After the day’s repetitive QP in the Other Place, the justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould headed down the hall for Senate Question Period. Senator Larry Smith was up first, asking about the decision-making process to approve only one THC testing device, which many police forces are opting not to buy. Wilson-Raybould replied that they had expertise from the Canadian Society of Forensic Scientists, and that while it was the first device approved, it was not the only tool that law enforcement officers have, which was why they invested in field training for drug detection. Smith asked if there were other devices on the way, and Wilson-Raybould offered the backgrounder on the one approved device and said that she was open to approving others as they are tested.
Tag Archives: The Senate
Roundup: A quixotic UN quest
It’s time for the United Nations General Assembly, and while prime minister Justin Trudeau won’t be making an address at the Assembly this year, he did give a speech yesterday about Nelson Mandela, and how other should follow his legacy, and later in the day, announced a $20 million contribution to a global infrastructure hub.
The other thing that everyone is talking about is Canada’s (possibly quixotic) quest for that temporary Security Council seat in 2020, which means a lot of schmoozing and diplomatic niceties during the General Assembly – and it’s going to be an uphill battle, for which Canada has so far…deployed a logo. Add to that, the government hasn’t really articulated why exactly this is important to our foreign policy other than to stick it to the Harper years when they decided that they wouldn’t bother going for the seat again in a fit of pique.
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1044218706937696257
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1044218710519623685
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1044218714202214400
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1044284604310478848
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1044287893554946048
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1044288949806481408
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1044291455454404608
Meanwhile, this session of the General Assembly will see the adoption of the Global Compact on Refugees, which Canada had a hand in crafting.
Roundup: Her Excellency’s many issues
The floodgates have opened, and stories about the difficult first year that Her Excellency Julie Payette has been having as Governor General have been fast and furious. From concerns that she’s still living at Rideau Gate rather than Rideau Hall despite there being renovated living quarters now available, to concerns about her not telling her security detail where she’s at, the concerns on the ground that she’s breaking convention by not visiting every province in her first year, were all warm-ups for this wide-ranging piece in the National Post that compiles a lot of the things we’ve been hearing unofficially in Ottawa, about what a struggle the year has been. While some of it is growing pains, and some of it are potentially unfair comparisons to having previously appointed Governors General who were superhuman in their ability to take on a volume of work (and in the case of someone like Adrienne Clarkson, write all of her own speeches for 500+ engagements in a year), I was particularly disturbed by the fact that the Liberal Research Bureau was doing the background checks and vetting for the appointment when Trudeau should have kept the Vice-Regal Appointments Committee in operation (and the only reason anyone can think as to why he disbanded it was that it was Harper’s creation and it was simply an act of pettiness). The fact that they didn’t properly prepare her for the role is also a big red flag as to the seriousness with which they undertook the process and the decision. I hope that these are just growing pains and that they’ll sort themselves out, but given how badly this government has managed its appointment processes so far, it really leaves one questioning some of the competence of the senior ranks of this government.
If there’s a silver lining to all of this, I would say that I hope it means that it might encourage some of these charities and organisations that the GG used to be the patron of might look instead to members of the royal family. This could very well be a golden opportunity to start re-forging some links with our monarchy, and getting more royals on our shores to have a lot more face-time and remining both royals and Canadians that we have bonds that need to be strengthened, lest they atrophy. It’s also a particularly good time given the addition of Megan, Duchess of Sussex, to the family, and the fact that she spent that much time in Toronto gives her that connection already, and we should be capitalising on it (not to mention the fact that Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, has Canadian ancestors including a pre-Confederation Prime Ministers, and we should be milking that connection for all it’s worth too).
Meanwhile, here’s a look at Payette finally getting to Humbolt, Saskatchewan, six months later, and the fact that she’s been reluctant to visit other sites of tragedies, like Fredericton after the recent shootings there.
Special note: If you’re concerned about the tornado that hit this area, they were to the west of Ottawa, and across the river in Gatineau, and nowhere near the Parliamentary precinct. I wasn’t affected, and my power didn’t go out (hence why you’re getting this morning’s roundup).
Roundup: Bernier’s dog whistles
While we’re on the topic of bozo eruptions, we got another one from Maxime Bernier over Twitter on Sunday evening, railing about Justin Trudeau’s declaration that diversity is our strength. While I won’t reproduce all of Bernier’s feed, some of the commentary around it has been interesting, and in particular, just what kinds of dog whistles and language that Bernier employs in his language – and likely not a coincidence that this happened on a day of counter-protests to white supremacists in the United States. Also worth noting that his tweets were in rapid succession and in both official languages, which indicates that they were premeditated and not spur of the moment, and that does mean something as well.
The thread is filled with white nationalist language, whether he recognizes it or not.
