Tag Archives: Rona Ambrose

Roundup: The call is coming from inside the caucus room

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The hits just keep coming for Andrew Scheer, as one of his MPs came out vocally against his leadership yesterday. In the wake of the fairly low-key announcement of his Shadow Cabinet, it was quickly noticed that Ed Fast was not on said list, and Fast himself said that he was asked to be part of it and he declined, saying that Scheer should be surrounded by people loyal to his leadership, while Fast has concerns about it. Up until this moment, Scheer’s loyalists were dismissing those vocally and publicly calling for Scheer to step down as being Toronto elites and sore losers that go back to leadership rivals. Fast’s public denouncement puts a lie to this narrative.

Let’s face it – public dissent in caucus is rare because we have virtually eliminated all of the incentives for it. Our bastardized leadership selection process has leaders claiming a “democratic legitimacy” that they use to intimidate MPs into not challenging them, because it goes against the “will of the grassroots” (and to hell with that MP’s voters, apparently). We gave party leaders the power to sign off on nomination forms with the purest of intentions and it quickly got perverted into a tool of blackmail and iron-fisted discipline. Pretty much the only time MPs will speak out is if they have nothing to lose, and Fast is in that position – he could retire tomorrow and be all the better for it. And it’s when the dissent goes public that leaders really need to worry because that means that it’s happening by those inside the caucus room who aren’t saying anything out loud. Provincially, we’ve seen instances of it taking only one or two MLAs coming out publicly for leaders to see the writing on the wall and resign. The caucus may be bigger in Ottawa, but the sentiment is increasingly out in the open – that can’t be sustainable.

Scheer later went to the annual UCP convention in Calgary, where he was predictably given a fairly warm welcome– but he shouldn’t rest on this applause because he doesn’t need to win Alberta – he already has their votes, and they’re not enough to carry the country, no matter how much they increase their vote share. He needs seats in Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada, and he is having a hard time cracking those areas, in particular because of his social conservatism and the UCP convention isn’t going to be the place to go to get honest feedback about that problem. It’s a bubble, and a trap that becomes too easy to feel that there is nothing wrong if he stays in it too long.

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Roundup: Holding up a mythical threat

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The first day of the new Cabinet, and Justin Trudeau, along with Chrystia Freeland and Jim Carr, had their first meeting as a group with Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi, who held up the now-former Bill C-69 as the source of much of the anger in Alberta, and his demands that it be changed. The problem here – and Nenshi acknowledged – is that the pre-existing system that Stephen Harper’s government put into place in 2012 did not work, and Nenshi could list projects being held up by it, which is all the more reason why his strident condemnation of the new assessment system is all the more baffling. Part of the problem here is that the bill – along with the now-former C-48 – have been used as scapegoats for the frustrated economic ambitions of the province. Never mind that C-48 was largely symbolic – there is no pipeline project that would head for the northwest coast of BC, nor is there going to be, and no, Northern Gateway is not going to make a comeback because the obstacles identified by the Federal Court of Appeal were almost certainly insurmountable. And C-69 is in no way a “no more pipelines” law.

I talked to a lot of environmental lawyers on both sides while C-69 was being debated, and the biggest source of unease on the proponent side was the uncertainty as to whether the legislated timelines would have the problem of issues stopping the clock – thus dragging out those timelines – much of which was alleviated when the draft regulations were released. Again, the talk about the carbon budget in the bill was clarified in the regulations, which also alleviated many of their concerns (and caused some on the environmental side ulcers). So while the government is now talking about tweaks to the regulations, that seems more than entirely appropriate for the reality of the situation, and their refusal to scrap the law is entirely rational and just.

The problem becomes fighting the narrative that has been created around this law, and the fact that it has grown into a mythological terror is what they will have to grapple with – and compounding this is the fact that this government has proven itself time and again to be utterly incompetent at communications. For as much as Catherine McKenna did some good work when she was the minister, she kept repeating the tired slogan of “the environment and the economy go together” and other nonsense talking points (and then insisting that she spoke like a regular person), which did nothing to counter the lies being promulgated by Jason Kenney, Andrew Scheer, and others, about what was actually in the legislation. And you can’t fight lies with canned talking points. I wish this government – and the communications geniuses in the PMO most especially – would get that through their heads, which is why trying to placate the anger when it’s being directed at the mythology and not the reality of this legislation is going to be an uphill battle.

