In a piece in the Huffington Post that gives yet another farewell from Andrew Scheer to the office of the Speaker, we find that at least two of the people running for the job – Mauril Bélanger and Yasmin Ratansi – are vowing that if elected Speaker, they wouldn’t use the official residence in Kingsmere. While Bélanger could certainly make the case as an Ottawa resident that there’s no real need, anyone else eschewing the use of the residence is, frankly, being obtuse. Scheer makes some good points – that the National Capital Commission needs to spend money to keep the place functional anyway, so it’s not a huge savings if that’s the motivation, and the fact that the “luxurious” apartment the Speaker gets in the Centre Block is anything but (the piece has photos of it, and well, I would hesitate to call it a two star), and it’s not really healthy to live at the office. Beyond that, the whole point of having an official residence is that it’s to be used for entertaining – MPs, diplomats, and even journalists during the annual barbecue at Kingsmere every June. That entertaining can be pretty important, particularly among MPs. Speaker Milliken used to hold dinners that always included MPs of different parties so that they could get to know each other better outside of the Commons – something that is increasingly important with the demise of evening sittings and the fact that MPs simply don’t socialise together the way they used to. Vowing to do away with the official residence – and the space to hold this kind of necessary entertaining – is not being frugal, it’s playing into cheap politics that ultimately serves nobody, and in fact feeds into the toxicity that surrounds the perception of politics as it is. None of this is actually some kind of luxury five-star extravagance that is soaking the taxpayer. It’s relatively modest, but reflects the office – one of the reasons why we have official residences to begin with. Rejecting it, even for symbolism, does nobody any favours.
Tag Archives: The Queen
Roundup: A plea without merit
At a security and defence conference in Ottawa yesterday, RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson gave a plea for warrantless access to people’s Internet subscriber data. Trust us, Paulson said – we won’t abuse it or violate the Charter. Never mind that every privacy expert ever, as well as the Supreme Court of Canada, has said that no, they don’t need this kind of information without a warrant. At one point, Paulson made the comparison of getting a warrant to run license plates, which is patently ridiculous because you can’t get nearly the same information from a license plate that you can from someone’s browser history. Paulson raised all manner of bogeymen by which he needs warrantless access, from cyber-attacks to child pornographers, but the funny thing is that after the Supreme Court’s decision against warrantless access to subscriber data, RCMP data shows that forcing the police to get a warrant to see your IP history hasn’t hampered investigations, which makes Paulson’s plea all the more problematic. Trying to get this particularly dangerous power is not a surprise, but it is perhaps a little unbecoming knowing coming from a Commissioner who should know better.
Roundup: Changing the refugee timeline
The Liberal government has released their official refugee resettlement plans, and surprising probably no one, they had to back away from the pledge of 25,000 by year’s end. The revised goal is 10,000 by year’s end, the 15,000 remaining by the end of February, and while that number will be both government-sponsored and privately sponsored, they pledge to have a least 25,000 government-sponsored refugees by the end of 2016. All security screening will happen on the ground in the refugee camps, while they will be offered mental health services once in Canada. There are spaces for 6,000 that would be prepared in a couple of different military bases, but those are intended only as a back-up, with the intention to have communities take them right away. So in all, more resettled refugees than the previous government would have done, but not quite as ambitious as they had initially hoped for. As for why the government changed their minds, Trudeau told Matt Galloway in an interview that it was because they wanted to “get it right,” at which point, we ask ourselves how we consider the accountability question. Do we blast them for breaking the campaign promise? Do we point out that it was possibly a reckless promise in the first place, as they were trying to one-up the other parties? Do we try to have a more grown-up conversation where we allow them the ability to change their minds with changing circumstances (and before you say it, no, I don’t think that the attacks in Paris changed anything, particularly about the question of security)? The Conservatives have certainly decided to declare victory on this one, but it should probably be noted that while things are going slower than promised, the doors are not closed, which is unlike the calls we’ve seen in several American states and others. Trudeau is sending the message that these refugees are not some outsider menace, as it should be noted that in fact the vast majority of attacks that have happened to date were from those who were born in the country where the attacks happened, and they were radicalized later in life. It does send a message that keeping up with resettlement is happening in spite of the Paris attacks, and that should perhaps be noted too.
Roundup: A hedge on refugees?
It looks like the new Liberal government may be walking back a little on their first election promise, around the 25,000 Syrian refugees. Initially the promise was 25,000 government-assisted refugees with additional privately sponsored refugees on top of that figure. Yesterday, it sounded like the 25,000 will be a combination of the two based on comments by the minister, but Trudeau seemed to contradict that in his press conference while the minister’s spokesperson was hedging somewhere around the fact that there may be some privately sponsored among the 25,000 this year with more to come in 2016, but I’m not sure that the privately sponsored numbers will be that significant in the short timeframe that it would be too much of a difference for that 25,000 target. Meanwhile, it sounds like plans are being developed to fly a thousand Syrian refugees per day out of Aman, Jordan, while temporary lodgings are currently being worked out. No doubt we’ll hear more details in the coming days.
