Tag Archives: The Senate

Roundup: A bad term-limit promise

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Senator John Wallace announced yesterday that he’s keeping his pledge to Stephen Harper and resigning after eight years in the chamber despite the fact that he won’t have reached the mandatory age of 75. Of the other cohort of Senators that Harper appointed in late 2008, only Pamela Wallin has indicated that she plans to also end her term after 8 years – but not including the time she was suspended, so she’s got a couple of years left to go. Other senators from that cohort have either said that their pledge was conditional on Harper’s reform plans, which went down in flames after the Supreme Court of Canada shot them down spectacularly, or that they still have things left to accomplish, which is fair. But you know there is a whole crowd of people waiting for them to fail to live up to this “promise.”

Here’s the thing – it was a bad promise that Harper never should have extracted because short term limits are antithetical to the design of our senate, and that a mandatory retirement age of 75 is actually part of its structural guarantees. By having security of tenure, senators are able to exercise institutional independence, and by ensuring that they have employment until age 75, there is not the temptation for them to try to curry favour with the government in order to try and win some kind of post-Senate appointment (be it a diplomatic posting, or heading and administrative tribunal or commission). The lack of term limits like Harper was proposing were part of what is supposed to keep senators more independent and less beholden to the party leaders than MPs are. But it’s not like Harper was trying to undermine the Senate’s ability to be independent – oh, wait. He spent his nine years in power doing exactly that. So no, I will not be joining in the chorus demanding these senators resign, and in fact, I think Wallace is making a mistake in doing so.

Meanwhile, the Senate has grave concerns about bill S-3 on gender inequities in registering First Nations identity with the government, which the minister herself has acknowledged has problems but she wants them to pass it anyway because there’s a court deadline which she said they couldn’t extend, but now it looks like they’re going to. Also, this was a government bill introduced in the Senate so you can’t even claim that it goes against the will of the Commons. Once again, the Senate is doing its job, and oh, look – Andrew Coyne is furiously clutching his pearls over it, while National Post reporter’s description of the current state of the Senate is that they’re moving away from rubber-stamping bills which was never their role in the first place. Honestly, my head is about to explode about this. Again.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/808862320478875651

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Roundup: Questions about fundraising

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This whole fundraiser headache just won’t go away, and at this point, I just want to bang my head against a wall because all sides are just making this whole situation way more needlessly gross than it needs to be. At his end-of-year press conference yesterday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that at fundraisers, people do talk to him about stuff and he listens, but that doesn’t really influence his decision-making. And I’m a little queasy about everyone labelling this as “lobbying” because that has a fairly specific term and any actual lobbyists need to be registered, which the party makes an effort to screen them out of these events. According to the opposition, this was “bragging” as opposed to the reality that when you’re the PM, people will want to tell you stuff all the time, so unless the suggestion is that he doesn’t attend fundraisers any longer, then I’m not sure how you stop people from taking that opportunity to try and tell the PM their great idea/issue they’re passionate about that he could totally do something about/etc. The NDP are vowing to introduce a bill to put the government’s ethical guidelines into legislation, but how do you legislate the “appearance” of conflict of interest? It’s a subjective measure that the media and the opposition have been torqueing with no actual demonstrated quid pro quo (and no, insinuation based on coincidental timing is not actually proof of quid pro quo), and I’m not sure what they’re exactly suggesting they give the Ethics Commissioner power to do when it comes to regulating said appearance of conflict, but giving yet more power to an unaccountable officer of parliament rankles on me even more.

And then there’s the Trudeau Foundation. After they embarked on new fundraising efforts because of low interest rates were hitting their ability to do their work, and lo, they suddenly have new donors, some of them Canadians with foreign connections. This apparently is a sign of a conspiracy that people are somehow trying to curry favour with the Prime Minister, despite the fact that he has severed his ties to the Foundation before this happened. (Apparently this too goes into “appearance” of conflict where none actually exists). Oh, and it’s also apparently suspicious that some companies have increased their lobbying of a new government. Because it’s not like you want to get your points to the new people in charge when you’re looking to change policies that the previous government implemented (or refused to). That’s kind of how lobbying works. It’s not necessarily nefarious.

