Roundup: A rare apology

A trio of Justin Trudeau-related items in the news today, which makes me want to look at them together. The first incident of note was actually last in chronological order, but to me it seemed most significant, which is the fact that during Question Period yesterday, Trudeau stood up and apologised for having told reporters on Wednesday that opposition party obstruction was to blame for why a committee on electoral reform was not yet up and running, and pledged that he was still serious about the topic. I’m not sure that we ever saw Stephen Harper apologise, nor would we ever see it because that was a man who was not only determined to always be seen to be right, but he also had a particularly obstinate streak that made him dig his heels in rather than be proven to be wrong. Most often this was around the inappropriate behaviours of cabinet ministers, and rather than have them step down over wrongdoing, Harper would keep them in position well past the time that the heat was on them, and only shuffle them once the attention was elsewhere so it didn’t look like he was capitulating to demands of the reporters. Trudeau on the other hand owned up to what he had said, apologised, promised to do better, and even applauded when the MP who called him out made a slightly clever dig about it in his follow-up question. It was a show of humility and accountability that we are unused to seeing here. The second incident of note was after his speech on Fort McMurray at the start of the day, during Statements by Ministers (a practice in Routine Proceedings that the Conservatives had virtually allowed to fall into complete disuse). Rona Ambrose rose to give remarks in reply, and got emotional during it, and once she finished speaking, Trudeau was quick to cross the aisle to give her a quick hug – again, something that cold fish Harper was loathe to do, and only once gave awkward hugs around speeches related to either an MP’s passing or the attack on Parliament Hill (I forget which and tried to find a reference but couldn’t – forgive me). Trudeau remains a master of the humanizing gesture that helps to civilise politics in a way that we have become unused to after a decade of angry sound and fury. The third item of note had to do with a point of order raised after QP, when Blake Richards accused Trudeau of sticking his tongue out during a question raised by Diane Watts about P3 projects. Nobody but Richards seems to have witnessed this, but we do know that Trudeau does occasionally possess an irreverent side. Did he stick his tongue out? Maybe. Is it the end of the world if he did? Hardly, and in the theatrics of QP, it’s a bit tiresome but does raise the spectre of the “fuddle duddle” incident, if only less profane.

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Roundup: A pointless procedural dust-up

The shine has come off around the medical assistance in dying bill, as the government decided that enough was enough, and it was time to send it to committee. So they invoked time allocation, and not surprisingly, there was all manner of outcry about how terrible this was, and Conservatives like Jason Kenney equivocating, insisting that they never employed time allocation on such sensitive life and death matters as this (ignoring things like safe injection sites or laws around prostitution as also being life and death matters for those that it affects). Kenney’s later assertions about what this bill will do were also…fanciful to say the least.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/727954797190479872

I will say that I have little sympathy for MPs who railed about the government cutting off debate, after two nights of midnight sittings and over 84 MPs having spoken to the bill. This is second reading debate, which is the principle of the bill. And I’ve listened to enough speeches to know that they all basically say “this is a very personal issue,” and “What about palliative care?” with minor variations throughout. The concern trolling about the conscience rights of doctors is also in there, never mind that this is a bill dealing with the criminal code and that issue is one for the provinces who deliver healthcare and the provincial certification bodies for physicians. There remains committee stage debate – which is the real meat of the bill – report stage once it comes back, and third reading debate. If MPs still have things to say, there remain plenty of opportunities, and the government also pointed out that some MPs had been up to speak several times on the bill, meaning that there couldn’t possibly be that many more MPs who needed to speak. And if you’ll forgive my particular cynicism, how many more times do we need to hear MPs read those same sentiments in the record over and over again? The government was already generous in the amount of time it gave to debate second reading – accusing them of somehow stifling debate or invoking closure were both patently wrong and false. And so, once all of the procedural wrangling and grousing was done, it passed second reading by a wide margin. Liberal MP Robbie Falcon-Outlette was the sole member of that party to vote against, and he went on Power & Politics to make a bunch of patently false equivalences between this bill and the suicide crisis in places like Attawapiskat, with a host of intellectually dishonest arguments strewn along the way. The bill also began pre-study in the Senate, where I expect it will get a much tougher ride, and there remains a very real chance that even if the bill passes the Commons unscathed that it will not do so in the Senate, and that it may not pass by deadline.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/727990740576403456

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Roundup: Making up titles

Senator Peter Harder made it official yesterday – the announcement of a Deputy Leader and Whip – err, sorry, “deputy government representative” and “government liaison” as he wants them styled, and it erupted in a bit of a fight in the Chamber that he can’t just make up names for people because the Parliament of Canada Act doesn’t work that way. I also have concerns with the job descriptions that Harder has given them (and these were provided to me from a Senator).

