Tag Archives: Supreme Court

Roundup: An economic vision without an economic case

Posted on by

Andrew Scheer gave the second of his policy keynote speeches yesterday, this one on his economic vision, and as could be expected, it was full of hyperbolic declarations about the size of the deficit (it’s tiny in comparison to our GDP), and the state of Canadian household finances (which have been growing). He promised that any new spending programmes would have to be paid for out of government “savings,” and in his pledge to balance the budget in two years, that would mean cuts. Of course, Conservative mouthpieces say this is easily enough achieved because they did it before (forgetting of course that the previous government had a habit of booking savings that were never going to be achieved for the sake of getting to a paper balance, like Shared Services Canada, or the Phoenix Pay System). The Liberals, incidentally, were quick to put out Bill Morneau to put a price tag on those cuts and warn that they would come out of families, and with the spectre of seeing what Doug Ford is doing to those families in Ontario, well, it’ll make things harder for Scheer.

The part that everyone talked about, however, was his grand vision of an “energy corridor” across the country where pipeline projects would magically cross the country with buy-in from Indigenous communities and everyone would be happy and prosperous, and we would have energy security and would never had to import oil from Saudi Arabia ever again. The problem with this fantasy picture, however, is largely economics. Even if Energy East were to get built, by some miracle, it would not have an economic case given that it wouldn’t be used for domestic oil in the eastern provinces as it would be far more expensive than the oil they’re importing. In fact, Energy East did not make it off the drawing board because there was no economic case – it wasn’t because there was opposition in Quebec (which has already achieved some kind of mythical status), but because there was no economic rationale for the company given that Keystone XL was back on the table. Scheer’s promise (other than the fantasy of it even happening) is that Alberta will either have to take a huge discount per barrel of oil, or oil prices in the eastern provinces start taking a major jump because they’re paying a lot more for it, and upgrade it from heavy petroleum and refine it (in refineries that would have to have been refitted, likely with yet more taxpayer subsidies). But since when should logic or basic economics be part of an “economic vision”? That would be silly.

Chris Selley offers a critique of Scheer’s rhetoric, but finds it more astonishing that it’s the Liberals’ own self-inflicted damage that is putting Scheer in a position where he has a reasonable shot of winning.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A blow to the tanker ban bill

Posted on by

The Senate’s transport committee voted last night to not proceed with Bill C-48, which bans tankers on BC’s northwest coast, but before anyone gets too excited, I would caution that it’s not the bill’s end. We just saw the Senate’s national security committee recommend changes to the gun control bill that would gut it, and those got overturned by the Senate as a whole, and I suspect we’ll see a repeat performance of that with this bill – but the Conservatives will put up a fight, and because this was one of the bills that they did not offer a final vote timeline in their agreement with the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, they will dare him to invoke time allocation on this. (I plan to write more about this in column form later).

In the meantime, Independent Senator Paula Simons was one of the deciding votes on this, and she explains it all over Twitter.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Fighting on the economy

Posted on by

There are a couple of interesting threads out on the wires right now about the direction that the government is headed in as we head toward an election, and one of them is that Liberals in Ontario would rather their party fight the election based on the economy rather than the environment – this as the Liberals and NDP are trying to compete as to who can talk a better game on climate in order to head off the surge in Green Party support in the polls, and the recent Green by-election win. I’m sure this is going to be a very lively discussion behind the caucus room doors, and in the party’s election planning meetings, but that sentiment is clearly there.

At the same time, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Business Council of Canada are expressing some displeasure with the government, but as Paul Wells notes here, some of it is a bit…dubious, such as demanding balanced budgets and lower taxes while the Americans are fuelling their tax cuts with trillion-dollar deficits. Wells also noted that both of these lobby groups aren’t really acknowledging that much of the drag on our economy is caused by outside forces – namely the brewing trade war between the US and China, and before that, Donald Trump’s threats to tear up NAFTA – and that these groups have studiously avoided talking about climate and the need to deal with our emissions. Nevertheless, there is a malaise between Corporate Canada and the Liberals possibly because the party seems to be setting their Blue Liberal base loose as they try to move further to the left in order to claim the space the NDP usually occupies, and that may wind up costing them in the longer term, if history is any guide.