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Roundup: From a bad bill to a useless one

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Rona Ambrose’s judicial training bill looks like it may have some life left in it, as Independent Senator Pierre Dalphond himself a former judge, has started making deals and compromises to see the bill go ahead in an amended form. Working both with the bill’s Senate sponsor and one of its critics, Dalphond has come up with an amended version of the bill which should address most of its critics, and apparently got a procedural deal passed in the Senate as a whole, which gave instruction for the legal and constitutional affairs committee to hold a special session next week to deal with the bill, outside of the normal process where it would be dealing with government business (which is the whole reason the bill hasn’t gone anywhere – the committee is loaded with government bills, which Senate rules state needs to take precedence).

The amendments would ensure that a judicial appointee must commit to sexual assault law training as designed by the Canadian Judicial Council, and administered by the National Judicial Institute – moves that address many of the concerns around judicial independence (which likely would have rendered the bill unconstitutional), and would have created conflicts of interest where the bill as it stands would demand that future judges need to be trained by sexual assault survivors groups – the same groups that would normally be called upon to be expert witnesses in trials. This help to address other concerns about the bill, such as access for lawyers who aren’t in urban centres, or that requiring training before application would tip off coworkers to those lawyers that they were applying for a position on the bench. I remain curious what other objections the Canadian Judicial Council still has about the bill, but I guess we’ll find out next week when they will likely appear at the committee.

This all having been said, we need to remember that the Canadian Judicial Council has been seized with this issue for a few years now and has been ensuring that there is better training for judges, which is as it should be – the system is already working. That means that Ambrose’s bill is really, if amended, just another bit of feel-good legislation that MPs keep burdening the Order Paper with. (Note that as it stands, the bill is likely unconstitutional and actually a very bad bill despite its good intentions). And as with so many feel-good bills, it takes up all of the space in the media for little actual benefit, but that’s politics these days, unfortunately.

https://twitter.com/adamgoldenberg/status/1132389428910088192

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Roundup: Island of Unintended Consequences

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Over at Maclean’s, David Moscrop profiled the “new” Senate, and in it was probably the best description of the institution in its present state – the “Island of Unintended Consequences,” as penned by Greg MacEachern of Proof Strategies. And that’s very much true about the state of the Chamber, but unsurprisingly, almost none of those unintended consequences were explored. The bulk of the piece was devoted to the notion that we don’t know how senators will vote anymore and they say they don’t want to defeat bills but who knows *handwavey motion*.

The problem is that it’s not just the uncertainty over how senators will vote – it’s the fact that the people being put in charge in that Chamber don’t really know what they’re doing. The Order Paper is becoming hopelessly behind with bills piling up, and because nobody wants to negotiate and do any of the horse-trading that gets bills passed, it’s getting worse. This has serious implications for the government trying to get their agenda through, but too many senators are busy congratulating themselves on the fact that they’re not whipped that they fail to see the a) that horse-trading is not partisan but rather how things get done; and b) that the pile-up of legislation is going to become a serious problem unless they get their acts together and start getting bills through the system. If you want an unintended consequence, that’s certainly a huge one, and one that Senator Peter Harder seems willing to let happen so that he can get his way with the creation of a “business committee,” which will just fob yet more responsibility off of his desk and onto another small cliques’ plate (but he needs his $1.5 million budget!) and won’t do any of the things he promises when it comes to avoiding the end-of-session legislative pile-up. The fact that the Independents now make up the majority of the chamber, most of them too new to know what they’re doing (and lacking proper mentorship), the Order Paper crisis is happening and they don’t understand that it’s happening. This is a problem, and we need more senators to wake up to it.

Meanwhile, Senator Paula Simons talks about her live-tweeting in the Chamber as a way of de-mystifying its work, thanks to her career as a journalist, and I for one applaud her for it (though I will offer her corrections as she goes along).

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Roundup: An “uncontroversial” bill delayed

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It’s starting to become something of a rote exercise – that whenever the Senate does its job and considers large and contentious legislation, it’s accused of moving slowly. Most of the time, they’re actually moving fairly swiftly in the context of how bills get passed, but that’s not the narrative. And every single time, the pundit class will moan about how they’re frustrating the “will of Parliament” (because that’s how they refer to the House of Commons, when it is in fact but a third of what constitutes Parliament – the Senate and the Crown being the other two aspects), and on and on we go. This week’s performative disbelief that the Senate is daring to do the job required of it is around the marijuana bill – but not just that, but the accompanying bill regarding mandatory roadside testing. While the marijuana bill is actually proceeding fairly quickly given the agreed-upon timelines that Senators set for themselves on the bill (though they were slow off the mark because Senator Harder thought it wise to have the Senate rise essentially a week early at Christmas and then not consider the bill again until well after they’d returned so that he could put on the dog and pony show of having three ministers appear in Committee of the Whole before second reading debate even began), the mandatory testing  bill is languishing at committee. Why? While John Ivison may consider the bill “relatively uncontroversial,” it is actually the opposite, and there is a debate raging about the bill’s constitutionality, and many senators – including one who helped to author the Charter of Rights and Freedoms back in 1982 – are unimpressed with the government’s assurances. After all, they went through a decade of the Harper government insisting that their justice bills were Charter-compliant, only for them to be struck down by the courts, one after another.

