Roundup: Applause, heckles, and a questionable accusation

Stephen Harper made his speech before the Knesset yesterday, and largely accused the “Stop Israel Apartheid” movement as being a new breed of more sophisticated anti-Semites. So there’s that. Ahmed Tibi, an Arab-Israeli MK and leader of the Arab Movement for Change party, heckled Harper’s speech and walked out, because he took exception to Harper’s characterisation of Israel as a democracy – considering that most of the Palestinians are disenfranchised – and that he feels that it is an apartheid state, contrary to Harper’s assertion. Michael Petrou live-blogged the speech – complete with drinking game – and made some quite apt observations about the reality of the situation in the region along the way. Petrou also dissected Tibi’s heckling criticism of Harper’s speech, and notes where Tibi gets things right and wrong. Meanwhile, Harper did announce an additional $66 million in aid for the Palestinian authority. And CBC has a full list of the delegation that Harper brought with him, while Liz Thompson finds that a large number of them are also Conservative donors.

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Roundup: Trudeau’s mistakes and the sanctimonious reaction

Justin Trudeau admitted that a couple of errors were made in relation to travel claims that should have been charged to the Speaker’s Bureau he belongs to rather than his MP expenses, dating back to 2009 and 2010. He said that it was human error, repaid them by personal cheque, and said that had there been better disclosure rules – like his party has put into place – this would have been caught sooner. And then the partisan spin happened. The NDP tried to somehow wedge this into a kind of Nigel Wright scenario, which makes no sense whatsoever. There were also sanctimonious cries about how he swore he never used his MP expenses for his outside work – and it seems pretty clear that it was a mistake, where the claims were bundled incorrectly, but now we apparently can’t take his word for anything – gods help us if any of his denouncers have ever made a mistake before. Liberal partisans, meanwhile, note that the NDP are the most opaque about their own expenses, for what it’s worth. And for everyone who cries that it should be an MP’s job to speak publicly, I would ask where exactly in an MP’s job description is being a motivational speaker? It’s not. An MP’s job is to hold the government to account and to scrutinise the public accounts, though you’d be hard pressed to find an MP who actually does that these days – I can think of a mere handful. Trying to claim that their job is something else is one more reason why the state of parliament has become so abysmal.

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Roundup: Useless, misleading ads

Remember those Economic Action Plan™ ads touting the new Canada Jobs Grant programme that doesn’t actually exist yet? Well, as it turns out, only five percent of respondents bothered to actually go to the website to find out about them, and a mere two percent call the 800-number. But the best part is that Advertising Standards Canada also got involved to smack the government on the wrists for misleading advertising, saying that the programmes existed when they haven’t been implemented yet. $2.5 million well spent, apparently. Meanwhile, PostMedia obtained some of the aborted branding strategies that the government was considering using to attract international investment, many of which suggested that the country is just a work in progress.

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Roundup: Skills mismatch or lack of data?

Despite the government’s talk about the “skills mismatch” that is affecting our jobs sector, there is no actual evidence to support this, says TD Economics. And a big part of the problem is that we don’t actually have good data to track these kinds of things, apparently, nor are we tracking underemployment figures either. It also doesn’t appear that there is a real demand for jobs in the resource extraction sector despite the government’s promises of yet more jobs there – but hey, without the data, they can claim whatever they like. Meanwhile, medical specialists not being able to find jobs upon graduation is another problem being recognised and hopes to be corrected with more data on the part of the Canadian Medical Association as they try to steer students to sectors facing more of a crunch in the near future.

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Roundup: Preston Manning’s misdirected concerns

In a frankly bizarre op-ed, Preston Manning tries to accuse the Press Gallery for lacking proper ethics because the Parliamentary Press Gallery guidelines don’t have a section on ethical guidelines in their handbook – err, except that each member is subject to their own employer’s code of ethics. Also, the Press Gallery is not a monolith, but simply a means of organising ourselves in order to have proper access to do our jobs on the Hill. That Manning tries to somehow equate this to the Senate scandals and Mike Duffy’s role therein lacks any cohesive logic and makes one wonder how this passed the comment editor’s gaze at the Globe and Mail. Does he think that the Gallery could have somehow stopped him before he was appointed? That his constant lobbying for a Senate seat should have been dealt with – as though anyone took it seriously and not as a kind of sad and frankly pathetic long-running joke? Susan Delacourt gives Manning a respectful reply and cautions him that what he’s demanding of the media will mean more access by the government – something the current government is not a big fan of.

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QP: Gerstein down the memory hole

It was caucus day, and the Liberals and Conservatives met their new MPs elected in Monday’s by-elections, not that any of them will be sworn in for a couple more weeks. Outside the Chamber, the NDP continued to froth about comments that Justin Trudeau made around hope and fear. When QP got started, Thomas Mulcair asked about the written agreement in the Duffy documents about the Prime Minister publicly declaring his fitness to be a PEI senator. Harper assured him that while some MPs and senators have a secondary residence, it was inappropriate to make some expense claims on some of them. Mulcair wondered if that inclusion in the deal was a coincidence, but Harper said that those who are appointed to the Senate are expected to live up to their expectations and Duffy did not. Mulcair wondered if this declaration was part of the “good to go,” and Harper said that residency was not the issue. Mulcair pressed about what the approval was supposed to be about, but Harper insisted that the documents are clear that it was understood that Duffy would pay his own expenses. Justin Trudeau was up next for the Liberals, and asked about Senator Gerstein’s interference in the Deloitte audit, and once again asked why Gerstein enjoyed Harper’s confidence. Harper avoided the question, and insisted that this was only about Wright and Duffy. Trudeau pressed on the issue, but Harper just repeated his non-answer.

