Tag Archives: Nigel Wright

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: Stop berating members for doing their jobs

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It’s not often that I write about provincial matters, and especially not from Manitoba, but this one I felt like I should make a remark because of the way in which the story is framed, which infuriates me to no end. The headline is “Stephen Fletcher criticizes his own government’s bill in Manitoba.” Fletcher, a former Conservative MP and one-time cabinet minister, is currently an MLA in the province, and a backbencher in the governing caucus.

Because I know that the vast majority of Canadians didn’t get a quality civics education, let me spell it out – it’s a backbencher’s job to hold the government to account. Yes, even if they’re from the same party. And in this case, Fletcher had concerns about a bill and has been asking questions about it at committee meetings late into the night. In other words, he’s doing his job. We should be encouraging this.

But what does the local Canadian Press reporter ask the premier? Whether Fletcher should be removed from caucus.

Great Cyllenian Hermes, luck-bringing messenger of the deathless gods, give me strength before my head explodes.

We The Media keep insisting that we want more independent elected officials, and we constantly fetishise things like free votes, and the moment an MP or MLA starts asking tough questions of their own party or steps out of line, we freak out and start wondering if the leader is losing control of their party, or in this case, whether they need to be kicked out of the party. In this particular case, the article goes on to say that this is the first crack in party unity. Are you kidding me?

When we elect members under the First-Past-the-Post system, we are imbuing them with individual agency. That’s why we elect them to single seats and not giving votes to parties to apportion those seats out to their MPs. We privilege the independence of MPs and empower them to do their jobs. Whether or not they choose to do so is the bigger part of the battle, because of the pressures of looking like a team player, but We The Media make it worse because we pull bullshit like this all the time. Our insistence on these ridiculous narratives and demands that our elected members all act in lockstep constantly while at the same time demanding independence is doing the system in. It’s driving the need for message control which is poisoning our democracy, because our own journalists have a tendency to be too ignorant of how the system is supposed to work.

Let MPs and MLAs do their actual work of holding governments to account, and stop causing trouble. Seriously. You’re actively hurting democracy with this kind of bullshit.

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Roundup: Expulsion isn’t rocket science

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All day, we’ve been told that Senate clerks are “scouring the constitution” to find a “loophole” that will allow them to expel Senator Don Meredith, and even when they get former law clerks on television who’ve said clearly that yes, the Senate can do this, they still try to go “a ha, but they never did with…” name a scandalous former Senator, and in those cases, they resigned before the Senate had a chance to expel them. Suffice to say, a whole lot of reporters are being deliberately obtuse in order to create a false sense of drama around this.

The simple fact of the matter is that Parliament is self-governing, and it has the powers it needs to expel members if need be. Those are parliamentary privileges, and they have been exercised in the past in the Commons, as James Bowden’s research has shown, and those privileges would indeed extend to the Senate. It’s not sexy or rocket science, but people need to calm down and let the process work itself out.

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Adam Dodek says that the Senate needs to move quickly on dealing with Meredith if they hope to regain the public trust. And that may be the case, but we also don’t want to be too hasty, given the ham-fisted and poor manner in which the suspensions of Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau were handled, and the truth of the matter is that the Senate is on March break. The ethics committee is coming back a week early to deal with the matter, so they are moving quickly but they can’t simply act rashly and in the heat of the moment, which I think will be the danger in order to keep from invoking the ire of an impatient public, egged on by a media demanding that the story move ahead quickly before people lose interest.

Meanwhile we’re also seeing a lot of second-guessing about the role that Meredith played within the Independent Senators Group, and how he was described as having a “leadership position” within it. Indeed, Meredith was elected to one of four “coordinating positions” within the nascent quasi-caucus, in its early days after the first round of independent appointments when the group was still getting on its feet and Meredith had more legislative experience than most of the members of the group. That being said, he had very little actual standing within the group and was certainly not viewed as any kind of actual leader by anyone I’ve spoken to. I have sympathy for their position that he was innocent until proven guilty and that it took the Senate Ethics Officer two years to reach her conclusions, but on the other hand, we could still see this train on the tracks. It’s too bad the ISG didn’t insulate themselves a little better from this, but in all, I don’t think the damage looks as bad from out here.

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Roundup: Squeamish MPs and the problems they cause

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So many pearls got clutched yesterday on a couple of topics that, while unrelated, actually have a lot more in common than one may think. The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the legal definition of bestiality must include penetration (with only Justice Abella dissenting) based on its common law definitions going back years. It was a case that involved the sexual abuse of teen girls, but if you judged by the headlines and the reactions on social media, it was a number of bizarre over-readings of what the ruling was, as though they ruled it legal rather than saying that there is a hole in the law because MPs didn’t properly update it when they had a chance. And this is where this starts to overlap with what else is happening.

