Tag Archives: NDP Leadership

Roundup: Just a normal backbench function

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There are days when I wonder if the cynicism among reporters isn’t the bigger problem facing Ottawa as we get yet another incredulous piece talking about how backbench Liberal MPs are openly voting against their own party, and how incredible is that? One MP went so far as to say that the Prime Minister himself told his caucus that the media was going to have to get used to the fact that MPs would disagree with him from time to time. And lo and behold, it continues to be treated as both a novelty and an aberration that backbenchers will stand up to government. We had commentary on one of the lesser weekend panel shows yesterday that was some pundit or other incredulous that there were MPs disagreeing with the leader, apparently because there weren’t enough goodies like cabinet posts or committee chairs to go around, and I can’t even.

Meanwhile, we have interviews with the government whip about how he’s going to manage all of these free votes on things (which was fairly constructive, to be honest, as he talked about having copies of the bill at hand and lists of people he could direct MPs to talk about with their concerns). It’s helpful, but needs more reminding that hey, it’s actually a backbencher’s job to hold their own government to account as much as it is the opposition’s. Now, if we could just get them to start asking some real questions in QP instead of throwing these suck-up softballs, that would be really great. Oh, and while I’m on the topic of journalists and pundits acting all surprised that MPs are doing their jobs, can we also stop this faux-confusion about how things are working in the Senate with “independents” and “independent Liberals”? Because honestly, if you haven’t gotten the memo that Senate Liberals are not part of the national Liberal caucus, and that they simply chose to continue to call themselves Liberals because the Rules of the Senate say that a caucus needs to have an association with a registered federal political party, then you really need to get with the programme. Stop saying that things are confusing when they’re not. You’re not helping the public – you’re just making things worse.

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Roundup: The Sophie Grégoire Trudeau problem

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The issue of assistants for Sophie Grégoire Trudeau has become a bit ugly in social media, and overblown in the political arena while opposition parties on both sides of the spectrum try to cast the prime minister’s family as being these out-of-touch elites (some of it completely speciously, as the Conservatives try to equate Trudeau’s statement about not needing government funds for childcare and suddenly billing for nannies was hypocritical, despite the fact that he wasn’t the leader of a G7 nation before), because if there’s nothing that this country loves, it’s cheap outrage. And really, that’s what a lot of this is, combined with some garden variety sexist expectations that she should be a doting wife and mother in the home, taking care of meals and childcare on her own without any public profile. But before we delve into it further, a couple of important reminders.

Seriously, for the love of all the gods on Olympus, stop calling her the First Lady. We don’t have a First Lady in Canada because we have a royal family, and the closest equivalent – aside from Prince Philip as the Royal Consort – is the somewhat antiquated term of the Chatelaine of Rideau Hall.

No, this is completely wrong. We don’t elect governments or parties in this country. We elect 338 MPs, who come together in a parliament that forms a government. So in essence, we did elect the family that came along with the MP who was able to form a government.

And this really is the important point. We have a constitutional monarchy so that the royal family takes on the ceremonial and celebrity functions and prevents the Head of Government from becoming a cult of personality. Unfortunately, in this age of media and social media, where the Trudeaus are consider bona fide celebrities in their own right, it has created a kind of cult of personality (which is only worsened by the fact that the fact that Trudeau was elected by a nebulous “supporter class” means he is accountable to nobody and he knows it). So when the public comes looking for Grégoire Trudeau to do speaking engagements and to do the kind of celebrity outreach that members of the royal family do so well in the UK (but certainly less so here because of their relative absence), how are we supposed to react? What expectations do we put on her as the spouse of the Head of Government, who has no defined role? While I have no objections to the nannies or single assistant (Trudeau is prime minister of a G7 country, and demanding that his spouse do all of the domestic work is frankly odious, particularly given her diplomatic expectations), I find myself torn about the need for additional help. I have no doubt that she needs it, because she has chosen to parlay her celebrity toward charitable causes. And it’s less about the taxpayer’s money that rubs me the wrong way, but the fact that this is getting uncomfortable under our system of government and constitutional traditions. That we have a prime minister who has formed a kind of cult of personality is very uncomfortable, but it’s not a problem with an easy solution, short of insisting that members of the royal family start spending more time on our shores to do the work of the celebrity face of our constitutional order. Is the solution to have the party pay for her added assistants? Maybe. Or to charge speaking fees on a cost-recovery basis? One can imagine the howls out outrage that an “elite” is charging charities money already. There’s not an easy answer, but the discomfort around the larger problem of where our system is headed is something that we should be talking about. Unfortunately, that conversation is being drowned out by cheap outrage and the June and Ward Cleaver crowd, which is only making this whole exercise reek.

