In case you missed it, the moral panic over the past week or so is ministerial fundraisers, first in Ontario (and to a certain extent BC), but that’s bled over in to the federal sphere, because apparently we were afraid of missing out. And don’t forget, the federal rules are already pretty strict, with corporate and union donations already been banned and the contribution limit is pretty small (and when it comes to leadership contests, the Conservatives and NDP conspired to screw the Liberals, who were mid-contest at the time, but that’s beside the point). The point is that there’s a lot of unnecessary tut-tutting, particularly around a perfectly legal private fundraiser that the Minister of Justice is holding at a Toronto law firm. “Oh,” they say. “Some of these lawyers may want to be judges one day.” And this is the point where I look at people who say that straight in the face and ask if they really think that a federal judicial appointment can be bought for $500. Really? Seriously? Even on the issue of legal contracts, the minister can recuse herself if said law firm bids. There are processes around this kind of thing. The Ethics Commissioner said that there is no apparent conflict of interest here, but that doesn’t stop people from crying “money for access!” And when you have people like Duff Conacher going on TV and decrying that limits should be $100 because that way it’s equal for everyone, you have to wonder if that logic extends to not everyone can have nice things, so we should ban them so that it’s fair for everyone. Also, if you lower the limit too low, then people start looking for other ways to raise money, and all you have to look to is Quebec, where their strict donation regime became quickly susceptible to corruption. Of course, Conacher won’t be satisfied by any ethics regime unless he’s in charge of the parliamentary thought police, and frankly, anyone who quotes him in one of these stories becomes suspect because it means they’re going for cheap outrage. Are there bigger problems of perception in places like Ontario, where there aren’t any donation limits? Yes, indeed. But that’s not the case federally, and the minister is following the rules. Frankly, I’m not fussed that the PM is shrugging this off because honestly, this isn’t something that we should be lighting our hair on fire about.
Tag Archives: Thomas Mulcair
Roundup: The Senate Advisory Board reports
In keeping with the commitment to openness and transparency, the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments released their report yesterday (PDF) on the interim process by which the first seven of the new independent Senate appointments were chosen. It’s an interesting read – they had a list of nearly 300 names to consider after consultations and nominations, from which they whittled it down to 25 names – five per vacancy that they were expected to fill, from which Justin Trudeau ended up selecting seven names rather than just five. The cost of the whole process was about $170,000, which seems to be pretty bare bones if you ask me. There were observations on the process included in the report, primarily that the process was pretty rushed, which meant that most of the information they had on candidates were all based on self-declaration, and that they didn’t conduct interviews with their short-list candidates in this process – they merely identified them, and one presumes that PMO was then responsible for the final vetting – something that might change as the process goes forward and the panel has more time and resources going forward as they look to fill the remaining vacancies over the next year or so, and any future vacancies as they come up. Also, the report listed the nearly 400 groups that the Board reached out to in order to get suggestions, and had demographic data on gender, linguistic profile, and Aboriginal and visible minority status. It also noted that failed candidates got a letter thanking them for participation, and the report noted that they are free to apply again under the future process. The chair of the Board has dismissed any concerns over the issue of André Pratte and his property hiccough, given that it will be resolved before he is appointed, and it’s a perfectly reasonable position to take. I will also note that this report answers most of the questions that Scott Reid has been howling about in QP over the past couple of months with regard to process and the secrecy of the system. Yes, there is an expectation of confidentiality for those who did not get appointed, as with any Governor-in-Council appointment, and from the language of the report, the PM did indeed choose the names from those on the short lists. Thus far, it looks like this new system is working as expected, and it provides the necessary suggestions for how to improve the process even further. Of course, we need to see how these new senators will perform, particularly in the capacity as independents in a system where the rules are still weighted to party caucuses (though that is slowly changing), but so far Trudeau’s reform plans are bearing fruit. We just need time to evaluate them going forward before we can declare it a success or not.