And to tie this all off, the Globe and Mail ordered polling on “cash for access” fundraising (never mind that what happens at the federal level bears no resemblance to what went on in Ontario), and wouldn’t you know, most people don’t like it. And half of respondents think that you can buy government influence for $1500? Honestly? This is the media not doing our jobs to show how government works, but is just reinforcing stereotypes about crooked politicians being on the take. It’s kind of gross, and we should be better than this.

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Roundup: A small government climbdown

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Sometimes it’s not just that the Senate is everyone’s convenient punching bag in federal politics – it’s also what they like to dangle before the media to show that they’re serious about some issue or another. Early on in the parliament, it was Conservatives who were supposedly going to flex their muscles to defeat all kinds of government bills in the Senate, which never happened, and now we’re getting threats from the new independent cohort. This time, it’s Bill C-29, the government’s budget implementation act, and a provision therein that has Quebec all hot and bothered because it would affect their consumer protection legislation as it relates to the banks.

The government has maintained that because this is a federally-regulated sector that they have jurisdiction. Quebec disputes this, says that they have a Supreme Court of Canada decision to back up their position, and premier Couillard has been asking the government to remove this section from the bill, and impressing upon Senators to do something if the government won’t. New Quebec Senator André Pratte has apparently been making the rounds to do just that, while Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative” – Senator Peter Harder has responded with the usual plaintive wail that the Senate should respect the will of the House of Commons, never mind how much he was praising up and down the work they did on amending the assisted dying legislation just a few months ago.

But the pressure from the Senate may have already come to good effect. In Question Period of Friday, the finance minister’s parliamentary secretary, François-Philippe Champagne, announced a particular government climbdown on the issue:

We are going to continue working with consumer groups, stakeholders, and the provinces and territories to develop regulations and enforce the law. We are going to delay the implementation of some provisions of division 5 of the bill so that the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce can examine this important issue more closely.

In light of this development, should the Andrew Coynes of the world really be wailing and gnashing their teeth about the Senate supposedly overstepping their authority, or not respecting the will of the Commons? Or should we acknowledge that they heard the concerns that the government steamrolled over with their majority and forced the government to acknowledge that hey, maybe there is a problem that we should fix? Because I’m getting awfully tired of constantly hearing about how the Senate is somehow becoming this de facto ruling body of appointees, when it’s anything but. It’s doing the job that it was intended to do, which is sober second thought – particularly when there is a government with a majority, and with more independent senators in the chamber, they’re not taking orders from PMO to push things through. This is their job. This is what they’re supposed to do. Can we please tone down the histrionics about it?

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Roundup: Desmond’s deserving recognition

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The news was announced yesterday that Bill Morneau had chosen Canadian civil rights icon Viola Desmond to grace the new $10 banknote, which is being hailed pretty much universally as an excellent choice, and certainly the one that I had been hoping for when the shortlist was announced. As soon as it was announced, though, we got inundated with a flood of headlines declaring Desmond to be “Canada’s Rosa Parks,” which starts to grate because Desmond’s stand against segregation began nine years before Parks’ did, but she has largely been an unknown in Canadian history. I hadn’t even really heard of her until the History Minute last year (and side note, not only was it a compelling story, but I was pleased to see that Battlestar Galactica’s Kandyce McClure played her), and it was a reminder that yes, we too had segregation in Canada, albeit a subtler one because it wasn’t entrenched in legislation. That Canadians identify Parks before Desmond is part of our problem with our own history, both in that we have a tendency to whitewash much of it, but also that we are so inundated with Americana that our own achievements get lost in it (such as when Upper Canada was the first jurisdiction in the British Empire to end slavery). Of course, part of why Desmond’s case has been obscured in history has to do with the fact that her case was ostensibly one related to tax evasion (for the one cent theatre tax she did not pay to sit in the lower seats despite requesting to pay the higher priced ticket) and her lawyer didn’t push the racial discrimination angle in court. Hopefully, this inclusion will help to rectify this wrong, to restore Desmond’s rightful place in the history books and in the popular consciousness about civil rights in Canada.

