Tag Archives: Parliamentary Precinct

Roundup: Harder’s wrongheaded impatience

Posted on by

Our good friend Senator Peter Harder is at it again, going to the media about his frustrations that Senate modernization isn’t going his way. The current complaint is twofold – one, that they haven’t adopted all of the Auditor General’s recommendations; and two, that the rules allow for senators to delay debating bills for lengthy periods. So, let’s break it down.

First of all, the AG’s recommendation that the Senate require an external audit committee to provide some kind of “external validation” was a Very Bad Recommendation. I’ve argued this time and again, and I’ll say it again right here – the Senate cannot be put under external oversight because parliament is self-governing. This is a very important consideration that the AG doesn’t understand. I don’t care how many government departments and private companies use this external validation – they are not parliament and parliament is self-governing. That means that the Senate must police itself, no matter how much the AG seems to find that to be a problem (and considering how very little his audit found for how much it cost, as problematic and arbitrary as it was). And yes, an audit committee is an idea that could include external members but must have a majority of members from the Senate on it, non-negotiable. If Parliament cannot govern itself, then we might as well just declare that the past 148 years of Responsible Government were just a failed experiment and we might as well tell the Queen to take over and rule us directly again. I’m not even kidding. If Harder can’t grasp this fundamental concept, then that is a problem.

The other point, about delays, is as much Harder’s own failing as Government Leader – err, “government representative” than anything. If government bills need swift passage, he needs to make the case to the Senate, and if there are delays, then he has tools at his disposal including time allocation, which he must again, make the case for swift passage. And there are a lot of bills that the Senate does dispose of relatively quickly, particularly because the Commons likes to dump them on the Senate shortly before Parliament rises for either the holidays or summer, and implore that they get passed post-haste, and most of the time, they are. And just like with the Senate’s veto, there are sometimes cases where delay is warranted for any number of reasons, including that it’s a bad bill (such as the single sports betting bill in the previous parliament). The Senate is not a rubber stamp; changing the rules to force them to be more “disciplined” in how they debate is seriously close to curtailing the privileges of parliamentarians to suit the government’s agenda. Parliament is there to keep a check on the government, not simply nod everything through. This is one more piece in the concerning pattern that Harder is looking to make changes to an institution that he doesn’t understand and will cause lasting damage if he’s not reined in.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Civilian control – it’s a Thing!

Posted on by

Over the past couple of weeks, as the government’s “interim” fighter acquisition plans were announced and the fallout has been filtering down since. I’ve seen a lot of fairly disturbing commentary around it, not just from some of the usual ass clowns on social media, but I’ve also seen it in the House of Commons. No less than Rona Ambrose told the Prime Minister that the government needs to get out of the way of military procurement decisions and let the military decide what it needs or wants.

Nope. So much nope.

In case Ambrose or anyone else has forgotten, in a liberal democracy we insist on civilian control of the military. That’s kind of a big thing, and as Stephen Saideman points out, it’s a central ingredient and necessary thing for democracy. And it’s not just this attitude creeping out in Canada, but we’re seeing it in spades in the United States right now as Donald Trump is looking to put former military members into cabinet who haven’t passed their designated “cooling off” period yet.

It’s also why I get annoyed by these stories about how the government’s plans and policies are characterised as “contradicting” the head of the Royal Canadian Airforce, for example. The problem with these kinds of headlines is that if you’ve at all paid attention to the Canadian Forces for the past number of years, you’ll see that they will always say that they have the resources at hand to do the job they’re asked to do. If the government says that 65 new planes are enough, well, then the RCAF will make sure that 65 planes are enough, no matter how much they might like or need more. Plenty of stories filtered out during the air mission in Iraq about how the RCAF was managing it despite their budget constraints, and it was a lot do to with cannibalising training budgets and so on to ensure that those missions that were being asked of them still flew, and they did it without public complaint. (Never mind that they were concerned about the declining readiness of the fleet at the time, but they still had a job to do that was being asked of them, so they made it work).

We need to remember that governments set policies, and they are held to account for the policies they set, but it’s not up to the military to tell us what that policy should be. We’ve had procurement problems in the past where the military were allowed to set their own parameters and went wild looking for the biggest and the best kit available, and boondoggles resulted. So yes, the government can set its own policies and align procurement to match it. That’s fine. And we can hold them to account for that policy on any number of metrics. But we should really refrain from that metric being “the military said the old policy was fine” because of course they were going to say that. It’s also not their job to be yet another cudgel for opposition parties to wield and then hide behind like they do with every other institution and officer of parliament. Civilian control matters. Let’s remember to treat it that way.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/805181340673048576

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/805184815691681792

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/805187027419459584

Continue reading →

Roundup: An unexpected reversal

Posted on by

So, after the somewhat unexpected reversal of last night, I looked back to something from the past few days to help explain this bit of insanity that we’ve all witnessed. Michelle Rempel heard this from Republican officials late last week when she asked them how this all happened:

Here’s a look at what a Trump presidency is going to mean for Canada:

As the numbers tightened, we saw this going around:

https://twitter.com/kfile/status/796206974652321794

Meanwhile, a reminder about the underlying attitudes:

https://twitter.com/james_j_gordon/status/796200489918623745

I’m going to wait before I can have much else to say about the power of nativism, and this “drain the swamp” ethos that has taken over so much of the rhetoric in the campaign, and the part that civic ignorance feeds into the politics of resentment that in turn fuels this kind of thing. But wow.

