Tag Archives: Public Service

Roundup: Smart, engaged, and too free for comfort

Posted on by

It’s not the first piece that raises these questions, and I’m sure it won’t be the last, but I am starting to become a bit weary of the constant think-pieces that considers it a terrible woe that Justin Trudeau is putting smart and accomplished people in the Senate without the yoke of party discipline to constrain them. And lo, Chris Waddell’s over on iPolitics raises many of these same questions, worried about the lack of a democratic mandate (hint: It’s something called Responsible Government) and being fuzzy on the way the Senate actually operates.

Do Canadians want a more activist Senate composed of people who, while accomplished, have no democratic mandate to act? Do we want to see anyone who was not elected to office regularly rejecting or amending legislation passed by elected representatives? If so, on what basis should they do that? Their personal opinions? The views of others? If so, whose views?

In short, a) the democratic mandate comes from the constitution and our system of Responsible Government, where the government that holds the confidence of the Chamber can make such appointments and be responsible for making them; b) This fear that the Senate will suddenly start rejecting bills is nonsense. They’re aware of their role and the fact that they’re not elected, and they tend to exercise their powers with a little too much restraint if you ask me; c) They should do so on the basis of the constitution and whether it’s bad legislation. And yes, elected representatives do pass bad bills where Senators actually read them and find out that hey, it’s a bad bill and needs to be either amended, delayed, or outright stopped; d) Why does a party whip make the Senate rejecting or amending bills any more legitimate than if they do so on the basis of their lifetime of expertise in a given field or based on concerns that aren’t related to whether it’ll get them elected the next time around? Because seriously, that’s part of what “sober” in “sober second thought” means – having a more critical eye that isn’t just about trying to appease the public for short-term electoral gain when there could be bigger things at stake.

Senators don’t just review legislation. They can introduce bills as well — but without a party infrastructure to push such bills through the Senate and then get the attention of the Commons, how many of those bills will be debated in the House, let alone passed?

Yes, they can introduce bills, but they tend to introduce very few, and even fewer of them get very far because they are at the bottom of the list of the Senate’s priorities. And they can get into the Commons by the very same process they do right now – an MP sponsors it, and it goes through on the Order of Precedence. Party infrastructure has nothing to do with it (though the Conservatives did try some shenanigans by all signing up to sponsor Liberal Senate bills in the hopes of delaying and killing them, only to attach their names to bills that were never going anywhere and could backfire on said MPs in that it looked like they were putting their names behind things like stopping the seal hunt, which is political poison). Senate bills are considered Private Members’ Business. This isn’t rocket science.

Once appointed, senators can self-identify the issues they want to pursue in office. Simply by doing that, they make travel costs and expenses incurred in pursuit of those issues Senate business — expenses they can claim, in other words. But those issues are never earmarked by elected officials — so what makes them important enough to be paid for by taxpayers?

Despite the attention paid to Senators’ expenses of late, I’m not overly moved by this line of concern. Without electoral constituencies to concern themselves with, Senators adopt causes, and those causes usually wind up being reflected in committee studies, bills, and reports. And as we’ve found, from both Justice Binnie’s report and the Duffy trial, there are questions raised when Senators start claiming anything as “Senate business,” and yes, there is much more transparency now than there was before, and more rules and reporting yet to come.

Perhaps the fact that we lack answers to these questions of substance is the reason why the Trudeau government has passed just one bill through the Commons for Senate consideration in the five months since it was elected — legislation tabled last December giving it the authority to spend money.

Nope. Nope, nope, nope. This is utterly specious. The government has only passed one bill because they’ve only introduced seven thus far, and are taking them one at a time. That bill was spending estimates, and it had to go through, and lo, the Senate found that the Commons ballsed it up by sending an incomplete bill to them, missing the actual spending schedules. You know, doing their job of oversight when MPs couldn’t be bothered as they passed it at all stages in the span of a few minutes. So if anything, it’s a sign that the Senate is necessary and doing their jobs. Can we please stop this insistence that the only way we want smart and engaged people to have a hand in the parliamentary process is if it’s under the whip? The Senate isn’t a confidence chamber. The pundit class should know these basic facts.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Revolving door alarmism

