Tag Archives: The Senate

Roundup: From a bad bill to a useless one

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Rona Ambrose’s judicial training bill looks like it may have some life left in it, as Independent Senator Pierre Dalphond himself a former judge, has started making deals and compromises to see the bill go ahead in an amended form. Working both with the bill’s Senate sponsor and one of its critics, Dalphond has come up with an amended version of the bill which should address most of its critics, and apparently got a procedural deal passed in the Senate as a whole, which gave instruction for the legal and constitutional affairs committee to hold a special session next week to deal with the bill, outside of the normal process where it would be dealing with government business (which is the whole reason the bill hasn’t gone anywhere – the committee is loaded with government bills, which Senate rules state needs to take precedence).

The amendments would ensure that a judicial appointee must commit to sexual assault law training as designed by the Canadian Judicial Council, and administered by the National Judicial Institute – moves that address many of the concerns around judicial independence (which likely would have rendered the bill unconstitutional), and would have created conflicts of interest where the bill as it stands would demand that future judges need to be trained by sexual assault survivors groups – the same groups that would normally be called upon to be expert witnesses in trials. This help to address other concerns about the bill, such as access for lawyers who aren’t in urban centres, or that requiring training before application would tip off coworkers to those lawyers that they were applying for a position on the bench. I remain curious what other objections the Canadian Judicial Council still has about the bill, but I guess we’ll find out next week when they will likely appear at the committee.

This all having been said, we need to remember that the Canadian Judicial Council has been seized with this issue for a few years now and has been ensuring that there is better training for judges, which is as it should be – the system is already working. That means that Ambrose’s bill is really, if amended, just another bit of feel-good legislation that MPs keep burdening the Order Paper with. (Note that as it stands, the bill is likely unconstitutional and actually a very bad bill despite its good intentions). And as with so many feel-good bills, it takes up all of the space in the media for little actual benefit, but that’s politics these days, unfortunately.

https://twitter.com/adamgoldenberg/status/1132389428910088192

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QP: Jerry Dias says hello

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Wednesday, caucus day, and the benches were full as all of the leaders were present for the day. Andrew Scheer led off in French, accusing Justin Trudeau of being the best thing that could have happened to Donald Trump, and called the New NAFTA a “historic humiliation.” Trudeau reminded him that the Conservatives first demanded capitulation, then praised the deal, and now they were all over the map. Scheer suggested, in English, that the steel and aluminium tariff deal contained a hidden quota, and Trudeau reiterated that the Conservatives had no consistent position. Scheer insisted that any better would have been the one that Trudeau got, and Trudeau reminded him that they couldn’t get other trade deals like CETA done while he did. Scheer then pivoted to the question of Unifor’s presence on the media bailout advisory committee, and Trudeau reminded him that the panel needed to hear not only from media owners but also the employees, while the Conservatives have a history of attacking labour. Scheer tried to carry on, and he rambled about spending limits, when Trudeau brought up the Conservatives’ changes to the Elections Act. Jagmeet Singh was up next for the NDP, and he demanded that the federal government join BC’s lawsuit against drug companies for the opioid crisis, and Trudeau took up a script to list actions the government has been taking. Singh tried again in French, and got the French version of the same script. Singh then demanded the government join US Democrats to fix the New NAFTA, and Trudeau took up a new script to read that the NDP criticised the deal in the House of Commons but privately praised it. Singh changed to English to accuse Trudeau of using misleading quotes, and Trudeau read some more quotes in response.

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Roundup: A few straw men and some rhetoric about immigration

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Andrew Scheer gave another one of his “economic vision” speeches yesterday, this time on the subject of immigration policy. And while it was all “yay economic immigrants,” there were still a few questionable pronouncements throughout. It should be pointed out that off the top, he made a big deal about how they don’t want racists or xenophobes in the party (in apparently contradiction to the succour they gave avowed racists when they thought they could use them to paint the Liberals as the “real” intolerant party), and invoked his belief that we’re all God’s children so nobody is inferior regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation, and if they didn’t like that, the door was that way. So there’s that.

As for the policies, they were not only deficient when it comes to detail, but there was some of his usual problems of straw man arguments and hollow promises. For example, he repeated his usual argument that privately sponsored refugees do better than government-sponsored ones, but nobody is disputing that, and nobody is arguing against private sponsorship, but there is a place for government sponsorship which has to do with the most vulnerable who need more timely relocation and who may not have private sponsorship lined up. And yet, it’s part of his dichotomy about private groups being better than government. He also vowed to stop irregular border crossings, and good luck with that, because it’s always going to happen, and unless he can also stop Donald Trump from threatening immigrants and refugees in his own country, it’s not going to stem the flow coming into Canada irregularly – it’ll just push them to more dangerous crossings. He also didn’t stop the usual rhetoric that pits immigrants against asylum seekers that this kind of vow just exacerbates, so that’s not exactly turning over a new leaf. He also promised that economic migrants would get their credentials recognised in Canada faster, but good luck with that because credentials recognition is a provincial responsibility, and the federal government has precious few levers there, and successive federal governments have tried to deal with this situation in the past and not had much success, ensuring that his promise is empty. But what was perhaps most frustrating was his talk about intake levels – and while he took a dig at Maxime Bernier for calling on them to be reduced, he also said that the level should change every year based on “Canada’s best interests,” which is a giant loophole for that same kind of talk about reducing levels for bogus reasons.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1133506929442131971

