Tag Archives: Peter MacKay

Roundup: Encana and illogical anger

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The big news yesterday was that oil and gas company Encana decided to decamp their headquarters and head to the US under a new name to try and attract more investors there, and Jason Kenney and his ministers freaked out. They railed that this was Trudeau’s fault – despite Encana’s CEO saying otherwise, and despite the fact that there are to be no job losses in Alberta or loss of existing investments – and Kenney upped his demands on Trudeau (including the ludicrous demand that Trudeau fire Catherine McKenna as environment minister). And while the Trudeau blaming gets increasingly shrill and incoherent, there are a few things to remember – that Encana’s stock price has hewed pretty closely to the price of oil, that it lost more value under Harper than it did Trudeau, and that even bank analysts are mystified by the move. Perhaps Kenney’s blame is misplaced – imagine that.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1189992947615289345

There have also been a number of voices making the absurd comparison that governments are quick to help companies like Bombardier and SNC-Lavalin but won’t offer it to oil companies – which ignores that the Harper government also helped those same kinds of companies, while Trudeau bought a pipeline in order to de-risk it and ensure that it gets completed, not to mention that other companies usually asking for loan guarantees and aren’t reliant on oil or commodity prices. There is a lot of false comparison going on in order to nurse this sense of grievance, because that’s what this is really all about.

Meanwhile, here is some additional context on the economic situation in Alberta and Saskatchewan that we shouldn’t overlook as part of this conversation.

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Roundup: Performative or procedurally correct?

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The NDP held their first post-election caucus meeting yesterday, saying goodbye to departing MPs and welcoming their rookies and returning MPs, and when they met the press afterward, Jagmeet Singh announced that he is going to press for pharmacare and for the government to abandon their application for judicial review the Human Rights Tribunal compensation for First Nations youth. But there are problems with both – on the former, he is proposing the party’s first private members’ bill be taken up with the matter, and on the latter, the substantive problems with the Tribunal likely exceeding its statutory authority to make that kind of compensation order is kind of a big deal and as a lawyer, you would think he might have an appreciation for bad jurisprudence while still pushing for the government to go ahead with the compensation that they said they would honour. But you know, performative outrage.

Which brings me back to the notion of pharmacare legislation. The whole promise is built on both bad practice and bad procedure. Remember that when it comes to private members’ bills, they are allocated by lottery, meaning that it’s random as to who gets what slot, and Singh is not proposing as leader to take away the slot of the first NDP MP whose name comes up so that he can dictate what bill will be presented. That’s not only heavy-handed, but it actively removes the independence of that MP (which the NDP is used to doing while pretending they don’t, but let’s call a spade a spade). So much for any of the issues that MP cares about – the leader demanded their spot. The second and more important aspect is that private members’ bills can’t initiate government spending, and pharmacare is provincial jurisdiction, meaning that it’s depending on negotiating with premiers. The bill, essentially, is out of order, unless it becomes an exercise in demanding a national strategy, which the NDP love to do, but one of their MPs went on TV last night to say that they intend to use it to lay out the framework they want to implement. I can pretty much guarantee you that it means the bill will be dead on arrival, and that the committee that decides on what private members’ business is voteable will decide that it’s not. (The sponsor who was forced to give up their spot for this bill will then demand that the Commons vote to override the committee, and when they don’t, the NDP will wail and gnash their teeth that the Liberals don’t care about Pharmacare, which is a script so predictable it might as well be a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie).

What the NDP could do instead is use their first Supply Day to debate a motion on Pharmacare, which would then have a vote and let them scream and moan if the Liberals don’t adopt it for the reason that they’ve already committed to the implementation plan in the Hopkins report (which the NDP decry as not being fast enough), but at least that would be procedurally sound. But their apologists have been telling me on Twitter that all private members’ bills are theatre and only exist to make a point (untrue), or that they could simply get a minister to agree to it in order to spend the funds (never going to happen), but hey, it’s a minority parliament so the NDP can pretend to dictate terms as though they actually had bargaining given the seat maths. It’s too bad that they can’t be both performative and procedurally correct.

