Tag Archives: Nominations

Roundup: Wynne questions the prostitution law

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Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has announced that she has grave concerns about the anti-prostitution bill, which came into effect on Saturday, and that she will ask her Attorney General for a legal opinion on the law so as to be sure that the province is not being asked to uphold an unconstitutional law, given the concerns that were outlined in the Bedford decision by the Supreme Court. It’s a fairly interesting challenge that Wynne is making, having a provincial government coming out against federal legislation in this sense, but as the province has the duty to enforce the Criminal Code, her asking for options so publicly is an interesting case. As Emmett Macfarlane notes, it’s also interesting that she didn’t directly ask the Ontario Court of Appeal for a reference and their opinion on the law, but that could still come once the Attorney General and her office have had time to weigh in. It probably won’t make Wynne any more popular in Harper’s eyes, and will be one more reason for him to avoid meeting with her, but it could also be the first shot in a Supreme Court challenge of the legislation, which could conceivably be much faster-tracked than it would be if we had to wait for a Charter challenge the traditional way, which could conceivably help save lives, going back to the thrust of the Bedford decision in the first place.

https://twitter.com/HisFeministMama/status/541696722196787200

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/541659937022414848

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Roundup: Doubling down on cognitive dissonance

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With some of his trademarked clownish theatricality, Charlie Angus described his exasperation with We The Media for apparently getting the headlines wrong about the NDP’s promises around restoring the long-gun registry. Describing his reaction as having “banged his head on the table,” Angus tried to insist that no, they weren’t going to bring back the registry. Really! But they still plan to put in a system to track every gun, which is pretty much a registry, even if they don’t want to call it such. (The cognitive dissonance! It burns!). And while Angus and others try to double down on their senseless attempt at holding contradictory thoughts in their heads, it’s starting to look a lot like a facile attempt to please everyone – to play to their Quebec base (for whom the registry is a very big deal and tied to the École Polytechnique massacre), to keep their urban voters happy with their penchant for gun control, while trying to ensure that what few rural and northern voters that they have, who objected to the registry, aren’t similarly put out (and to ensure that they don’t have any other MPs rebel like Bruce Hyer did before they ousted him for standing up for his constituents wishes and thus going against party orthodoxy). It can’t really be done, certainly not how they’re describing, and yet here we are, pretending that their registry proposal isn’t really a registry, as though we’re idiots. It’s a nice try, but no.

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Roundup: Buttressing the Fantino problem

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You may think that Julian Fantino’s days in cabinet are numbered. Tone deaf to his file and to the particular needs of veterans, for a government that has tried to make the military a point of pride, Fantino has pretty much been a robotic disaster on par with the reprogrammed Robot from the Lost in Space reboot film. But don’t think that will be enough to convince Stephen Harper to decide it’s time to shuffle the cabinet and oust Fantino. No – that would be a sign that he made a mistake, and of weakness, and well, that simply couldn’t be done. Instead, there has been a great deal of shuffling of the deck chairs – moving retired General Walt Natynczyk to head the department as Deputy Minister, and now the PMO’s director of media relations, Stephen Lecce, has been reassigned as Fantino’s chief of staff – at least on an interim basis. In other words, everything is being done to buttress Fantino from the outside, but short of completely reinstalling his duotronic databanks with a new personality matrix, I’m not sure that it will help. I will add that Leona Aglukkaq’s decision to spend Question Period yesterday reading a newspaper while serious questions were being asked about the food crisis in her own riding were being asked was also not good optics, but as of yet, there are no calls for her resignation, not that it would have any success either, as she is too much of a needed symbol in the cabinet for Harper to let her go for any reason short of leaving briefing binders within reach of the associates of biker gangs.

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Roundup: Protection through body cams

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One of those bizarre incidents that happens from time to time overtook the conversation last night as Conservative MP Peter Goldring put out a statement at the end of the day declaring that he wears a body-mounted camera to protect himself from people who would otherwise abuse their authority or hide behind a cloak of anonymity – making clear connections to the current harassment allegations on the Hill – and suggests that others do so. A few hours later, the PMO sent out a statement claiming that Goldring was having trouble sending a statement of his own, but that he retracted it because it was ill-thought, and that was that. While people have been poking fun at Goldring all night – and equally being horrified that he would basically accuse the complainants of making up the allegations in order to trap the accused MPs, apparently – much of Goldring’s obsession with body-mounted cameras has gone ignored. I interviewed Goldring a couple of months ago (paywalled) after he put out a different release calling for the RCMP to all be issued body-mounted cameras, talking about all of the cost savings in court time that would be a result because there was a visual record and not just a notebook written in pencil that police officers could change at will. Most of this stems from this 2011 arrest for failing to provide a breath sample, for which he was cleared in 2013, but Goldring is now promulgating a notion that police routinely lie, and that video evidence is the answer to everything. These harassment allegations against those two suspended MPs seem to have pushed Golding over the edge, it would seem. Goldring, incidentally, is not running in the next election.

https://twitter.com/laura_payton/status/537807683743940608

https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/537825035529244672

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Roundup: An interim process

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The Commons Board of Internal Economy met yesterday and adopted the House of Commons administration policy on harassment as an interim measure going forward, but noted that they didn’t have any mandate to deal with the harassment incidents in question, and that they should be referred to the Procedure and House Affairs Committee instead (as only MPs can discipline themselves. Parliament is self-governing after all). That leaves the two suspended MPs in limbo for the time being. The NDP meanwhile are saying that one of the incidents may have actually been sexual assault and not harassment, according to Craig Scott who was in one of the meetings with one of the complainants. But the NDP’s justice critic, Françoise Boivin, said that Trudeau should have delivered a verbal warning to the two MPs and left it at that, because they didn’t want to lay charges or file a formal complaint. So they could then turn around and claim that Trudeau didn’t do anything about the incidents once he was made aware of them? Especially if they waited until the election to make that particular reveal? Trudeau maintains that he had a duty to act, which he followed up on.