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Roundup: Real problems with Monsef’s committee

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After a day of Twitter fights about the announcement on the electoral reform committee, let me say a couple of things. First of all, the moment anyone says they want to “make every vote count,” they immediately have lost the argument, and this includes the Prime Minister and minister saying this. Why? Because every vote already counts. No, it doesn’t mean that the person you voted for is going to win every time, but they’re not supposed to. If you believe otherwise, then you’re a sore loser. Whenever anyone brings up that the popular vote doesn’t match the proportion of the seats in the Commons, they are relying on a logical fallacy. The popular vote is not a real number because a general election is not a single event. It’s 338 separate but simultaneous events to elect members to fill each of the 338 seats, and together they form a parliament which determines who will form the government. We do not elect governments. If someone says we do, smack them. If someone gives a plaintive wail that the system isn’t fair, then they’re a sore loser trying to play on emotion, which isn’t actually how we should be making decisions. The fact that Maryam Monsef’s “five principles” for choosing a new system doesn’t mention accountability once is a giant problem, because that’s one of the key features of the current system – that we can punish incumbents and vote them out. Other systems can’t say the same, and we have European countries where parties just shuffle coalition partners and stay in power for decades. This is a problem. That the minister doesn’t seem to recognise that while she deals in emotion-laden words and saccharine emotion appeals is a problem. And it’s a problem that media outlets, in talking about other electoral systems, say nothing about the current system of its strengths. And after all of today’s Twitter fights, and appallingly ignorant statements made by the minister and other MPs on this issue, I’m going to reiterate a very important point that nobody is addressing – that the problem we’re facing is not that the current system doesn’t work, it’s that we have a crisis of civic literacy in Canada and people don’t know how the system works so they assume it’s broken because they buy into emotional arguments and sore loserism. That’s the problem that the minister should be tackling, not trying to upend a system that actually does work very well.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/730463384735514629

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Roundup: Who to blame for short timelines

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Our friend Kady O’Malley penned a column over the weekend about how anyone upset about the tight timeline of the assisted dying legislation should be upset at the fixed election date instead of the Supreme Court for imposing the deadline. And she’s right, but I’m not particularly enthused about her suggestion that the election date be moved to earlier in the year instead of October, as that date pretty much wipes out the fall sitting of Parliament. I mean, that is a valid point, but if you were to ask me, the real suggestion would be to simply eliminate the fixed election date as we already have a constitutional requirement that elections be held every five years, whereas the fixed date is a particular bit of Americanisation that is supposed to provide stability but just winds up making the whole system worse off, from turning Question Period into an unrelenting series of election ads, to simply changing the government’s calculations on policy to suit that date rather than supposedly helping the opposition by giving them more predictability when it comes to election timing. It didn’t, incidentally, stop the speculation of early election calls since pretty much every media outlet continued to ask whether there would be an early call (as is permissible, since the legislation can’t actually bind the powers of the Governor General), so it’s not like it changed that conversation any. That all being said, I would like to note that while many people quite rightly point out that there was no obligation on the Supreme Court to give the government that year (plus the extra four months) to come up with a bill, but could rather have struck down that prohibition immediately and we would have had few ill-effects, I will point out that without a deadline, MPs would simply keep putting off the legislation under the constant plaintive wails that it’s “deeply personal” and “a difficult subject.” Our MPs, in the event you haven’t noticed, are a lot that really are pretty lacking when it comes to moral courage to deal with difficult things. Instead, they wait for people to bring it to the courts in order to be “forced” to deal with it, and if you look at the pattern from the last decade or so, their response is to half-ass some rushed legislation in response, decry the courts for forcing them into such a compromise position, and leave it for it all to be challenged in court once again. That we have a new government doesn’t seem to have changed the pattern too much, with overly cautious legislation that doesn’t appear to meet the test laid out by the Supreme Court in the Carter decision, while MPs fall all over themselves to declare that it’s a “deeply personal” issue while wailing plaintively that there are no provisions for more palliative care in a bill that is about changing Criminal Code prohibitions. So rather than blaming the fixed election date (which is a valid position), I choose instead to blame our rather spineless crop of MPs, who have mostly chosen to complain about the lot they’ve been given rather than rise to the occasion.