Kevin Milligan, meanwhile, finds himself a bit puzzled at how little these same Corporate Canada voices have acknowledged the very significant changes that the government made in the fall economic update to deal with the US tax changes.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1127275895859716096

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1127278184821444608

Continue reading →

Roundup: Mark Norman and the culture of leaks

Posted on by

As the Conservatives try to keep the Mark Norman affair in the news – currently demanding committee hearings with a laundry list of witnesses, as though that had any chance of happening this close to an election when Parliament is seized with trying to get as many bills through the process as they can – there are a couple of new bits of information that I have a hard time fitting into the established factual matrix. The one that the CBC published yesterday was that it was revealed that Norman was authorized by the Harper Cabinet to communicate with Davie Shipyard – because they were using Norman to doing an end-run around the then-Chief of Defence Staff, who was opposed to the lease and refit of the supply ship. I’m not sure entirely how this would be the piece of information to exonerate him, given that he’s alleged to have leaked the news of the pause on the process to a lobbyist and a reporter as a way of pressuring the government to restarting it (which they did in short order). You also have to wonder why Peter MacKay would have sat on this bit of information for all of these months only to pull it out now rather than defend Norman in public with it. None of it makes any actual sense, but that’s where we are.

In light of the case, the National Post has a piece about the use of leaks in Ottawa, and the currency around them – how governments use them to manipulate journalists, how bureaucrats use them to even scores, and very occasionally they’re used to hold people to account. The question the piece asks is why, in a city of leaks, Norman was being made an example of, but I’m not sure it’s a question we’ll get an answer to anytime soon. While it’s a good overview, I keep going back to The Thick of It, and the discussion around leaks during the Goolding Inquiry, when Malcolm Tucker described leaks as essential to release the pressure going on in government, lest things get dark if they didn’t. And I do think there’s an element of that, but given the exercise we just went through during the Double-Hyphen Affair, and the competing leaks and denials, I find myself wondering if We The Media need to exercise a bit more self-reflection in our use of them, rather than simply allowing ourselves to be manipulated because we think it’ll be good for our careers. (Or maybe I’m just being naïve).

Continue reading →

Roundup: Surprising job numbers

Posted on by

There were surprising economic numbers out yesterday – record job creation, and historic unemployment rate lows in Quebec, and nearing lows for youth unemployment. The government had obviously been preparing for the threshold of a million jobs created since they took office, because once it happened with this morning’s release, they were all over it, and everyone of them was pushing insufferable memes over their social media channels, and trying to wedge it into QP when they got bored of the Mark Norman scripts. And before you ask, no these jobs weren’t all in the public sector, but the majority were in the private sector and were full-time jobs, and were broad across different sectors that tested well, meaning that the data has less chance of being suspect as the month-over-month data can be.

This will set up a few different narratives as we careen toward the election – from the Liberals, it will be seen as proof that their plan for “investing in the middle class” is working, which will be key for their re-election message. While Andrew Scheer has attempted to claim that there was a jobs crisis in this country on several occasions – based in part on deliberately misconstruing StatsCan data – it’s never really stuck. Likewise, this pours a lot of cold water on the claims that the federal carbon price is a job-killer (though they would say that it remains too soon to tell). It also is on the road to completely disproving that said carbon price will drive the country into recession – in fact, it looks like the economy is picking back up steam after the slowdown related to the most recent oil price crash (which the Bank of Canada had always stated was due to temporary factors, though it spread a bit further than initially anticipated). That these job figures had other strong indicators like good wage growth in them, it bolsters the picture of that recovery, which should be back to solid growth by the time of the election. Of course, the Conservatives will try to point to the fact that the Americans are showing bigger job growth than we are, but it also bears reminding that they’ve juiced their economy with a trillion dollars in annual deficit spending, which puts Trudeau’s very small deficits in favourable comparison.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1126925907908808704

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1126929298563244032

I’m not sure that this will undo all of the damage the Liberals have been doing to themselves, and they’re going to inevitably be arrogant in how they communicate this economic good news, but they can at least point to good numbers.

https://twitter.com/SkepticRod/status/1125431876670255104

Continue reading →

Roundup: The Norman trial collapses

Posted on by

As expected, Crown prosecutors announced yesterday that they were staying the breach of trust charges that had been laid against Vice Admiral Mark Norman regarding the leaks of cabinet confidences related to a shipbuilding project, and people who don’t pay attention to details decided that the timing was suspicious and spun a number of conspiracy theories, many of them around the fact that Andrew Leslie was due to “testify against” the government. (Reality check: Leslie agreed to be a character witness for Norman months ago, and PMO was fully aware and there were no indications that they tried to dissuade him from doing so). With that out of the way, Norman made a statement about bias and presumption of guilt by senior levels of government, and his lawyer, the formidable Marie Henein, threw shade at PMO – stating that while the prosecutors acted independently, she felt PMO was withholding documents for far too long in the process – and the suggestion is that some of the Harper-era documents were what eventually exonerated him (though the Crown attorneys said there was no one piece of evidence that was responsible). As this was happening, Harjit Sajjan announced on his way into caucus that the government would pay Norman’s legal expenses. Norman later met with the Chief of Defence Staff, General Jonathan Vance, who said that with this out of the way, that Norman would be returning to duty soon, though we’ll see if it will be back as vice-chief of defence staff, as the role has since been filled by someone else. There are lingering questions – lots of them – about what happened here, but there aren’t likely to be many answers anytime soon given that the trial for the bureaucrat also charged with leaking information is coming up.

