Tag Archives: Peter Harder

Roundup: The whinge of the everyman

Posted on by

I had hoped that after the last round of appointments that we were done with the vapid narcissistic “everyman/woman” wannabe candidates for the Senate would finally go back into the woodwork, but no, I see that we are indulging them once more in a plaintive wail about how terribly unfair it is that deserving, qualified candidates with decades of community and specialty experience got the nod and not them. Because who wouldn’t want an expert in the field when you could get a hot dog vendor or a draftsman who will totally enrich the legislative experience by…um, well, I’m not really sure. I mean, that’s kind of why we have a House of Commons, right? So that the everyman/woman can run and get their chance to do their part and influence policy and so on? And then the Senate goes over their work to ensure that they haven’t made mistakes with the legislation and that it’s all looking good. You know, that whole sober second thought thing? Still failing to see what value a hot dog vendor is going to add to that process. But oh noes! Elites! To which I simply reply “So what?” Do you, hot dog vendor and draftsman who are complaining to the media that your application was passed over, actually know the role and function of the Senate? Because based on everything you’ve said here, I’m not seeing that indication at all.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/795439635535110148

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/795440234980839424

Meanwhile, Senator Peter Harder is coming to the defence of the new appointment system (as he obviously would, being a recipient of its beneficence already), but takes a few gratuitous swipes at the partisans still in the Senate while he’s at it. But there’s a key paragraph in there toward the bottom, where he talks about how Trudeau “voluntarily relinquished one of the traditional levers of power of his political party and of his office” when he expelled his senators from his caucus, and it rankles just a bit. Why? Because Trudeau didn’t so much give up one traditional lever of power so much as he used the show of relinquishing his lever to gain control over a bunch of other levers instead that are less obvious, from centralizing power over the MPs in his caucus with their institutional memory driven from the room, or his now using ministers to meet with individual senators to try to cut deals for support and using Harder’s own empire-building efforts to “colonize” the new independent senators with his offers of “support” and constant attempts to bigfoot the efforts of the Independent Senators Group to establish their own processes. So no, government influence has not been driven from the Senate – it’s just changed forms, and not necessarily as transparent as it was before, and yes, that does matter.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Harder’s arrogant dismissal

Posted on by

It is probably not without a certain amount of chutzpah that Senator Peter Harder went before the Senate’s modernisation committee yesterday, and not only lectured to them about what the Senate does, but offered his particular thoughts on how the institution should be reformed, and most of all, having the gall to suggest that there was nothing that could be learned from the House of Lords and their integration of crossbenchers. Harder, with his mere couple of months of experience, has taken it upon himself to declare that the Senate should comprise of the government representative (a creature which does not actually appear in convention, statute or logic) and independents who will loosely affiliate on an ad hoc basis – no government, no opposition, no parties, no partisanship.

Give. Me. A. Break.

This declared allergy to partisanship in the upper chamber has reached the point of being utterly ridiculous. Parties exist for a reason. No one is arguing that the current power structure in the Senate needs to be broken apart and for independents to be given more power and resources, but blowing up parties is not the way to go, nor is assiduously screening nominees for any past hint of partisanship because there is nothing inherently wrong with partisanship. If Harder thinks that 105 individuals can sufficiently organise themselves for debates without any kind of structure – that his office doesn’t impose anyway – is lunacy. And it does concern me that Harder is making a bit of a power grab, especially considering that his office is already poised to start offering staffing services for the incoming batch of senators, which is not only unseemly but once again looks to bigfoot the work that the Independent Senators Group has been doing to come up with a bottom-up approach to organising unaligned senators in a manner consistent with the operation of the Chamber while working to give them caucus-like powers for committee assignments and with any luck, research dollars and support. But this isn’t the first time that Harder has attempted to bigfoot this nascent group, and I think that’s a very real problem. His attitude towards the modernisation committee – and in particular his arrogant dismissal of the crossbencher model (which the Independent Senate Group has been looking toward) – is a worrying sign.