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Roundup: A rare apology

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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: Responsible, not rogue

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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: Mulcair stands firm (for now)

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The caucus meeting ran well overtime as Thomas Mulcair met with his MPs – assuming you call them “his” any longer, given the vote on Sunday – and when they did all finally emerge and faced the media, they put on a big show of solidarity, where they all got behind him in the Foyer. Mulcair announced that he was staying put for the time being, that they were united in this decision, and he was going to remain the caretaker until the new leader is chosen. Not that every MP felt quite the same, and perhaps none of them was more courageous than Don Davies, who bucked the trend of solidarity and it being unseemly to dissent in public, who openly said that while they were united, it wasn’t uniform. And here we are – Mulcair continues to be abrasive and snide in QP, and probably will for the foreseeable future, since he no longer has to care about appealing to anyone as he is on the slow departure. Meanwhile, Jason Markusoff writes about the party’s existential crisis in the wake of the convention, while Paul Wells reminds us that the NDP has been in existential crisis for years. John Geddes writes that the party had pretty much found its new leader – Megan Leslie – but she doesn’t want the job, and it doesn’t look like she’ll be convinced otherwise. (I would of course add that while Leslie ticks most of the requisite boxes, she also lacks enough of a killer instinct for political leadership, which would likely hobble her eventually). So we shall see how this all transpires going forward, but for now, Mulcair is digging in for the long haul, whether his caucus likes it or not.

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Roundup: Enter Peter Harder

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Those seven new independent senators are now sworn in and installed, and it seems the Conservative spared no time in trying to insist that they were all secretly Liberal partisans, particularly the new “government representative,” Senator Peter Harder. In response to questions during a restored non-ministerial Senate QP, Harder said that he was recommended for appointment by the Institute for Research on Public Policy, and that he had no communication from the government about it. He also claimed he didn’t intend to be partisan, but be a kind of bureaucratic presence who could field questions on behalf of the government, while relaying concerns to cabinet on occasion. Harder also said that the new practice of bringing ministers to the chamber to answer questions would continue, and be expanded to 40 minutes, which is not a bad thing. What I am a bit more concerned about is the fact that Harder is talking about making amendments to the Parliament of Canada Act to start formalizing some of these changes that Trudeau has imposed on the Senate, but I’m not seeing much in the way of collaborating this with the other efforts to modernise the Senate’s operations. That this would be a discussion around the cabinet table and not involve senators themselves, based on Harder’s statements, is concerning because it does seem like meddling in the way the Senate operates – something Trudeau has already been doing with little regard for the consequences – despite the fact that none of them are in the Senate, particularly under this new regime. I don’t want to go so far as to say that he’s meddling in the Senate’s privilege, but it’s getting close to the line in some cases. The Senate is the institutional memory of parliament, and is supposed to have a longevity for a reason, which is why Harder insisting that it’s not unusual for governments to tinker with the Act to reflect stylistic preferences rubs me the wrong way. I also have some sympathy for the concern that “government representative” is a fairly American term that’s not really reflected in our Westminster traditions (though perhaps Australia’s “Washminster” system may find a more analogous term. We’ll see what Harder starts implementing soon enough, but I do retain a sense of scepticism.

