Tag Archives: Rona Ambrose

Roundup: The quest for a less arbitrary majority

Posted on by

The electoral reform committee met for the first time yesterday and got all of its housekeeping details out of the way – “electing” Francis Scarpaleggia as the chair (though it was unopposed) and naming Scott Reid and Nathan Cullen as the deputies, allocating clerks and resources, and starting to figure out when the meetings will begin, hearing from the outgoing Chief Electoral Officer to start with. But with all of this going on, it bears reminding what we are doing with this whole “reform” endeavour in the first place, much of which has to do with the complaints that parties that don’t get a majority of the votes wield a majority of the power. Joseph Heath writes a great piece debunking this kind of thinking that everyone should read, because it is a reminder that trying to find a “true majority” becomes a futile quest – there is enough arbitrariness in any system that there can never be an actual majority, but it is simply more naked under First-Past-the-Post. Changing the system just moves the goalposts in different ways – indeed, proportional systems just removes the possibilities of majority government with the horse-trading of coalitions, which brings yet more arbitrariness into the system. So good luck, committee members, with your stated goals for the system you wish to choose when they are built upon foundations of sand.

Meanwhile, as our friends in the media write yet more stories about what the committee will be looking at, can I please offer the reminder about doing some actual research when it comes to systems like ranked ballots. Consistently our media colleagues have repeated the grossly distorted line that ranked ballots somehow “increase the disparities of first-past-the-post.” We’ve seen this over and over again, especially as the NDP and their Broadbent Institute brethren have picked it up as a talking point. No.

This supposed fact comes from a single analysis done by CBC’s Eric Grenier using a single poll done around the time of the election regarding second choices. That’s it. It doesn’t detail how the system actually works and what it is designed to do, which is to eliminate tactical voting, and yet we’ve never heard that description used once. Oh, wait – I used it in a sidebar I researched for the Ottawa Citizen. But that’s it. It would be nice if other journalists writing about this file could actually go and do a bit of research on their own rather than repeating the talking points provided to them by partisans, because we might get a better understanding of what is actually up for debate.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Debating electoral reform processes

Posted on by

Amidst all of the continued and sustained howling by the Conservatives for an electoral reform referendum, and the interminable bellyaching about the composition of the parliamentary committee and how it doesn’t let the NDP game the system in their favour, the Ottawa Citizen commissioned Stewart Prest to write a pair of op-eds about the reform process and the problems it faces, and to debate between the usefulness of a referendum or a citizens’ assembly. On the former point it’s fairly uncontroversial – that the Liberals won’t be able to get broad-based buy-in unless they can get more than one party on-side, but we’re not having any discussions about ideas because all we’re hearing is howling and bellyaching. Prest’s latter point, however, is the much more troublesome one, because I have a great deal of scepticism about citizens’ assemblies, particularly based on what happened in Ontario. Prest touches on the two main criticisms, both of which need to be expanded upon – that they are easy to manipulate, and that they undermine our representative democracy. On the former point, the outcomes of these assemblies tends to be overly complicated and shiny, what with STV in BC and MMP in Ontario. That there is a pro-reform bias to these assemblies is in and of itself a problem (not to mention that the pro-reform narrative, no matter who it comes from, is ripe with dishonesty particularly as it comes to the status quo), but that the lack of civic literacy on the part of the participants makes it easy for them to fall into the thrall of the various “experts” that steer them to the various options. As for the latter point, I do think it’s a problem that we entrust these very big decisions to a group of randoms with no legitimacy. (If you bring up the Senate’s legitimacy, I will remind you that their authority comes from the constitution and that their appointments are based on the Responsible Government principle that they are made by a government with the confidence of the Chamber). It does diminish our representative democracy because the inherent message is that politics is not to be left up to the politicians, which is a sad kind of cynicism. We elect our MPs for a reason. While I could be convinced as to the merits of a referendum because it would legitimise a decision of this magnitude made by our elected officials, to pass off that decision to yet another body is to again this same kind of buck-passing that has made it acceptable for us to insist that the Supreme Court now do our legislating for us instead of MPs, or officers of parliament to do the role of opposition instead of MPs. Why? Because it’s easier for the elected to hide behind the unelected to avoid accountability, and the public laps it up because they’re not elected so they must have superior opinions, freed from the grasping for re-election. So no, I don’t really see the merit in citizen assemblies as an end-run around democracy, and I think it needs to be called out more loudly.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Jumping the satellite offices gun