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne not only unhelpfully endorses the Segal-Kirby call for the Senate to limit its veto to a suspensive one (because hey, it’s not like we might need an option to stop a prime minister with a majority from passing really terrible legislation), but goes one step further and proposes that any bill in the Senate that has not been passed in six months is deemed to have passed, so that when they can’t procedurally speed through certain bills that get bottlenecked in committees (like any private member’s bill, many of which are objectively terrible), or when they demand more time and attention, they should just be passed anyway? Seriously? What a way to run a parliament.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The problem with sponsoring bills

Posted on by

News that the “Government Representative” in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, has been asking unaligned senators to sponsor government bills as they arrive from the Commons has me feeling a bit uneasy, and I’m trying to figure out why. This meant a trip through the Senate Procedure in Practice, and I find my concerns only slightly mollified. I will admit that the government’s plan to move a government bill in the Senate – Bill S-2, which deals with motor vehicle recalls – also has me uneasy because while it is being sponsored under Harder’s name, the fact that Harder is not a cabinet minister remains a troubling procedural issue. Government bills should be introduced by cabinet ministers, whether that minister is the Leader of the Government in the Senate or another minister in the Senate (which happens on occasion), and Harder, while sworn into the Privy Council, is not a minister. That the Conservatives did this with Claude Carignan was not a particularly good precedent to create or follow, since Carignan was essentially a minister without being in cabinet for the only reason that Stephen Harper was having a fit of pique over the ClusterDuff Affair, Carignan also having been sworn into Privy Council and being given access to PCO resources to do his job. But while Carignan was at least a part of the government’s caucus, Peter Harder explicitly is not, which is why this decision to have him sponsor government legislation is troubling. I remain of the view that as much as Harder is trying to present himself as non-partisan and independent, you cannot be independent while also representing the government because it is an inherent conflict of interest. That he is being asked to perform the functions of a cabinet minister while still proclaiming himself to be independent is risible. It is a problem that Justin Trudeau’s particular…naivety around his Senate reform project cannot simply gloss over without eroding the fundamental tenets of our Westminster system. That he wants a more independent Senate is not a bad thing, and the appointment of a critical mass of unaligned senators is a laudable goal, but you cannot expect someone who is not a minister to do the functions of a minister and still call themselves independent. As for Harder asking unaligned senators to sponsor bills, it’s not quite as outré as having Harder sponsor government bills that are initiated in the Senate, but I am still uncomfortable as this is typically something done by a member of the government’s party, given that the sponsor’s job is to defend the bill and advocate for its passage. While I don’t buy that every new appointed unaligned senator is really a crypto-Liberal, as many a Conservative senators would have you believe, the fact that Harder is the one doing the asking is still uncomfortable. It would perhaps be better if he were to call for volunteers to sponsor bills on their way from the Commons and then perform a coordinating role rather than an assigning one, if only for the sake of optics. Harder calling up unaligned senators and asking them to act as sponsors looks too much like he is playing caucus management, and if he continues to insist that it’s not the way that the chamber is operating, then perhaps he needs to be more conscious of the optics of the way he is operating.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Term limit nonsense

Posted on by

As we gear up for the Conservatives’ policy convention this weekend, one of the policy resolutions on the table is term limits for the party leader, which they propose to cap at eight years should the leader become Prime Minister. While this is an example of the grassroots showing some displeasure at Stephen Harper and his stranglehold over the party for well over a decade, it’s a terrible bit of Americana that people keep trying to import into our system as though it were a panacea to problems that exist here. They’re entirely wrong, however, but they keep trying. Over in the National Post, John Pepall argues that term limits are fundamentally undemocratic because they prevent people from having the choice of electing a popular leader for as long as they like, but while he has a point, I would stress that term limits in a Canadian context are a complete lack of understanding of our system of Responsible Government, which rests on the principle of confidence. After all, term limits are largely unnecessary because our system can dump a prime minister at any point by means of a vote of no confidence – something that can’t happen in the American system, as they don’t have a system based on confidence, but rather on defined terms, with the relief valve of recall elections in some cases. Otherwise, they are forced to wait out a term until the next election, while in a Westminster system, it can happen with a snap vote in the Commons. Of course, we do have the problem in this country particularly around being able to dump a leader who is not the PM because we have moved away from the caucus selecting the leader, to systems of either delegated conventions, one-member-one-vote, or the latest Liberal abomination, the “supporter category.” Caucus selection kept leaders accountable to them, and it kept them in check, whereas they accumulated more presidential powers as the base that elected them grew larger and they felt more empowered by their “democratic mandate.” While leaders can still lose membership reviews by party members (witness Thomas Mulcair), a caucus can still pressure a leader to resign these days by simply making their dissatisfaction public. In most cases, like with Alison Redford, all it takes is a couple of MPs/MLAs with enough of a spine to go public, and the leader sees the writing on the wall. In cases where the leader digs in their heels – as with Greg Selinger in Manitoba – it can become the death knell for that particular government, as we witnessed in that province’s election just weeks ago. But all of these upsets were accomplished without term limits, and respecting the principles of Responsible Government. Trying to graft on Americana will just turn our system into some kind of monstrous chimera that won’t actually be able to function – hell, the changes we’ve made to leadership selection processes so far have already damaged and warped our system and need to be undone. But if Conservative Party members want to actually respect our system of government, they’ll vote down this cockamamie policy proposal with extreme prejudice, and hopefully we won’t have to speak of this again.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Process matters during reform

