Tag Archives: Saudi Arabia

Roundup: Salaries are not cement

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As the debate over the proposed changes to the Parliament of Canada Act continues to roll along, some of us are struck by the fact that the whole framing of the debate continues to be utterly wrong – that the wrong headline on the Canadian Press piece about prime minister Justin Trudeau looking to “cement” the changes in order to make it harder for a future prime minister to roll them back is completely wrong, given that the PCA has nothing to do with the appointment process. And yet, here we are, once again debating the independent appointments commission, when the actual changes to the Act involve salaries for caucus leaders and some organisational issues. Virtually all of these have been extended to the Independent Senators Group, from committee chairs and assignments, to a role on the Internal Economy Committee, budget allocations for their leadership’s office (aka the “secretariat”), and so on. The only thing they can’t get currently, which they need changes to the PCA for is a higher salary for their leadership team. Fair enough, one might say, but considering that they eschew the label of a caucus, and the roles of both government and opposition, preferring to be neither fish nor fowl, it does make it a bit harder to justify that they should be on equal footing to them. In practice, they are very much a caucus, but this is what the changes they are asking for boil down to – it has nothing to do with “cementing” the changes to the institution, and it would be great if the pundits and journalists talking about this issue could grasp that basic fact.

With that in mind, Colby Cosh penned a fairly (deservedly) harsh piece about the changes to the Upper Chamber, and the fact that Trudeau is creating a Frankenstein’s monster that has more to do with his trying to absolve himself of his responsibility for the Chamber than anything. And Cosh is absolutely right – this has been about Trudeau washing his hands of any whiff of scandal in the Upper Chamber since he became leader, consequences be damned. And there have been real consequences – Trudeau centralised power within his caucus because he got rid of the voices with the most experience who could push back against him without consequences (it’s not like he can threaten not to sign their nomination papers), and got rid of the bulk of his party’s institutional memory in one fell swoop. He’s also losing his ability to get his legislation through the Chamber because he named someone inept as his “representative” (who should be a full-fledged Cabinet minister in order to ensure proper lines of accountability) who refuses to negotiate timelines on bills in the manner in which the Senate operates.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1074845188210622465

This having been said, I will again reiterate that what we should strive for is for the ISG to become like the crossbenchers in the Lords, but that depends on a strong enough Liberal and Conservative contingent to provide balance, and this prime minister has no interest in that, preferring to continue with this experiment in Frankenstein’s Monster until he gets burned by it. And while I’m sure that there will come a reckoning, that the ISG will fracture, and eventually some of its members will drift to an established caucus, it may be some time before that happens and sanity starts to prevail in the Chamber. I just wouldn’t count on this prime minister to provide any of it.

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Roundup: Trudeau’s year-end musings

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It’s that time of year, when the prime minister is starting his rounds of year-end interviews, and thus far, with CTV and The Canadian Press having been done so far. Some of the newsworthy moments have been that he is saying that he is looking for a way to get out of the weapons deal with Saudi Arabia. He also says he’s not planning on an early election (to which I would say of course, because he’s going to have too hard of a time getting everything he needs to get done before the fall, so why would he want to go early?) There was also some very careful language around Energy East, both in that there is not a current proposal on the table so any talk of it is hypothetical, but also that under the current approach, there is no support for the project in Quebec, which could mean that under a different environmental assessment regime (like the one they’re planning in Bill C-69) they may have better luck. Maybe. But I did find the qualifier very interesting. He also pushed back against some of the simplistic notions around the deficit in some of his clearest responses to date (though he still used much of the same pabulum language), so that’s maybe a sign he’s improving on that file. Maybe. He also warned about using populist anger over issues like immigration, which immediately made the Conservatives get huffy and say that he was launching personal attacks, and so on.

Out of all of this, I was most interested in what he had to say about the Senate, and how he plans to make changes to the Parliament of Canada Act, though the headline says this is about trying to make it harder for a future PM to make changes to reverse his reforms – though the Act wouldn’t do that at all, nor does he actually say that in the interview quotes, so I’m not sure where they got that notion from. I am on the record as saying that I think they should hold off on these changes for now, because the Senate has made sessional orders to do everything that they need them to do around the additional caucus funds and so on, and because it’s simply too early to make these kinds of permanent changes to the legislative authority given that the “reforms” have been ham-fisted and ill-considered, and we could very well be creating even more problems for ourselves down the road. But they want to ram this through before the election, and there is going to be a fight on their hands to do it, so we’ll see how that plays out in the New Year.

