Tag Archives: Patrick Brown

Roundup: Conference call confidential

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Over the weekend, Jen Gerson got a big scoop for Maclean’s, which was the first of the two Ontario Progressive Conservative caucus conference calls that eventually led to Patrick Brown’s resignation. (If you haven’t read the piece, do so now because I’m going to spoil it a bit). When it turned out that Brown himself was listening in, along with some of his remaining staff, it turned into a bunch of pleading (and whinging) while those caucus members who were on the call (about 20 of the 28 in total) were united in the fact that Brown had to step down right away, or they were going to publicly call for it, and Brown kept insisting that for the sake of his dignity, he wanted to meet them all the following morning and resign afterward. None of the caucus were having this because they were already being blasted over social media, and by the time everyone from caucus could get to Toronto and meet the following day, it was going to be too late for the sake of the party’s image in the run up to an election.

This is an interesting point, but I think this is an instance where the credibility of allegations comes into play. While CTV did have to walk back on a couple of the details, the core allegations remain intact and as soon as they were published, reporters from various outlets began remarking that this was an open secret, and that they had all been working on their own stories about Brown but that CTV had beaten them to the punch. That most of Brown’s campaign staff immediately jumped ship also indicated that there was a certain credibility to the allegations – this had to be more than just “fake news” and baseless allegations designed to get him out of the way. That context matters in the wake of the social media discussion.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/967565398668275712

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/967571024299442177

This tension, which I talked about not only in my Maclean’s piece but also in my book, is part of the problem with the way parties are run these days, where the elected members of caucus are treated as afterthoughts to the leader, even though they have very real concerns of their own. While none of the discussions recorded on this call seemed to have ventured into the territory of “we can’t do this because the members elected him,” that became the narrative once it happened by those who resented caucus making the push. Granted, several of Brown’s MPPs started tweeting that they were calling for his resignation before he pulled the plug, and usually it only takes one or two caucus members to go public before a leader with any modicum of shame does the right thing, though I’m not sure that Brown had quite enough shame to want to go out with enough dignity, and his pleading to be given until the next day was likely an attempt to forestall the inevitable. It’s all fascinating how it played out, but remains part of the object lesson in why our leadership selection needs to change.

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Roundup: Gaming the system a second time

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So the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party’s nomination committee has allowed Patrick Brown to run for the leadership contest, despite the fact that he was kicked out of caucus (which also rescinded his nomination as a candidate in his riding), which is going to go super well for everyone involved, be it Brown claiming that he’s been vindicated from the allegations (he hasn’t), or the other candidates who are trying (and failing) to come up with new policy on the fly as they try to distance themselves from Brown’s campaign platform. But what gets me are all of the pundits saying “It’s up for the party members to decide,” which should provide nobody any comfort at all, because the reason the party is in the mess it’s in is because Brown knew how to game the system in order to win the leadership the first time. He has an effective ground game, and can mobilise enough of his “rented” members, likely in more effective distributions (given that this is a weighted, ranked ballot) than other, more urban-centric candidates can. He played the system once, and has all the means necessary to do it again. Saying that it’ll be up to the membership to decide is an invitation to further chaos. This is no longer a political party. It’s an empty vessel waiting for the right charismatic person to lead it to victory, which is a sad indictment. Also, does nobody else see it as a red flag that Brown’s on-again-off-again girlfriend is 16 years his junior and used to be his intern? Dating the intern should be a red flag, should it not? Especially when one of his accusers is a former staffer.

Meanwhile, here’s David Reevely previews the party’s civil war, while Andrew Coyne imagines Brown’s pitch to members as his running as the “unity candidate” in a party split because of him.

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Roundup: The IRB’s crushing backlog

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Some fairly big news out of the Immigration and Refugee Board, which has decided that they will forgo the legislated timetables for hearing cases, and just hear them in the order that they were received. This after they have run out of internal solutions to manage the ballooning caseload of arrivals crossing the border trying to flee the Trumpocalypse to the south of us, while being under-resourced and understaffed because this government has proven itself utterly incapable of making necessary appointments in a timely manner (Supreme Court of Canada excepted), and this is the mess we find ourselves in as a result.