Posted on by

The Senate is the centre of so much talk these days – government bills on their way that are likely to face amendments, blame for the trans bill dying there last parliament (despite the fact that the committees were overloaded with the government’s “tough on crime” bills and there was no way to prioritise private members’ legislation), the ongoing fascination with Mike Duffy’s return to work, and of course the ongoing internal reform project. Another snag in said reforms was unveiled yesterday in that it turns out that the Senate’s committee on Ethics and Conflicts of Interests for Senators can’t actually be legally constituted because under the Rules of the Senate, there need to be government senators on the committee. Well, there are technically no longer any government senators, and thus, they can’t be recommended to said committee. It’s a reminder of why process matters when it comes to doing reforms, because boldly forging ahead without a plan, and without the necessary rule changes in place means this happens. And yes, rule changes need to happen on a variety of issues, not the least of which are the ways in which it spells out who can constitute a caucus – necessary for independents to be able to organise themselves around logistical issues. As for Peter Harder, the Internal Economy committee has decided not to grant his additional budget requests for staff. He got half of his initial ask, but that was enough as far as they are concerned, and I can’t say that I’m unsympathetic to the committee because I still can’t fathom why Harder needed all of that staff considering that he has no caucus to manage. His excuse that it’s what his predecessor had in terms of budget and staffing seems to me to be a clearly bureaucratic reflex from his previous career in the civil service – ensuring that you have budgets that get spent and lest they be cut, and he wants to ensure that he gets that same budget as before, even though, as I said, there’s no reason why he needs so many people.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Making up titles

Posted on by

Senator Peter Harder made it official yesterday – the announcement of a Deputy Leader and Whip – err, sorry, “deputy government representative” and “government liaison” as he wants them styled, and it erupted in a bit of a fight in the Chamber that he can’t just make up names for people because the Parliament of Canada Act doesn’t work that way. I also have concerns with the job descriptions that Harder has given them (and these were provided to me from a Senator).

For his deputy, Senator Bellemare:

Assists the Government’s Representative to process the legislation coming from the House of Commons (government, private members’ bills and government bills in the Senate) in a transparent, impartial, constructive and non-partisan manner;

In the context of an evolving modernized Senate, assists the Government’s Representative so that all bills (including bills coming from Senators) receive a fair and non-partisan treatment;

Assists the Government’s representative to provide Canadians with a clear understanding of the treatment by the Senate of the bills coming from the House of Commons;

Assist the Government’s Representative in the Chamber, to make sure that due process is provided to Government legislation and all other bills and businesses,

Follow the legislative work of Committees,

Assist Committees to provide more substantive reports on their specific study of bills,

Assist informally Senators with rules and procedures.

And for his whip – err, “liaison,” Senator Mitchell:

It is the role of the Government’s Representative group in the Senate to facilitate the passing of government legislation and to contribute to the effective functioning of the Senate in a non-partisan and open way. The Government Liaison position will be responsible for administrative and management roles and for liaison with all Senators. Specific responsibilities will include:

-Working with the caucuses’ Whips and with independent Senators to help organize the business of the Senate, including, for example, the coordination of Senate Committee placements;

-Supporting sponsors of bills by ensuring that they receive the required input, briefings, and material from Ministers and government officials to present bills effectively;

-Assisting sponsors of bills to identify and deal with the issues and concerns raised by Senators in the debate and review of legislation.

The Government Liaison will exercise these responsibilities in a collaborative and non-partisan fashion.

