Stephen Harper is in New York to attend the UN, so of course that means he’ll speak to American media and reveal things he wouldn’t here at home. So we learned that President Obama has asked for more support in Iraq than we have committed at present, but he won’t say anything more than that, other than “we haven’t out” anything as to what we might send. He also started waxing about something that sounded awfully close to the need to find the “root causes” of radicalizing youth. Harper even said that our deficit figures are smaller than expected, though his Wall Street Journal interviewer did challenge the methodology on some of his claims about just how great our economy is performing. He even made some claims about immigrant voters, which can be disputed once you drill down into the numbers. Suffice to say, it’s more than you get here at home, which remains a problem.
Tag Archives: Terrorism
Roundup: The Tabulator gong show
Over in the New Brunswick election last night, their new Tabulator machines which were supposed to deliver election results faster all pretty much fried and turned into a big gong show, with missing ballots and unreadable results, while the company who was contracted out to run the machines didn’t answer calls. With no results being trustworthy, parties began demanding manual recounts, and with a virtual tie result, the final results likely won’t be clear in the morning. And so, let this once again be a lesson that paper ballots should always be used with manual counts because that’s the only tried and true way with actual accountability.
Roundup: Passing knowingly flawed bills
The Senate, it turns out, passed a tough-on-crime private members’ bill that contained a gaping error in it, and they knew it had an error in it and passed it anyway – with observations attached about the errors. Why? Because said private member had become a parliamentary secretary, and sending it back to the House to fix the error would have basically killed it because its sponsor could no longer sponsor it. It seems to me that there should have been a fix for that – generally a unanimous vote in the Commons that someone else take it on, as has happened when an MP retires while their bill is in process – but more to the point, if the government was so enamoured with it, then they should have drawn up a government bill that fixed the errors and put it through the process, which likely would have been expedited since it had already had committee hearings in its previous form. But hey, let’s keep up this nonsense of backbenchers sucking up to the government with these nonsense bills, and let’s keep up this bawling that the Senate shouldn’t overturn flawed bills that passed the Commons because they’re not elected. It’s really helping our legislative process, clearly.
Roundup: The premiers take exception
What’s that? Several premiers are taking exception to the federal factum on Senate reform that says that the government can make changes without provincial consent? You don’t say! It’s almost like we’re a federation and that the provinces have as much say in things relating to the constitution as the federal government does. What a novel concept that is!
Access to Information documents show that the government listened primarily to industry stakeholders when it made changes to the Fisheries Act around the protection of fish habitats – not that this should come as any great surprise.
Roundup: Politics and blame for Lac-Mégantic
As the blame and politics around the Lac-Mégantic explosion swirl about, which you can parse in all sorts of different ways – including the company saying that the locomotive may have been tampered with – it does bear reminding that Transport Canada has been slapped by auditors in the past for not having clear training regimes and procedures for their inspectors – so that even if inspections were conducted, were they all conducted the same, and what kind of follow-up was done, given the rates at which the same problems were found in successive inspections. The CBC’s extensive coverage can be found here. Liza Ch. Savage looks at how it figures into the Keystone XL pipeline debate in the States. Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall also send their condolences, as well as those for the floods in Alberta.
Roundup: Exit Ted Menzies, eventually
Minister of State for Finance Ted Menzies has announced that he won’t be running in 2015, and has taken him out of the running in the upcoming cabinet shuffle. With Vic Toews’ resignation said to be imminent (and I’ve heard this from caucus sources), this is likely the first of a number of such announcements to be made in the coming couple of weeks. It remains to be speculated if Menzies decision is a genuine desire to move on, of if this isn’t a face-saving exit with political capital intact if he was told that he wasn’t getting back in. Nevertheless, this fuels the shuffle speculation fire in the coming weeks.