As you may have guessed, the pearl-clutching amongst the pundit class carries on over the Senate amending bill C-14 (I swear that Michael Den Tandt has clutched his pearls so tightly that he’s cut off the flow of oxygen to his brain) and the “suddenly assertive” Senate (it’s actually not, but rather it has a couple of genuinely problematic bills before it), and while I won’t repeat yesterday’s civics lesson, let me say that the Supreme Court decision around bestiality is exactly the kind of object lesson that the assisted dying legislation could easily become.

Let’s face it – MPs don’t like to deal with tough issues. When the abortion laws they tried to pass post-Morgentaler decision was defeated, they didn’t make a second attempt. When they passed “temporary” prostitution laws in the 1980s to deal with a specific public nuisance issue, they didn’t return to the issue as promised to deal with it until the Supreme Court struck them down in the Bedford decision. We saw yesterday morning with the bestiality case that where MPs should have dealt with the issue when they changed other laws around the issue in the 1980s, they didn’t until the Supreme Court had to render a decision that pointed out the loophole and a sexual offender had two charges against him dropped rather than the court make up a new law holus bolus. And now there’s doctor-assisted dying. The Court had very good reasons when they made the Carter decision to insist on a timeline, which MPs have been balking about because they don’t want to deal with it. When the Prime Minister defends the conservative nature of C-14 with the excuse that it’s the “first step” of a longer conversation, I don’t actually trust that there will be a second step because MPs are too squeamish to deal with tough problems. And that’s exactly why I think the Senate is right to rip the band-aid off right now and force the government to actually deal with the whole issue as the Supreme Court laid it out. And yes, the government is going to grumble and say they don’t want to accept the amendments, but I also think that it’s part of the narrative of reluctance, where they can then hide behind the Senate as having “forced” them to accept the changes, so that they have political cover when interest groups confront them during the next election. But we’ve seen this problem of MPs not wanting to do their jobs time and again and the problems that it eventually causes. And if it means that the Senate has to be the grown-ups and make them deal with it this time, so be it.

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Roundup: The anti-intellectual warning shot

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The markets are crashing, the dollar continues to plummet and the price of oil seems to be in free-fall, but what is it that has the Canadian commentariat entranced – well, aside from the latest Duffy minutiae? The fact that Doug Ford may be contemplating the federal Conservative leadership if Stephen Harper fails to win the upcoming election. It kind of makes me want to weep. “Oh, it’ll be hilarious!” the Twitter Machine keeps relaying, but no, it wouldn’t. It would be heartbreaking for what it means to democracy. As we saw with the Rob Ford years in Toronto, and as we’re seeing play out with the Donald Trump primary race in the States, what more rational people see as hilarious and unbelievable is being embraced by a share of the electorate who are disengaged and who believe that all politicians are liars, so they would rather someone who stands up there and “tells it like it is,” never mind that what they’re telling them is completely divorced from reality and also generally false. We are already dealing with an overload of anti-intellectualism in the Canadian discourse (and no, not just from the right-leaning populists – you should see the abuse heaped on the economists who dared to debunk the NDP’s minimum wage proposal earlier in the week). Do we need it compounded on the federal scene by such an individual? While people may treat it like a joke, it’s a legitimate threat. Remember that Rob Ford got elected mayor because the very people who dismiss the Ford brothers can’t seem to grasp that they do strike a chord with voters, and I can’t think of anything more terrifying for the future of federal politics.

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Roundup: In danger of losing the plot

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As Nigel Wright’s testimony wrapped up in the Duffy trial yesterday, I am going to confess that I have pretty much lost the plot at this point. I’m having a hard time seeing what the point of Donald Bayne’s cross-examination was, and how anything Wright did somehow excused Duffy either claiming those expenses, or accepting the cheque in the end. Trying to establish a broad conspiracy that may or may not include the prime minister’s current chief of staff is salacious political gossip, which may or may not go to the prime minister’s judgement in the people he surrounds himself with, but for the life of me, I can’t see how this is relevant to the trial. Yes, people lied and covered up what happened – politically relevant, perhaps, but legally? I’m still having a hard time following where Bayne is going in this. Meanwhile, Aaron Wherry offers some ideas about what may constitute political scandal in the whole ClusterDuff affair – seeing as some are starting to express doubts that there is one – while Andrew Coyne expresses faux sympathy for Harper, who has been deceived by those closest to him for so long.