Roundup: Party accountability sacrificed for Big Data
Justin Trudeau is encouraging his party to adopt a new constitutional structure, and I am completely aghast at the way in which he proposes to essentially blow up the way parties work in this country for under the banner of “modernization.” And even worse, that he denigrates the existing system as being somehow elitist if people hold party memberships. No, seriously. Paying $10 to get buy-in to the party membership is “elitist.” My head is exploding right now. As with the way the Liberals blew up their leadership selection process to absolutely obliterate any trace of accountability, they are moving to the exact same thing with their party policy process, and shifting to a Big Data approach that eliminates any incentive for the meaningful participation in the process that our system is built around. And let’s not kid ourselves either – for their last leadership race, the Liberals destroyed the line of accountability to the leader in order to populate their database. Now they want to put that process on steroids in the name of making the party – err, sorry, “movement” – wide-open. Anyone can participate! So long as they can collect all kinds of data on you in order to target and craft messages and fundraising appeals rather than have you be an engaged citizen. Remember that there is far more to the political process in this country than just showing up to vote every few years, despite what you may think. The process actually involves people getting involved with the party, buying memberships, attending meetings, talking about and developing policy positions that then get voted on and forwarded to policy conventions, where they are then discussed by delegates from across the country and voted on, and once adopted, form the basis of the party platform. That is real people engaging in the process. Granted, this has been made much more problematic the more we increasingly presidentialise our party leadership systems in this country – again, spearheaded by the Liberals in 1919 with delegated conventions, and culminating in the way that Trudeau was elected in 2013, so that leaders amassed so much power that they began dictating what the election platform was going to be, policy resolutions be damned. And to whom is that leader accountable? It used to be caucus when they selected a leader, then it was to the party members, who were a somewhat nebulous group but they still existed and could hold reviews. But now? When anyone can vote for the leader, he or she is accountable to nobody, with an increasing amount of power under the rubric of a “democratic mandate.” By blowing up the policy process, where does that leave the membership? Or can we even call them that anymore since they no longer have buy-in to the party? If the process becomes technology driven – as this Big Data approach suggests – then what happens to riding associations, to volunteers, to the people who engage in the process from the grassroots? Do we simply adopt a slactivist approach that the leader’s office drives? Rather than encourage more people to join the party, to get involved, to do the hard work that won them the election – how do you think all of those doors got knocked on? – this starts to take that human element out of it in favour of a charismatic leader’s direction. It’s not that the system wasn’t working as it stands – it was. The problem goes back to civic literacy. We’re not taught in schools that the fundamental part of engaging in the political process is to join a party. Parties haven’t exactly been great at reaching out to teach people this either, because their membership drives focus on nomination races or leadership contests rather than hey, here’s a way for you to get involved in how this country runs. And wide-open approaches haven’t worked for the Green Party, with their wiki-style policy platform (which, remember, got somewhat hijacked by Men’s Rights Advocates and was exposed as such during the election), so why are the Liberals getting on board? To populate their database. It’s cynical, and it’s destructive to the way that our Westminster system works. But hey, it’s modern, so let’s climb aboard without thinking about it!