How long before we hear the kind of thing Ingraham offered? https://t.co/fwypJUpy1r #cdnpoli
— Alheli Picazo (@a_picazo) August 13, 2018
I would post examples to prove my point, but what they did was so disrespectful to the victims. I'm not going to amplify that.
— Alheli Picazo (@a_picazo) August 13, 2018
One more thing: Conservatives rail against "identity politics," yet what Bernier offers here is simply another version of it.
Like most everything else, what they claim to despise exists in some other form on their own side. #cdnpoli
— Alheli Picazo (@a_picazo) August 13, 2018
https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1028812175673094146
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1028834166849368064
I might be willing to suspend enough disbelief around Bernier to suppose that he’s really not all that bright and that he really doesn’t know what he’s doing when he tweets stuff like this, but the people who surrounded him in his leadership campaign absolutely knew what they were doing when they tweeted things like red pill memes, and one presumes that they’re still in Bernier’s orbit. But Bernier has consistently demonstrated that he doesn’t have particularly adept political sensibilities (witness his ejection from shadow cabinet), and the fact that he went from going to Pride parades during his leadership campaign to insist that his libertarian values meant that he valued freedom over social conservatism, to becoming a Jordan Peterson convert who was paranoid about “enforced speech” and the bogus fears about being jailed for mis-gendering someone. But as is pointed out below, we are two weeks away from the Conservative policy convention, and it’s possible that this dog whistling is also about Bernier trying to gather support to oppose Scheer in some capacity or other.
It will include votes on party policy. There were already going to be questions about the party's stance on supply management, in light of Bernier's well known views.
— Catherine Cullen (@cath_cullen) August 13, 2018
That last quote raises some interesting questions. What does Mr. Bernier hope that Canada strives for? Less diversity? Precisely the current amount?
— Catherine Cullen (@cath_cullen) August 13, 2018
On the question of values, Maxime Bernier was asked by @RosieBarton during the Conservative leadership race what he made of Kellie Leitch's proposal to screen arrivals to Canada for "Canadian values".
— Catherine Cullen (@cath_cullen) August 13, 2018
It's worth noting that Bernier never mentions new Canadians anywhere in his Twitter thread today. But I am curious how/if his current views co-exist with what he said two years ago.
— Catherine Cullen (@cath_cullen) August 13, 2018
Michelle Rempel also put out a tweet thread in response (which again, I’m not going to repeat), and some of the points she made seemed to be refuting Bernier, but at the same time, she makes her own coded appeals about planned migration and the language of pitting groups of newcomers against each other, in very Jason Kenney-esque ways.
Some of @MichelleRempel ‘s comments sound like a pretty direct rebuke of @MaximeBernier ‘s earlier tweets. #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/kmP03rjTDN
— Catherine Cullen (@cath_cullen) August 13, 2018
Oh and then there’s this. pic.twitter.com/21L616jcPW
— Catherine Cullen (@cath_cullen) August 13, 2018
Ultimately, however, we are back to the notion of where the adult supervision is with this party, and we recall the reasons why Harper put the party into communications lockdown – before they won in 2006, they went into lockdown because the 2004 election saw them lose because of precisely these kinds of bozo eruptions from the likes of Cheryl Gallant and others. And the strict message discipline seemed to work, but it causes as many problems as it solves (not to mention it’s terrible for democracy). But with this kind of tire fire over the past couple of weeks, you have to imagine that Scheer, whose own Twitter strategy is a lot of lies, obfuscation, narrative building and populist memes, is all for this kind of air war that he thinks will rile the base in ways that appear to have worked for both Trump and Ford. Maybe this kind of “shitposting” (as it is colloquially known) is the message discipline, in which case, we’re probably all doomed.
https://twitter.com/aradwanski/status/1028816033610575872
https://twitter.com/aradwanski/status/1028816045262307328
https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1028416748331126785
Roundup: Moe’s carbon bafflegab
Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe (or his staff) penned an op-ed in the National Post yesterday, to explain why he thinks Canadians are opposed to the federal government’s planned carbon tax. The reasons, however, are…not convincing. Nor are his counter-claims about what the alternatives are. And to be fair, almost nobody likes taxes, which is why leaders like Moe have been casting any kind of carbon price in as negative a light as possible in order to turn public sentiment against them. And we can’t ignore that most Canadians want to fight climate change like they want a pony – they say they want to do it, but don’t actually want to undertake any of the responsibility that goes with it.