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Roundup: Trying to politicize the RCMP – again

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Trying to cash in on the Duffy trial, the NDP decided to send an open letter to the RCMP Commissioner yesterday, essentially demanding that the case against Nigel Wright be re-opened and expanded to include current chief of staff Ray Novak, for some unknown reason. Oh, and they want a “clear response” as to why there are no charges. There are a few problems with this approach, so let’s list them, shall we?

  1. The RCMP don’t have to answer to the NDP. Sorry, but they don’t. They don’t have to explain why they didn’t press charges for someone else’s partisan gain.
  2. We’ve pretty much determined that in order for a bribery charge to be even feasible, they would have to establish the mens rea – the intent – that the $90,000 cheque was intending to buy influence. It wasn’t, and we have Wright’s testimony under oath to that effect. Are there no lawyers in the party that can explain this?
  3. And this is the big one – the NDP are explicitly trying to politicise the RCMP by making them part of their campaign against the Conservatives in the campaign.

Whoever in the NDP brain trust decided it was a good idea to drag the RCMP into the election should give their heads a shake because it’s kind of gross. The NDP brought them into a previous election – you’ll remember the December 2005 letter from the RCMP that the NDP used against the Liberals in that election, and when Harper won the election, how there were plenty of curious appearances of ties with the then-RCMP commissioner and Harper. (An investigation, it should be noted, that amounted to nothing). One would think that the RCMP would have learnt their lessons, and that they’ll be more circumspect. I guess we’ll see if they are, but suffice to say, the NDP trying to repeat that particular cheap stunt is not particularly endearing, and they should rethink trying to drag nominally non-political actors into the fray. No good can come of it.

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Roundup: The other ruthless dictator

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NDP-turned-Green MP Bruce Hyer is warning that Thomas Mulcair will be as dictatorial of a Prime Minister as Stephen Harper if elected. To which I would reply “quite possibly.” While some of Hyer’s criticisms are that Mulcair will say anything to get elected, that’s fairly standard practice across a host of different parties and even leaders – and don’t think the Greens are much better, if you looked at how Kevin Milligan eviscerated their election platform’s costing over the weekend. But Hyer does have a point in that Mulcair’s NDP has been a very tightly controlled ship. Iron-fisted in many respects, but it does go back to the 2011 election, when Jack Layton was still in charge. The moment the election was over and they had accidentally won that wave of Quebec seats, with all of those paper candidates, the party went into communications lockdown and messaging became even more tightly controlled than that of the Conservatives. The NDP went so far as to centralise their communications media relations – something even the Conservatives hadn’t done, with their famous control from the centre. This carried on through the leadership and was adopted by Mulcair when he became leader, so it’s not just him that’s doing it – it’s the party’s entire apparatus. And it’s not like the NDP was this bastion of free voting even when Layton was in charge – MPs were routinely punished for stepping out of line with their votes, be it with QP slots taken away, or what have you. Solidarity was enforced, much as it continues to be under Mulcair. While I find José Nunez-Melo’s sour grapes at his nomination not being protected to be a bit rich, it does bear reminding that there is a darker side to the NDP that they don’t like to show or talk about, but it is there if you pay attention, even if Hyer is trying to pin it on Mulcair personally.

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Roundup: The Economist Party fact-checks

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With the Liberals casting the NDP federal minimum wage proposal as a mirage, and the NDP insisting that they haven’t deceived anyone (never mind that the Huffington Post did a piece asking ordinary people about what they thought of the pledge, only to learn it applies to federally-regulated industries, which won’t affect most people, and lo and behold, the people asked felt deceived. Imagine that!) While the NDP claim it will affect over 100,000 people, the Economist Party crunched the numbers, and found them lacking.

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Roundup: Tolerating Ray Novak’s deception

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If there was one exchange on the campaign trail yesterday that speaks volumes for the way the current government is operating, particularly the lying about who knew about the cheque as opposed to Duffy himself repaying, it was between Hannah Thibedeau and Stephen Harper while in Hay River, and it goes thus: “You just mentioned in that answer a vast majority of staff believed that, but there were staff and very high profile staff that knew otherwise. For a few days, you have been evading that question about the deception done by many of your senior staff in the Duffy case including Mr. Ray Novak – he’s your current chief of staff, and he was told about Mr. Wright’s cheque in emails directly with Mr. Wright. So why have you tolerated Mr. Novak’s lying and even promoted him to current chief of staff who’s travelling with you right now?” Harper, predictably, rejected the premise of the question and insisted that only Wright and Duffy were responsible and they were being held accountable, which is clearly not the case. This was the party that rode into government on the white horse of accountability. It’s funny how that horse is nowhere to be seen these days.

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