Tag Archives: Private Members’ Business

Roundup: Party positions and individual agency

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The weaponization of private members’ business continues unabated in Parliament, as the Conservatives put out an attack yesterday that claims that the Liberals want to “legalize” hard drugs because maverick backbencher Nathaniel Erskine-Smith tabled a private members’ bill that calls on the decriminalization of small personal amounts in order to better treat addiction as a public health issue and to not criminalize people with addictions – something that has worked in some countries. The lie, of course, is both in claiming that this was official government policy, and that it was calling for legalization – because who cares about truth or facts when there is fear to be mongered?

The bigger problem here? What it does to how private members’ business is treated in the House of Commons, and more to the point, there is a very big potential for this to blow up in Scheer’s face because of Cathay Wagantall’s sex-selective abortion bill currently on the Order Paper. And yes, let’s not be obtuse about this – the media feeds this particular weaponization, both in how they made this kind of abortion bill an Issue during the election, and how we both demand that MPs be both independent and yet castigate the leader for “losing control” when any MP shows any glimmer of independence. (And for the record, Scheer has not said anything about Wagantall’s bill, other than to have his spokesperson say that he “discouraged” such bills).

I know that everyone is going to be cute about these bills, and how if they get tabled the party “must” support the position because everything is so centrally controlled, and so on, but this is part of what poisons the system. Insisting that everyone be marching in lockstep from other parties ensures that the same insistence is made about your own party, and it removes any agency from MPs. They’re MPs, not gods damned battle droids. If we want drones to simply read speeches into the record and vote according the leader’s office, then why do we even bother with MPs? Why bother with parliament at all? The Conservatives’ release is embarrassing, and they should be ashamed of themselves for it (which of course would imply that they’re capable of shame, but I have my doubts about that one too).

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Roundup: Convention confusion

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The Conservatives announced over the weekend that their policy had convention had been postponed to November in order to give more time to their leadership contest – but then had to spend the rest of the day explaining that no, this didn’t mean that the leadership was going to be held in November, and no, they hadn’t made any final decisions on the leadership, and so on. Because it would have been great if they’d actually said that in their press release.

With this in mind, I figured I would do my best to clarify what part of the problem is here, which is that they don’t actually have leadership conventions anymore, but “leadership events” where all of the mailed in ranked ballots get counted up in a dramatic way to try and replicate the fun and excitement of a delegated convention. One might assume that they might try to kill two birds with one stone and have both events at the same time, but we’ll see if that is actually the case.

This having been said, we also need to remember that so long as we have a system where there is direct election of party leaders by their membership, and that those leadership candidates are running on policy slates as though this were an American presidential primary, it starts making party policy conventions into a bit of a farce. Why? Because so long as leaders feel empowered to move ahead with the policies that they have a “democratic legitimacy” to enact, then what does the grassroots policy preferences matters? We’ve seen this erosion across parties for years, and it will continue apace under this Conservative system just as it has with everyone else so long as we keep up this bastardized system of membership votes for leaders.

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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: Undead electoral reform concerns

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With BC’s electoral reform referendum on the horizon, and vague promises around it from the Ontario NDP as the election draws to a close, we’re apparently talking proportional representation again. Sigh. Over the weekend, Jean Chrétien made the particular case in his idiosyncratic way that the reason why it’s a bad system, and the core of his argument is that it doesn’t force people to engage with voters. Door knocking to win a riding? Democratic. Being a party wonk who gets in because they’re on a list? Not very democratic. It’s a way of looking at the practical inputs and outputs of the system that most people gloss over when they whinge about the popular vote (which, I will remind you, is a logical fallacy because general elections are not one single event, but 338 separate but simultaneous events) and how “unfair” it seems when viewed through this skewed lens.

As for this referendum in BC, it’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast with its two-stage vote – the first vote as to whether to keep First-Past-the-Post or to adopt a system of proportional representation; the second stage being to choose between three systems – mixed-member proportional with some regional weighting, dual-member proportional, and a hybridized system where urban ridings would have single-transferable-votes, and rural ones would have some kind of proportional system akin to MMP. But there are problems with all three choices – the regional weighting associated with their version of MMP exists nowhere in the world so we don’t know the outcomes; the dual-member proportional is a theoretical system dreamed up by some University of Alberta system that exists nowhere in the world and we really have no idea if or how it would actually work; and the split urban-rural system would never pass constitutional muster. If BC’s attorney general thinks that the Supreme Court would allow different voting systems based on where you lived, I suspect that he’s dreaming, and it would have to be one hell of an excuse to try and save this with Section 1 of the Charter (being that it’s a reasonable curtailing of your rights and freedoms in a free and democratic society). So, good luck with that.