For his deputy, Senator Bellemare:

Assists the Government’s Representative to process the legislation coming from the House of Commons (government, private members’ bills and government bills in the Senate) in a transparent, impartial, constructive and non-partisan manner;

In the context of an evolving modernized Senate, assists the Government’s Representative so that all bills (including bills coming from Senators) receive a fair and non-partisan treatment;

Assists the Government’s representative to provide Canadians with a clear understanding of the treatment by the Senate of the bills coming from the House of Commons;

Assist the Government’s Representative in the Chamber, to make sure that due process is provided to Government legislation and all other bills and businesses,

Follow the legislative work of Committees,

Assist Committees to provide more substantive reports on their specific study of bills,

Assist informally Senators with rules and procedures.

And for his whip – err, “liaison,” Senator Mitchell:

It is the role of the Government’s Representative group in the Senate to facilitate the passing of government legislation and to contribute to the effective functioning of the Senate in a non-partisan and open way. The Government Liaison position will be responsible for administrative and management roles and for liaison with all Senators. Specific responsibilities will include:

-Working with the caucuses’ Whips and with independent Senators to help organize the business of the Senate, including, for example, the coordination of Senate Committee placements;

-Supporting sponsors of bills by ensuring that they receive the required input, briefings, and material from Ministers and government officials to present bills effectively;

-Assisting sponsors of bills to identify and deal with the issues and concerns raised by Senators in the debate and review of legislation.

The Government Liaison will exercise these responsibilities in a collaborative and non-partisan fashion.

The problem with these descriptions is that they are largely comprised of buzzwords. Throwing around terms like “due process” and “non-partisan” is hard to square with the fact that these are government representatives, and government is inherently partisan. While I can grudgingly agree that having a Deputy makes some sense out of pure logistics, the “liaison” role is largely nonsense. The existence of the Independent Working Group means that there was no need to have a Whip to organise committee assignments for non-aligned senators, and senators are grown-ups and should be able to arrange getting materials from Ministers and government officials. They have phones and emails, and assistants who can make arrangements. And “assisting sponsors of bills to identify and deal with issues and concerns,” which purported will including helping senators draft amendments? Again, they’re grown ups who can do their own jobs and talk to the Law Clerk if they need to. Aside from bigfooting the Independent Working Group – and making this move without consulting them – what is most striking is that Harder made this move for largely the sake of optics – he wanted both a Conservative and a Liberal by his side to make a big show of being bi-partisan, even though the role he gave Mitchell is ludicrous, and heaven forbid that Harder just have Bellemare by his side, because that would give the impression that he is really a Liberal, and he couldn’t have that. So instead Harder is making things worse for everyone with this particular move, angering both the Conservatives and the Senate Liberals, while still acting outside of the Parliament of Canada Act and the Senate Rules. It’s undermines his credibility, the work of the independents at pushing for meaningful reform, and is going to make getting anything accomplished in the Senate difficult for the foreseeable future.

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Roundup: Peter Harder’s ham-handed problems