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1133508491438624769

Meanwhile, the IRB says they need more funding if they’re going to tackle the asylum claimant backlog (which again, they inherited from the Conservative government) rather than just stabilize growth, which is what they’re projecting currently – but the real kicker here is that they’re still relying on faxes and paper copies rather than emails or electronic files, because they can’t share information effectively with CBSA, which should boggle the mind. And this problem was identified a decade ago (as was pointed out by Liberal MP Alexandra Mendès at Public Accounts), and it’s still a problem. I’ve talked to immigration and refugee lawyers who say that it’s a huge frustration for them that until recently, they couldn’t even schedule hearings by email. The IRB say they’re seized with the issue, but cripes, this should be embarrassing.

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Roundup: Harder tries to play hero again

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After hosting most of the Alberta senators to a lunch in Edmonton, Alberta premier Jason Kenney has written a letter to Senator Peter Harder, Leader of the Government in the Senate – err, “government representative,” to say that he and the leaders of the other two main parties in Alberta are willing to accept Bill C-69 if they keep it as amended by the committee. Those amendments, mind you, were largely all written by industry lobbyists, and gut much of what the bill was trying to accomplish, which was an overhaul of the environmental assessment process, because what’s on the books now (which is the process that Harper gutted in 2012) isn’t working and is only resulting in court challenges.

And Harder? Well, after his whip – err, “government liaison,” Senator Grant Mitchell, has been pushing for the bills to pass largely unamended, Harder says that he now wants to send this bill as amended back to the Commons, as well as the recommendation that Bill C-48 (the tanker ban) – though I’m not sure how that would happen given the de facto committee recommendation is that it not proceed – and let them decide whether or not to keep the amendments. Let the government deal with it – or rather, wear the decision for not accepting the amendments so that Kenney will turn his ire to Trudeau, and not the Senate. Because Harder is such a hero like that (while making up parts of his job description that don’t actually exist).

Meanwhile, former Senator Hugh Segal is taking to the pages of the Globe and Mail to warn the Senate against defeating C-48 because he says it would contradict the Salisbury Convention. *sigh* No. The Salisbury Convention doesn’t exist in Canada, no matter how many times Harder of luminaries like Segal bring it up. It’s contrary to the Constitution, we don’t have the same historical reasons for why Salisbury was adopted in the House of Lords, and it also goes against the whole notion of a more “independent” Senate. Nor is C-48 an election promise so far as anyone can gather, which is a trigger for Salisbury – if it existed (which it doesn’t in Canada). There are plenty of reasons why the Senate shouldn’t defeat C-48, but making up that it’s contrary to Salisbury isn’t one of them.

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Roundup: Rationalizing a deciding vote

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Yesterday, Independent Senator Paula Simons wrote a piece for Maclean’s to explain her vote last week that essentially ensured that the Senate’s transport committee would not vote to report Bill C-48 (the west coast tanker ban) back to the Senate without amendments. It’s a mere delay to the bill, ultimately, and it’s likely that the full Senate will vote to reject the committee report and may entertain another amendment or two at Third Reading, but I would be mighty surprised if this bill didn’t get pass largely unmolested. But as much as I do respect the good Senator, I will take exception to a few of the things she wrote in her piece.

The biggest thing I will always, always object to is when senators say that it’s not their job to defeat bills passed by the democratically elected House of Commons. That’s false – it’s absolutely their job under the Constitution – that’s why it has an unlimited veto. The question is when they should use it, and I’m not sure that this is a good example of a bill, because it doesn’t fail any particular constitutional tests (Jason Kenney’s nonsense rhetoric aside). But for as much as Simons prevaricates on the question of how appropriate it is to block bills in the newly empowered “independent” mindset of the Senate (insert more back-patting about the lack of whips here), she then says that the other tradition is to defend her region, which she did. I have reservations about this line of thinking, because it gives rise to parochialism and some of the flawed thinking that gave rise to a bogus school of thought that believed that a “Triple-E” Senate could somehow force the hand of a government with a majority in the Commons (rather than just become a repository for 105 new backbenchers). If she really were defending her region, she should remember that her region includes BC, whose northern coast the bill is intended to defend. As well, her concerns ignore the process that Trans Mountain has been undergoing for the past year – just because it hasn’t started construction doesn’t mean it won’t, and trying to provide an alternate route that was proved far more problematic in the past – witness the Federal Court of Appeal decision regarding Northern Gateway – I’m now sure that she’s doing anyone any favours by letting the rhetoric of Kenney and the oil industry dominate her thinking.