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Roundup: Pre-negotiation and a better debate

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In advance of the debate, Justin Trudeau held a photo-op with one of his sons in a pumpkin patch in nearby Manotick, while Jagmeet Singh was at a bistro near Parliament Hill to outline his party’s priorities were they in need of negotiating in a hung parliament, and conveniently, they were all planks of his party platform. Of those six enumerated, four were wholly or in part provincial jurisdiction, one involves building an entirely new tax system, and the final would drive out competition in the mobile phone sector, and then they also decided that electoral reform should be in there as well. (Look for my column on this coming later today). So there’s that. Andrew Scheer had no events, but his party did say that their full platform will be released today, now that the debates are over.

And then the final French debate, which was a far cry better than the hot, hot mess that was the English debate. Possibly learning from the experience, the format changed up considerably, so that there were better questions, more direct engagement, and far less cross-talk (though that did start to creep in during the second hour, when Scheer was trying to go after Yves-François Blanchet). Scheer and May were noticeably weaker in French, while Scheer and Singh in particular kept up their focus on getting their canned one-liners delivered, even if it was tortured to get them in. Nevertheless, while we once again didn’t learn too many new things, it was a far and above better performance for all involved than the English disaster. (Here’s Paul Wells’ take on the night).

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Roundup: Quality over quantity

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Every time I see a piece that presents the shockingly low numbers of women in politics in our country, I tense up a little. Not because the numbers are terrible – because let’s face it, they are – but because almost always, these tend to be quantitative lists trying to talk about a qualitative problem. Lo and behold, we have yet another of these in the Ottawa Citizen this morning, but there are a few figures in there that need to be unpacked a little more.

The one that really bothers me and deserves to be contextualized is the one percent change between number of women in this parliament and the previous one, and this is where the quantitative/qualitative aspect really comes into play. First of all, the House of Commons is larger in the current parliament by 30 MPs. This means that a one percent gain in a larger Commons means more women on an absolute numbers basis, and that matters. The other, more important fact, however, is the quality of the female MPs we elected this time around. In 2011, let’s face it – much of the increase came from the number of NDP MPs who were accidentally elected following the “Orange Wave” – candidates who hadn’t been properly nominated, had never been to their ridings, never campaigned in them, and were just names on a list that the party put there in order to ensure that they could max out their spending limits. When a wave of sentimentality overcame the Quebec electorate, they got elected. Much was made of the number of young women that were elected, but qualitatively, most of them were underwhelming MPs, whose only real skillset was in reading the scripts that were put in front of them and throwing tantrums in the media when they needed some attention. Most of them, fortunately, didn’t get elected again. That said, for the 2015 election, the Liberals put into place a system to seek out and encourage more women to seek the nomination and to support them in winning it. Qualitatively, you got better MPs who were not just names on lists, who proved they could fight and win both a nomination race and an election by doing the work of door-knocking and being engaged, and more of them wound up in the Commons. It’s a qualitative improvement that can grow further in the next election.

This is why suggestions about changing our electoral system to incorporate lists in order to get more women and minorities into the Commons frustrates me, because there is an implicit message that women and visible minority candidates can’t fight and win elections on an equal basis. I think that’s wrong, and targets the wrong problem because it ignores the complexities and realities of our nomination system and ways that it needs to be improved – such as how the Liberals started doing – and how that changes the game on the ground. The problems in our system when it comes to getting women elected are cultural, not mechanical. Simply changing the electoral system to artificially inflate the numbers of women won’t solve the underlying problems, but merely mask them. We should remember that every time these quantitative lists are released.

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Roundup: An imaginary crisis

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The summer hearings of the electoral reform committee have ended, and now they move to cross-country hearings before they begin their deliberations. The optimistic among them think they can achieve consensus. The remarkably optimistic insist that it’s going to be some form of proportional representation. And the Conservatives say that any consensus would be contingent upon a referendum, while some Liberals say that if they can get consensus there would be no need for one. So, with any luck, that means it’ll all go down in flames. That said, there was still more eye-rolling testimony yesterday that should be commented upon.

There’s this existential drama going on where a Liberal MP on the committee noted that they’re not in a crisis situation, so is this the best time to have the debate, and Elizabeth May, true to form, prompts a witness to say that we should change the system now before there’s a crisis. But what crisis are we talking about?