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Roundup: Mulcair’s political demise

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Well, that was unexpected. After the NDP voted to adopt a resolution that would see them take the Leap Manifesto back to their riding associations for further discussion – much to the protests of their Alberta delegates – Thomas Mulcair took to the stage to give a lacklustre speech that was basically a rehash of his election speech for the past, oh, ten months, with the whole laundry list of applause lines and nothing about why he deserves to stay at the helm. And when the party voted, they voted 52 percent in favour of a leadership review. Mulcair indicated that he plans to stay on as interim leader until a new one can be chosen, which may be a process of up to two years, but we’ll see how long that lasts once the caucus and national council have had their deliberations. Suffice to say, there has been a tonne of reaction. Jen Gerson digs into the events a little more including some local reaction to the Leap Manifesto resolution adoption, while Jason Markusoff discusses that adoption on the Alberta NDP. Markusoff and John Geddes enumerate eleven signs that showed that Mulcair wasn’t going to win the review vote. Here are the five steps the party needs to take next regarding the leadership, and a look back at the results of leadership reviews in years past. CBC looks at some possible contenders for the leadership contest, while Don Braid advises Rachel Notley to divorce her party from the federal NDP. Chantal Hébert notes that the writing was on the wall for Mulcair from the start of the convention, while Michael Den Tandt says that the Leap Manifesto will sink the NDP permanently. Paul Wells delivers a tour de force with the questions that the party now has to grapple with as they choose that new leader, and the divides that future leader will have to straddle.

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Roundup: Mulcair losing steam and support

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The wheels are starting to come off Thomas Mulcair’s continued leadership of the NDP, as more and more voices are starting to come out to question the direction of the party under his leadership – not that many of them will say that directly, but the implication is certainly there, considering that the whole point of Mulcair’s leadership was in large part for them to occupy more of the centre of the spectrum in their haste in believing that the Liberals were a spent force whose days were numbered. And it’s more than just the fringe socialist wing of the party that’s calling for his head. Yesterday, some thirty-seven NDP members from Quebec, including three former MPs, published an open letter calling for the party to renew itself, and one of those MPs was one of Mulcair’s biggest boosters during the leadership. Most damning was when he went on Power & Politics yesterday to say, and I quote, “I haven’t really heard a compelling reason for him to stay on.” During a press conference, Niki Ashton was asked repeatedly whether she supported Mulcair’s leadership, and she evaded every time, insisting instead on talking about the “team” rather than the individual. Given how much importance that the NDP place on solidarity and showing a united front, and how they treat any kind of public dissent as being unseemly (and sometimes even subject to punishment), Ashton’s silence was actually quite deafening. These new calls from the grassroots that the open letter was showcasing is showing the cracks in Mulcair’s mea culpa, and in the outreach efforts he’s made so far. The message is that he’s still not listening, and that could cost him. And on top of the questions we already had about his continued leadership – in no small part whether he can still be part of the generational change taking place in this country’s political ranks – it seems like the party also has to ask itself if they can really ask Mulcair to be a leopard who can change its spots. They brought Mulcair into the party for a reason, and gave him the leadership for a reason, and those reasons are no longer reflected on the political landscape, particularly if the Liberals keep outflanking them. People ask who are in the wings, and despite Nathan Cullen’s grand protests that he doesn’t want the job, I’m pretty sure he does, and I’m sure there are a few people who are still interested, even if they didn’t win their seats in the last election. Leadership hopefuls will emerge – that’s not the question. The question is whether the party’s grassroots will decide to give Mulcair one more chance, or if they’ve decided that he’s run out of chances.

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