In the meantime, we should brace ourselves for another round of obnoxious talk about the “Salisbury Convention” (which doesn’t apply to Canada and never has), and about the original intent of the Senate. It won’t be edifying.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1130956002029916162

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Roundup: A weekend of Norman

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Over the course of the long weekend, there was another push about the Vice Admiral Mark Norman story, but there were some problems in how this has all been unfolding. The National Post had a longread that was the first to interview Norman and his family about the ordeal, but in the process, in focusing on making Norman a martyr to his cause, I’m not sure that they did him any favours because it did seem to make it look like he did what he was accused of doing – this, while everyone kept tweeting about how enraging this story was on Norman’s behalf.

There were other threads – General Jonathan Vance, the Chief of Defence Staff, gave a somewhat exasperated sounding interview to state that the decision to suspend Norman was his and his alone, while the Globe and Mail reported that it was the former National Security advisor to the prime minister and the former Clerk of the Privy Council – both Harper appointees, it should be noted – that called in the RCMP to investigate the leak after their own internal investigation was inclusive. This blows up the narrative of the Conservatives that it was somehow a personal vendetta to destroy Norman’s career, or that the prime minister was personally directing this – though that narrative is also about trying to match up Trudeau’s stupid misspeaking about the Norman case likely winding up in court before charges were even laid that had them trying to spin a narrative about interference. (The Conservatives, meanwhile, keep hoping that there will be more embarrassing revelations, but they don’t seem to be coming). Likewise, the attempts to insist that the government was orchestrating the withholding of documents hasn’t actually matched up with the realities of the processes involved.

But while the Post story was curious enough, I found this analysis piece by the CBC’s Murray Brewster to have its share of framing problems, in saying that the allocation of responsibility was throwing people under the bus – like Vance (never mind that he admitted it was his decision). Brewster also seems to confuse the arguments that Crown prosecutors were making with those of “senior government officials” framing the prosecution, because I have never read anything about senior officials framing the prosecution – nor have I read anything coming from government or officials framing the allegations against Norman as an issue of civilian control, which is why I always found it odd because that’s at the heart of what was being alleged. Beyond that, Brewster wonders why the Liberals aren’t asking questions of the Conservatives about how they rewrote the rules on that procurement in the first place, or why the former Conservative ministers didn’t speak to the RMCP after the charges were laid, or why Norman would stake his career on this procurement – all questions that I don’t know why the Liberals would ask. They’re a little past holding the Conservatives to account because the Conservatives aren’t in power any longer, and it would seem to me that it would be more the role of journalists asking these kinds of questions of the Conservatives, as opposed to the government – perhaps more than trying to curry sympathy for Norman.

https://twitter.com/btaplatt/status/1128335527785193472

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Roundup: An economic vision without an economic case

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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.

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Roundup: A blow to the tanker ban bill

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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.

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Senate QP: Morneau explains…and explains

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Just minutes after the Commons QP ended, Senate Question Period got underway with special guest star finance minister Bill Morneau, for what was likely to be forty minutes of Morneau’s trademarked pabulum, but in slightly longer form. Senator Larry Smith led off with a completely question about how Canada can’t get pipelines built while we help China build theirs (not true), and demanded to know when the Trans Mountain expansion would be built. Morneau noted that there were a number of questions in there, but stated that by buying the existing pipeline, they wanted to get it built but we engaged in a meaningful process of engagement with those along the line, and that they planned to make the decision by June 18th. On Smith’s other questions, the decision to be part of the Asian Infrastructure Bank was part of our global economic engagement, which has a positive impact on the Canadian economy, and on Bill C-69, they looked forward to the amendments from the Senate. On a supplemental, Smith asked whether his office was working with Catherine McKenna’s about amending Bill C-69, and her acknowledged that they were engaged, but the amendments were up to the Senate.

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Roundup: Questions about that Senate poll

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There is some drama going down at the Senate’s internal economy committee over Senator Donna Dasko’s poll on the Senate appointment process. Conservative senators say the poll is really partisan and should be a personal expense, whereas Dasko says they just don’t like the results and are trying to shoot the messenger. But I will have to say that I’m leaning more toward the Conservative side on this one because Senator Yuen Pau Woo – the “facilitator” of the Independent Senators Group – and others have been using this poll to push the Senate appointment process as an election issue, knowing full well that Andrew Scheer plans a return to partisan appointments and Jagmeet Singh follows the NDP dogma of preferring to abolish the Senate (but good luck getting the unanimous consent of the provinces). That is de facto partisan, whether Woo and the Independents believe it to be or not (and it’s somewhat galling that they don’t see this as being partisan, and yet they refuse to engage in the horse trading on managing bills in the Senate, because they see that as a partisan activity when it most certainly is not).

We all know that I didn’t find the poll particularly illuminating, because it could have asked Canadians if they wanted a pony and would have achieved similar results. I do especially find it objectionable that these senators are using it to justify their world view of the Senate, which is and of itself a problem – their particular disdain for everything that came before, dismissing it as being partisan and hence evil and wrong, is part of what has caused the myriad of problems the Senate is now facing with its Order Paper crisis and committees that aren’t functioning, because they don’t understand how Parliament or politics works and they don’t care to. But now they have a poll to point to that says that Canadians like the independent appointments process, as though that justifies everything. It doesn’t and it creates more problems in the long term.

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