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Roundup: Energy, pipelines and C-69

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With the big climate conference about to get underway, and the current oil price crisis in Alberta – along with the demands by the Conservatives to withdraw Bill C-69, there’s a lot of interesting things going on if we wanted to actually talk policy and not just hurling insults and blaming Justin Trudeau for everything wrong in this world. So with that in mind, here’s Andrew Leach with a fascinating thread on the oil sands, pipelines, climate commitments, and Bill C-69.

By now means is Bill C-69 a perfect bill either, and I’ve spoken to lawyers on both the environmental and proponent sides about their concerns, and they can all point to some of the same concerns, but I also think that the Conservatives’ characterization of it as a “no more pipelines” bill is beyond hyperbolic. If it works as it’s supposed to, the ability to better scope assessments will likely mean more timely actions and targeted consultations thanks to the early engagement that the bill mandates. But trying to cast this bill as a millstone around the country’s economy is ridiculous on the face of it, and withdrawing it won’t miraculously make the oil price differential disappear, or GM to reopen the Oshawa plant, as has been intimated. But far be it for us to expect honest debate on these issues these days.

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Roundup: Sorry for the service interruption

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Hey everyone – sorry for the service interruption! Malware sucks. Fortunately, it’s been taken care of and I have new preventative measures to ensure that it won’t happen again in the future, but that also costs me a lot more money to run this site than it used to, so if you can, please consider becoming a patron (and you get some exclusive content to go along with your support). Thanks again for your patience with this.

Good reads:

  • This week’s first ministers’ meeting is expected to get testy, and lo, the oil and gas sector is not explicitly on the agenda (to which Trudeau insists it’ll get discussed).
  • Oh, look! Data on rural work camps and violence against women! It’s something that does happen, despite the Conservatives deriding the association made.
  • Dairy producers are the beneficiaries of import quotas under TPP rules (and lo, I wrote about this being likely two months ago based on the CETA experience).
  • Federal lawyers are objecting to the UCP trying to join the Saskatchewan court challenge on carbon taxes. (It is unusual for opposition parties to be party to a case).
  • A lot of doubt is being raised as to whether the government will actually end arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
  • Apparently Canada’s “feminist” foreign aid policy is too unfocused and spread too thin to have a meaningful effect (not to mention is underfunded).
  • The Commons foreign affairs committee was supposed to have an in-camera meeting with Chinese officials, but that has been cancelled.
  • The Privacy Commissioner is calling for tougher digital privacy laws.
  • Environment Canada is an outlier in that it generally doesn’t track the e-waste of its weather balloons (in part because it’s too costly as we’re a vast country).
  • The CFO of Hwawei was arrested in Vancouver for extradition to the United States, and that could trigger backlash from China.
  • Raj Grewal’s lawyer says that all of Grewal’s gambling loans were from friends and family, and are entirely traceable.
  • Ontario’s chief controller resigned after she refused to sign the Ford government’s attempt to sell the “true” size of the deficit as $15 billion.
  • The New Brunswick premier wants Energy East to be revived, but TransCanada isn’t interested. It’s like there are economics at play!
  • Kevin Carmichael looks at the Bank of Canada’s sudden caution on raising interest rates, in large part because of the oil price shock.
  • Colby Cosh looks into Statistics Canada’s programme of testing municipal wastewater for signs of cannabis consumption.
  • Chantal Hébert looks at the federal-provincial  battles over pipelines, that will play out well after the next election.
  • Chris Selley disputes that there’s a crisis around the French language in Ontario.
  • Andrew Coyne looks at how far Andrew Scheer is willing to go to get the far right vote on the immigration issue as he rails against the UN global migration compact.