Posted on by

Oh noes! Civil servants take positions in ministers’ offices! How terribly partisan of them! Yes, it’s time for another head-shaking column from some of our more alarmist media friends, bemoaning sweetheart deals and revolving doors, but as usual, it lacks all pretence of nuance or much in the way of a reality check on the way things work. I find it mystifying that someone would rather have a twenty-something fresh out of university, whose only real qualification is loyalty to the PMO, filling those ministerial office positions rather than professionals with years of experience in the department. Because while yes, some civil servants went to work in ministers’ offices in the Conservative years, there were a lot of these twenty-somethings on power trips, trying to play power games with departmental officials, which one presumes that people who have civil service careers would be less likely to do. And yes, they get good salaries in those positions, but they’re also a) quite ephemeral given the nature of party politics, and b) enormously stressful jobs that have some people working eighteen-hour days, and they should be compensated for it. And the “revolving door” back to the civil service afterward? Again one asks why they shouldn’t be able to translate government experience into the civil service, particularly if they’ve gained some policy expertise? So long as they perform their duties in a neutral fashion once back in the civil service, I’m not seeing why this is a problem. We need good people doing public service in this country, and we have already set up so many barriers that make recruitment a real challenge for anyone not being bridged in from school, and the growing list of restrictions makes work in ministerial offices increasingly unattractive because their post-political opportunities have become increasingly limited. If we’re not careful, all of our political staffers will be twenty-somethings trying to get experience rather than established people of substance, and I’m not sure that’s a situation that anyone relishes.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Mulcair losing steam and support

Posted on by

The wheels are starting to come off Thomas Mulcair’s continued leadership of the NDP, as more and more voices are starting to come out to question the direction of the party under his leadership – not that many of them will say that directly, but the implication is certainly there, considering that the whole point of Mulcair’s leadership was in large part for them to occupy more of the centre of the spectrum in their haste in believing that the Liberals were a spent force whose days were numbered. And it’s more than just the fringe socialist wing of the party that’s calling for his head. Yesterday, some thirty-seven NDP members from Quebec, including three former MPs, published an open letter calling for the party to renew itself, and one of those MPs was one of Mulcair’s biggest boosters during the leadership. Most damning was when he went on Power & Politics yesterday to say, and I quote, “I haven’t really heard a compelling reason for him to stay on.” During a press conference, Niki Ashton was asked repeatedly whether she supported Mulcair’s leadership, and she evaded every time, insisting instead on talking about the “team” rather than the individual. Given how much importance that the NDP place on solidarity and showing a united front, and how they treat any kind of public dissent as being unseemly (and sometimes even subject to punishment), Ashton’s silence was actually quite deafening. These new calls from the grassroots that the open letter was showcasing is showing the cracks in Mulcair’s mea culpa, and in the outreach efforts he’s made so far. The message is that he’s still not listening, and that could cost him. And on top of the questions we already had about his continued leadership – in no small part whether he can still be part of the generational change taking place in this country’s political ranks – it seems like the party also has to ask itself if they can really ask Mulcair to be a leopard who can change its spots. They brought Mulcair into the party for a reason, and gave him the leadership for a reason, and those reasons are no longer reflected on the political landscape, particularly if the Liberals keep outflanking them. People ask who are in the wings, and despite Nathan Cullen’s grand protests that he doesn’t want the job, I’m pretty sure he does, and I’m sure there are a few people who are still interested, even if they didn’t win their seats in the last election. Leadership hopefuls will emerge – that’s not the question. The question is whether the party’s grassroots will decide to give Mulcair one more chance, or if they’ve decided that he’s run out of chances.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The big visit

Posted on by

With Trudeau now in Washington DC, we are being bombarded by What It All Means. And thus, the arrival was full of firsts, and we are being told to expect an announcement regarding the expansion of the border pre-clearance programme, however privacy concerns remain. John Kerry says there’s no urgent need for a new Canada-US pipeline as we already have some 300 already, while our new ambassador says that the Keystone XL issue “sucked all of the oxygen” out of the relationship between the two countries, while progress is coming on some “less sexy” files. And here’s a look at the State Dinner menu, which features both Canadian and American spring flavours. Trudeau is also expected to announce that he will host a “Three Amigos” summit with the American and Mexican presidents in June, something Stephen Harper was supposed to do and then didn’t.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The slow trickle out of caucus

