QP: Second verse, same as the first

A very blustery day on Parliament Hill, and all three main leaders made it through the rapidly accumulating snowfall in order to make it to QP on time. Rona Ambrose led off, mini-lectern on desk, reading a question about pulling the fighters out of Iraq, insisting that it means that Canada is not fighting terrorism. Justin Trudeau said that they consulted with allies and came up with a robust new plan to do what was needed. Ambrose insisted that military action and fighting was necessary, to which Trudeau quoted to her the US coalition leader saying that they couldn’t bomb their way out of the crisis, and that they needed training. Ambrose switched to the issue of new funding for UNRWA, which was found to be linked to Hamas. Trudeau noted his meeting with Ban Ki-moon, and the commitment to re-engaging with the world. Stephen Blaney was outraged that some of our aid money could find its way to terrorists groups, at which Karina Gould reminded him that our aid money was neutral. Blaney then called the decision to send Griffon helicopters with the new trainers “bungling,” but Harjit Sajjan merely confirmed that yes, the helicopters would be deployed. Thomas Mulcair was up next, outraged that more trainers over in Iraq would mean more risk. Trudeau reminded him that Canadians always stand up to do their duty when called upon. Mulcair asked again in French, and got the same answer in French. Mulcair mentioned his trip to Saskatchewan, and demanded EI reforms to help people in the oil price drop. Trudeau said that they were working hard to meet that demand. Mulcair decried a $6.5 billion shortfall for grain farmers without the Canadian Wheat Board. Lawrence MacAulay noted that government no longer had ties to the former Board.

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Roundup: Hollow Senate threats

As the Conservatives grasp their diminishing influence in the opposition benches, their threats of using the Senate to get their way seem to be increasing. Yesterday, as the Liberal government announced their bill to repeal two of the anti-union private members’ bills that passed in the last parliament, at least one Conservative MP was beating his chest and threatening that the Senate would be used to defeat the bill. The problem? That he’s unlikely to find allies in the Senate to carry out this threat. You see, one of these bills badly fractured the Conservative Senate caucus in the last parliament, which is almost certainly what led to Marjory LeBreton tendering her resignation as Government Leader early, and her threats to the caucus very nearly provoked a revolt. Given how much trouble they went through to pass the bill in June, and how much they had to crack the whip and still have dissenters, those who abstained or who just refused to show up for the vote, I really doubt that they would have any fight left in them on this bill. It makes the insistence from their MP caucus that they will somehow be a rearguard action to stop bills they don’t like from being passed as not only fanciful, but actually pretty insulting to that Senate caucus, who they’re treating as just another group of backbenchers that they can push around, and with a leadership contest soon to get underway, they’re going to find that their senators are about to start getting a lot more independent, as the guy who appointed them is no longer around and his influence has almost faded entirely as even his MP caucus swallows themselves whole to reverse their previously held positions now that he’s gone. If they think that they can still wield that influence to preserve this unpopular and contentious bill, well, they may soon find themselves getting a rather rude awakening. (Meanwhile, the Conservative allegation that the repeal of those bills was somehow repayment for an illegal union donation that the Liberals didn’t even know about, and which was repaid as soon as it was uncovered, is laughable considering that the repeal of these bills was in the bloody platform).

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QP: Call Denis Coderre

The first QP of 2016, and after several statements of condolences for the incidents in La Loche, Saskatchewan, and the attacks in Burkina Faso and Jakarta, there was a moment of silence for the victims in La Loche. Rona Ambrose led off, script on mini-lectern, and read her condolences for La Loche and asked for an update on the situation. Justin Trudeau expressed his condolences, and noted that the RCMP and victims support services were on the ground to support the community. Ambrose then accused Trudeau of “swanning around” in Davos while Canadians were hurting. Trudeau insisted that his party was elected on a commitment of investment and growth, and listed the business leaders he met with to get them to invest in Canada. Ambrose then accused him of running down the resource sector, to which Trudeau insisted that the resourcefulness of Canadians included the natural resources sector. Ambrose switched to French, and accused the government of spending through the surplus they left behind (not that any of the projections agreed that there was a surplus ongoing), and Trudeau reiterate that they were elected on a platform of investment. Ambrose then demanded that Trudeau call Denis Coderre to fight for the Energy East pipeline, to which Trudeau replied that they had ten years to get pipelines approved and couldn’t. Thomas Mulcair was up next, and concern trolled about the fact that the TPP was being signed without changes. Trudeau corrected him, saying that signing was only one step that was moving forward with the consultation process. There was a round of the same again in French, before Mulcair switched to the PBO’s report on tax changes. Trudeau praised them for helping more families than before. Mulcair brought up comments made by the new Clerk of the Privy Council about university protesters (Trudeau: I’m pleased he’s the new clerk and will lead public service renewal).