Now, it needs to be reiterated that the IRB has a long history of problems in managing its backlog, and that it’s not just this current government that has been a problem, but the previous one as well, where they took a system that had an optimal number of cases churning through the system (essentially, there was no actual backlog) and threw a spanner in the works by deciding that they needed to reform the appointment process to involve an exam (which critics at the time declared was because they wanted to stuff it with their cronies). The result of this was a sudden backlog of files that they decided to try and tackle by legislating yet more changes to the system including new timelines, but if memory serves, those changes were criticised as not giving most refugee claimants time enough to get all of their documents in order or get a lawyer that they can trust to help them with their cases, particularly because many of these claimants are traumatized when they arrive and distrusting of authority; the end-result of that was going to mean yet more appeals and court challenges, because they also put in systems that tried to limit those as well. I’m not sure ever got that backlog cleared before the current government decided to reform that appointment process yet again, and here we are, broken process and a system struggling under its own weight, and awaiting yet more promised reforms that have yet to materialize. Slow clap to successive governments for continually dropping the ball on this file.

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Roundup: A return to “bold” policy

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The federal NDP had their biannual policy convention over the weekend, and Jagmeet Singh’s leadership was “reaffirmed” when some 90 percent of delegates voted not to have a leadership review. So they’ll keep giving him a chance despite his intransigence in not running for a seat, apparently. And while they got a new party executive, and talked about how they need to do better when it comes to dealing with the harassment allegations in their own ranks that went ignored (particularly around Peter Stoffer), they also decided it was time to return to “bold” policy ideas after a fairly timid electoral platform the last time around. Not so bold, mind you, as to embrace the Leap Manifesto, which went unspoken during the convention despite rumours that it would rear its head once again, but rather, they went for things like universal pharmacare, dental care, and free tuition – you know, things that are the ambit of the provinces. Oh, and re-opening the constitution, as though that’s not going to be any small hurdle. (The free tuition debate, meanwhile, took over Economist Twitter over the weekend because the NDP’s adherents have a hard time understanding how a universal programme actually disproportionately benefits the wealthy rather than applying targeted benefits that would benefit those who are less well-off).

https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/965304844369125376

Chantal Hébert, meanwhile, finds the same core message of the NDP unchanged despite the changing slogans. There is some disagreement about that.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/965588988487610368

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Roundup: A firmer timeline for cannabis

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The Senate came to a negotiated decision around the marijuana legalization bill timeline yesterday, and there is a bit of good news, and a bit of bad news if you’re waiting for its passage. On the one hand, the new timeline has the benefit of an end date – that it aims for third reading vote by June 7th, but that also moves a vote on second reading until March 22nd, and from then on, it will go to five different committees instead of just three. It does, however, mean that the government’s timeline of July is now out of the water, because even if it passes in June (because there is the possibility of amendments, but there should be enough time to deal with those), there will still be an eight-to-twelve week lag time between royal assent and when the stores can open their doors given production and distribution timelines, and the likes. So, it likely means no legal weed over the summer, if you’re so inclined.

A couple of additional notes: I keep hearing this concern trolling that keeping the legal age below 25 is terrible because youth shouldn’t smoke it because of brain development and so on. The problem with setting the legal age too high is that it remains the forbidden fruit for those youth, which encourages use, but it also ignores the reams of data that we have on what happens when drinking ages are set too high, especially in states where it’s 21 instead of 18 or 19. What happens if you have young adults who binge drink to the point of alcohol poisoning because there is no way to build a culture of moderation – not to mention, it will continue to be an active driver for the black market if young adults can still get it that way. At least by setting it to the provincial drinking age, you have a better chance of reaching them through education programs (which will hopefully be better than the current “don’t do drugs” scare tactics that governments repeatedly try and fail at) than simple prohibition. In other words, I hope that senators (and in particular Conservative ones) don’t make this a hill to die on.
The other note is that in the lead up to this negotiated timetable, Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative” Senator Peter Harder took the CBC to proclaim his concerns with the pace of the bill, and lamenting that it had been in the Senate since November – err, except it was really only there for a couple of weeks before the Christmas break, during which time the Senate was busy dealing with a glut of other bills from the Commons, and that they rose a week before they planned to, and this is only the third week back after the break, during which it has received several second reading speeches. He was utterly disingenuous about how much time it had been in the Senate to date, and I suspect that this is all part of his play to continue casting the partisan gamesmanship (or threats thereof) by the Conservatives in order to push through his reforms to the chamber that would delegitimise structured opposition, which is a very big deal, and one that Senators shouldn’t let him sneak by them by playing up concerns over this particular bill’s progress.

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Roundup: Scheer unveils more reheated policy

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While at the Manning Centre Networking Conference in Ottawa yesterday, Andrew Scheer unveiled another policy plank – that he was going to support a free trade deal with the United Kingdom, post-Brexit. And a short while later, put out a press release and “backgrounder” (which was a bit content-free) to say that he was going to travel to the UK next month to start talking about just this.

