Roundup: A vow to do away with message control

In his year-end interview with The Canadian Press, Justin Trudeau has promised an end to message control if he were to form government, and the unmuzzling of bureaucrats. It’s a bold promise, and one that we’ll have to see to believe because we have to remember where many of these directives come from, which is largely because Conservative candidates were making boneheaded statements to the media during campaigns, which sunk the party’s chances until message discipline became the order of the day. Once media could no longer jump on their every utterances, people weren’t exposed to what they were saying, and the Conservatives eventually got into power, where the discipline continued in order to keep their place. Likewise, after the 2011 election when a busload of accidental NDP MPs got elected, that party went into message lockdown in order to ensure that they didn’t have any particular bozo eruptions. If more Liberal candidates start saying things that causes the party some embarrassment – especially as We The Media can jump on said quotes and run with them rather mercilessly – then we’ll see how long they go without message control. Trudeau makes a point about the fact that you can’t be a government from a single person, and he has made a concerted effort to showcase the team around him, probably to mask any perceived weaknesses he has on the policy front (though I would say that most people underestimate his intellectual capacity). I also think that Harper’s spokesperson disputing Trudeau’s assertions and claiming that ministers are available to speak to the media is utterly precious. The last time a minister responded to my phone calls was pretty much never, and I’m not the only one who has to make do with a bland talking point from their spokesperson rather than getting an actual quote from said minister, let alone a briefing on a new piece of legislation.

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Roundup: Leave it to (yet another) Officer

Thomas Mulcair has written to the two other main party leaders about establishing a process to deal with MP-to-MP harassment, and proposes a clear definition in the Standing Orders, an independent Officer of Parliament to deal with complaints, training for MPs and staff, and to ensure that the process protects the rights of victims including to privacy. While some of this sounds reasonable on the surface, there are a few flags to my eye, some of it centred around the creation of yet another Officer, which gives the impression that this kind of thing is commonplace enough that you would need someone to deal with it full-time, rather than amending the mandate of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, for example, to deal with these kinds of issues as well. The proliferation of these Officers is actually a problem, and much like the NDP’s desire to blow up the Board of Internal Economy to create a new bureaucracy to deal with the administration of the Commons, it’s a problem that seeks to remove the self-governing powers from MPs. This is an issue that needs actual debate – if the message is that we can’t trust MPs to manage their own affairs, then what does that say about their ability to manage the country’s affairs? In a way it’s almost infantilizing them, and that should be concerning. Liberal colleagues say that they want the investigations taken care of quickly, and it was noted that there had been discussion of a harassment policy arising from a 2012 document by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and that members of all parties were to take it back to their caucuses to discuss the matter, but it hadn’t moved forward since. Paul Wells looks at these harassment allegations in the broader picture of the sad place that the capital finds itself in at the moment.

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Roundup: Distancing themselves from Duffy

After a powerful QP in the House yesterday, it was an equally exciting evening in the Senate – in particular, the Board of Internal Economy, which was opened to the public for the first time. And it was amazing. While Senate QP was focused on Senator Tkachuk, who was badgered incessantly about his decision to go easy on Senator Mike Duffy in the audit report because he had paid back his expenses (though they didn’t know at the time that it was with funds from Nigel Wright), Tkachuk nevertheless took the chair at the committee. But while there was an expectation that the Conservatives might try to defend or justify their actions, it was almost the opposite. In fact, the Conservatives on that committee, most especially Senators Claude Carignan and Elizabeth Marshall – the Whip and a former Auditor General in Newfoundland – were systematically tearing down all of the various excuses that Duffy had made previously about how it was a temporary assistant who filed improper per diem claims and so on. In fact, the whole committee meeting opened with the Senate Clerk and the financial officers describing that once they started looking at Duffy’s per diem claims, there was a systematic pattern of his claiming per diems for days when he was not in Ottawa and not on Senate business. (It should be noted that the audit didn’t pick this up because it was looking at Duffy’s residence claims, and was checking whether he was in Ottawa or PEI, but when the media began looking at the dates in the audit as compared to campaign claims and other business, this pattern emerged). In fact, the pattern that also emerged was one where Duffy was not only claiming Senate expenses when he was campaigning – which is clearly against the rules – he was also being paid by the campaigns for his appearances, which is clearly “double dipping.”

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