Of course, this too has led to debates in the Senate about their role and whether they should be challenging the constitutionality of bills. Some of the Independent senators, which Leader of the Government in the Senate – err, “government representative,” Senator Peter Harder has added his voice to, believing that Senators shouldn’t substitute their judgment for that of the courts, citing that because these issues aren’t black and white that the courts should handle them. (In the same breath as Harder says this, he also says that they shouldn’t be rubber stamps, apparently unable to pick a lane). So to say that this is “uncontroversial” means that someone isn’t paying attention to the debate – only what’s being told to him by the government’s mouthpiece (in this case, Bill Blair).

If the Senate passes C-45 before C-46, the sky won’t fall. They can apply existing impaired driving laws, because, newsflash, people already drive high while pot is illegal. Once again, the government isn’t inventing cannabis – they’re legalizing and regulating it. Will it be more difficult without detection devices? Maybe. But it’s not like there’s a legal vacuum. Let’s calm down a little.

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Roundup: BC causes Western alienation?

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As a former Albertan, I often find myself unmoved by tales of “Western alienation” because they are so often based on lies that Albertans like to tell themselves – that they put the oil underground themselves, or that the National Energy Programme caused the global recession and crash in oil prices, or that their inability to properly run a provincial budget that doesn’t rely on resource revenues to paper over the problems with it is somehow the fault of others. And when I see people like Rona Ambrose concern trolling about how “Western alienation” is real and dangerous, I find myself even more unsympathetic because she and her former colleagues tend to go out of their way to foment these feelings in order to score temporary points against the government of the day. And then there’s this kind of nonsense that gets thrown in – that somehow BC is part of the cause of “Western alienation,” as though BC wasn’t also in the west.

https://twitter.com/lazin_ryder/status/928078971832434689

It’s fine if Alberta wants to have its own particular regional character. That’s part of what makes Canada so great – that we have regional characters that are distinct and yet make up part of the whole of the country. And hey, we don’t always get along, because we do have different issues and priorities in a country as vast as ours. But I also find it a bit, well, rich, that a province that is as rich as Alberta’s – and it is the richest province my pretty much any measure – thinks that they’re hard done by as a result. But while they enjoy roads that are frequently paved, or infrastructure that isn’t crumbling around them, and whine that they’re so hard done by, my patience runs thin because they don’t seem to realise that not every province has it as good as theirs. And to top it off, their politicians tell even more lies about how equalization works in order to further drive these feelings of “alienation” for their own benefit. It’s shameless and we should be better than this, but who cares about trying to cause discord for the sake a few votes? It’s not like any of this “alienation” that they foment is dangerous, right? Oh, wait…

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Roundup: Another CRA overreach?

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It came up in QP at the end of the week, and then on a rare Sunday afternoon press conference, where the Conservatives are accusing the government of going after the disability tax credit, particularly when it comes to diabetics. I’m not sure that this is “the government” per se, and not CRA wielding its authority, especially when you add in the recent furore over the folio on employee discounts, where they were looking to enforce some Tax Court decisions, but not necessarily communicating the specifics in the best way possible. Now, the CRA says that nothing has changed with this particular tax credit, and that they’re in fact trying to make it easier by re-hiring nurses that had previously been fired in order to process these claims, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see if there is a decent response from the government on this (as opposed to some more pabulum around tax fairness for the middle class and so on), but one would trust that they would want to get on top of their messaging for a change, rather than letting the Conservatives keep up with this drip-drip-drip narrative. That said, I’m not sure that “this is another tax grab to pay for Trudeau’s out-of-control spending” is the best message, since most of what these measures collect are mere rounding errors. That said, this might also be CRA flexing its muscles now that it has more resource to do this kind of work, when they were merely treading water beforehand.

https://twitter.com/alisoncrawford5/status/922171824766685184

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/922292502530473984

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/922293916568756225

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Roundup: The “nice countries only” option