I will say how glad I am once again to live in Canada, with a constitutional monarchy and a system of Responsible Government, with a Supreme Court that isn’t partisan, and with a neutral civil service. Because we’re probably going to be reminded about how important that is in the next few years.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau will be stopping in Cuba and Argentina on the way to the APEC meeting in Peru, and everyone is recalling his father’s frienship with the Castros.
  • The government has named a five-person panel to make recommendations regarding overhauling the National Energy Board.
  • Here’s a look at the latest round of Order Paper questions, with questions on alcohol on government flights, classified documents and ministerial swag.
  • Here is your look at ministerial expense repayments for various and sundry reasons.
  • The Victims of Communism memorial is now up for a new design from five different bidders, to go with its new location. The original design is out of the running.
  • Correctional Investigator Howard Sapers is leaving the job and will be leading a review of segregation in Ontario prisons.
  • Conservative MP (and former sportscaster) Kevin Waugh thinks that female athletes are treated better than their male counterparts, and is being criticised for it.
  • The first Conservative leadership debate is tonight.
  • The premier of PEI is (rightfully) expressing some scepticism over the province’s electoral reform plebiscite results, and reformers are howling as a result.
  • My Loonie Politics column looks at whether the instances of Liberal backbenchers voting against the government are really signs of independence showing.

Odds and ends:

The Yukon Liberals won the territorial election on Monday night, and Trudeau congratulated prospective new premier Sandy Silver.

Both women candidates in the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race have dropped out citing harassment and intimidation.

Roundup: Walking out on Wallonia

Posted on by

Talks to save the Canada-EU trade agreement broke down yesterday, and after more than two days of direct talks, trade minister Chrystia Freeland walked out of the meeting and basically declared that it was now impossible for the EU to come to an international trade deal. And really, this was about the Walloons in Belgium who weren’t letting this go through. Wallonia’s president tried to sound an optimistic tone, and said that “difficulties remain” around largely the investor-state dispute resolution mechanism and wanted Justin Trudeau to hold off on his planned trip to Europe next week to finalize the deal so that the Walloons could have more time.

While Freeland said she was ready to get back on a plane and go home to see her kids, it looks like the EU president managed to keep her around for more talks, which may have been the whole point of Freeland’s exit – so that the rest of the EU could pressure Wallonia to come to their senses. While Belgium’s ambassador to Canada also said that the deal wasn’t dead, we did see some of the usual suspects line up to applaud the potential demise of the agreement, like Elizabeth May, the NDP, and the Council of Canadians.

Throughout this, however, I will admit to more than a little distaste at the snide tone of the Conservatives throughout all of this. In QP yesterday, Candice Bergen laid this at the feet of Freeland personally and declared that she would have to “wear it.” Gerry Ritz said that Freeland should have “rolled up her sleeves” and stayed at the table (which she had already been doing), and Rona Ambrose demanded that Justin Trudeau get on a plane and smooth this over himself. And there is this overall tone that the deal had been “gift wrapped” for the Liberals (after Harper had already done two symbolic signings of the agreement before it had been ratified), which is specious and facile. The Liberals have countered that the deal was essentially dead before Freeland resurrected it, largely through reopening some of the negotiations and through declaratory statements to clarify the language in the provisions of the deal, so it’s not like they didn’t do nothing. Quite the opposite, in fact. And one fails to see how it’s Freeland’s fault when pretty much everyone agrees that this is now an internal EU matter that Canada really can’t do anything about. Then again, the Conservative message around other trade deals like softwood lumber are equally fantastical (how they could have forced the Americans to come to an agreement when they clearly aren’t interested is beyond me, and there was a lot of unhappiness with the deal they signed when they first got into office that gave the Americans a victory). Sure, they signed a bunch of deals with small countries with small economies. Sure, they got CETA and TPP off the ground, but they still protected a lot of industries that didn’t necessarily deserve it, nor did they seal those deals either. Trade is a difficult business, and I’m not sure they have the moral authority to be as frankly abusive as they have been on the file.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Chagger vs Bergen

Posted on by

The big news yesterday was Rona Ambrose shuffling up her shadow cabinet after the summer of leadership announcements, and naming Candice Bergen as the new Opposition House Leader in the place of Andrew Scheer. What is of particular interest is that you have two fairly inexperienced people in the role in both the government and the official opposition, which could make for some very interesting times going forward.