Posted on by

Two more Conservative senators have left the fold to sit as independents, which is showing some of the strain on the caucus in that chamber. Senators Michel Rivard and Diane Bellemare both opted to leave the caucus, but we’ll see if they’re the last ones to do so, particularly as the Senate becomes more used to more independence on all fronts. In Rivard’s case, it was in part because of growing frustrations that were particularly felt after the last election where those senators were shunted aside, and not allowed to participate – Harper’s preferred tactic to dealing with the expenses scandals that largely happened under his watch with people that he appointed. For some of these senators, who were long-time members of the party and organizers, that sidelining hurt (and yes, there are still bruised feelings on the Liberal side of the Senate after they were kicked out of national caucus). As for Bellemare, she was already charting an independent course before the last election, and she was one of the senators who rebelled and broke ranks over those labour bills, and she carried on a very principled opposition from within her own party’s ranks, even as PMO leaned on the Senate to pass them (and when they didn’t pass C-377 the first time around and that caucus nearly revolted after then-Senate Leader Marjory LeBreton threatened and cajoled them, she subsequently resigned). As part of her resignation from caucus, Bellemare said she is looking to explore the creation of a quasi-third party in the Senate, a way for the independent senators to pool resources and one imagines give themselves leverage for things like more committee assignments and the like. The Senate is already looking at ways to reform their committee assignment processes, and the growing numbers of independent senators will likely make the work all the more urgent – particularly once the new appointees start rolling in. And while I’m not yet ready to declare the demise of parties within the Senate, it is starting to look like the Conservatives may have to make some changes in the way their Senate caucus operates lest they start losing yet more members.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Coming up with a new organizational model

Posted on by

There’s the Senate bat-signal, and there are a couple of articles out there about how the Senate organizes itself that need to be discussed. Global has an exclusive piece about how the Senate agreed to change its organisational funding model in light of their new post-government caucus reality, but *gasp!* it’s all closed-door negotiations about your taxpayer dollars! Oh, I’m sorry, did I yawn there? Senate caucus funding used to be allocated along government and opposition lines, but with there being no governing party in the Senate any longer, Senate Liberals were at risk of losing their operational funding, and yes, this is an issue because it costs money to run things and the Senate is an integral part of our democratic system. The compromise that they came up with, allocating funds on a proportional basis of seats, is actually pretty novel. Yes, it’s more money than they got before, but remember that the Senate Liberals can no longer draw from the caucus resources of their Commons counterparts either, particularly for things like research dollars, so not giving them some kind of additional resources would be punishing them again for Trudeau’s unilateral decision to kick them out of caucus. Let’s not forget that democracy costs money, and one of the most egregious forms of cheap outrage journalism is pretending that a parliamentary body can be run for pennies when it absolutely cannot, particularly if we want them to do the heavy lifting of parliament, as they are increasingly doing. Meanwhile, there is some consternation that the government won’t be appointing a whip when they appoint their “government representative” in lieu of a Leader of the Government in the Senate, but mostly because there has been a defined role in terms of the government whip for doing some of those organisational tasks like allocating offices and parking spaces, not to mention organising committee assignments when there are only so many spaces to go around and lots of senators want on some committees and fewer on others. After all, the whip’s job is more than just telling people how to vote – that role has been far less prevalent in the Senate, and well before Trudeau’s edict, Liberal Senators were not being given instruction by their Commons counterparts and exercised a great deal of independence. (As for the Conservatives, we saw in the Duffy trial that Nigel Wright was trying to encourage Harper to exercise levers of power that didn’t actually exist within the Senate, to the institution’s detriment, and while many Conservative senators don’t see anything wrong with the way they’ve been doing things, well, they haven’t known any differently and that’s part of the problem). Of course, with no government caucus, there is less of a need for that role, but what I suspect is going to end up happening is that the Senate’s internal bureaucracy is going to wind up taking on more responsibilities to deal with this lack of the traditional structures and growing number of independent senators. Again, there are organisational duties that need to be performed, and it would behove the institution to figure out who’s going to do them.