This I can’t figure out. We’ve had 149 years post-Confederation of free and fair elections, and reasonably good governance, and do I keep needing to remind everyone that the system isn’t broken? Because it’s not. And people who tend to talk “crisis” have been the ones from whom that crisis is that the party they favour didn’t win. “Oh, but Stephen Harper!” the exclaim. To which I remind them that he wasn’t a Bond villain. Yes, he bent the rules of Parliament to their breaking point, but that had absolutely nothing to do with our electoral system and everything to do with all of the other tinkering that we’ve done to our system in the name of making things “more democratic,” like changing the way we select leaders. Harper had a “democratic mandate” from his party members, the cachet of having united the party, and an immense amount of goodwill among the party members for that. But he was also unchallenged by his own party members for his going too far and his excesses because the party members let him, in large part because of civic illiteracy on their part in not knowing they had agency enough to push back, and their accountability measures having been weakened by successive generations of ways in which people tinkered with the system. This whole electoral reform exercise is just tinkering with the system on a more massive scale, and I have zero confidence that things will end up better because (to quote Colby Cosh), it’s a contrived moral panic over a solution in search of a problem. There is no crisis. There will not be a crisis, and it will certainly not be over the perceived legitimacy of a so-called “false majority” (which doesn’t exist because it’s a sore loser term to try to make a Thing out of a logical fallacy). The crisis is one of civic literacy – not the electoral system. Attempts to cast it as such are disingenuous in the extreme.

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Roundup: Corrosive myths about mandates

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It’s official – Theresa May is now the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom thanks to being selected by her party caucus, and thanks to her rival dropping out (after a spectacular media implosion) and she was left with no rival to take to the party membership. (See her first speech here). But that has already started the general nonsense about her being “unelected” or not having a “mandate,” all of which is complete and utter nonsense, as though anyone making those claims doesn’t understand how the Westminster system works – and yes, I’m looking at you, CBC, who used the term in your reporting on her being appointed by the Queen yesterday to the job.

One of the most incomprehensible piece on the subject so far was published in the Guardian, written by Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats, who seems to be utterly mystified with the way that governments are formed in our shared system of government, or the fact that we don’t elect prime ministers. (He also advocated a bunch of proportional representation nonsense, which didn’t help his arguments any either). Now, while it’s likely that the whole piece was simply his attempt at trolling for the government to call a general election (somehow bypassing the Fixed Term Parliaments Act as though it were no big deal), hoping to reverse their devastating losses from the previous election while running on a pro-Remain ticket, it’s nevertheless shocking just how civically illiterate the leader of a major political party is in print.

There was a great rebuttal to Farron’s nonsense by Robert Hazell, which offers some clarity on the way that Westminster parliaments work, but he makes the very salient point that all of this talk about needing a democratic mandate “has a corrosive effect on public understanding of our parliamentary system, and on legitimacy and trust in government.” And he’s absolutely right, which is why I am especially outraged that media outlets like the CBC are repeating this bilge rather than reporting on our shared system of government as it exists and how it’s supposed to work. Civic literacy should not be a high bar to clear when it comes to reporting on politics, and yet here we are.

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Roundup: Skirting the Charter