To refresh, the role of the House Leader is to basically determine the agenda of the Commons (deputy leaders fill this role in the Senate), when it comes to determining what items will be up for debate on what days, the scheduling of Supply Days for opposition parties, and basically doing the procedural management. Why the fact that two relatively inexperienced MPs will be doing this is interesting is because we’ll see what kinds of ways that they prioritise things. (Bergen does have experience as a parliamentary secretary and minister of state, but little in the way of procedural experience as far as I’ve been able to determine). What everyone will be paying attention to in particular, however is tone. The fact that for the first time in history, it’s two women in the role is going to have people waiting to see just how that affects tone (as Rosemary Barton gave as her item to watch in this week’s At Issue), because we have been fed a number of gender essentialist narratives that women do things differently and without as much of the partisan acrimony – not that I necessarily believe it, given that Bergen herself is a pretty die-hard partisan. The added spoke in this wheel is the NDP’s House Leader, Peter Julian, whom I have it on good authority is unreasonable to work with at the best of times. When the tension between the House Leaders boiled over into Motion 6 in the spring (and the subsequent The Elbowing that broke that camel’s back), I have little doubt that it had a lot to do with Dominic LeBlanc losing his patience with both Scheer and Julian (who totally insisted that they weren’t even being obstructionist, which I find a bit dubious). So will they be able to work together to push through what promises to be an extremely busy legislative agenda? Or will Bardish Chagger need to start resorting to procedural tactics to ensure that bills can get passed without endless Second Reading debates that the opposition refuses to let collapse so that they can get to committee (which was constant in the previous parliament when the NDP were official opposition). I’m not going to make any predictions, but it is something that I am very curious to watch as the era of “openness and cooperation” rolls along.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The cynicism of Kellie Leitch

Posted on by

As it turns out, would-be Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch has opted not to recant her survey question on “screening” immigrants and refugees for anti-Canadian values, and has doubled down on it by insisting that there is a conversation to be had, and suggested that there was merit to the “barbaric cultural practices” tip line, but that it had simply been communicated poorly. Thus far, only Michael Chong has bothered to respond and refute the narrative that Leitch is putting forward.

https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/771831806165344257

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/771848455086039040

Objectively, Leitch’s concerns about keeping Canada safe are nonsense because all of our domestic terror incidents have been home-grown and self-radicalizing lone wolves. That she thinks there are unified “Canadian values” are also hugely problematic because there are plenty of Canadians who are intolerant of other religions and cultures (particularly of Muslims), sexual orientations (hell, two of her other putative leadership candidates are running on socially conservative platforms that are downright homophobic), violence and misogynistic behaviour is prevalent if not endemic in our own culture, and the embrace of personal and economic freedoms is a dubious metric, especially as her own government was perfectly willing to curtail personal freedoms in the name of national security. The myth of shared values is nothing new, however, but it is just that – a myth. Add to that the notion that these values are something that can be tested or screened. Is Leitch somehow proposing polygraphing all prospective immigrants or refugees on these issues? Or, as I was not even really joking yesterday, hiring a bunch of telepaths to find out if they’re hiding something. It’s not even that this is dog whistle politics, it’s that the country repudiated this kind of thinking in the last election in a pretty big way. Leitch trying to adopt the language of Donald Trump to try and bring together her party’s base is deeply cynical and Leitch should know better (presuming she has the EQ to realize it, which I suspect she doesn’t).

In other Conservative leadership news, anti-abortionists are ready to back Pierre Lemieux and Brad Trost, and probably Andrew Scheer if he winds up running again. Martin Patriquin in Maclean’s argued why these kinds of leadership candidates will continue to hurt the party’s brand.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Peace bonds and terror suspects

Posted on by

Everyone seems to want to talk about how the Aaron Driver terrorism incident went down and how it relates to the government’s plans to amend the old C-51 into something that better balances Charter rights, so here is some preliminary analysis from the expert, Craig Forcese, and more analysis that he did with Kent Roach for the Globe and the Post. And yes, the Liberals have reiterated that they plan to amend the legislation, while the NDP continue to demand its repeal (which may be difficult given how it interacts with pre-existing legislation). Meanwhile, here’s an interview with Driver’s father and a professor who studies radicalization – who noted that the isolation of the peace bond may have made that radicalization worse – and a reminder about the realities of terrorism like this in Canada versus Europe.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The shameless Duff

Posted on by

Senator Mike Duffy is back in the news again, once again claiming his housing allowance for his long-time residence in Ottawa, because of course he is. There are a couple of problems here, but the first one is the way in which the story is being reported.