Continue reading →

Roundup: No Fridays off

Posted on by

It’s not the first time I’ve written on this topic, and it certainly won’t be the last. Yesterday’s column by David Akin about making MPs continue to work on Fridays has me itching to reiterate a few points, even if some of Akin’s writing style makes me cringe a little. (Seriously, PROC is an “obscure but important” committee? Really?) Akin makes good points in that we are already seeing a greater diversity in people running and getting elected, and more women running and getting elected than ever before, and that people who put their name on the ballot know that the job entails actually being in Ottawa five days a week for roughly half the year. And really, that’s one of the points that makes me a bit crazy when we keep circling back to these discussions about making parliament “family friendly.” Parliament is not just another workplace, and you can’t apply the same standards to it that you would with any other job. We all know that a great deal of sacrifice is involved with the job, which is why we compensate MPs fairly well for it (though one could quite easily argue that they are underpaid, though populist sentiment means that argument will never win the day). Even more crazy making were MPs on Procedure and House Affairs committee saying things like “It’s special being here,” while trying to figure out how to vote from their riding or telecommute to the job in Ottawa, never mind that the job involves being in Ottawa because it relies on building personal relationships. No, it’s not “special” to be in Ottawa – it’s the job you signed on for. Being present to vote is what you signed on for. If you didn’t want to be in Ottawa but still serve the public, you could have run for local city council, but no, you wanted to play a federal role. That means being in Ottawa. It doesn’t mean being here year-round, and clearly it’s not given the growing number of constituency weeks, but constituency work is not what your job is. Your job is to hold the government to account, which means being present, debating, reading the Estimates and the Public Accounts, doing committee work, grilling ministers and department staff, and engaging with stakeholders as part of that job. All of that is done here. Sure, helping people with passport forms is all well and good, but it’s not actually your job. In fact, the growing MP role as civil service ombudsman is a distressing turn of events, because it starts to subtly politicise the system, but it also takes away from the accountability role. We are already in a crisis of civic literacy in this country. Having MPs justify the fact that they don’t feel the need to be in Ottawa to do their jobs, and to wrap that justification up in the flag of being family-friendly is a problem. Yes, it’s tough, and marriages break up with too much frequency, but the system already bends over backwards to accommodate spouses and families. The reality remains, however, that this is not a job that you can do from home, and candidates needs to go into it with their eyes open rather than making excuses to shirk their duties once they get here.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Doing the policy heavy lifting

Posted on by

If you were to turn to the Big Book of Canadian Political Journalism Clichés, you’d find pages of tiresome and frankly libellous descriptions of the Senate of Canada. And oh, look – The Canadian Press drew from a number of them to craft the lead of their latest piece: “Canada’s Senate, often accused of being an anachronism, is being asked to wrestle with the futuristic dream of driverless cars.” Of course, the accusations of being an anachronism often come from clueless political journalists who recite the received wisdom around the Upper Chamber with little or no critical insight or understanding of Chamber, its actual role, or its operations, and they treat it like a joke, which makes ledes like this commonplace. “Isn’t it hilarious that the Senate is supposed to look at future technology? Aren’t they all ancient, napping in the Chamber? LOL,” and so on. And then this line a little further down in the piece: “His request for a Senate study is part of the Trudeau government’s attempt to recast the much-maligned upper house as an independent and valued institution that has an important parliamentary role to play.” Um, no, it doesn’t need to be recast as having an important role to play because they’ve always had it. The Senate has been doing the kinds of cutting-edge policy study and research that the Commons can’t or won’t for decades. Just in the last parliament alone, they studied things like BitCoin and crypto-currencies, and they have been debating legislation on growing issues like genetic privacy that the Commons continues to shirk while they snipe at one another over partisan issues. But hey, when asked to do a comprehensive study on the regulatory, policy and technical issues that need to be addressed by the growing field of driverless cars, hey, it’s all a big joke because it’s the Senate. That kind of tiresome attitude is part of why the studies and reports that come out of the Senate – which in many ways acts like a built-in think tank for Parliament (and a hugely cost-effective one at that) – tend to go under the radar. Some reports get a couple of days of press, such as the very good report on the Canada-US price differential (which the previous government then largely ignored when they went to craft legislation to close that gap – an issue now moot thanks to our falling dollar), but for the most part, the media will ignore the studies. It’s really a shame because there is a lot of good work in there that is worth a lot more discussion and attention, lest it gather dust on a shelf. But why actually turn to those studies when we can make jokes about the Senate, malign its denizens thanks to the actions of a couple of bad apples, and ignore the actual work while grumbling that they aren’t elected? It’s too bad that We The Media can’t take these things more seriously, as we would all be better off as an informed citizenry as a result.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Mister Speaker is a meanie