Chatelaine has seven facts about Desmond. Former Nova Scotia lieutenant governor Maryann Francis talks about when she was able to give a Free Pardon posthumously for Desmond and the meaning of it for her. Maclean’s digs into its archives to look at Desmond and the issues of racism in Nova Scotia going back decades.

Meanwhile, there have been a few comments about how our wartime prime ministers, Sir Robert Borden and William Lyon Mackenzie King will no longer be gracing banknotes, while Sir John A Macdonald and Sir Wilfred Laurier are moving from the $5 and $10 banknotes to the $50 and $100, with accusations that this means that we’re somehow “effacing history.” The thing is, Borden and King are in plenty of other places in our history books, while a person like Desmond is not. I think we have room enough to learn about the contributions of more than just the great white men of history and making it more inclusive. That’s hardly effacing history – it’s opening it up.

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Roundup: Giving the PMO too much credit

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Over the past day-and-a-half, everyone and their dog has had an opinion about just what Maryam Monsef was thinking when she stood up in Question Period and said that the electoral reform committee hadn’t done their job in bringing forward a recommendation and then tried to use the Gallagher Index equation as a way of ridiculing their work. And when she stood up in QP to apologise yesterday no less than five times, the opinions got more and more “sure” that everyone knew just what was going on.

And while I am always happy for a Thick of It reference where I can get it, I’ve seen a lot of tweets over the day that have basically posited that Monsef is this vacuous cipher for the PMO, and that she’s just reading the lines assigned to her, and it bothers me. Why? Because Monsef isn’t vacuous. Quite the opposite in fact, and while she may stick to her lines in QP and have all the sweetness of saccharine, she’s very deliberate in the way she responds (as she articulated to John Geddes here). So yes, she prepared for Thursday’s QP and had some lines prepared, including the one about the Gallagher Index, but she also knew that she was going to be bombarded with a bunch of ridiculous questions from the opposition parties who overread the conclusions of the report. Did she go too far? Yes, absolutely, and I think she recognised that. But she’s also been handed a really shit file to manage, and she’s got a tonne of work to do in stick-handling it.

Essentially, the Liberals made a foolish promise that they probably knew they couldn’t keep, but they also managed the expectations around it somewhat with promises for consultation that gives them an out. It was also just one item in a comprehensive reform package, most of the rest of which is well on the way of being implemented, but they went and oversold this one item and now they need to figure out how to break it without looking like they’re breaking it for self-interested reasons. And no, I don’t think they want to break it just because the current system worked out for them – rather, they realised that the alternatives are not actually better for our system in general. Part of how they can hope to break it is to show that the other parties are unreasonable and no consensus can be reached, and to a great extent, the electoral reform committee report demonstrated that, but Monsef went and overshot and her own party members got hit with friendly fire as a result. And now they need to keep up the charade a while longer, but this is something that they need to smother, but they can’t look like that’s their plan, and Monsef has a hell of a job trying to manage that.

Oh, and for everyone who asserts that this is just the PMO pulling the strings instead of the minister, I’m less convinced. I’ve had conversations with people who’ve worked in Queen’s Park who now work here, and their assessment is that this actually is government by cabinet – the centre is not stickhandling everything, and I’m not convinced that Monsef, as junior as she may be, is just a puppet like so many Harper ministers were. The evidence just isn’t there for me.

Meanwhile, Colby Cosh offers some more context for that whole Gallagher Index nonsense, while Paul Wells manages to better interpret Monsef’s reaction and the real reason why the committee failed, which has to do with the referendum question. Andrew Coyne mystifyingly tries to equate the issue with free trade, while again insisting that Monsef is just a cipher for the PM.