And great Cyllenian Hermes, were there a lot of hot takes on the end of the Norman trial today. Christie Blatchford described Norman’s ordeal, while Andrew Coyne has so many questions. Susan Delacourt and Matt Gurney both point out that this could remove one controversy from Justin Trudeau’s plate before the election, but both point to the lasting reputational damage that this has helped to inflict on Trudeau.

I have a few comments of my own that nobody seems to have brought up – one of them is to point out that the RCMP unit that investigated the leak was apparently the same one who investigated Senator Mike Duffy, and so ballsed up that investigation that we all know how it ended. Perhaps we should question whether this investigative unit is very good at their jobs. The other thing that bothers me in this whole affair was less about the leak than it was about what appears to be a high-ranking military official who balked when Scott Brison, the Treasury Board president, put the process on pause so that they could examine the sole-source contract granted by the previous government (as is the official version of events). Remember that this contract was granted after the House of Commons rose for the summer (and before the election call), and when Senators raised it while they still sat, the government offered no clarity or details, so there was no proper scrutiny at the time. That matters. But whether Brison paused the process to examine it, or to possibly open it for tender, it shouldn’t have been for Norman to work his contacts to try and pressure the government to resume the process (as is the allegation), because that undermines the civilian control of our military. Nobody is talking about his angle, which I think needs a better airing in all of this.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A trio of justice issues

Posted on by

There were three major law-related stories in the news yesterday, starting with the announcement that Supreme Court of Canada Justice Clement Gascon has opted to retire early, citing “personal and family reasons.” This was quickly followed by Justin Trudeau announcing that a replacement process would be launched, and would again be headed by Kim Campbell, while the Conservatives followed a few hours later with a demand that this process not go ahead until the leak from the previous process was investigated (though the Privacy Commissioner is already on that case). The thing to remember of course is that there is something of a deadline here, being the election, and it’s more than possible that the Conservatives want this delayed so that they have the possibility of naming the next judge if they should happen to form government in October. For what it’s worth.

The second story was that of the carbon tax reference at the Ontario Court of Appeal, which was live-streamed for the first time in its history. The province’s argument apparently is that if the federal government is allowed to impose a carbon tax, that they’ll start intruding into other areas of provincial jurisdiction, which is…dubious. And it sounds like the judges weren’t having much of that line of reasoning either.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/1117808109802663938

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1117809485395816451

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1117811576940060673

The third law story of the day was the revelation that the directive around civil litigation involving Indigenous people that Jody Wilson-Raybould instituted as one of her last acts as justice minister has been fiercely contested within the department because it many cases, it amounts to litigating badly and not actually getting the courts to resolve the legal questions that are at issue, which they argue doesn’t actually help reconciliation because you’re not dealing with underlying issues that require resolution. The piece also noted the frequent and direct political interference that Wilson-Raybould exerted on civil litigation (which she can do as Attorney General, unlike the arm’s length nature of criminal prosecutions), sometimes undermining the arguments that Crown attorneys were trying to advance in the middle of cases. It’s fascinating reading and yet more insight into what was going on with Wilson-Raybould in the lead up to her being shuffled.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Missing the mark on encouraging participation

Posted on by

The House of Commons’ status of women committee tabled a report this week that is about getting more women into politics? The problem? That all of its recommendations are focused on what the government can do, when it’s not their job. Rather, it’s the job of political parties, and only some of them take it seriously. Add to that, the one recommendation that people tend to focus on — that the federal government give some manner of financial compensation to parties who recruit more women candidates — is bad policy because it simply rewards parties for putting women candidates in unwinnable ridings and lets them claim their percentages. The Conservatives had their own dissenting report as well, which focused on their notion of women running on “merit” rather than quotas (because there’s apparently no tokenism in their party), and wanted more focus on women who bully and discourage other women in politics. (The NDP’s own dissent focused on some of the language of the recommendations, and more funding for women’s groups, childcare, and so on).