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Roundup: Religious Freedom office on the line

In a month, Canada’s Religious Freedom ambassador’s first three-year term will expire, as will his office’s budget. He’s been making the rounds, once again, to talk about how much value there is in his office in helping our diplomats understand the religious points of view that dominate certain other countries, and uses that as the justification for his office. In a piece by the Citizen, there are a few other voices who say that he’s been doing a good job, and that he’s been available and accessible to talk about certain foreign policy issues, which is all well and good, but there does remain a certain discomfort around the very existence of the office and its raison d’etre. Part of that has to do with the suspicion that this was an office designed like its American counterpart to essentially be an office of Christian proselytising around the world – and to a certain extent, the press releases we did see out of that office seemed to weigh in particular to countries where there was a Christian minority in some level of persecution. But what the Citizen article misses is a more existential problem that the office faces, which is that its very existence creates a problem of perception in terms of a hierarchy of rights. The previous government in many statements it made in the Commons and elsewhere seemed to point to freedom of religion being a more fundamental building block to other rights and freedoms, which is fairly anathema to human rights academia. Back when the office was created, I spoke to a number of scholars who were sceptical because it introduced the notion that there was a hierarchy of rights, when all rights should be treated equally, lest they get their own departments within Global Affairs, and the jockeying for status, position and funding would take over. It remains to be seen what Stéphane Dion and the Liberal government thinks of the Office and whether they will be inclined to keep it around, or possibly absorb it into some other department within Global Affairs, of if they are persuaded by the argument of the perceptions of hierarchy.

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Roundup: Barton in charge

The announcement came down yesterday making it all official – Rosemary Barton has now passed the gauntlet of the competition process and has officially been named the permanent host of CBC’s Power & Politics. It’s not as though she didn’t more than prove herself in spades over the course of the election, with six-days-a-week broadcasts, and sharp coverage, but that Chris Alexander interview, where she shut down one of his tantrums and put him in his place – that has become legendary in political circles already. A senior journalist in this town described her as an “accountability interviewer,” and that’s something that’s been desperately needed in this city, where there has been a certain amount of timidity in the kinds of interviews we’ve seen. Not having a Jeremy Paxman of our own, we’d seen many a political show host in this country tiptoe around members of the Harper government for close to a decade because they often threatened (or instituted) boycotts after one hissy fit or another (John Baird being particularly famous for them), but Barton was having none of that – and it went for opposition MPs as well, like her interview with Thomas Mulcair pretty much on the day she was given the interim job when Evan Soloman’s sudden firing happened, and she didn’t put up with Mulcair’s too-cute-by-half routine. In their release, CBC pointed out her history as a reporter, going back to her starting out as a researcher for the French-language RDI while in Winnipeg, and covering politics in Quebec City – the kinds of chops that her predecessor never had, who relied instead on personality than on hard-won experience in covering the beat. And with Barton’s permanent appointment comes the acknowledgement of the changing face of politics in Canada – the fact that she’s not a middle-aged white male is important in an age of younger MPs, and of gender-equal cabinets, that a younger woman is tougher and more competent in the role than her middle-aged male contemporaries. It’s just too bad that this announcement didn’t happen in June on the heels of Solomon’s departure. (And as for Evan Solomon, it was announced that he’s taking over the afternoon broadcast for Ottawa’s CFRA radio station, because all is apparently forgiven for his ethical lapses).