First it was the curious announcement from long-time Liberal Senator (and one-time leader of the provincial Liberal party) Grant Mitchell was stepping away from the senate caucus to sit as an independent. For someone as nakedly partisan as Mitchell, it was a curious move that raised a number of questions for me. Then, later in the evening, news came down that Peter Harder, the “government representative” in the Senate, will be naming a deputy and a whip, and that whip was to be Mitchell. (The deputy was named as Diane Bellemare, who was a Conservative senator who quit that caucus a couple of months ago and became a founding member of the Independent Working Group). In amidst a number of smartass remarks going around the Twitter Machine about how an independent whip was supposed to work, I will offer again the reminder that in the Senate, the job of the whip is more about logistics and administration with things like assigning offices and parking spaces, and with organizing committee assignments and seeing that absences are filled on committees than it is about telling senators how to vote. Likewise, deputy leaders in the Senate are much more equivalent to House Leaders in the Commons, where they help determine scheduling of debates on bills and so on. But given that Justin Trudeau was looking to shake up the way the Senate operates, thus far it has mostly been about rebranding the office of Government Leader in the Senate under a new name and maintaining the “not a minister in name only” fiction that Harper employed when he wanted to put distance between himself and the Senate. Add to that the odd insistence that Peter Harder sit as an independent while taking on this role, which is problematic at best. But if his job is just to represent the government, and to shepherd legislation through the Chamber, then why does Harder need a second person to do the House Leader-equivalent work, or a whip for the independents – particularly when the Independent Working Group has been working on developing a system of administrative representation for those unaligned senators. It smacks to me that Harder, whether with the blessing of Trudeau or not, is trying to impose a top-down organisation for unaligned senators in the chamber rather than letting the bottom-up process that the Working Group is engaged in run its course. While I’m not indulging the conspiracy theories that this is all a crypto-Liberal charade playing out, I do think that Harder is overstepping here by a great degree. Sure, it looks greatly symbolic that he got a Conservative and a Liberal with him to do these tasks, but it does look like he’s trying to impose something on the new independent senators that currently goes against what the Senate rules allow (being of course a caucus organisation that is not tied to an existing federal political party). As with Harder trying to get an inexplicably big staff for the job he says he plans to do (as opposed to the old job of Government Leader), this new move is problematic. It could very well be that Harder doesn’t know what he’s really doing and how the Senate operates, which was always the going to be a problem when Trudeau insisted that his “representative” would come from the first batch of independent appointments. But these ham-handed moves are making that problem all the more glaring. This is an increasingly obvious example of Trudeau not thinking through his Senate plans and ballsing it up as he goes along because he doesn’t understand the institution either, and that is a problem.

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Roundup: No appetite for back pay

With parliament resuming this week, all attention is on whether or not Senator Mike Duffy will resume his duties. After all, there have been a few signs of activity in his office, with computers being updated and such, but there remains a question as to whether his health will allow it, but we’ll see. As for the question as to whether he will be getting any back pay for his time suspended without it, well, senior senators are not so keen. In fact, the phrase “no appetite” is continually used, and they are quick to point to the fact that the Senate’s internal discipline – which the suspension was part of – was based on the Deloitte audits and not criminal findings of guilt or innocence, thus his acquittal by the courts makes it largely an irrelevant issue as far as they’re concerned. I would also add that should Duffy decide to press the issue, well, there are a few well-placed senators who around this issue who are known to leak things to the media, and who will undoubtedly start doing so about any other skeletons in Duffy’s closet that they are aware of. Meanwhile, there remain questions back in PEI about whether Duffy remains qualified to represent the province, as there is still a level of distrust that he is actually a resident (and given that it sounds like he spent the bulk of his time on suspension in Ottawa, well, that doesn’t help matters much). Meanwhile, some Conservative senators are grousing a little bit that Senator Peter Harder isn’t really providing much in the way of answers during regular Senate QP (as opposed to ministerial versions thereof). I think they’re being a bit unfair, considering that he’s been on the job only a couple of weeks and hasn’t yet staffed up his office, nor really had a chance to get proper briefings from the Privy Council Office (because yes, he has been sworn into the Privy Council to take on this job, making him a quasi-minister) on the files that he is likely to be asked about, or had much in the way of a briefing binder prepared, but it does put him on notice that they do expect him to step up his game in the role of “government representative,” particularly when it comes to being the conduit for holding the government to account. These are things that are important, especially as there are no opposition voices in the Commons from Atlantic Canada or the GTA, making the Senate’s role in asking those questions all the more important.

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Roundup: Responsible, not rogue

A Liberal MP has broken ranks on a government bill! Oh noes! Let us now treat this as some kind of crisis of leadership! Okay, so the CBC piece about the event is only slightly more measured than that, but their Twitter headline certainly wasn’t.

One of the most enduring problems with Canadian political reporting is the constant conundrum of demanding that MPs exercise more independence, but immediately treating any instances of MPs breaking party ranks as some kind of crisis of leadership, where obviously the grip has been lost and soon it will be all over for the leader. (In some cases, the party itself treats it as some kind of betrayal of solidarity *cough*NDP*cough* and punishes its MPs internally with things like removing QP spots for weeks or removing members from committees or travel junkets). Ditto with senators, or at least until Trudeau kicked his senators out of national caucus – “is the leader losing control of his senators?” was not an uncommon headline either (though not one that is generally screamed as loudly, and one might also add that not enough ink was spilled on the split in caucus over Bill C-377 – the “union transparency” bill – the first time around when they voted to gut it, and Marjory LeBreton stepped down as Government Leader a couple of weeks later after seriously mishandling the whole thing inside her caucus). And yes, Trudeau did promise more free votes, but this is one of those common promises that tends to wind up with MPs voting in lock-step anyway because they all really support their party or they all just happen to all think in lock-step. I am also reminded that when Michael Ignatieff tried to encourage his caucus to vote more freely on private members’ bills by not rarely voting for them personally – so that they wouldn’t look to him as to how to vote – he was punished for it by Jack Layton lying about those missed votes as poor attendance during the election (though Ignatieff should have responded with the policy and shut him down, but didn’t, and lost the election quite badly as a result). Suffice to say, when MPs don’t vote in lockstep, we shouldn’t use terms like “goes rogue,” because it gives entirely the wrong connotation about what has taken place. We want more responsible and independent-minded MPs, so let’s not make it harder for them to do so. And let’s leave the word “rogue” to this for the time being:

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Roundup: Linda Frum’s misplaced concerns

Conservative Senator Linda Frum has decided to take on the topic of the current batch of Senate reforms, and I can’t even. And yet, I must. So here we go. Her two main points are about the institution’s lack of accountability and lack of legitimacy, and while she notes all of the changes with the former, she is way off base with the latter – but more on that in a moment. Much of the problem with Frum’s whole thesis is that it ignores historical context and perspective. With the lack of accountability, she correctly laments that the Duffy incident highlighted poor financial controls, but this is not unique to the Senate – most elected legislatures also lacked adequate controls until very recently, hence we had the moat cleaning imbroglio in the UK, or the Nova Scotia MLAs who bought flat screen TVs and generators as office expenses, or federal MPs improperly claiming their own housing allowances just a few years ago. It’s a process and the Senate was actually ahead of the curve of the Commons for much of the last number of years. And good for her for denouncing the “everybody does it” excuse. But her analysis of the Senate’s legitimacy issue is, frankly, jejune. The Senate does not need to derive its legitimacy from popular elections because it comes from the constitution and from Responsible Government – as with all Governor-in-Council appointments, the Prime Minister is empowered to make them so long as he or she maintains the confidence of the Commons, and he or she is accountable for making them. That is where the Senate’s legitimacy is drawn from, and people who insist otherwise tend to be more enamoured with Americana rather than the actual function of our own Senate – a body geared toward more deliberation than as a competing legislative body. Popular election would make the Senate just that – a competing chamber more inclined to gridlock if it is controlled by an opposing party to the government in the Commons, and otherwise full of 105 backbenchers for the Commons parties to boss around, seeing the great expense and organisation that would go along with Senate elections (even more than MP elections given that senators represent a whole province and not a small riding). Leaving aside Frum’s conspiracy theory that all of the new independent appointments are just closet Liberals (and I will give her the point that Peter Harder’s insistence on styling himself an independent is deeply problematic), Frum is boggled by the notion that a body that is not a confidence chamber can operate without defined government and opposition sides, and that Senators could weigh legislation on its merits rather than on the basis of the whip. In fact, Frum goes so far as to posit this baffling gem:

So long as we senators are not elected, our democratic legitimacy depends on government-appointed Senators following the leadership of a government that is elected – and that government, in turn, must honestly acknowledge its responsibility for the actions of the senators it appoints.

I barely even know where to start with this, other than to say “Nope. Nope, nope, nope. So much nope.” You see, the Senate has institutional independence under the constitution. The whole point of the Senate is that it’s supposed to push back against a prime minister when that prime minister tries to ram through dubious legislation through a majority Commons that they control. If said PM also has senators under their thumb, then it kind of defeats the purpose of it, no? And no, as I explained in my column this week, the PM doesn’t have the responsibility to police the Senate because of that institutional independence. And I get that Frum is doing yeoman’s work in trying to defend her partisan affiliations, which are totally legitimate. I too don’t think that a Senate full of independents is the best thing for our system, but that doesn’t mean that a greater presence of independent senators – enough to ensure the balance of power is no longer weighed in the favour of any one party – is illegitimate or unconstitutional. Frum is wrong on that point, and it needs to be said.