Roundup: No ideological obstruction
There’s the Senate bat-signal again. Conservative Senate leader Claude Carignan says that his caucus won’t abuse their majority in the Senate to thwart Liberal legislation that comes forward, to which I say “Um, yeah. Of course.” Because wouldn’t you know it, Senators have a job to do, and they know it. Of course, I’ve never bought into the conspiracy theory that Conservative senators would be the puppets of Harper, trying to influence things beyond the political grave, or even the theory that they would be extra dickish just because they were Harper appointees. Then again, most people seem to forget that senators of any stripe suddenly get a lot more independent when the PM who appointed them is no longer in office, and they get really, really independent once leadership races kick off. So far we’re at the first of those two, and with the Conservatives as a whole allegedly experimenting with a less command-and-control style of leadership, we may see the yoke they unduly placed over their Senate caucus lifted. Mind you, we’re still waiting for a signal to see what Trudeau will do in terms of both the Speaker of the Senate and the Leader of the Government. Without a Leader, they might as well just cancel Senate Question Period, which would be a loss because it’s quite instructive for how QP in the Commons should be run. Some senators have floated the idea of just having Senate QP be about asking questions to committee chairs (which, incidentally, they already can do), but it’s not a good idea because those committee chairs aren’t going to have a lot to say about issues of the day, they won’t have access to briefing materials, and they aren’t conduits by which the government can be held to account, which is the whole point of QP – not asking details about committee work. But seriously – can we please stop worrying about fantastical hysteria about what the Senate is going to do? 99 percent of it is based on false assumptions and ignorance of the chamber, and it’s so, so tiresome. They have jobs to do. Let them.
Roundup: No, Chong’s bill won’t give us Australian leadership spills
News of the leadership spill in Australia, ousting Tony Abbott as prime minister and ending the greatest political bromance of the Commonwealth countries (Harper and Abbott were quite the mutual admiration society), we were suddenly inundated with Twitter musings about whether that could happen in Canada, thanks to Michael Chong’s Reform Act which passed this summer. While Kady O’Malley offers the “in theory” answer, the in practice answer is that no, it couldn’t happen here, because Canada has a terrible system of leadership selection that purports to “democratise” the system with grassroots involvement, but instead created an unaccountable and presidentialised system of an overly powerful leader that has little fear of their caucus turning on them, because caucus didn’t select them. When it comes to removal, selection matters. A lot. Chong’s bill, perversely, makes an Australian situation less likely by raising the bar for leadership challenges to happen in the first place, and would instead give us situations like what happened in Manitoba where a sitting leader was challenged, and when it went to a leadership process where he still participated and won based on the grassroots support when his caucus was no longer behind him, well, it’s ugly and it’s down right unparliamentary given that a leader needs to have the confidence of his or her caucus, and when they don’t but stay in based on grassroots votes, the system breaks down. Paul Wells cautions that reforming a system usually replaces real or perceive problems with different problems, while Andrew Coyne points out that being able to dump a bad leader quickly is the lesser evil of being stuck with them.
Roundup: Mulcair’s Senate delusions
It was Thomas Mulcair’s turn to talk to Peter Mansbridge, and it was a bit of a doozy. Not only because he too insisted that whoever wins the most seats should form government (with a bunch of “it’s a really complex constitutional question but…” thrown in), but rather because of his continued wilful ignorance about how he proposes to deal with the Senate. It’s not just about his fantasy notion that Senate abolition could ever happen (which it won’t), or that he’ll somehow be able to sit down with the premiers and make it happen right away (even if he brings the federal cheque book to the table, it’s still not going to happen). No, it’s his attitude for how he would deal with it should he form government. Not only are vacancies mounting, but he told Mansbridge that he wouldn’t even appoint a Government Leader in the Senate. This is actually a Very Big Deal. Why? Because if legislation is to pass the Senate, it needs to happen according to proper procedure, and proper procedure requires a government voice – particularly one from cabinet – to be in the Chamber to shepherd government bills through, an to answer questions on behalf of the government in Senate Question Period. Now, Harper has already been petulant about this when he refused to make his current Senate leader a member of cabinet (even though he still gets PCO support, and as we’ve learned, PMO handlers to deal with messaging), but there is still a government leader in there to do the things that he’s supposed to do. If Mulcair would be so completely cavalier as to further break an already damaged institution by refusing to let it do its job properly under the pretext of daring them to vote down bills passed by the Commons, it’s unconscionable. We have someone campaigning to be the leader of the country on a platform of thumbing his nose at the constitution, whether that’s around a refusal to make appointments, or in ensuring that it can do its job. And this is more than a question of “democratic expression” of a government that has won an election, as Mulcair phrases his bullying tactics – it’s about process. And what is democracy? Democracy IS process. Process matters, just like the constitution. Why are we giving him a free pass when he seems to be of the notion that the constitution and the institutions of parliament don’t matter?