As for Moe’s arguments, he decries the carbon price as a “one-size-fits-all” approach, which is bogus off the start. The price does not indicate the mechanism by which it’s implemented, whether that’s cap-and-trade or a tax, and how those systems are set up and administered can vary greatly, particularly in how the revenues are recycled. That’s why the federal government gave provinces the space to design a system that fits their particular circumstances best. So right off the start, Moe is being intellectually dishonest in his argument. And as for the stated goal of reducing emissions, a carbon price is not only about reducing emissions – it’s about giving a market signal so that major emitters can drive innovation to reduce their emissions and avoid paying it (you know, something a fiscal conservative would recognise, were Moe actually one and not a populist goof), and it ensures that everyday consumers make choices to reduce their emissions. If you see people lining up at gas stations when the price drops a few cents, imagine what price indicators mean when it comes to other behaviours.
Moe keeps pointing to his province’s investment in carbon capture and storage, which has not yet proven itself cost-effective as a technology, but ironically would be more cost-effective if there was a carbon price that would help to better monetize its value. He talks about designing an offset system that would recognise carbon sinks in agriculture, but again, having a price allows this recognition to be better tracked and monetized, which again, provides incentives. You’d think this would be elementary stuff to someone who purports to be a fiscal conservative that believes in the free market. But that’s not what Moe is (nor is Doug Ford or Andrew Scheer for that matter), and they need to justify how they’re rejecting actual fiscal conservative measures.
Roundup: A public dust-up
Late last week, as news came out that the Canadian government had been instrumental in getting a number of Syrian “White Helmets” and their families out of that country and that a number of them would be resettled in Canada, there was a bit of a public scrap between Conservatives as the party’s foreign affairs critic gave a position on the situation that Rempel hadn’t been consulted on, despite the fact that she’s the immigration and refugee critic. Her musing publicly as to whether the boys made the decision without her is one of those signs that perhaps not everyone is singing from the same song sheet in Andrew Scheer’s Conservative party – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but not consulting the relevant critics before freelancing an opinion to the media is a bit of a faux pas. Whether it was sexism (per Rempel’s insinuation) or just arrogance on the part of O’Toole, remains to be determined, but it was certainly illuminating for observers.
On the subject of Rempel, the Hill Times has an extensive profile of her, which is a good read that I’d encourage everyone to do. It’s a pretty fair piece, and I would suggest to people that her persona over social media is not representative of who she is as an MP. Which isn’t to say that her social media persona isn’t a problem – it very much is, particularly when she sends her followers on the attack against someone who she has a disagreement with. But that aside, she’s the kind of MP who takes the time to do her actual job of things like reading the Estimates and the Public Accounts, and who can follow debate and ask questions that aren’t scripted (and indeed, she tends to eschew talking points whenever possible). We need more MPs who take the job as seriously as she does.
Roundup: Deleting the message
The Conservatives decided to delete their tweet yesterday that depicted a black migrant crossing to Canada – over a bridge made of Trudeau’s #WelcomeToCanada tweet, and through a broken chain-link fence. There was backlash that the tweet was racist, and it certainly was intended to stoke the xenophobic tendencies that they have been flirting with. I will point out once again that their continued reliance on the talking point that this is about the “orderly” asylum system would probably make most of Europe laugh and pat them on the head condescendingly, because it’s pretty precious that they think Canada should get the special status of an “orderly” system that no other country gets.
Full response from @CPC_HQ spox Cory Hann #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/iP4c7874dn
— Laura Stone (@l_stone) July 17, 2018
https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/1019323971274248193
Meanwhile, Maclean’shas a look at the history of the Safe Third Country Agreement, and how it’s basically just waiting for Donald Trump to blow it up if he actually learns about what it is and what it does. Chris Selley, on the other hand, points out the ways in which both the federal government and the new Ontario government are mishandling the whole file, which is fair criticism. But I do think we can’t take our eye off the fact that the Conservatives are flirting with xenophobic populism for partisan gain, and playing cute with it, pitting one group of newcomers against another, and patting themselves on the back for their “compassion” for certain groups of refugees that they use solely as props to hammer away at the regime they’re fleeing. This has been their modus operandi since Jason Kenney was immigration minister, but they’ve poured it on a little thicker since they saw that this kind of populist rhetoric worked for Trump and Brexit (never mind the fact that we have solid proof of election interference in both, and definitive proof of broken rules in the Brexit referendum). This is worrying for our democracy, and we should be very wary of their adopting these techniques.
Roundup: Senate constituency office?
Independent Senator Dan Christmas has opted to open a “constituency” office in his local Mi’kmaw community in Nova Scotia in a bid to be more accessible. Which is all well and good, but the CBC piece that reported on this is atrocious. Embarrassingly so.