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QP: In the shadow of Rob Ford

With Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s admission that he smoked crack cocaine crowding out the news cycle, and the upcoming votes on suspensions in the Senate keeping the anticipation there, it was likely that a bombshell of epic proportions could be dropped in the Commons and it wouldn’t make the news. It didn’t happen, but it quite possibly could have. Thomas Mulcair led off QP with a bit of a soliloquy, and brought up the meme of week about how he “couldn’t care less” instead of showing contrition. Harper got up and waxed as poetically as is possible for him, talking about the honour of public service and that he wanted sanction for those senators who broke the rules. Mulcair brought up that these were Harper’s appointments, but Harper continued to insist that they wanted rule-breaking senators to face the consequences. Mulcair turned to the letter the RCMP wrote to Duffy’s lawyer that was asking for documents, to which Harper asserted that the letter was to Duffy’s lawyer and that they have been cooperating with the RCMP. Mulcair wanted all documents related to the ClusterDuff affair tabled in the House, but Harper assured him that he had no role in the affair. Justin Trudeau was up for the Liberals, and asked if Senator Gerstein mentioned Wright’s scheme to repay Duffy between February and May. Harper asserted that he had no idea, and Trudeau pounced, wondering why Gerstein still had his position if he was involved. Harper asserted that the actions in question were those of Wright and Duffy, and then reached for the cudgel of the Liberal senators supposedly “blocking” the sanctions.

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Roundup: Special rules to punish Justin Trudeau

Because they are never short of such ideas, the NDP held yet another press conference yesterday to announced new proposals to make Parliament “more accountable.” What that really was code for was “let’s try to punish some Liberals, and in particular, Justin Trudeau.” You see, of their three proposals, the main one was to ban MPs and Senators from “double-dipping by banning payment for work that is part of their job as an MP or Senator.” Which is news to me because nowhere in any legal or constitutional text does it say that it’s part of a Parliamentarian’s job to be a motivational speaker. In fact, that’s the reason why certain MPs and Senators sign up to speaker’s bureaux – in order to do these kinds of gigs without having to expend their parliamentary resources on it, and because they’re not talking about matters that are related to their parliamentary duties, but usually their careers before they were in public life (Marc Garneau’s astronaut career, or Larry Smith’s football commissioner career for example), it makes sense not to treat it as part of their duties. Oh, but Justin Trudeau was able to make a successful living at this and still accepted speaking gigs after he got elected, therefore it must be awful and should be banned. Never mind that he almost always made money for the organisations that he was invited to speak at (with that one notable exception, where it was a case of organisational failure), or that the Conflict of Interest and Ethics commissioner cleared these gigs – this is strictly a case of cheap punitive politics. There can be cases made for the other two suggestions – banning parliamentarians from being on corporate boards (but family businesses are okay), and strengthening the powers of the aforementioned Commissioner – but they are less about scandals than perception. Parliamentarians have any corporate board work cleared by an ethics regime, and sure it could be strengthened, but there has yet to be a demonstrated case of any kind of influence peddling, and one suspects it’s simply a case of “corporations bad!” at work. And as for strengthening the role of the Commissioner, well, it seems to me that it’s the NDP who are in charge of the Commons Ethics committee and this has yet to make it onto the agenda when the review of her legislation is a year overdue. Perhaps if they made an effort to actually focus on that rather than play partisan silly buggers and constantly demanding investigations into the wrongdoing of individual MPs, then perhaps they might make progress on such a change.

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Roundup: Charlie Angus’ distraction and vilification

At a press conference in Ottawa Friday morning, NDP MP Charlie Angus declared that he doesn’t think that the Auditor General should look at MPs’ expenses because the Senate is evil and stuff. No, really. If that wasn’t a more clear-cut case of distraction (and vilification), I’m not sure what is. The AG put out a statement outlining a few things about his forthcoming Senate audit – basically, it’s like any other audit, so stop asking him about it. Academics are hoping that this new scrutiny will sweep away the “old boys’ network” in the Senate, never mind that it’s been on its way out slowly for the past number of years as increasingly rigorous new rules have been put into place. Have similar rules been put into place on the Commons side? Well, we don’t know, because they’re not transparent, while the Senate is – not that you’ll hear Charlie Angus or Thomas Mulcair admit that. Meanwhile, it seems that Pamela Wallin was whinging about “media bullying” when they made Freedom of Information requests to Guelph University about her billing them for flights for her duties as chancellor, because you know, she’s the victim in all of this. The CBC looks at what’s next for Wallin, and also provides a fact sheet on Senators’ pay, and the key players in the expenses scandals. Meanwhile a group of psychologists – and Andrew Coyne – say that the Senate itself breeds a sense of entitlement, which doesn’t seem to explain why the problems are confined to a small minority, or why MPs and cabinet ministers fall into the very same kinds of entitled behaviours (if not even worse, because they’re the people’s chosen representatives, and a strategic genius to boot, and are therefore even more entitled).

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Roundup: Economic Action duds

Survey data shows that the Economic Action Plan™ ads are getting little traction with the public. In fact, of a sample size of 2003 Canadians, only three of them actually visited the website. And yet, the government was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to show these ads during the hockey play-offs – which totally seems like an efficient use of tax dollars, and an important way of getting messages across to the public. Shall we also go back to the tautology about them being necessary to show consumer confidence?

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