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Roundup: Shelly Glover and Joy Smith, concern trolls

Shelly Glover, police officer “on leave and planning to return to it once she’s out of politics,” is currently peddling in hysterics and trading upon her time as a police officer that worked undercover on the prostitution beat. Glover says that the laws that were struck down will make it more difficult for police to help exploited women and children – err, except that the laws against human trafficking and child exploitation remain in effect. The laws that were struck down were the ones that made women in those situations be afraid to go to the police for fear of self-incrimination, which seems like a bigger deal than police using those laws to arrest those same women, criminalise them, and hope that it might instead put them in touch with social services agencies while they were locked up. And then there’s her caucus colleague, Joy Smith, who a) doesn’t actually read the literature on the Nordic Model of prostitution laws except for the ones that are devoid of fact and tell her what she wants to hear, and b) conflates all sex work with human trafficking, and all human trafficking with sexual exploitation, which anyone with an inkling of how things work can tell you is a gross overreach. I’m glad that Smith thinks that it’s easy enough to criminalise the buyers of sex to curb demand – because that totally worked with things like alcohol during the prohibition era or illicit drugs today, right, and criminalising those very same drug users is totally saving lives in places like Vancouver’s Lower East Side, right? Oh, wait… Terri Jean Bedford, one of the plaintiffs in the case, says that any new laws need to take consenting adults into account, which may be difficult when faced with an ideology that the exchange of sex for money is inherently bad (while ignoring the other transactions for sex that occur as part of everyday dating and marriage). CBC looks at five questions arising from the Supreme Court decision.

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Roundup: A claim without evidence

John Baird and Leona Aglukkaq made the announcement yesterday that said that we made our submission to the UN regarding our Arctic sea floor claims. Apparently we have claimed the North Pole – but we don’t yet have evidence to support that claim. Um, okay. And yet this is the same party who is standing up in the House to ridicule Justin Trudeau for saying that he was going to listen to the advice of scientists before he determines if we do indeed have a claim on the North Pole or not. Because politics.

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Roundup: So long, Mac Harb

It appears that Mac Harb has a sense of shame after all, and has not only tendered his resignation to the Senate, but repaid the full amount that the Senate has determined that he owed, and dropped his legal challenge. Of that challenge, he said it wasn’t about the money, but about the lack of due process within the Senate itself, which seems fair enough. And he does make the point that the ongoing cloud and investigations made his work there impossible, and that he thinks the Auditor General’s audit will turn up a trove of other Senators who interpreted the rules as he did. Um, okay. You know it won’t be a forensic audit, right? Just checking. With Harb’s departure, that still leaves the three embattled Harper-appointed Senators under a cloud of suspicion, and the Conservatives without a convenient whipping boy for the Liberals when it comes to saying that they don’t support the seal hunt (which Harb alone opposed when he was in their caucus).

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QP: Getting Harper on the record, scattershot style

With all leaders on deck on a lovely Tuesday afternoon in the Nation’s Capital, QP got underway with Thomas Mulcair reading a question on why John Duncan was dropped from cabinet over an improper letter, but not Jim Flaherty. Harper responded that in Flaherty’s case, it was an administrative error. Mulcair moved on to the topic of EI “quotas,” to which Harper insisted that they were merely performance audit. Mulcair then moved onto the “scandals” in the Senate, to which Harper somehow turned it into a paean for an elected Senate — not that it would actually address the current issues. For his final question, Mulcair demanded that Harper stay away from the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Sri Lanka, and Harper started off by carrying on his elected Senate paean before saying that he would not attend the meeting. For the Liberals, Bob Rae asked about the house calls that EI recipients are receiving as part of the effort to stamp out fraud. Harper responded by saying that EI was paid into by honest Canadians and they want to ensure that the money is there for honest recipients. For his final question, Rae asked about the Estimates tabled yesterday and the increase in advertising budgets while front-line services are being cut. Harper insisted that said front-line services were not being cut.

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Roundup: Defibrillator populism

Because no move is too crassly populist, Stephen Harper announced yesterday that he was unrolling a federal programme to put defibrillators in every hockey arena in the country – never mind that healthcare is a provincial jurisdiction. Because you can’t do something that’s not too feel-good for the hockey-and-Tim-Horton’s crowd that this government has targeted as the key to its continued political future. On a related note, here’s a look at how the overt Canadiana of the Tim Horton’s brand is preventing its expansion in the States from taking hold – without it, it’s just another donut shop.

Academics are reacting to the appointment of Dr. Andrew Bennett as our religious freedom ambassador, and it’s none too flattering – it seems that he doesn’t really have the academic credentials for the post, as his PhD is in politics, and he’s really more of a glorified civil servant than an expert in theology or religious issues. Ouch.

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