And I have to stress that this is a party issue, not a government issue. Parties are the ones who set the rules for their nomination contests, and are responsible for recruiting their own candidates, and even more to the point, these should be grassroots efforts rather than coming on high from party headquarters. That means mobilising party members at the ground level to find and recruit more women, and to convince them to run. The Liberals have had success with this — they instituted a programme of getting people to find women in their communities and then asking them several times to run, because they know the research that shows that while a man would likely accept on the first request, women can take something like seven times being asked before they will accept to run. Overcoming that socialised reluctance is a big part of it, and where the focus needs to lie — on top of the parties making their nomination rules more clear (and less reliant on the “unwritten rules” as have been spoken of), and ensuring that things like childcare are being taken care of so that women can do things like door-knock and and canvas. None of this is something that the government can take care of, but the party grassroots needs to be aware of and work toward implementing.

It’s not just rules — it’s an ecosystem. Part of that is civics education, because we don’t teach students about things like nomination races and why they matter, and how to get involved. That’s one of the most fundamental parts of our system, and we don’t teach it. How do we expect more young women to get involved if we don’t tell them how? This is where the focus needs to lie if we’re to make any lasting change.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Unenforceable garbage legislation

Posted on by

As expected, the Speaker ruled yesterday that he didn’t have the jurisdiction to police whether or not the different party caucuses adhered to the Reform Act additions to the Parliament of Canada Act, and thus Jane Philpott’s complaints will fall on deaf ears (just as Erin Weir was hoping to belatedly make the same complaints about his own expulsion from NDP caucus). And then we immediately got another wave of self-righteousness over the Twitter Machine about how terrible it was that MPs couldn’t even follow their own laws just after they passed them.

To recap the whole Reform Act saga: It was a dubious prospect from the very start because it was utterly misguided in what it was trying to accomplish, which was to nominally weaken the power of the party leader and strengthen the power of MPs. Everyone was treating this as a rebuke of the “dictatorial” Stephen Harper, so it became this big optics battle, never mind that it would have done nothing about the Conservative caucus and their mood, since the vast majority of them were still convinced that Harper walked on water. And while Michael Chong may have been noble in sentiment, he chose the wrong vehicle to make his proposed changes. The right vehicle would have been reforming leadership selection processes, which are the bane of our system, but he didn’t dare do that, so we got the Reform Act instead. And because no party actually wanted to do more than mouth the platitudes of the bill, they ensured it was so completely neutered in committee and made optional, with no enforcement, that we got the eventual garbage bill passed into law because it felt good to do so.

Here’s the thing: MPs didn’t need this bill to give them any more power. They already had all the power they needed, but they either choose not to exercise it, or don’t know about their own powers because, well, most of them don’t even know their own job descriptions. (This is why I wrote my book). And Chong’s garbage bill actually limited their powers under the guise of strengthening them. But would anyone articulate that at the time (other than me, howling into the void from the pages of the National Post)? Of course not. All of the hollow platitudes were siren song. And so once again, MPs passed a meaningless (but not actually harmless — the bill is actually democratic poison) bill into law with no intention of following through on it, because it felt good. And this kind of thing keeps happening because not enough MPs are serious enough about their actual constitutional roles. We need better informed MPs, or this kind of thing will keep happening.

Continue reading →

QP: Trudeau challenges an absent Scheer

Posted on by

The prime minister was present for a miserable day in Ottawa, but Andrew Scheer was absent, despite his previous fist-shaking about the libel suit. That left Lisa Raitt to lead off, raising the lawsuit, and wondered when the action would commence. Justin Trudeau stood up, with notes in hand, and he noted that the leader of the opposition has a history of making false and misleading statements, which is why they put him on notice. Raitt tried again, and listed broken promises as falsehoods the prime minister spoke previously (pretty sure there’s a difference there), and again demanded the action to commence. Trudeau repeated his response, and Raitt noted that the ball was now in the prime minister’s court, and Trudeau noted that Scheer did not condemn white supremacists when asked directly to do so yesterday, and said he’d give him another chance to do so. Alain Rayes took over in French, and he too demanded the action commence, and Trudeau recited the French version of his points that Scheer misleads Canadians and treats it as a virtue. Rayes tried again, and Trudeau repeated in French that Scheer did not condemn white supremacists. Jagmeet Singh was up for the NDP, and he concern trolled that Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott were kicked out of caucus, and demanded a public inquiry. Trudeau stated that they tried for weeks to resolve the issue but in the end, the will of caucus was clear. Singh switched to French to demand an inquiry, and Trudeau spoke about the great things that his government was focused on. Singh switched to a question about reliable cellphone service and demanded that the government stand up to telecom companies and order them to lower costs, to which Trudeau reminded him that the minister of rural economic development was making coverage a priority. Singh then moved onto the lack of federal involvement in money laundering investigations in BC, to which Trudeau noted that he must not have read the budget because there were investments in doing just that. 

Continue reading →