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Roundup: Taking out the caucus ballgag

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One of the cheapest attacks in Question Period on any given day is the rhetorical device where an opposition member laments that no member of the government benches from any given province will stand up to defend their province from whichever government programme they’re feeling aggrieved about. It’s one of those questions that seems largely directed to the backbenches, as if they were actually permitted to respond to questions (they can’t), but the questioner will always claim that it’s directed to members of cabinet from that province. And sometimes members of cabinet from that province will respond – witness Ralph Goodale taking Conservatives from Saskatchewan to school over carbon pricing denunciations, and yesterday, it was the NDP trying to needle Liberal MPs from BC over the approval of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline despite the fact that there was some vocal disagreement from Liberal MPs. And of course, in true partisan fashion, NDP MPs started tweeting out nonsense like this:

https://twitter.com/r_garrison/status/804054400926892033

But what’s throwing them for a loop is the fact that Trudeau is letting these MPs go public with their disappointment. There were no gag orders, they put out statements on their websites and Facebook pages, and they didn’t shy away from the press during caucus ins and outs yesterday, and even went on the political shows to express said disappointment. And it bears repeating that this is actually a shocking development because the PM is allowing members of his own party to have some public dissent rather than demand absolute lockstep agreement in public or so-so-solidarity on all things. *cough*NDP*cough* We haven’t seen this in Canadian politics in a long while. Usually when disagreements over regional issues get bad, we see things like Bill Casey leaving the Conservatives in protest (and eventually, a couple of election cycles later, crossing to the Liberals and getting re-elected under that banner). Rather, Trudeau is openly acknowledging the dissent and making moves to placate them in public and not behind the caucus room door. While one may criticise him for a great many things in the way that he has managed his caucus since becoming leader (including a great deal of centralization of power), I will give him points for the way this is being handled. I sincerely doubt that if this were happening under any other party that they would broker for any public dissent on the file.

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Roundup: Two yays and a nay

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The government announced its decisions on three pipelines yesterday – no to Northern Gateway (and a tanker ban on the north coast of BC was also reaffirmed), but yes to Kinder Morgan expansion and Line 3 to the United States. There are a lot of people not happy on either side – the Conservatives are upset that Northern Gateway also didn’t get approved, saying this was just a political decision, and the NDP and Greens (and the mayor of Vancouver) unhappy about the Kinder Morgan announcement, Elizabeth May going so far as to say that she’s willing to go to jail for protesting it.

None of this should be a surprise to anyone, as Trudeau has pretty much telegraphed these plans for weeks, if not months. And as for the critics, well, Robyn Urback makes the point that I do believe that Trudeau was going for:

In fact, Trudeau said as much yesterday in QP when he noted that they were sitting between a party demanding blanket approvals on everything, and another party opposed to approving anything, so that was where he preferred to be. He’s spending some political capital on this decision, including with some of his own caucus members who are not fans of the Kinder Morgan expansion, but he has some to spare, so we’ll see whether he’s picked up any support in the west, or lost any on the west coast when this all blows over.

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Senate QP: Joly is all about consulting

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This week’s ministerial Senate Question Period was hosting special guest star Mélanie Joly, minister of Canadian heritage and official languages. Senator Plett led off, raising the issue of the the request by CBC for an additional $400 million to go ad-free, demanding to know her response. Joly didn’t answer directly, talking about the consultations that she was undertaking around the disruption happening in the media sector thanks in large part to technological change, and the CBC submitted their request, which would be considered as part of a new digital policy toolkit. Plett then asked about restoring cuts that the Conservatives made to CBC, citing a Senate report saying that they didn’t need more funding but rather better management. Joly outlined her three priorities with that funding — more local programming, better digital content, and more new talent, which the CBC was developing an accountability plan based on those criteria.

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Roundup: Senate theatre a distraction

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In the event that you haven’t been paying attention to the Senate this past week, some Conservative senators took it upon themselves to amend the government’s legislation regarding their much-vaunted “middle-class tax cut,” and changes the various tax brackets therein to deliver bigger savings to some, less to others, and supposedly closes the $1.7 billion gap that kept the Liberal bill from being “revenue neutral.” It’s an unusual move, and one that may be beyond the Senate’s powers given that the Senate is not allowed to initiate money bills, and this might qualify as treading up on that restriction, though they claim an early twentieth-century precedent that would allow it. While this is interesting in and of itself, what it demonstrates is the way in which the Conservatives are using this manoeuvre to try and take one last partisan kick at the can to try and “prove” the worth of organised opposition in the Upper Chamber as “government representative” Senator Peter Harder is manoeuvring to try and eliminate the official opposition designation in order to do away with parties in their entirely in the Upper Chamber.