Scheer is behind the times on this, because Justin Trudeau announced that he and Theresa May were already having this discussion back when she visited in September, and Scheer knows this. So he’s reiterating this for a couple of reasons, beyond the fact that he’s trying to paint the picture of Trudeau being unable to adequately handle trade negotiations (never mind that his government concluded CETA that was in danger of going off the rails, and similarly extracted concessions from TPP talks, and they haven’t rolled over on NAFTA talks).

  1. Scheer is a Brexit supporter, and his trip to the UK is at a time where the UK Parliament is dealing with their Brexit legislation and not doing very well with it. One suspects that this trip is more about offering Canadian support for Brexit from his position as Leader of the Opposition, never mind that I suspect that the vast majority of Canadians would oppose Brexit (and hell, the number of Britons who regret voting for it seems to be growing daily). But Scheer does seem to want to offer that encouragement from his position.
  2. This announcement was to a crowd of small-c conservatives who feel a great deal of affection for the Anglosphere, and suspicion for other trade deals, particularly with China. It doesn’t seem to be out of the realm of possibility that this is a bit of red meat for that base.

Suffice to say, if this is a new bit of policy, this awfully thin gruel.

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Roundup: Protected nominations and the suffocation of the grassroots

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Oh, Liberals. You’ve really gone and done it again, haven’t you? All of your grand talk about respecting parliament, and now you’ve decided that you’re going to go and protect the nominations of your incumbent MPs, so long as they meet a set of criteria that, while better than nothing, is not all that onerous. Never mind that four years ago, it was all about how open nominations were about community leaders devoted to community service, but now? Now it’s about ensuring that your MPs simply have a big enough war chest and participate in a bare minimum of door knocking over the course of a year. You’d think that with this list of requirements, ensuring that there still remains an actual nomination process wouldn’t be too difficult – after all, if the excuse is that they’re so busy in Ottawa that they can’t be also running for their old jobs, then ensuring that they’re still doing the work that would be associated with a nomination process seems like a pointless self-inflicted black eye, no?

I’m not going to re-litigate this too much, but I wrote about why protected nominations are a Bad Thing in Maclean’s last year, but it really boils down to one basic concept – accountability. The biggest reason to ensure that there are open nominations is to ensure that a riding can hold their incumbent to account without needing to vote for another party to do so. Protecting nominations removes more power from the grassroots party members and enshrines it in the leader’s office, which is exactly the opposite of what should be happening. (And yes, Trudeau has centralized a hell of a lot of power, especially after pushing through the changes to the party’s constitution). And by imposing those thresholds to ensure that the nomination is protected, it creates incentive for the incumbent MP to treat that riding association like a personal re-election machine, rather than a body that holds that MP to account at the riding level.

To be clear, this isn’t just a Liberal problem. The Conservatives also set a fairly high bar to challenge incumbent nominations, some of which we’ve seen in recent weeks, but that’s been accompanied by rumblings that some of these challenges have been stickhandled out of the leader’s office, which is even more distressing for grassroots democracy. The erosion of grassroots democracy is a very real crisis in our political system, but most people don’t understand what these changes mean, more content to chide the Liberals for broken promises about open nominations than be alarmed at what the bigger picture result is. It’s a pretty serious problem, and it’s bigger than just a broken promise.

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Roundup: On leaders, interim or “parliamentary”

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In the wake of the Patrick Brown resignation, the Ontario PC caucus gathered behind closed doors to name Vic Fedeli as their “parliamentary leader,” a term that irks me to no end. Fedeli came out and called himself “party leader” rather than “interim” or “parliamentary,” clearly signalling that he wanted this to be permanent going into the election, but within hours, the party insisted that they would indeed hold a full leadership contest to be concluded by March 31st, where the party membership would vote on a leader (and yes, Fedeli will be running while still acting as the interim/“parliamentary” leader).

The adoption of the term “parliamentary leader” is recent, and as far as I know was only first used by the NDP to give a name to what Guy Caron is doing as Jagmeet Singh’s proxy inside the Commons while Singh refuses to get his own seat, and generally avoids being in Ottawa as much as possible. Caron is left to be the de facto leader, even going so far as to make key decisions around staffing in the leader’s office in Ottawa, which would seem to make him de jure leader as well and Singh to be some kind of figurehead, wandering the land. But why it’s offensive as a concept is because it attempts to normalize this notion that the leader isn’t in the parliamentary caucus – something that is an affront to our Westminster system. The Ontario PC party using this term both affirms the use of this term, and opens up the notion of a similar arrangement where a new leader could be chosen by the membership while not having a seat, further taking us down this road to debasing our system.