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Roundup: New paths to power

If there was any particular proof needed that things are indeed changing in the government, the way in which decisions are made is a pretty good place to start, as Susan Delacourt explores over in Policy Options. Gone are the days when all paths lead to the PMO, but rather individual ministers are empowered to make decisions, but at the same time, they are expected to consult with provincial and territorial counterparts. The civil service, having grown used to not being asked to draw up an array of options for shaping policy, is now a “fixer upper,” while the new dynamic makes it possible for anyone to contribute to policy discussions, meaning that the government can draw from a bigger pool of ideas. And the new buzzword of “deliverology” means that goals are being drawn up as tangible things that have knowable results, rather than just abstract dollar figures. (The “guru” of deliverology just met with cabinet at the Kananaskis retreat, where he said that the government has made good progress over the last six months). Commons committees are coming up with policy discussions of their own (not that they’re always going to be taken fully, as the assisted dying legislation shows). We have evidence that the Senate and their legislative agenda is being listened to, with examples like Senator Moore’s bill on restoring parliamentary authority over borrowing being adopted in the government’s budget, and Ralph Goodale talking about how they are considering his bill on CBSA oversight. So yes, it looks like the centre of power is less and less the PMO in this brave new world, which is probably not such a bad thing after all.

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Roundup: The verdict as reflection on the institution

Now that they’ve had a couple of days to digest the events, we’ve got some weekend punditry on the Duffy verdict and What It All Means™ for the Senate as an institution, and well, some of it is really hard to swallow. Rick Anderson has eight thoughts about the expenses issue, and most of them are on the right track, except for number four, which is about the Board of Internal Economy (Commons) and Internal Economy Committee (Senate), and his belief that these bodies are too political to police parliamentarian expenses. The problem with this line of thinking is of course parliamentary privilege – parliament is self-governing. It needs to be. It cannot be brought under the heel of a bureaucracy, because if we can’t trust our parliamentarians to run their own affairs, then we might as well just hand power back to the Queen. Do they get it right all of the time? No, of course not, but this is a democracy and there is an accountability process, and yes, that includes for the Senate. Of course with the Senate, it is much more tied to public pressure, but that public pressure has forced the Senate to make any number of changes in the past few years (they had already started before the whole ClusterDuff affair started, but that certainly accelerated things). This is of course why I have trouble with Adam Dodek’s condemnations of the Senate post-verdict and his (frankly wrong) assertions that nothing has really changed, and his assertion that most senators treat the job as a part-time gig. I’ve known very few senators who feel that way, and most that I’ve met and been in contact with are just as engaged as MPs with their files – even more in many cases when those senators have causes that they are engaged with. The days of senators sitting on a number of corporate boards is drawing to a close as boards are professionalising and the need for a senator as a “prestige” appointment become less common. (I would add that I actually think it’s not a problem for senators to sit on a non-profit board as a way of constituency outreach). And then there’s Michael Den Tandt who retreats to the same old fears about these new independent senators being wholly unaccountable, as though something has materially changed from when they were all in party caucuses (which is false), and that somehow that caucus could keep them more in line (no, not really). Apparently Den Tandt has forgotten that the Senate has institutional independence for a reason, and his musing that the Conservatives should champion abolition by way of a referendum is frankly ridiculous – despite what people may think about a referendum being a tactic to pressure premiers, it returns to the same problem of using majoritarian tactics to pressure minority provinces into giving up their counter-balancing representation. I think I’ll leave this meme here for his edification.

Mean Girls Senate Abolition

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Roundup: Duffy’s long road back

We heard confirmation yesterday from Duffy’s lawyer that he does indeed plan to return to the Senate despite some serious health concerns, not that he’ll find many friends there, which could make things more awkward than they’ll already be. In talking with one senator yesterday, I heard largely that he had few friends there to begin with, and because he spent his time fundraising for the party instead of doing actual Senate work, he never really got to know or ingratiate himself with his actual Senate colleagues, so it’s not like he’ll have a long list of people looking to welcome him back with open arms. And, because it’s unlikely the party will welcome him back, Duffy may continue to find himself on the outside. His lawyer also suggested that perhaps he should be paid back for the time in which he was suspended without pay, but you will find that argument will quickly go down in flames as senators will remind you that their internal discipline process is separate from the criminal trial, and his suspension without pay was internal discipline. And we’ll get a bunch of pundits lazily declaring that the Senate is still lax in its rules and processes, which it isn’t (and I would argue really wasn’t when Duffy was taking advantage of it), and oh look – Scott Reid did just that. Kady O’Malley admits her surprise in the ruling, while Andrew Coyne takes umbrage with “not criminal” as a standard that seems to be emerging. The Winnipeg Free Press editorial board notes how the new, better appointments could help to restore the Senate’s credibility, while CBC looks at what effect the Duffy verdict could have with future prosecutions of other senators’ questionable conduct.

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