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In the wake of news that Saudi Arabia has, rather unsurprisingly, used Canadian-built LAVs against its own civilians, former Liberal cabinet minister Irwin Cotler is calling on the government to end arms sales to that country. Part of the problem here is that it means a lot of lost jobs in economically vulnerable areas of the country (where these jobs are really the only thing that is keeping that region from being devastated), and the fact that there seems to be this notion that we can only sell arms to nice countries. That notion came up in last night’s NDP leadership debate in Victoria, where the three participants all gave variations of “we should only sell to nice countries,” which is unrealistic. Stephanie Carvin made this point over Twitter a couple of days ago, and it deserves a second look.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/892030735296716802

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/892031138084122626

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/892036494092890112

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/892038040541171712

And that last point is the most salient – nobody wants to make hard choices, especially when it means lost jobs and economically devastating a region that each party covets (and make no mistake – all parties supported these jobs during the election, which makes it hard for them to be suddenly concerned about these sales to Saudi Arabia now, when they were all rooting for them when votes were on the line).

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Roundup: An astronaut for GG?

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Despite some MPs are agitating for the next Governor General to be Indigenous, it looks like it’s going to be Julie Payette, former astronaut. Payette is a woman and francophone, which fulfils the Anglophone/Francophone alternation that has been the pattern since we started naming our own Governors General, and the government’s desire to have more women in top spots. That she’s not Indigenous will be criticised by some, but I suspect that it may actually avoid other headaches because I do wonder if an Indigenous GG may not find themselves in an inherent conflict of interest given the relationship with the Crown that Indigenous people have which is as sovereign people in a treaty relationship, and being the Queen’s representative has the possibility of being far more complicated once you dig into it. As well, there would likely be pressure on an Indigenous GG from other Indigenous communities to exert influence on the government, given that the understanding of Responsible Government and heeding the advice of the government of the day isn’t all that well understood, and would lead to a lot of disappointment. Meanwhile, here’s Philippe Lagassé on some other aspects of the GG that are worth thinking about.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/885286674468614146

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/885289432747782144

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/885290949588508672

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https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/885296355324952576

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/885297826862960640

While Paul Wells has a great piece about the message being sent with Payette’s appointment, Lagassé also makes a good point about how her appointment is being framed.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/885307090935451649

And this comment from Denise Donlon seems to sum up a lot of the sentiment I’ve seen:

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Roundup: The Khadr settlement

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News that Omar Khadr’s lawyers have reached a settlement with the government for some $10 million over his mistreatment and violation of his rights set off a firestorm, particularly among Conservatives, who took to the Twitter Machine to perform some outrage and to virtue signal, ignoring all of the relevant facts about the case, like the fact that he was a child soldier, that he was tortured, subjected to an illegal court process, confessed under duress to a made-up offence and pled guilty under similar duress, and the fact that thrice the Supreme Court of Canada found that we violated his Charter rights. (The government, incidentally, will only confirm that there is a judicial process underway, nor have any Liberal MPs joined in the online fray). And before you ask, no, this isn’t just something to be worn by the Harper government, but goes back to the Chrétien and Martin governments.

https://twitter.com/aaronwherry/status/882238708904337408

And it cannot be understated, no matter what Khadr is accused of having done (and there is much disputed evidence that he could have thrown that grenade), the reason he would be getting compensation is because Canada violated his rights. And while Andrew MacDougall may explore the partisan point-scoring on Khadr, we cannot escape the simple fact that, as Stephanie Carvin drives home, that we are now paying the financial price for violating his rights for no tangible benefit. I would add that this financial penalty should also serve as a deterrent to future governments who think that they can get away with violating a Canadian’s rights and there not be any consequences. Amidst this, that a party that purports to be concerned with “law and order” to have trouble grasping with the basics of the rule of law, and coming up with a myriad of disingenuous justifications for ignoring said rule of law, is troubling. Oh, and the widow of the soldier that Khadr is alleged to have killed, and the other he is alleged to have blinded, are applying to the Canadian courts to claim his settlement (but I would be curious to see, if it makes it to trial, if their claims would hold up in court considering that they are based on charges and evidence that would not have stood up to Canadian law).

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/882304117607215104

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/882304426932932608

https://twitter.com/aradwanski/status/882311305104850946

Meanwhile, while all of this outrage is being performed, remember that these same conservatives who insist that he was fully capable of having the mens rea to commit war crimes (which there are no legal basis for) who also insist that fifteen-year-olds can’t consent to sex, or that they need parental consent to attend gay-straight alliance clubs at their schools. Because there’s so much logical consistency there.

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