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/956958255129006081

Mike Moffatt, meanwhile, has the right idea – all leaders should be considered “interim,” because they should be able to be removed at a moment’s notice by the caucus (given that the caucus should select the leader, and that the leader should live in fear of the caucus). What happens instead with electing leaders by the membership is that they feel they have a sense of “democratic legitimacy,” which they feel insulates them from accountability, and they wield their imagined authority over the caucus, meaning that it’s the caucus who has to fear the leader instead of the other way around – especially if the rules persist that the leader signs their nomination papers. That’s not the way our system was designed to function, and it’s caused great damage to our system, and it gets worse as time goes on, with each iteration trying to turn it more and more into a quasi-presidential primary. The way the Ontario PC party has had to deal with this Patrick Brown situation within the context of their bastardized rules (and fetishizing the 200,000 members signed up in their last leadership contest, the bulk of them by Brown and his team) is utterly debasing to Westminster parliaments. More than anything, the events of the past week should be an object lesson in why we should restore caucus selection, should anyone be listening.

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Roundup: Hehr out of cabinet

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In the hours that the drama around Patrick Brown was playing out, another accusation was levelled over Twitter, this time around Liberal cabinet minister Kent Hehr, which seems mostly to involve lewd suggestions he made to female staffers in private during his time as an MLA in Alberta. When news of that reached Davos, Justin Trudeau said he would follow-up and have an answer before they left the country. And just before the plane took off, we had our answer – Hehr had tendered his resignation from cabinet, and during his “leave of absence,” Kirsty Duncan would take over his responsibilities while an investigation was carried out. Hehr remains in caucus, no doubt pending the results of that investigation. Maclean’s spoke with Hehr’s accuser here.

Politically, it’s fraught for Trudeau given that both of his Calgary MPs – both of them veterans of the Alberta Liberal Party – have been taken down by allegations of sexual misconduct. And in a related story, the investigation promised into Kang’s actions has not contacted one of his accusers, however many months later, and that goes for both federal and provincial investigations.

Speaking of Brown, here’s a detailed look at how Wednesday night played out, and some further conversations with his accusers. One of Brown’s (former) deputy leaders called the incident a “hiccup,” and later had to apologize for it.

Meanwhile, Supriya Dwivedi talks about politics’ #metoo moment, and the fact that the Bro Code is breaking down, while Aaron Wherry talks about how #metoo has arrived on Parliament Hill. Chris Selley looks at the path ahead for the Ontario PC party in Brown’s demise, and it’s a messy path given the rules in the party’s constitution, with just four months to go before the election.

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Roundup: Baillie and Brown gone

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While provincial politics are not my bailiwick, we had a couple of very big developments in two different provinces yesterday. The first was that Jamie Baillie, leader of the PC party in Nova Scotia, was forced out over sexual harassment allegations that came out after an independent investigation, resigning his seat immediately. And in Ontario, graphic sexual harassment allegations were made against PC leader Patrick Brown dating back to his days as an federal MP, and Brown called an emergency press conference to deny the allegations, but was quickly met with a string of staff resignations, plus calls from his own caucus to resign (while federal leader Andrew Scheer slightly underbussed him, without actually coming out to actually say so). Around 1:30 AM, Brown offered his resignation as leader (but not as MPP).

https://twitter.com/avelshi/status/956359197330890752

https://twitter.com/btaplatt/status/956362961446232065

Part of what interests me in this is less the day of reckoning for sexual misconduct, but yes, that is happening, and perhaps now those smirking Conservatives who insist that the Liberals are the party of sexual harassers, owing to the fact that they’ve ousted theirs rather than swept it under the rug, will see that this is very much not the case. Rather, it’s the mechanisms in each party around what happened. With Nova Scotia, the party ousted the leader (who, admittedly, had already announced his intention to resign but planned to stay on until a successor was chosen; he is now out completely). In Ontario, their provincial party constitution doesn’t give them that option. And this really boils down to the way in which we have moved to a system of “democratic” elected leadership contests rather than caucus selection, where leaders can be deposed and replaced in a single vote, and have that accountability mechanism be right there, at all times.

This will, no doubt, renew calls for “formal mechanisms” in parties to depose leaders, and calls for more Michael Chong-esque “Reform Act” laws that will simply protect leaders by putting a high bar to depose them, rather than the current system, where shame and public pressure can force a resignation in a hurry once one or two caucus members go public. (In this, Paul Wells notes that politics is the “art of the possible”). None of this disguises the fact that the root cause remains the broken system of selection. We need to return to caucus selection if we want leaders who are afraid of their caucus, and not the other way around. Because we could see more of these kinds of incidents in the months to come, and the alternative is to have an endless series of interminable, expensive leadership contests where accountability remains out of reach.

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