The problem with these descriptions is that they are largely comprised of buzzwords. Throwing around terms like “due process” and “non-partisan” is hard to square with the fact that these are government representatives, and government is inherently partisan. While I can grudgingly agree that having a Deputy makes some sense out of pure logistics, the “liaison” role is largely nonsense. The existence of the Independent Working Group means that there was no need to have a Whip to organise committee assignments for non-aligned senators, and senators are grown-ups and should be able to arrange getting materials from Ministers and government officials. They have phones and emails, and assistants who can make arrangements. And “assisting sponsors of bills to identify and deal with issues and concerns,” which purported will including helping senators draft amendments? Again, they’re grown ups who can do their own jobs and talk to the Law Clerk if they need to. Aside from bigfooting the Independent Working Group – and making this move without consulting them – what is most striking is that Harder made this move for largely the sake of optics – he wanted both a Conservative and a Liberal by his side to make a big show of being bi-partisan, even though the role he gave Mitchell is ludicrous, and heaven forbid that Harder just have Bellemare by his side, because that would give the impression that he is really a Liberal, and he couldn’t have that. So instead Harder is making things worse for everyone with this particular move, angering both the Conservatives and the Senate Liberals, while still acting outside of the Parliament of Canada Act and the Senate Rules. It’s undermines his credibility, the work of the independents at pushing for meaningful reform, and is going to make getting anything accomplished in the Senate difficult for the foreseeable future.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Peter Harder’s ham-handed problems

Posted on by

First it was the curious announcement from long-time Liberal Senator (and one-time leader of the provincial Liberal party) Grant Mitchell was stepping away from the senate caucus to sit as an independent. For someone as nakedly partisan as Mitchell, it was a curious move that raised a number of questions for me. Then, later in the evening, news came down that Peter Harder, the “government representative” in the Senate, will be naming a deputy and a whip, and that whip was to be Mitchell. (The deputy was named as Diane Bellemare, who was a Conservative senator who quit that caucus a couple of months ago and became a founding member of the Independent Working Group). In amidst a number of smartass remarks going around the Twitter Machine about how an independent whip was supposed to work, I will offer again the reminder that in the Senate, the job of the whip is more about logistics and administration with things like assigning offices and parking spaces, and with organizing committee assignments and seeing that absences are filled on committees than it is about telling senators how to vote. Likewise, deputy leaders in the Senate are much more equivalent to House Leaders in the Commons, where they help determine scheduling of debates on bills and so on. But given that Justin Trudeau was looking to shake up the way the Senate operates, thus far it has mostly been about rebranding the office of Government Leader in the Senate under a new name and maintaining the “not a minister in name only” fiction that Harper employed when he wanted to put distance between himself and the Senate. Add to that the odd insistence that Peter Harder sit as an independent while taking on this role, which is problematic at best. But if his job is just to represent the government, and to shepherd legislation through the Chamber, then why does Harder need a second person to do the House Leader-equivalent work, or a whip for the independents – particularly when the Independent Working Group has been working on developing a system of administrative representation for those unaligned senators. It smacks to me that Harder, whether with the blessing of Trudeau or not, is trying to impose a top-down organisation for unaligned senators in the chamber rather than letting the bottom-up process that the Working Group is engaged in run its course. While I’m not indulging the conspiracy theories that this is all a crypto-Liberal charade playing out, I do think that Harder is overstepping here by a great degree. Sure, it looks greatly symbolic that he got a Conservative and a Liberal with him to do these tasks, but it does look like he’s trying to impose something on the new independent senators that currently goes against what the Senate rules allow (being of course a caucus organisation that is not tied to an existing federal political party). As with Harder trying to get an inexplicably big staff for the job he says he plans to do (as opposed to the old job of Government Leader), this new move is problematic. It could very well be that Harder doesn’t know what he’s really doing and how the Senate operates, which was always the going to be a problem when Trudeau insisted that his “representative” would come from the first batch of independent appointments. But these ham-handed moves are making that problem all the more glaring. This is an increasingly obvious example of Trudeau not thinking through his Senate plans and ballsing it up as he goes along because he doesn’t understand the institution either, and that is a problem.