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Roundup: Theatrical tough talk

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It’s a bit of a strange thing, but we’re told that Stephen Harper decided to play tough at the G-20 summit in Australia, where he apparently told Russian president Vladimir Putin to “get out of Ukraine” while shaking his hand. And while the PMO tried to spin it as Putin “reacting negatively,” what the Russians say the response was, was “That’s impossible because we’re not in Ukraine.” This should have been predictable given the series of denials to date, while the only other response would logically have been “Make me,” thus calling Harper out on his bluff since we don’t exactly have the military capabilities to take on Russia. We just don’t. Harper’s chest-puffery follows on that of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who had previously apparently told Putin off for the downing of that Malaysian Air flight over western Ukraine, as it contained 38 Australian nationals. Given that we know that Harper and Abbott are members of the mutual admiration society, that they would engage in copycat techniques is not unsurprising, but still – it all comes across as stagey the whole way through – especially the way the PMO started boasting to the media there. Shortly before that, while in New Zealand, Harper said that he wants to ensure that any fight in the region of Iraq is against ISIS, and not against any government, meaning the Assad regime in Syria. He doesn’t want to go there, feeling the solution to that civil war remains a political one.

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Roundup: Leave it to (yet another) Officer

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Thomas Mulcair has written to the two other main party leaders about establishing a process to deal with MP-to-MP harassment, and proposes a clear definition in the Standing Orders, an independent Officer of Parliament to deal with complaints, training for MPs and staff, and to ensure that the process protects the rights of victims including to privacy. While some of this sounds reasonable on the surface, there are a few flags to my eye, some of it centred around the creation of yet another Officer, which gives the impression that this kind of thing is commonplace enough that you would need someone to deal with it full-time, rather than amending the mandate of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, for example, to deal with these kinds of issues as well. The proliferation of these Officers is actually a problem, and much like the NDP’s desire to blow up the Board of Internal Economy to create a new bureaucracy to deal with the administration of the Commons, it’s a problem that seeks to remove the self-governing powers from MPs. This is an issue that needs actual debate – if the message is that we can’t trust MPs to manage their own affairs, then what does that say about their ability to manage the country’s affairs? In a way it’s almost infantilizing them, and that should be concerning. Liberal colleagues say that they want the investigations taken care of quickly, and it was noted that there had been discussion of a harassment policy arising from a 2012 document by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and that members of all parties were to take it back to their caucuses to discuss the matter, but it hadn’t moved forward since. Paul Wells looks at these harassment allegations in the broader picture of the sad place that the capital finds itself in at the moment.

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Roundup: Big turnout for Remembrance Day

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It was a gorgeous Remembrance Day in Ottawa, and Laureen Harper could be heard on camera remarking that this was probably the nicest Remembrance Day she’s ever seen here. Some 50,000 people turned out for the ceremony in the Nation’s Capital, which also saw the re-dedication of the War Memorial to feature the dates of the Boer War and the Afghanistan mission, along with the phrase “In the Service of Canada,” which captures the other peace-keeping operations and missions that our soldiers have been deployed on. The Governor General delivered his speech, and Princess Anne delivered a message from the Queen for the re-dedication. John Geddes writes about why this year felt different than others past. Stephen Saideman writes about how Canada does Remembrance Day better than the Americans do Veterans Day (and Memorial Day). Maclean’s has some photos of ceremonies around Canada and the world.

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Roundup: Hollande pays a visit

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French President François Hollande landed in Calgary and met with Harper and the Governor General in Banff as the start of his state visit yesterday. He’ll arrive in Ottawa today to address a joint session of Parliament.

Candice Bergen admits that the “family tax credit” aka sorta-income-splitting, won’t benefit single parents because they’re generally too low-income, which again raises the utility of giving tax credits to those who are less likely to need them – as in wealthier two-parent families, never mind that it’s the kind of pandering to the social conservative base that it represents.

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Roundup: Raising the spectre of domestic terror

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It was an odd event yesterday – a Conservative MP asking the PM during Question Period to respond to “unconfirmed reports” to a domestic terrorism link to a hit-and-run case in Quebec involving two members of the Canadian Forces, where the suspect was shot and later died. It was only hours later that the RCMP released a brief statement that the suspect was known to them, and that he may have been radicalised. It’s still early days in the investigation, but one wonders if it’s perhaps too soon to suddenly believe we have ISIS cells operating in Canada, and that this wasn’t an isolated incident where one individual who, by all accounts, was a recent convert for whatever reason, and decided to act on the vague ISIS threats that were made public in media reports. I guess time will tell, but expect the government to start using this incident as justification for greater counter-terror legislation. At the same time as this story was breaking, the Director of Operations of CSIS was at a Senate committee, saying that they do the best they can with prioritizing their investigations, but can’t cover every base because of budget limitations. Duly noted.

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