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QP: Talking to the folks at home

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Caucus day, and the benches were full, with all of the leaders present. Andrew Scheer led off, and he decided to re-litigate the cancellation of Northern Gateway, and demanded that it be revived. Justin Trudeau responded by reading quotes from the Federal Court of Appeal decision, and saying that the Conservatives treat the Duty to Consult as a suggestion. Scheer insisted that Indigenous communities would benefit from Northern Gateway, and Trudeau repeated that they didn’t understand that they need to work with Indigenous communities and scientists to ensure that projects get built in the right way. Scheer switched to French to demand the full guest list for the India trip, to which Trudeau congratulated the members of NSICOP for their work and that they accepted their recommendations. Scheer switched to English to raise the allegations around Navdeep Bains and the Brampton land deal — despite Bains’ repeated denials. Trudeau took the opportunity to tell the folks at home that parliamentary privilege means Scheer can say anything he wants inside the House without fear of prosecution, but the real test was if he repeated it outside. Scheer piled on the list of Liberal ethical lapses, and Trudeau again addressed the people at home to say that while the role of the opposition is to hold government to account, the current party across the way was more content with smears and innuendo. Guy Caron was up next, and demanded action for missing and murdered Indigenous women, to which Trudeau listed the measures they have taken to date. Caron demanded a national action plan, and Trudeau said that while there was work to do, they were continuing make progress. Sheri Benson wanted the PM to meet with petitioners around the MMIW inquiry, to which Trudeau read a statement about the Inquiry’s mandate and listed some of the investments made. Benson asked again, and Trudeau noted the extension of the Inquiry’s time, mandate and added funding.

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Roundup: Grewal gives some answers

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Just when the drip-drip-drip of new information and the grasping of straws around the Raj Grewal drama was reaching its expiration date, it all blew up anew last night on two fronts. One was the report that the RCMP had been asked to investigate a Brampton infrastructure project where questions are being raised about a land deal and that information had been passed along to both Grewal and Navdeep Bains (and in QP yesterday, Bardish Chagger called the reports false and warned that if allegations were repeated out of the House, they would be met by Bains’ lawyer); the other was that Grewal released an eleven-minute video, releasing it both to the Globe and Mail and to his Facebook page.

In the video, Grewal methodically went through not only his gambling habits, but also the loans (all of which were done by “transparently” cheque and since repaid), and then went through all of the allegations around property ownership, loans, his wife’s finances, the aforementioned Brampton infrastructure project, and even the questions he was asking in the finance committee study on money laundering and terrorist financing. A lot of the information puts to rest speculation and shows how grasping at disparate information and forming a sinister narrative can be when there are fairly simple explanations – explanations that Grewal probably should have been making over the past week as this was coming out, and answering media questions when they called (though one probably has a bit of sympathy for the feeling overwhelmed by it all). What is news out of this, however, is that Grewal said that while he’s leaving the Liberal caucus and taking a leave of absence for his treatment, his announced intention to resign may have been premature, and he’s going to be considering it over the next few weeks – but would have a definitive answer before the House resumes in January. (So maybe Jagmeet Singh made the right call after all in not immediately jumping back to Brampton in anticipation of that seat opening up). I’m not sure this will stop the hyterial questions – particularly the risible notion that he was some kind of national security threat – but it does seem like a lot more questions are now answered than not.

Meanwhile, further to yesterday’s discussion about why MPs shouldn’t be subject to the same kinds of background checks as ministers, here is some more discussion about why it’s a Very Bad Idea.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1068485192149389312

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1068486410464686080

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1068489389062254592

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1068491118122160128

https://twitter.com/cforcese/status/1068480047793618944

https://twitter.com/cforcese/status/1068481863348449283

https://twitter.com/cforcese/status/1068483537110614016

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Roundup: Ginning up the Grewal resignation

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As the stories on Raj Grewal’s gambling debts and intended resignation continue to trickle through, a number of them have taken on a vaguely conspiratorial tone. A lot of facts that shouldn’t be out of the ordinary are treated as suspicious for absolutely no reason at all. For example, people keep wondering why he was reassigned from the finance committee in September “with no warning.” Gee, what else happened in September that would have affected committee memberships? Could it have been the fact that the parliamentary secretaries all got shuffled, so committee assignments need to be rejigged? Maybe? And whoa, he asked questions on catching money launderers to law officials and FINTRAC agents during a study on – wait for it – “Confronting Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing: Moving Canada Forward.” Such an amazing coincidence that is totally suspicious. And the latest “revelation” is that Senator Jean-Guy Dagenais says that a retired Mountie told him a year ago that he heard Raj Grewal was under investigation, and he therefore thinks PMO should have known then. Erm, except that neither the OPP nor the RCMP tell the PMO what they’re investigating because they operate at arm’s length, and more to the fact, Grewal was a backbench MP, which I cannot stress enough.