Continue reading →

Roundup: No appetite for back pay

Posted on by

With parliament resuming this week, all attention is on whether or not Senator Mike Duffy will resume his duties. After all, there have been a few signs of activity in his office, with computers being updated and such, but there remains a question as to whether his health will allow it, but we’ll see. As for the question as to whether he will be getting any back pay for his time suspended without it, well, senior senators are not so keen. In fact, the phrase “no appetite” is continually used, and they are quick to point to the fact that the Senate’s internal discipline – which the suspension was part of – was based on the Deloitte audits and not criminal findings of guilt or innocence, thus his acquittal by the courts makes it largely an irrelevant issue as far as they’re concerned. I would also add that should Duffy decide to press the issue, well, there are a few well-placed senators who around this issue who are known to leak things to the media, and who will undoubtedly start doing so about any other skeletons in Duffy’s closet that they are aware of. Meanwhile, there remain questions back in PEI about whether Duffy remains qualified to represent the province, as there is still a level of distrust that he is actually a resident (and given that it sounds like he spent the bulk of his time on suspension in Ottawa, well, that doesn’t help matters much). Meanwhile, some Conservative senators are grousing a little bit that Senator Peter Harder isn’t really providing much in the way of answers during regular Senate QP (as opposed to ministerial versions thereof). I think they’re being a bit unfair, considering that he’s been on the job only a couple of weeks and hasn’t yet staffed up his office, nor really had a chance to get proper briefings from the Privy Council Office (because yes, he has been sworn into the Privy Council to take on this job, making him a quasi-minister) on the files that he is likely to be asked about, or had much in the way of a briefing binder prepared, but it does put him on notice that they do expect him to step up his game in the role of “government representative,” particularly when it comes to being the conduit for holding the government to account. These are things that are important, especially as there are no opposition voices in the Commons from Atlantic Canada or the GTA, making the Senate’s role in asking those questions all the more important.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The exoneration of Mike Duffy

Posted on by

It was rather a stunning result, where Senator Mike Duffy was acquitted of all 31 charges against him for fraud, breach of trust and bribery. The judge ruled that he found Duffy to be a credible witness, and said largely ruled that Duffy followed what few rules there were in place at the time, a fact that many would contest – there were rules that Duffy indeed skirted, but not to the degree of criminality, according to the judge. In fact, it goes against the very ruling of former Justice Ian Binnie in his arbitration report, who noted that there were rules and there was also common sense in determining the eligibility of expenses, and while he didn’t rule on criminality, it does contradict some of the judge’s reasoning in the Duffy verdict. That the judge singled out the PMO for scathing words is of very little comfort, particularly because of his belief that they somehow overrode Duffy’s free will in “forcing” him to accept that $90,000 cheque. Duffy is now free to return to work in the Senate, but he may not find it a very welcoming place, given his direct culpability to the hits on the institution’s credibility. That, and there will be eyes on his spending at all times, particularly by those senators who knew that there were rules in place – despite what Bayne and eventually the judge felt – and those rules have only become more stringent since. More from Köhler, Harper and Reevely, while Reevely had a few other thoughts over Twitter that also bear repeating.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Freeing up some spots

Posted on by

The Senate bat-signal is calling me once more, and there’s plenty to discuss, starting with the fact that the Conservatives and Liberals have come to a decision about making space on the committees for “non-aligned” senators to get seats – likely two on each committee. It’s a tacit acknowledgment of the changes happening, and starts living up to a bit more fairness for the growing number of independent senators, but it’s not everything that it’s cracked up to be in part because this was a move made without consulting the Independent Working Group, which is organizing on behalf of seven of those independents (and may grow to include more as the new ones start getting their bearings). There were also 18 vacancies on committees, which this does fill. So it’s a good and welcome change, but there do seem to be a few questions around the process by which this happened.

As for Senator Harder’s budget request, I’m still having a hard time buying it. As he explained, he’s looking to hire a chief of staff (I’m dubious why), a senior policy advisor (okay), a director of communications (sure), three legislative assistants (three sounds like an awful lot), a director of parliamentary affairs (again, a bit dubious), plus an executive assistant and an assistant (I’m not sure why he needs both). It’s not like he has a caucus to manage, even if he is liaising with all parties in the Senate. He went on Power & Politics to insist that this is just like the previous Government Leaders got – but he’s not the Government Leader. They explicitly made this whole distinction so that it was going to be different. He’s not a cabinet minister, so I’m not sure why he needs the same staff as a cabinet minister would. His file management is minimal in comparison, and he has not caucus to manage, legislative agenda of his own to carry out. He’s sheperding the government’s agenda, and possibly answering questions on their behalf in Senate QP, maybe (which we’re not entirely sure about yet, and even then, he still wouldn’t need that much staff for that task). I remain dubious in the face of the task at hand, and the government’s insistence that they’re doing things differently, rather than just putting a new label on the position and being too-cute-by-half about it.

Continue reading →