Posted on by

The NDP are signalling that they have received a hopeful sign in their attempt to take their battle over their satellite offices to the Federal Court, because an affidavit from a university professor that argues in favour of their position was accepted as evidence by the court. If I may be so bold, championing this as a hopeful sign is jumping the gun. Sure, they haven’t had their case summarily dismissed just yet, but that’s hardly a good sign. It could be that the judge wants to hear more arguments before writing his or her reasons as to why this case should never be brought before the courts because of parliamentary privilege, and while there is some academic opinion out there that this doesn’t qualify, I have a hard time seeing why not. It is a fundamental tenet of our democratic system that parliament be self-governing, which means that it does not submit itself to an external body for oversight, and that the courts do not interfere with Parliament and its operations, just as Parliament does not interfere with the courts as they do their job. The mechanism by which the House of Commons governs its affairs is the Board of Internal Economy. They may choose at some future point to come up with a new internal mechanism, but for the time being, that’s it. Normally it operates by consensus, but in this case, the NDP feel that they are being treated unfairly because the other parties at the table insisted that they broke the rules, and to justify their refusal to play by those rules, the NDP have cried “partisan” and “kangaroo court” rather than admit that they were in the wrong when they used parliamentary resources to open up those satellite offices (the very nature of which are dubious to begin with, because they are an extension of the centralization of power and communications within the leader’s office, which is problematic for the rights of individual MPs). By turning to the courts, the NDP are repudiating the supremacy of parliament in determining its own affairs, and that’s a problem. But then again, they are consistent in this repudiation, from demanding that the Board of Internal Economy be dismantled and replaced by a new bureaucracy to oversee MPs activities and expenses, and that senators be placed under some other external authority (in advance of abolition, of course). The problem with trying to replace parliamentary self-governance with a technocratic bureaucracy is that it undermines the fundamental nature of our democratic system. If we can’t expect the people we elect to be able to manage their own affairs, then why are we bothering to elect them in the first place? We might as well just hand power back to the Queen, tell her that the past 170-odd years of Responsible Government didn’t really work out, but thank you very much, and be done with it. Asking the courts to interfere with Parliament’s self-governing ability is a similar admission, rather than taking responsibility for their actions. It’s petulant and does long-term damage to our very democratic system. I quite look forward to a sound denunciation of their position by the Federal Court.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Peter Harder’s ham-handed problems

Posted on by

First it was the curious announcement from long-time Liberal Senator (and one-time leader of the provincial Liberal party) Grant Mitchell was stepping away from the senate caucus to sit as an independent. For someone as nakedly partisan as Mitchell, it was a curious move that raised a number of questions for me. Then, later in the evening, news came down that Peter Harder, the “government representative” in the Senate, will be naming a deputy and a whip, and that whip was to be Mitchell. (The deputy was named as Diane Bellemare, who was a Conservative senator who quit that caucus a couple of months ago and became a founding member of the Independent Working Group). In amidst a number of smartass remarks going around the Twitter Machine about how an independent whip was supposed to work, I will offer again the reminder that in the Senate, the job of the whip is more about logistics and administration with things like assigning offices and parking spaces, and with organizing committee assignments and seeing that absences are filled on committees than it is about telling senators how to vote. Likewise, deputy leaders in the Senate are much more equivalent to House Leaders in the Commons, where they help determine scheduling of debates on bills and so on. But given that Justin Trudeau was looking to shake up the way the Senate operates, thus far it has mostly been about rebranding the office of Government Leader in the Senate under a new name and maintaining the “not a minister in name only” fiction that Harper employed when he wanted to put distance between himself and the Senate. Add to that the odd insistence that Peter Harder sit as an independent while taking on this role, which is problematic at best. But if his job is just to represent the government, and to shepherd legislation through the Chamber, then why does Harder need a second person to do the House Leader-equivalent work, or a whip for the independents – particularly when the Independent Working Group has been working on developing a system of administrative representation for those unaligned senators. It smacks to me that Harder, whether with the blessing of Trudeau or not, is trying to impose a top-down organisation for unaligned senators in the chamber rather than letting the bottom-up process that the Working Group is engaged in run its course. While I’m not indulging the conspiracy theories that this is all a crypto-Liberal charade playing out, I do think that Harder is overstepping here by a great degree. Sure, it looks greatly symbolic that he got a Conservative and a Liberal with him to do these tasks, but it does look like he’s trying to impose something on the new independent senators that currently goes against what the Senate rules allow (being of course a caucus organisation that is not tied to an existing federal political party). As with Harder trying to get an inexplicably big staff for the job he says he plans to do (as opposed to the old job of Government Leader), this new move is problematic. It could very well be that Harder doesn’t know what he’s really doing and how the Senate operates, which was always the going to be a problem when Trudeau insisted that his “representative” would come from the first batch of independent appointments. But these ham-handed moves are making that problem all the more glaring. This is an increasingly obvious example of Trudeau not thinking through his Senate plans and ballsing it up as he goes along because he doesn’t understand the institution either, and that is a problem.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Six months later