Roundup: The RCMP officially get involved
The big news yesterday was that the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, Mary Dawson, has suspended her probe into the Wright-Duffy affair as the RCMP have begun a formal investigation into the matter. And then the RCMP confirmed this fact. So it’s all getting very real, ladies and gentlemen. It’s now in the big leagues, though it further gives the Conservatives an out from commenting on matters (“as this is an ongoing police investigation, it would be inappropriate to comment” will be the new line in QP). On a not-unrelated note, Liberal Senator Joseph Day is starting a campaign to close that loophole in the Conflict of Interest Act that allows public office holders to accept “gifts” including cash from friends without reporting it. Day also noted that they tried to close this loophole back in 2006 when the Accountability Act was first being debated, but the Conservatives and NDP struck it down.
Roundup: Poor, poor Mike Duffy
Poor Senator Mike Duffy. Poor, poor Senator Duffy. So poor, in fact, that he had Nigel Wright, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff write him a personal cheque for $90,000 to cover his housing allowance repayment. And how did the dear Senator repay Wright for his very generous gift? By bragging around town that Wright had done it, enough that those emails found their way to one of Duffy’s former journalist colleagues. Oh, and such a “gift” would also be against Sec. 17(1) of the Senate’s Conflict of Interest Code. Oops. (And apparently the Ethics Commissioner on the Commons side is now looking into Wright’s actions). Now, there is some ambiguity in those regulations, predicated on what constitutes a gift and just how close of a friendship the pair have – and that came as the bombshell later in the day. After an afternoon of Conservative talking heads peddling the story that the pair were very close, and that Wright helped Duffy out because he was concerned about his financial situation given his health and all, comes the revelation that Duffy tried to say that he got a loan from the Royal Bank and that Wright had no part in this, and more than that, insiders say that Duffy and Wright barely know one another. This despite PMO’s assurances to the contrary, although they tried to paint this in that altruistic light, while simultaneously trying to shift the attention to Senators Brazeau and Harb instead. They were also trying to peddle the line that Harper knew nothing about this – that his own chief of staff cut a cheque to make a noisy and embarrassing story go away, and yet the boss was kept in the dark? Yeah, that’s totally plausible. Tell me again how this is going to end well for any of the parties involved.
Roundup: A Liberal win in Labrador
The people of Labrador have spoken, and by a rather large margin have decided that Liberal Yvonne Jones should represent them in the House of Commons, rather than forgiving Peter Penashue and giving him another chance. The wisdom on the ground is that this was entirely a local race and had almost nothing to do with the national scene, Justin Trudeau’s leadership and whatnot. Penashue said he accomplished more in two years than any other MP anywhere, which is the kind of hyperbole we’ve come to expect from the guy who apparently did ALL THE THINGS for Labrador, and hence this defeat will be Labrador’s loss. The Conservative Party also issued a graceless statement which nevertheless tried to turn it into some kind of indictment of Trudeau’s leadership, claiming they lost twenty points since his leadership win (though no one has seemed to find any polls which had them over seventy percent), and claiming that majority governments don’t normally win by-elections (which is also not exactly true, considering how many they’ve won to date). Jones’ win means this is the first time that the Liberals have increased their seat count at the ballot box in over a decade (the only other time they’ve increased their count, of course, being when Lise St-Denis defected from the NDP).
Roundup: The demise of the honour system
The audits on Senators Duffy, Brazeau and Harb came out yesterday and found against all three, and while Duffy had pre-emptively repaid all of his expenses, Harb was ordered to pay some $51,482 and Brazeau some $48,744 (both figures include interest). No word on Brazeau’s reaction but Harb is not going down quietly. While he did resign from the Liberal caucus, he has also retained a very prominent lawyer to represent him as he challenges the findings. Because part of the audit also found that there was ambiguity in the rules, and those ambiguities are were Harb really fell into. There was also news that Senator Duffy had improperly charged per diems while he was in Florida on vacation – but he blamed that on a temporary assistant while his usual one was on maternity leave, and that he repaid those expenses immediately upon finding out the error. Meanwhile, the Liberal Senate leader, James Cowan, has said he does want to see if these results can be turned over to the RCMP, the Senate has also adopted new rules that spells the end of the “honour system” that the Senate previously operated under. The Senators that I’ve spoken to have no problem with this, but this isn’t over yet. Susan Delacourt muses about the public reaction to misspending rather than egregious behaviour like these three senators’ entitlements, lying to the House or contempt of parliament, and what kind of signal that sends.