To that end, Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column looks at the issue of parties policing MPs’ off-hours, considering the Clement and Grewal situations, while Susan Delacourt cites those same two cases, and wonders if we need to do a better job of screening backbenchers. And I’m pretty dubious because backbenchers are not ministers. They don’t have access to secret materials (Clement, I remind you, is a former minister and thus a member of the Privy Council, and his activities on NSICOP are outside of the usual activities of a backbencher), nor are they public office holders. Their job is to hold government to account – they are not part of the government, and it doesn’t matter what committees they’re on. Treating them as the same thing is not only a gross overreach, but frankly it will give MPs a wrongheaded sense of their place in the system, which is already suffering because of civic illiteracy.

Are Grewal’s debts concerning? Yup. Is it a crisis that he was mentioned in passing as part of an investigation into other suspicious characters? Maybe, but we don’t know enough to say whether it is or not, and the baseless speculation and ginned up allegations aren’t helping. Should Trudeau and the PMO have been more candid from the start about the reasons Grewal was resigning? Probably, and given this government’s inability to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, their approach once again blew up in their faces. But treating this affair with clickbait headlines and spinning random facts out of context in order to make them seem sinister is bad reporting.

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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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QP: Praising your own record

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While the PM was present once again for QP, the finance minister was over in the lock-up for the fiscal update, and Andrew Scheer was…elsewhere. Again. Lisa Raitt led off, and true to form, wanted to know when the budget would be balanced. Justin Trudeau stated that no government in history added more to the debt than Stephen Harper, and praised his own record on growth and employment. Raitt tried again, and Trudeau lambasted the Conservative record on deficits and noted the decrease in the debt-to-GDP ratio. Raitt accused Trudeau of being arrogant for breaking promises, and Trudeau listed off the Conservative record of cuts and low growth. Alain Rayes took over to ask again in French, and this time Trudeau picked up a sheet to talk about how many children in Rayes’ riding were being helped by the Canada Child Benefit. Rayes tried one last time, and Trudeau lauded his party’s record of economic growth. Guy Caron was up next, and he railed about the possibility that the government would legislate an end to the Canada Post labour dispute. Trudeau took up a script to read that they believe in collective bargaining, but that legislation was not a step they took lightly, but they were prepare to act. Caron switched to English to ask the same thing, and Trudeau read the French version of his script. Karine Trudel said the reported mail backlogs were exaggerated and that Canada Post was creating an artificial crisis, to which Trudeau remarked, without script, that they were working in partnership with unions, but they were ready to act if they couldn’t come to an agreement. Irene Mathyssen tried one last time in English, and Trudeau insisted that they transformed the relationship between the government and organised labour.

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Roundup: Saudi oil and AG reports

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While the issue of Saudi Arabia continues to make headlines, Chrystia Freeland insisted that she doesn’t consider the case closed and more sanctions are being contemplated. She also said in QP yesterday that no future export permits will be granted to the kingdom (in reference to the LAVs we’ve been selling to them).

Of course, when I tweeted this, my reply column filled up with a bunch of indignant people who demanded to know when we would stop buying Saudi oil and use Alberta oil in Eastern Canada instead. Let me assure you that it’s never going to happen. If we don’t buy Saudi oil, it won’t impact their bottom line in the slightest. The amount we import from them is a rounding error on their books. Add to that, Energy East was never about domestic supply – it was about export via the long route. If by some miracle, a future Andrew Scheer government not only built said pipeline and they demanded that Eastern Canada start using Alberta oil, he would essentially be demanding that Alberta take a $10/barrel discount on that oil, because economics. I seem to recall a former prime minister who remains demonised in Alberta to this day because he wanted to ensure domestic supply, which would mean Alberta got a lower price for their barrels. Why would Scheer want to repeat that very same policy, but wrapped in an “ethical oil” cloak?

Auditor General’s report

Yesterday was the fall report of the Auditor General, and there were reports on:

  • The fighter jet procurement programme got a spanking, and particular attention was paid to the retention problems around pilots and mechanics.
  • Security at many of our embassies is falling behind; the government blames the Harper era for lack of investment.
  • The military isn’t stamping out harassment as quickly as it should because there is no coordination in its programmes, resulting in a number of gaps.
  • There is a lack of both a strategy and budget for rural Internet connectivity.
  • CRA gives people inconsistent treatment, and where you live can determine how friendly your local regional tax office is.
  • Inmates eligible for parole are being kept in prison for longer than necessary because of a lack of halfway houses and parole officers.
  • The lack of coordination between departments means the government may not even know which historic buildings they own.

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