“Hasn’t the Senate tightened its rules?” is usually the first plaintive wail that we hear, and yes, they did. They have put rules in place around what constitutes proof of a primary residence in the province that a senator represents, and those rules include things like driver’s licence, health card, CRA tax assessment – things that Duffy didn’t have when he was first appointed and yet started claiming his housing allowance for the residence he lived in for years already. Duffy has since acquired the necessary documentation to “prove” that his primary residence is PEI. It’s also problematic to start devising a formula for how many hours one has to spend in their primary and secondary residence because it is generally a qualitative and not a quantitative measure, complicated by the work that senators do, and in some cases, there are senators who can’t travel back to their primary residences because of health concerns and are essentially forced to spend more time in Ottawa than they would otherwise. They may yet assign some kind of hour or day measure, but my understanding is that there is not one at the moment.

The bigger problem here is not the rules or the Senate itself (and for the love of all the gods on Olympus, I wish that my journalistic colleagues would stop treating this issue as a problem of the institution than its actors), but rather that Duffy himself is completely and utterly without shame. If he had any shame or decency, he wouldn’t keep claiming for his Ottawa residence, because he would know that it’s what got the whole issue rolling in the first place. But no – he is entitled to his entitlements, and has taken the fact that he was not convicted of criminal fraud and breach of trust as validation rather than the fact that he was nevertheless condemned for his behaviour while recognizing that it didn’t quite meet the test of being criminal. And that’s why this is really a Mike Duffy problem and not a Senate problem. He never should have been appointed as a PEI senator, and yet here we are.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Shirtless panic

Posted on by

Photos of our prime minister, shirtless and on vacation, continues to make people lose their minds. A week later, and it remains an item of discussion – or derision – and feeds this particular faux cynicism about media coverage, despite the fact that it clearly is not what is topping the headlines. The fact that other countries mention it triggers our inherent Canadian desire to go “Look! Other countries are talking about us!” and we report that, and suddenly it’s “all anyone can talk about” when clearly it’s not the case. And then come the lame attacks based on it, like the latest round of Conservative ads, where they accuse the media of focusing on Shirtless!Trudeau instead of the economy.

https://twitter.com/CPC_HQ/status/762742848445943808

https://twitter.com/CPC_HQ/status/762779942627053568

The problem with that narrative is that the economic news was clearly the headline for the days in which those numbers got released, but hey, so long as we can try and keep up this narrative that the PM is a selfie-obsessed pretty boy who’s too stupid to manage the economy, the more we think it’ll do something to bolster our own numbers (never mind that being effectively leaderless is not helping the poll numbers of either opposition party).

So with that in mind, here’s Jen Gerson telling everyone to relax about Shirtless!Trudeau because it’s August, we’re all on vacation anyway, and that this isn’t just about Trudeau but about the sea change in tone that has taken place in this country over the past year, and that people need to lighten up.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Monsef’s terrible “event toolkit”

Posted on by

Maryam Monsef appeared before the special committee on electoral reform, and it went about as well as you could expect, from her frankly juvenile (and wrong) opening remarks, to the predictable questions from those there – the Conservatives demanding a referendum, the NDP demanding to know whether the fix was in for ranked ballots, and Elizabeth May making outrageous remarks in her boosterism for proportional representation. Oh, and the Liberals at the table wondering just why she cares so much. No, seriously.

https://twitter.com/laura_payton/status/750754591784984576

https://twitter.com/laura_payton/status/750777788257402880

What was perhaps most surprising and yet odious about the whole affair was the 38-page “event toolkit” that Monsef unveiled at the appearance, which is designed to help facilitate discussions on electoral reform. (National Post summary here if you don’t want to read the whole thing). And it’s ridiculous and terrible. Laughably so, especially with the step-by-step instructions on how to host one and advice like creating a “special hashtag” for your event.

Event planning aside, the few pages devoted to different electoral systems are actually terrible because they miss the point. They all stem from a kind of discussion that fetishises “representation” and talks nothing at all about accountability, which is half of the gods damned equation when it comes to why we vote at all. It is not enough that we vote for a person and can be all warm and fuzzy about what that “representation” means to us (which is where a lot of the unicorn thinking of electoral reformists tends to wind up), but rather, it must also provide us with a means of holding those who are already in place to account. That means an ability to vote them out, and the only time that the word “accountability” is mentioned is on the page of the “guiding principles” that Monsef purports that the exercise is to he held under, and even then, the mentions do not get to the point. The principle of “preserve the accountability of local representation” and asking “how could any proposed reforms affect MPs’ accountability to citizens” does not actually make it clear that the ability to hold an MP or a party to account is a fundamental principle of our democratic system. Instead, we are treated to the usual “more democracy” kinds of rhetoric that are bogging down our whole understanding of our electoral system. It’s why I treat this whole exercise with suspicion, and those fears are being validated.

Continue reading →