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne is no fan of the two-stage referendum and would rather simply prefer a single ballot where status-quo was an option like they did in PEI. Where Coyne goes wrong is when he said this as successful in PEI – it really wasn’t. They had to go some five ballots before a PR system squeaked through by the narrowest of margins with unusually low voter turnout for a province that typically takes voting very seriously. Colby Cosh, meanwhile, quite properly lambastes the whole affair as being completely gamed, because aside from the way in which they’re dubiously counting the second ballot if one system doesn’t get a majority from the start, there are still too many unknowns in the three proposals, including whether the proportional lists would be open or closed – a very huge consideration in how PR systems work, and which goes to the heart of holding governments to account in these systems. In other words, this BC referendum is shaping up to be a boondoggle from the start, which is not good for our democracy in the slightest.

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Roundup: Not the constitutional crisis you were looking for

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After much drama and back-and-forth between the two chambers, the Senate passed the omnibus transport bill yesterday after the Commons rejected their amendments a second time. Once again, we did not get the constitutional crisis that we were promised, and we’ll get a whole new round of back-patting that the Senate did its job, because at least a few of the amendments were accepted (even though the larger problem remains that many of the ones that were rejected saw no debate, nor were reasons for rejecting them provided other than the government “respectfully disagrees,” which is not a reason).

Amidst this, the Conservative Senate leader, Senator Larry Smith, penned a response in Policy Optionsto Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative” Senator Peter Harder’s previous op-ed about the apparent use of a Salisbury Convention in the Canadian Senate (which was false). The problem there, however, is that Smith didn’t really rebut anything about the Salisbury Convention or lack thereof. Rather, he went on about how the prime minister is trying to walk back on his promise of a more independent Senate by means of their rejection of the bulk of the amendments to the transport bill, and the apparent orchestration through Harder of a policy of trying to tell senators how to vote (as in, pass bills even though we say that we don’t want you to be a rubber stamp). And while I sympathise with many of his points, I’m not convinced by his overarching thesis.

Despite the fact that many a Conservative senator keeps trying to promulgate a series of conspiracy theories, from the fact that the new Independent senators are all just crypto-Liberals that are being whipped to vote a certain way, that they are trying to “destroy the opposition” in the Senate, or in this case, that the PM is trying to undermine his own pledge for independence via Harder’s patently unhelpful suggestions. But part of the problem is that on the face of it, none of these really stack up. While we can’t deny that many of the new senators have government sympathies, I wouldn’t consider them partisans in the same sense. The issues of their block-voting has more to do with their anxieties about accidentally voting down government legislation than it is about their being whipped to vote a certain way. And frankly, the biggest reason why I sincerely doubt that Trudeau is conspiring with Harder is the fact that there has been so little competence being demonstrated by Harder and his office when it comes to management of the agenda in the Senate that it seems more than implausible that there is any kind of coordination happening, particularly since I know that there are people in Trudeau’s and Bardish Chagger’s offices who know how the Senate works, and we’re not seeing their input. And the longer that the Conservatives keep pushing these woeful conspiracies, the more they undercut their own position on maintain a level of status quo in the Senate that is probably beneficial in the longer term. But they never seem to learn this lesson, and it may cost them, and the institution, as a result.

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Roundup: Reheated economic policy

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Andrew Scheer came out with his first economic policy plank yesterday, and it was pretty much a tepid reheated policy of the Harper era that plans to be packed into a private members’ bill at some point this parliament. The idea is a “tax credit” for parental EI benefits – because Harper-era Conservatives loved nothing more than tax credits, and tax credits are the loophole in private members’ bills that let them spend money without actually spending money, because the rationale is that they’re reducing income rather than raising revenue, but if I had my druthers, I would see that loophole closed because a tax expenditure impacts the treasury just as much as an actual spending programme does. Add to that, tax credits are generally not tracked by the Department of Finance, so their ongoing impact is not reported to Parliament, nor is their effectiveness really tracked either – and yes, there is an Auditor General’s report from a couple of years ago that states this very problem with them.