Posted on by

The Liberal government is now six months old, so everyone is checking in on the list of their promises kept and broken. This one list, compiled from the “Trudeau Meter,” however, is a bit nitpicky on some of those “broken” promises, calling them broken because there was no mention in this year’s budget when there are three more years of budgets left in the current mandate, and it’s pretty hard to expect everything to have happened in the first six months of a government, when there are a lot of moving pieces to keep track of. In other words, give them a little more time before you declare all of these promises broken. The deficit figures for this year continue to look better than anticipated as the Fiscal Monitor shows continued surpluses into the spring months (which the Conservatives will be insufferable about in QP next week, I can promise you), but that may be because CRA is apparently having a banner year in terms of collecting lapsed taxes, up to an extra $1 billion so far. So there’s that. The Conservatives, meanwhile, have the challenge of trying to stay united during this period of transition for their party, particularly as the leadership contest starts to intensify. As for the NDP, they’re now struggling to remain relevant six months later. So there’s that.

Continue reading →

QP: A death in the House

Posted on by

The death of Conservative MP Jim Hillyer shocked Parliament Hill, and all plans for the day were cancelled. The Conservatives cancelled their national caucus meeting to mourn instead, and it was agreed that the day in the Commons would be cancelled after a few brief statements of condolence. Hillyer died in his office on Sparks Street at some point either last night or this morning, likely from a complication to a bone infection that he was suffering from, yet nevertheless insisted on coming to Ottawa for budget day.

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: Trying to game the committee

Posted on by

As we heard late last week, the NDP’s democratic reform critic, Nathan Cullen, has been pushing his new idea of a “proportional” committee to better examine electoral reform options and come up with an idea that can be presented to Canadians. It’s a gimmick, of course, and it one has to be cognisant of Cullen’s agenda, which is of course a certain kind of proportional representation system that his party favours, just like Cullen’s other suggestion of “trying” an election with a new system and then asking voters for forgiveness by means of a referendum after the fact. It’s trying to game the system in a way he prefers, as Colby Cosh pointed out over the weekend, which should raise any number of red flags for those who take Cullen’s proposition seriously.

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 →

Roundup: The consideration of anachronisms

Posted on by

You know that I can’t resist a good Senate piece, and lo, University of Ottawa law professor Adam Dodek provides us with one, urging the government to move on what constitutional Senate reforms that are within its grasp – the things they can change without the provinces, namely property requirements, the net-worth requirement, and the use of “he” in the constitution. While the third seems blatantly obvious, one wonders whether there are other instances in the constitution, in either official language, where the gender defaults to male, and whether that would need to be updated at the same time. As for the property and net worth requirements, one has to ask what purpose changing them serves in the modern age. The $4000 figure in both real property and net worth has never been inflation adjusted, so the figures present little barrier to anyone actually qualifying in this day and age, as the way that they came to accommodation to allow Sister Peggy Butts to sit in the Senate are a good example. (Well, except for freelance journalists, in case anyone still harbours the illusion that I’m lobbying for a Senate seat). While Dodek posits that the requirements were part of an attempt to create a landed gentry in Canada that failed, my own reading of history has tended to an attempt to attract a more “serious” sort to the Upper Chamber, and let’s not forget that these were the days when there was a property requirement to exercise the franchise at all (and until the rules changed, women who owned property could actually vote, though almost none did). The property requirement does help to serve as a kind of shorthand for the primary residence question (except when monkeyed around to fit appointments into inappropriate areas for political considerations *cough*Mike Duffy*cough*), and in Quebec, it has the added significance of the historical senatorial divisions that marked minority enclaves that were to have designated representation. While those divisions have not been updated, one supposes that there is a debate to be had as to whether to update them to better reflect the modern Quebec, or to keep them as is in order to serve as a historical touchstone to remind us about the Senate’s role in giving voice to and protecting minority communities. Which leads us back to the question of why we want to undertake this exercise in the first place – is it necessary? I’m not seeing the pressing need for these changes, other than the usual “because it’s anachronistic” excuse. That’s the thing about a parliamentary system though – much of it is anachronistic, but that’s part of the beauty, because it is a direct touchstone to the evolution of our system, such as why the monarch is not allowed in the Commons. That the Senate has anachronistic property requirements that are no great barrier to membership demonstrates the evolution of our system in a very real way, and keeps parliament grounded. To do away with the harmless requirements for the sake of modernizing it risks losing that historical touchstone that is so absent from many things in politics these days, to our detriment.

Continue reading →