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It was a late-night sitting in the Senate to deal with more amendments to the assisted dying bill, and in the end, amendments that would include advanced directives in the bill were defeated. Part of the debate was that more time was needed to study the issue, and the mover of the amendments, Senator Cowan, made the very trenchant point that while the bill mandates the government to study the issue within 180 days of passage, there is no guarantee that they will do anything with it other than issue a report that will gather dust, because as we’ve been exploring lately, MPs tend to be rather spineless and because this is a tough “moral” issue, they will refuse to discuss it until forced to by the courts. Again. Meanwhile, a background paper on the bill was released by the justice minister that stated that they didn’t need to strictly follow the Supreme Court’s Carter decision because they were trying to articulate new principles about trying not to normalise suicide among the elderly and disabled. It seems to me that this is the very same logic that the previous government employed in their crafting new prostitution laws, which went around the very issues that the Supreme Court dealt with (the safety of sex workers) and tried to craft legislation that was inherently denunciating rather than which tried to put in place a better regime. That has yet to be challenged in the courts, but it is coming. In this particular case, it does seem like an attempt by the government to try and circumvent clear direction by the Supreme Court on how they have interpreted the Charter in this instance, as Carissima Mathen points out below, it’s not like they can simply say “new law!” and pretend that the existing Charter jurisprudence doesn’t exist, because it clearly does. Is this the way that this government purports to deal with the constitutional dialogue with the courts and push back against them? Maybe. But it also seems like they are flirting with a bill that is unconstitutional to try and keep themselves from pissing off too many interest groups, be they religious or the disabled community, despite the fact that there seems to be clear interest from Canadians that they want this kind of law in place (and in particular, advanced directives if you believe what senators say they are getting in terms of the feedback from Canadians). Of course, they could very well find themselves “forced” by the Senate to provide enough political cover (which I still think is a very distinct possibility), but I am getting the sense that we are now seeing the “campaign from the left, govern from the right” sensibilities starting to emerge in this current Liberal government.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/742528101364551680

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/742531190243135488

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Roundup: Process questions and straw men

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Because it was making the rounds yet again on the Sunday morning politics shows, I figured I should reiterate a few points, plus make a couple of new ones, concerning the new Senate appointments, and the role of the new “government representative.” The first point is that yes, the Senate is going to have to change a few of its rules, and that is a process that has already started and probably won’t be concluded for a few more weeks or months. That we have a name and a face to go with this new role may accelerate the process rather than it being nebulous with Dominic LeBlanc and Maryam Monsef just shrugging and declaring that they were confident that the Senate could work it out. With Peter Harder now in the picture, with an idea about how he wants to tackle his role, there is something a little more concrete in terms of how he wants to shape the new rules to suit his purposes. His budget as “government representative” as opposed to Leader of the Government in the Senate is also up for some debate, particularly within the Internal Economy Committee, just as they are going to have to take up what to do with the new “Independent working-group” and how they want to organise and style themselves so as to give a voice to the independent senators who are currently being frozen out of decision-making processes. (This goes as well for the Rules Committee, which has already been undertaking the question of how to better allow independent senators onto committees, as that process is mostly done behind closed doors by the caucus whips). Harder’s decision to remain officially an independent while taking on this role does complicate things, but nothing is so difficult that it cannot be solved with a little more diligence, and hopefully it won’t be too impeded by some of the more partisan senators on either side of the aisle whose feelings have been bruised by the talk of independence being an improvement on the way the Senate operates. The final point is this constant concern trolling that somehow the budget won’t get passed, or that the government won’t be able to get its agenda through if nobody is there to crack the whip. It’s a lot of specious reasoning predicated on a number of straw men, ignorant of history and civic literacy. Apparently every time the governing party in the Senate was in the minority there was some kind of constitutional crisis, which is false, and no, budgets were not held up or defeated. The Senate is very reluctant to stop any bill because they are aware of their democratic legitimacy (and yes, they do have it by virtue of Responsible Government so don’t even go there), and when they have defeated legislation, it is generally for good reason, such as constitutionality, the legislation being out of bounds, or the fact that the country was not on side with it, and it needed to be put to a test (such as with free trade in the 1980s). They have a job to do. I’m particularly galled at those concerned that the Senate is going to suddenly be empowered to use their constitutional veto powers if they are more independent and less beholden to the government of the day, never mind that the Senate has not abused its veto in decades. They were given those powers for a reason, and yes, sometimes elected legislators get things wrong and there needs to be a mechanism to stop their legislation. But this pearl-clutching about the new state of affairs really needs to stop.

