this very idea. Oops.

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/845063148197593089

https://twitter.com/aaronwherry/status/845071914079043586

But you know, they have some more outrage to perform.

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Roundup: Backbenchers already have jobs

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There were a couple of competing tweet storms that went out yesterday – one from Alex Usher, who seems to think that maybe backbench MPs should consider their jobs to be part-time and take on a second job, and Emmett Macfarlane, who (correctly) thinks that idea is a bunch of bunkum.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/843847448137252864

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/843847937264357376

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/843848254743891969

As Kady O’Malley points out, it’s not actually against the rules.

And hey, there’s even an academic study that shows that the public (at least in the UK) isn’t too keen on backbenchers taking on second jobs.

I’m going to assume that much of Usher’s position comes from ignorance, because let’s face it – most people, including most MPs, don’t know what an MP’s job description is supposed to be. (Hint: It’s holding the government to account). But because most MPs don’t know that’s their main job, many of them spend their days burning their time and energy doing things like writing up and promoting a dozen private members’ bills that will never see the light of day, or crusading for causes that are as much about getting their own face in the news than they are about helping those in need (or maybe I’m just cynical). The point, however, is that if Usher thinks MPs are bored and in need of something to do, I would suggest that those MPs should actually be doing their jobs, and if they’re actually doing it right, then they shouldn’t be bored. They especially shouldn’t be bored if they’re doing their jobs correctly and not just reading scripts into the record prepared by the leader’s office (and to be fair, there are a few MPs who don’t, even though they’ll still rely on prepared speeches). If we carry on with this path of making MPs obsolete by turning them into drones then sure, I can see Usher’s point, but the answer is not to let them take on outside work. The answer is for them to actually learn their own jobs and do them. Parliament would be vastly improved if that were actually the case.

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