While John Ivison rightly calls this a bit of convoluted political theatre, what the calculation the Conservatives in the Senate are likely going for is for those amendments to be defeated in the Senate as a whole (as all amendments get reported back from the committee in the form of a report that the full Senate then votes to either adopt or not in the aptly-named Report Stage vote) with the strength of the new independent senators. At this point, they can go “Aha! See! I told you these new ‘independent’ senators were all just Liberal stooges!” and pat themselves on the back for being oh, so clever. Unfortunately, while there is a lot of merit in the pushback against Harder and company’s attempts to eliminate the role of parties in the Senate as part of modernisation, the Conservatives insist on shooting themselves in the foot and undermining their own efforts by trying to prove that the new independent appointments are all closet Liberals. Instead, they should work with the Senate Liberals to expose Harder’s ambitions and efforts to build a personal power base out of the independents, and maybe they’d catch the attention of the rest of my journalist colleagues, who dismiss this as partisan antics and turf protection while they continue to dwell on the non-issue of committee assignments (that can’t be reconstituted until a prorogation happens anyway). This petty theatre is distracting from the actual issues and dangers of undermining the role of the Senate, and proves that the Conservatives haven’t learned enough lessons from the last election.

Meanwhile, the trans rights bill is headed to the Senate, and all eyes are turning to see what kinds of shenanigans that Conservative Senator Don Plett will get up to in order to slow or hamper the bill’s progress. Of course, because it’s now a government bill and not a private members’ bill, his avenues for obstruction are much diminished, and the political climate has changed meaning that he won’t likely find too many allies to back him up, and Harder will have tools to shut down any obstructing tactics if they carry on too long, so I doubt it will be much of an issue, but it’s another last kick at a can that won’t get too much more traction.

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Roundup: Crying wolf on fundraising

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I’m starting to feel like a bit of history repeating again as I get cranky over yet more clutched pearls about so-called “cash for access” or “pay to play” fundraisers, which are nothing of the sort. Cabinet ministers are not soliciting stakeholders for tens of thousands of dollars of donations to meet fundraising targets. This is a government whose penchant for consultation means that there are multiple avenues of access for said stakeholders that they need not pony up to ministerial shakedowns in order to get meetings. And this latest allegation, that somehow “communist billionaires” from China got preferential access for $1500 (they didn’t pay as they can’t donate since they aren’t Canadian citizens) stretches credulity, and taking the cake is this hysteria about a donation made to the Trudeau Foundation. You know, a foundation that the Prime Minister is not a part of, and is a registered charity, which the PM sees no enrichment from in the slightest. That wealthy donors also contributed to the foundation, a statue of Trudeau’s father (again, where is the actual enrichment?) and to law school scholarship at McGill (Trudeau did not go to McGill law school) doesn’t have any particular relevance to him or government business, so even on the face of it, where is the conflict of interest? And don’t tell me that there’s a “perception” because if you actually look at the facts and not just go “Hmm, Justin Trudeau…Trudeau Foundation… Yup, sounds fishy to me,” then you’d realise that this is bunk. But no. Here we are, yet again, trying to make hay over activities that are reported, above board, and not actual conflicts of interest beyond people yelling “smell test!” and “appearance!” with no actual facts. And let me again remind you that the Chief Electoral Officer himself noted that our current donation levels are fine, and lowering them will mean money starts to move underground, which we do not want. And if you bring up the Ethics Commissioner calling these events “unsavoury,” let me also remind you that she wants all gifts to MPs registered at an extremely low threshold, meaning a massive amount of more compliance paperwork which MPs themselves have balked at, and the Lobbying Commissioner’s investigation is because people have brought this to her attention, and it doesn’t mean that she has found anything amiss. Honestly, stop lighting your hair on fire over innuendo. You’re currently crying wolf, and when any real impropriety happens, you risk it being shrugged off after any number of previous false alarms.

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