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Roundup: Looking beyond mediocrity

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It’s Manning Networking Conference time again, and with a leadership contest in the offing, you can bet that some possible leadership hopefuls are starting to lay out a few markers (even if Nigel Wright wants them to focus more on policy). Jason Kenney is again “contemplating” a run after apparently recovering from burnout after the election (and it does bear noting that he’s only just started showing up to QP again). Peter MacKay thinks that the Conservatives can beat Trudeau of they’re smart about it, while others like Michael Chong and Diane Watts think the party needs to do better on issues like the environment. But all eyes, of course, were on Kevin O’Leary, who said a few outrageous things as he is wont to – that he wants a national referendum on pipelines, that he thinks it should be the law that a prime minister has to have run a business before they can lead the country, or that he thinks the party system is becoming doomed in the wake of a mass populist movement where people wants politicians to solve their problems regardless of political brand or label. Of the many things he did say, one that I thought merited a little more attention was his calling out the Conservatives for having become a party of mediocrity, and I do think that’s true, as it built itself around the personal brand of Stephen Harper post merger. Despite the NDP using phrases like “Bay Street buddies” in their references to the Conservatives over the past decade, there was really very little of that kind of branding to the party. It wasn’t about wealth (despite their policies actually benefitting the wealthy) or aspiration, or even markets once you really broke it down, but rather about this attempt to appeal to the suburban nuclear family in all of its messaging and the way it built programmes (but again, while they appeared to be for these suburban masses, the benefits disproportionately went to the top). Harper himself cultivated the image of being some minivan driving hockey dad, despite the fact that he was both a career politician, and it soon became clear that his kids weren’t much into hockey either (though his son was apparently quite the volleyball player, for what it’s worth). For O’Leary, whose brand is about greed being good, and a certain conspicuousness to his wealth, it’s pretty much anathema to the suburban image that Harper was crafting, and that his ministers followed suit in embodying. The closest they got to any Bay Street types was Joe Oliver, but he again was less about materialism or consumerism than he was about parroting approved Harper talking points. It is interesting that this is something that O’Leary has picked up on and would certainly be pushing back on should he decide to go ahead and pursue a leadership bid, because that would certainly be a radical shake-up for the party.

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Roundup: “Elected” senatorial whinging

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One of Alberta’s “senators in waiting” is grumbling about the current Senate appointment process, believing that the people of Alberta “have spoken” when they chose his name from a list to one day fill a Senate seat for that province. The problem, of course, is that the Supreme Court declared that whole process – which was a bit of a farce from its very inception – unconstitutional. If one wants Senate elections, they need a constitutional amendment with the seven-provinces-representing-fifty-percent-of-the-population amending formula. And don’t give me the “but it’s a non-binding election” line either, as Justice Cromwell very rightly pushed back during the Senate Reference hearings, “why not hold a consultative auction then? Is that any less valid?” The thing with the excuse for Senate elections as they have existed in this country so far is that they don’t actually provide any form of accountability is because they are for a non-renewable term. With an election, the re-election is where the accountability comes in. Anyone can get elected, no matter how terrible – we’ve seen untold number of examples of this in the past, and with the process that Alberta put into place, most of their Senate “elections” were just names on a ballot – most of the time, there was little advertising, there were no televised debates, and generally only one party participated as the Liberals boycotted the process and the NDP had no interest seeing as they want the Senate abolished anyway. At least when you have MPs who more or less accidentally get elected, you can judge them the next time around to see whether they did a good job or not (and we got a taste of this with the demise of many of those NDP MPs who got elected in the “Orange Wave” in 2011). Complicating the process in the Alberta conception of Senate “consultative elections” was the notion that they were based on provincial party nominations which don’t necessarily correspond to the federal parties that Senators caucus in (or at least used to until a couple of years ago), and what would one’s platform be anyway? It’s pretty hard to make legislative promises as a Senator, and promising transparency in spending is a sideshow compared to the actual legislative duties that they are expected to perform. And if memory serves, none of the “elected” Senators that Harper appointed have put forward any bills in the Senate either. One of them is also now concern trolling about the new “independent” senators as not being accountable to a party caucus, which makes one wonder why the big fuss about electing a Senator if one simply expects them to follow party lines despite the fact that the place was created with institutional independence for the very sake of pushing back against the government. Nevertheless, the Conservatives’ democratic reform critic has decried the new Senate appointments process as an “insult to Alberta” (erm, what part of unconstitutional don’t you understand?) and now we get these demands that the results of this sham election be considered regardless of the process or the Supreme Court’s judgment. The Senate was not designed to simply create 105 new backbenchers for the Commons. It would be nice if people stopped insisting as though that were the case, which is precisely what these “elections” have given us.

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