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And add to that, this announcement is yet another sop to the suburban family voter that the Conservatives want to try to recapture from the Liberals. Of course, like most of the plans of the Harper era, the tax credit structure doesn’t actually help a lot of the families who need it, and the benefits tend to go towards those who make more money in the first place, which one suspects is why the Liberals’ Canada Child Benefit was seen as a more advantageous plan to that same voting demographic that Scheer wants to target. And don’t take my word for it – here’s Kevin Milligan and Jennifer Robson to walk you through why this isn’t a well though-out plan from an economic or policy standpoint.

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Roundup: Lagging CBSA oversight

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A report commissioned by PCO advises for the creation of a new oversight body for both the CBSA and the RCMP, given the amount of overlap between the two bodies when it comes to law enforcement. Currently, CBSA has no civilian oversight, though its national security functions are just now getting some oversight under the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, and those functions would likely fall under the creation of the new intelligence commissioner created in Bill C-59 – but those don’t deal with the day-to-day interactions at the borders, or with some of their other functions, like immigration detention.

What the Canadian Press story doesn’t mention is that there is right now a Senate bill sitting on the Order Paper, which passed the Senate unanimously, to create a CBSA Inspector General. In fact, it passed in October 2016, and has been sitting there ever since, as no MP has bothered to sign up to sponsor it (which is unusual in the extreme). More unusual is the fact that Ralph Goodale had previously signed up to sponsor the version of the bill that was being debated in the previous parliament, but now that he’s public safety minister, he’s become much more gun-shy, saying that they need to do more consultation and will come out with their own bill. But almost a year-and-a-half later, it’s still sitting there, when it could be amended by the government to make whatever technical fixes they deem necessary and swiftly passed. (I last wrote about this for the Law Times a year ago).

Of course, if they wanted to go that route, the government would need to give the bill a Royal Recommendation and put in implementation language into the bill – something that it currently lacks to get around the requirement that it can’t spend money. In other words, it’s a framework but nothing more at this point. But if the government were serious about oversight for CBSA, they could do something to ensure that it happens expeditiously. But that commitment to oversight seems to be a bit more academic at this point, given that they haven’t moved on this in all this time. And that should be mentioned in these more recent stories, but haven’t been.

https://twitter.com/cforcese/status/948274583865499649

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Roundup: Demands for MP parental leave

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Some MPs are looking for changes to the Parliament of Canada Act in order to better accommodate parental leaves, given that they have no provision for them, and MPs start getting salaries clawed back if they miss more than 21 sitting days. (Mind you, records of those absences aren’t made public, so we have no way of checking). And while I’m sympathetic to the notion that there is no parental leave, I find myself sighing because there is this constant need by MPs and the press to describe Parliament as a “workplace,” and try and ham-fistedly force a number of hackneyed comparisons to justify it.

No. Parliament is not a “workplace.” And MPs most certainly are not employees.

I understand that it’s a job that’s not the friendliest for new parents. And I get that there is this desire to get younger voices into parliament, and there is a need to facilitate them, which is great. But I get very, very nervous every time MPs start talking about how they want to start changing things to make the place more “family friendly,” because every time they’ve done that to date, they’ve made things worse. Eliminating evening sittings to be more “family friendly” had a devastating effect on collegiality because MPs no longer ate together three nights a week. Now they’re looking to avoid coming to Ottawa altogether, instead appearing by videoconference instead, and no doubt they’ll demand to be able to vote remotely as well. And that is a bridge too far.

When you get elected, it’s to do the job in Ottawa. Work in the riding is secondary to your role as an MP, and that role is to hold government to account. Meeting constituents, while good small-p politics, is a secondary consideration to your duties. And the added danger in appearing remotely is not only a further breakdown in what remains of collegiality, it’s that the lack of facetime with other MPs and with witnesses who appear at committees means that there is no ability to forge connections or have off-script conversations, which are the lifeblood of politics. You need to show up to do the job. Your job is to be in Ottawa to vote and be seen voting, and to attend debate and committees. You knew that when you ran for office, and you knew that when you decided to have a child while in office. Trying to do this job remotely means that soon every MP will start to demand it, until the Commons is reduced to a small cadre of people there to fulfil quorum while everyone else attends to the “very important business” in their ridings.