Mulcair going on about the Senate is nonsense. LET'S IGNORE THE CONSTITUTION! IT'S JUST A SUGGESTION ANYWAY, AMIRITE? #CBCNational
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) September 10, 2015
Roundup: The slippery slope of civic ignorance
With Justin Trudeau adding his voice to those of the other leaders in completely misreading how a Westminster democracy works with the formation of government (albeit acknowledging that the incumbent does get the first crack), I think it’s quite apparent we’re in a crisis of civic literacy in this country. While Kady O’Malley gives a refresher here, there was an interesting idea posited by Leonid Sirota that we may be witnessing the birth of a new convention. I’m a bit sceptical about that, and would agree more with Emmett Macfarlane that it may be a political convention as opposed to a legal one, but it should also be a warning signal to our political actors that ignorance of the system, whether genuine or deliberate, does have broader repercussions. The system works the way it does because, well, it works. That’s why it evolved the way we did. To try and move it past that for crass political purposes demeans it, and opens a number of cans of worms that will do nothing more than create problems down the road that will be even bigger headaches. Better to learn and apply the system as it exists, rather than try to change the rules for petty reasons. Also, we need to stop dismissing these kinds of conversations as boring or pedantic because they matter. The rules matter. If we don’t point out what the rules are and that they matter, then it makes it easier for people to break them without anyone raising a fuss.
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@pauldalyesq Or, to put it even more starkly, our elections are in effect becoming presidential ones. Indeed, there are other reasons 1/
— Leonid Sirota (@DoubleAspect) September 8, 2015
@pauldalyesq increasingly leader-centred. Leaders are the drivers and focus of campaigns; parties just vehicles for them. 3/3
— Leonid Sirota (@DoubleAspect) September 8, 2015
Roundup: Calling in the OPP
It took MPs long enough to respond, but one supposes that it’s about time they did. On Thursday of last week, the Information Commissioner issued her damning special report on the RCMP destroying records that were under Access to Information requests, related to the long-gun registry, and the government is now proposing legislation to make it retroactively legal (more in my column here). No MP other than Wayne Easter bothered to actually say something until yesterday – five days later – at which point the committees decided to get involved. The NDP are moving a motion in Ethics committee, which has jurisdiction over Access to Information policy, while the Liberals are proposing similar hearings in the Public Safety committee where they can haul the RCMP Commissioner before them. Still, it’s another week’s delay, and there’s no guarantee they’ll get the hearings given the limited number of sitting days left, and the fact that government MPs can block their request in camera. That having been said, it looks like Suzanne Legault’s recommendation that charges be laid for the destruction of those records might actually come to fruition, as the Attorney General’s office did forward the request on to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who in turn has asked the OPP to investigate. We’ll see if the government proposes to still go ahead with retroactively changing the law while there is an active police investigation, but if they stick to their guns, that they’re just “closing a loophole” (which is not true), then they just might.
Roundup: The other CSIS bill gets scrutiny
The Senate heard a lot of testimony yesterday regarding Bill C-44 – the other bill to boost CSIS’ powers, in case you’d forgotten about it. Those new powers include being able to operate abroad and break laws in other countries, which might be a bit of a problem, and raises a bunch of questions when it comes to how you oversee those kinds of operations, particularly given the limitations that SIRC faces when they can only visit one CSIS foreign posting per year to look into their operations. There was also testimony from Ray Boisvert, the former assistant director at CSIS, who described the internal processes of conducting investigations and getting warrants, painting a pretty robust system of high bars to proceed with investigations or operations – but again, we have to take his word for it, because we no longer have the in-house oversight of the Inspector General’s office, and SIRC does an annual review. SIRC, incidentally, said they have enough resources to do the job they’re supposed for now, but if they’re going to need to take on new responsibilities such as overseeing a far more robust and empowered CSIS, well, they’ll also need more money, which this government seems pretty unwilling to give. Curiously, the deputy minister of Public Safety said that the Auditor General also provides oversight of CSIS operations, which is pretty wrong – he looks at value-for-money, which is not the kind of oversight that CSIS requires.