The article refers to Christmas as a “member of the Canadian government” which he explicitly is not. Being a member of government means being part of Cabinet, which Christmas certainly is not. In fact, as a senator, his job is to hold government to account. That’s not talked about in here at all. I’m also not sure what he hopes to use the office for, because senators traditionally don’t do the kinds of constituency work that MPs do, such as acting in an ombudsman-like capacity for constituents having trouble dealing with the civil service (particularly with immigration files, which is a huge problem). And it’s not like he’s the first senator to do so – I recall Senator Mike Duffy making a big deal about doing the same thing in PEI (which I can’t recall if he ever got around to actually doing, or if it was simply a stated intention that some of the usual pundits went around congratulating him for), and Senator Bob Runciman had a constituency office as well. Regardless, the article doesn’t really give much of a sense of his plans for the office – just that he wants to be visible in his community and that he wants to be a kind of “ambassador” to Ottawa from the Mi’kmaw, which again, not really an apt analogy because he doesn’t represent that government in any capacity. I am forced to wonder if this is a result of a lack of understanding of his role because, as an Independent senator, he lacks much in the way of proper mentoring from established senators, but again, I remain mystified, and we’ll see how long this lasts before he realises he could better spend his office budget doing things that are of more utility.
Roundup: Cluelessly disparaging parliamentary privilege
Sometimes you read an op-ed so clueless that it burns. This piece by lawyer and part-time law professor Daniel Tsai about the Mike Duffy lawsuit is one of those pieces. Tsai argues that the lawsuit is an opportunity for the courts to make changes to the Senate that, according to him, will make it “more accountable.” As his evidence, he cites statements from Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative” Senator Peter Harder darkly musing that some senators may want to protect their friends, and Senator Marilou McPhedran’s quest to root out harassment in the Senate as “proof” that the problem is the Senate’s parliamentary privilege. But he also cites former Senator Don Meredith as a case of harassment without also acknowledging that it was because the Senate has parliamentary privilege that they’re able to discipline their own, and that they had recommended expulsion for his breaching the Senate’s ethical code, and that forced his hand to resign. This is a feature, not a bug.
The whole piece demonstrates that, lawyer or not, Tsai doesn’t understand what privilege is, the importance of Parliament’s need to be self-governing (if it’s not, we might as well just turn power back over to the Queen), or the fact that the institutional independence of the Senate (which allows it to hold the government to account) requires it to have a robust set of privileges that can police its own members rather than subject the institution to threats of lawsuits from its various members when they’ve feeling sore by the fact that they’ve been disciplined. Weakening privilege won’t make the Senate more accountable – it will make it vulnerable to vexatious litigation, and along the way, weaken the House of Commons’ own parliamentary privileges as well (because the privileges of the Senate and the Commons are inextricably linked).
None of this is to suggest that the Senate is perfect – it’s not, and there have been bad apples that generally have been made to resign when the going gets tough. Tsai completely ignores the constitutional role of the Senate and the way in which it’s constructed with a defined purpose in mind in order to engage in some populist pandering to the myths that surround the institution. His “solution” about a judicially-imposed limitation on the privileges that are embedded in the constitution (seriously?!) would make things worse, not better.
Roundup: Performing partisanship
Andrew Potter put out a very interesting post yesterday about self-help for partisans, given the tone of the rhetoric right now, and it came at a particularly apropos moment given how unreadable my Twitter reply column has become since the publication of my fact-check piece for Maclean’s. And no, it’s not just Conservatives who are sore that their team has been caught out, it’s also an equal number of their opponents who are utterly obnoxious in using the piece to prove something about the Conservatives.
What has really gotten me, however, are the number of partisans whom I’ve worked with, who have been sources for pieces I’ve written that have savaged the Liberal government, who are taking to Twitter to accuse me of bias. And I had to step back from my reactions to realise something that Potter articulated in his piece:
And maybe that’s the big problem — that everyone has stopped arguing with their opponents, and has decided to simply perform for their supporters.
And this is it exactly – they’re not engaging critically with what I wrote or acknowledging that I have a record of being just as critical on the government on very substantial issues (as opposed to cheap outrage and the usual hairshirt parsimony that means nothing). They have to take to social media to denounce me in order to perform their partisanship. And I get it. But it’s really, really disappointing.
But as Potter also points out, this is also reflecting itself in how Parliament is operating these days – MPs aren’t debating with one another. They’re performing for their base, and we can see that in the way that we went from debate to reading speeches into the void, and from QP that engaged on issues to one that is now solely focused on generating outrage clips for social media. Parliament is ceasing to be about debate or ideas, or about governance or accountability – it’s about performing for your base so that you can win a few more votes. And that’s not only sad, but it’s terrifying for what it means for the future. And that’s why I think we need to have a rethink of where rules changes have gotten us, and start reshaping those rules that will force MPs to re-engage with Parliament in the way it’s intended to run, rather than allowing it to further degrade into this puppet show we’re careening toward.