The other point is that these MPs are not lacking in resources when it comes to finding childcare solutions – they are very well compensated, and can afford options that most Canadians can’t. That does matter in the equation, and why my sympathy has its limits.

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Roundup: An historic apology

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As promised, Justin Trudeau delivered a long-awaited apology for those LGBT Canadians who had been persecuted and hounded out of jobs in the civil service, military and police forces as a result of government policies, and to go along with this apology will be some compensation. (The speech and video are posted here). As well, a bill was tabled that will expunge the records of anyone caught up in these processes, but as Ralph Goodale explained on Power Play, the bill requires an application as opposed to the government doing a blanket action, and won’t cover some of the other charges such as being a found-in during a bathhouse raid. That could set up for an interesting future legal challenge, for the record.

So who does this apology affect? Some examples heard yesterday include Diane Doiron, who spoke to Chatelaine about her experiences, or former sailor Simon Thwaites, who was on Power Play.

While some may dismiss the rash of apologies from the Trudeau government as “virtue signalling” or being soft, history shows that official apologies tend to come more from conservative sources than liberal ones. Aaron Wherry, meanwhile, notes that while the Conservatives did participate in yesterday’s apology, they have been making a lot of political hay of late trying to show themselves in opposition to those who would “denigrate” the history of Canada, or who constantly find fault with it rather than praising it uncritically. And yes, it is an interesting little dichotomy.

Those who say that the apology doesn’t go far enough, pointing to the ongoing blood donation ban facing gay men who have had sex in the past year (note: this is a change from the previous lifetime ban) still hasn’t been lifted as promised, the government did put in research dollars to ensure that the proper scientific evidence is there to lift it permanently. While critics say that this remains discriminatory, I remind you that previous governments had to pay dearly for the tainted blood scandals of the past, which is doubtlessly why the current government wants to ensure that all of their bases are covered and untouchable legally in the event that any future lawsuits from this change in policy ensue.

Regarding those Conservative absences during the apology:

During the apology speeches in the Commons, I and several others noted that there were a number of conspicuous Conservative absences – some 15-plus vacant desks, all clustered in the centre of their ranks, which looked pretty obvious from above (and this matters when you’ve got the galleries full of people who have come to hear the apology). I remarked on this over Twitter, and it created a firestorm, especially when I highlighted the vacant area on the seating chart. Some of these absences are legitimate – some MPs were away on committee business, and I got flack from some of them for that afterward, feeling that it was a cheap shot, and if that’s the case, then I do apologize. It wasn’t intended to be, but it was pointing out that the giant hole in their ranks was conspicuous, especially as this was not the case during QP, which immediately preceded said apology. I will also note that none of the Conservative staffers who monitor my Twitter feed (and I know that they do, because they constantly chirp at me by claiming I’m too partisan in my QP-tweeting), offered up a correction or explanation until hours later, which I would have gladly retweeted if provided one. They did not. I can only work with what I can see in front of me at the time, and if some of those MPs who were there during QP went to fill the camera shots on the front benches, that’s still a poor excuse for leaving a giant hole in the middle of their ranks that the full galleries can plainly see.

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Roundup: Economic update choices

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The fall economic update was released yesterday, and while the rapid pace of economic growth has meant more revenues and a smaller deficit, it also means that the government isn’t going to put too much more effort into getting back to balance anytime soon, keeping the focus on reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio instead (which is going down faster). Instead, finance minister Bill Morneau insisted that they would be “doubling down” on investing in the middle class, mostly by indexing the Canada Child Benefit to inflation earlier than planned, as well as enhancing the Working Income Tax Benefit (and I will note that this part of his speech seemed to be one where Morneau acknowledged that singletons existed and needed a hand up too). There was some additional programme spending in there as well (for more, the National Post outlines eight things in the update).

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While the economy is growing at an enviable pace, it could put the government and the Bank of Canada in a bind as the need to start withdrawing stimulus measures comes to the forefront, and deciding whether fiscal or monetary policy should make the first move. There is also a marked shift between last year’s update and this year’s in that the focus is moving away from longer-term goals to short-term ones (and that could be political reality setting in). Critics accuse the government of using the update to try and change the channel on the recent headlines around Bill Morneau’s assets and disclosures, while Andrew Coyne gives his signature scathing look at the choices of the deficits, and around the rapid growth in government spending.

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