Posted on by

While astute readers will know that I have my issues with the way that Speaker Regan is attempting to crack down on heckling in the Commons, one thing I will not countenance is the kind of whinging that the opposition – and in particular the Conservatives – are engaged in as a result. Yes, the Speaker does call them out more, because *gasp* they heckle more! Science! But what gets the Conservatives most are the ways in which Regan will sometimes editorialise in his interventions, whether it’s his admonition to keep the Chamber from sounding like a 1950 boys’ club, or in reminding two front-bench Conservatives that Question Period is not the Muppet Show. It is a different tone from the Speaker than we’ve seen in the last several parliaments, and Regan is adopting a more forceful tone when it comes to trying to put an end to heckling. I may disagree with how he’s doing it, and in particular his sanctimonious tone, but his naming actual MPs who are heckling is part of the process of trying to turn the tables so that they are being held to account for their behaviour. It’s a legitimate tactic, but to complain that he’s picking on the Conservatives is a bit rich. Yes, the Liberals were boisterous when they were in opposition, and nobody is saying that’s a bad thing, but even when in government, the Conservatives tended to be boorish hecklers, and their behaviour in opposition is not much improved. If they had instructive cross-talk or clever retorts, then yeah, it might not be so bad, but most of the time, it’s not clever. I will also add that this is part of the problem with the issue of heckling in the Commons – everyone agrees that it’s a problem, everyone insists that they don’t do it, even when they do, and it’s always someone else who’s worse and needs to be dealt with instead of them, because they’re always the victim in this. None of it is true, but MPs like to tell themselves that it is. It’s also a problem in that making the Speaker crack down on it is more about trying to treat symptoms than it is the actual cause of why they’re doing it in the first place, but that would mean more broad changes to the rules and the way that things run, and there seems to be even more resistance to that. Until MPs can have a grown-up conversation about the issue of heckling, we’re likely to get more whinging on all sides of the issue rather than actual progress.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Making adjustments on the fly

Posted on by

Lots of developments in the Senate, so let’s get to it, shall we? Kady O’Malley looks into the ways that the Senate is going through the process of reshaping itself to fit the new reality that they find themselves in, and so far they’ve been doing it in a fair-minded way, tempering some the partisan excesses of the previous parliament while they start adjusting their rules around things like Question Period in the new scheme they’ve developed. I’m still a little hesitant, considering that they’re losing some of the pacing and ability to make exchanges that made Senate QP such a refreshing change from Commons QP, but we’ll see once they start working out the kinks. Meanwhile, the Senate is trying to adapt its Conflict of Interest committee to a reality where there are no “government” senators, and more debate about how to include the growing number of independent senators into that structure. We’ll see how the debate unfolds in the next week, but this is something they are cognisant about needing to tackle, just as they are with how to better accommodate independent MPs with committee selection as a whole. Also, the Senate Speaker has ruled that the lack of a Leader of the Government in the Senate does not constitute a prima facia breach of privilege, convinced by the argument that the lack of a government leader doesn’t affect the Senate’s core ability to review and amend legislation, and that the primary role of the chamber isn’t to hold government to account. I would probably argue that it may not be the primary role, but it is a role nevertheless, but perhaps I’m not qualified enough to say whether that still constitutes an actual breach of privilege, as opposed to just making the whole exercise damned inconvenient and leading to a great number of unintended consequences as they venture into this brave new world of unencumbered independence. At this stage, however, things are all still up in the air, and nothing has really crashed down yet, but it’s a bit yet. By the time that Parliament rises for the summer, we’ll see if all of those broken eggs wound up making a cake, or if we just wind up with a mess.

Continue reading →