Meanwhile, this story has just made my head explode. https://t.co/hcAKj0VVLU pic.twitter.com/c6sku2I21B
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) April 3, 2016
Roundup: Slowly effacing the Crown
There has been a certain level of trepidation amongst monarchists when the Liberals came to power, given their penchant for rewriting Canadian monarchical symbols out of things in order to focus on the maple leaf. When Trudeau announced that there would be no changes to our relationship with the Crown, there was a bit of a sigh of relief, particularly when he said that he would not be de-royalizing the service names of the Canadian Forces, but they are slowly and subtly reversing some of the Conservative restorations of monarchical symbols, starting with generals’ rank pins. They had gone from maple leaves, reverting to the older crowns given that hey, this country is a constitutional monarchy and the head of the Canadian Forces is the Queen of Canada. But now they’re turning back into maple leaves. The official excuse is that it’s easier for our international allies to recognise, but I am suspicious that this isn’t in fact a reversion to traditional Liberal effacing of monarchical symbols. What especially makes me insane about this is that it reinforces the narrative that the Conservatives as the party of the monarchy, inherently politicizing the Crown which should never, ever happen, and which is really, really irresponsible for the Liberals and NDP to engage in. Like, completely and utterly boneheadedly irresponsible. The Crown is our central organising principle. It is the centre of our constitutional framework. I cannot emphasise enough that letting one party drape themselves in the glow of the Crown unchallenged is beyond negligent. Worse, they not only let it go unchallenged by buy into this completely wrong narrative that they’re reverting to Britishisms when the Canadian monarchy is separate and distinct (well, more or less, but there is not grey area thanks to the Conservatives’ completely boneheaded royal succession bill). Rather than defending the Crown of Canada, you now have parties that are playing stupid political games around it, and doing lasting damage to Canadians’ understanding around our very constitutional framework. So slow claps all around, because this is the height of ignorant wrongheadedness. Everyone needs to be spanked for this petty and irresponsible nonsense.
https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/716069134925103104
https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/716069379809480705
Dear @davidpugliese: Canadian monarchy. It’s a Thing, and it’s distinct from the British Monarchy. pic.twitter.com/yeX5MxBn1C
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) April 2, 2016
Update:
I may have been hasty about the pips, as there may be good reason to change them. The rest of my points, about allowing the Crown to be politicized (especially since it allows more clueless journalists to put this frame around it), and my own trepidation about the Liberal penchant for effacing Crown symbols, remains.
@pmlagasse Simply corrects over-reach on Army General ranks. Pips had no place on a Cdn Uniform as they are based on Order of the Bath
— Richard Berthelsen (@rberthelsen) April 2, 2016
Roundup: Minimizing blame
The NDP’s election debrief has been released just days before their big policy convention, in which Thomas Mulcair will need to convince delegates there to let him stay on the job. Little of what was in the report was new, other than name-checking all of the various internal bodies, committees and commissions who were consulted and who have work ahead of them. There were a couple of things that did stand out for me, however. The big one was about communication:
There were many frustrations shared about our internal communications during the campaign. Members, particularly local campaign managers, felt that the reporting from the ground had no effect on the strategic decision-making happening in the central campaign. What was being felt door-to-door was not being communicated, being miscommunicated, or went unheard. Members feel this impeded the ability of the central campaign to shift strategy when necessary.
The party has centralised a whole lot since 2011, and that was certainly reflected. That said, with everyone in the report saying that their local campaigns went great, it does smack a little bit of buck-passing to the central campaign. There were a few other points raised, such as the lack of a Quebec-specific offer, that they were not nimble enough in reacting to attacks from other parties, and that they didn’t adequately prepare for the niqab debate (but everyone was proud of their principled position, which confuses me a bit since the position wound up being that this was a court decision rather than the fact that we don’t tell women what to war in Canada). Glaringly absent in the report was the share of blame placed on Mulcair. In fact, he was barely mentioned at all. This was the closest it got:
We heard disappointment from members who felt that decisions about the strategy employed in the debates led to a situation in which our leader’s full capabilities — as demonstrated in the House of Commons over the previous years — were not on display. Across the country, we heard that our party activists did not understand why we refused to participate in some national debates.
While he wrote the big mea culpa letter taking responsibility, that’s not reflected in their actual debrief, which makes me a bit suspicious. And let’s face it – he had a big part in that, from his demeanour, to his inept slogan of “good, competent public administration,” to his poor debate performance, to the fact that his lack of the same kind of charisma that Trudeau exhibited did weigh in on people’s decisions. I’m left to wonder if the fact that they didn’t include criticisms of his performance in the report because it goes against the party’s solidarity mindset, or if it’s a kind of whitewashing of the record in advance of the leadership review vote. Suffice to say, it doesn’t make the report feel as forthcoming as it could or should be.
Roundup: The modernization agenda
Conservative Senator Thomas McInnis, chair of the new modernisation committee, took to the op-ed pages of the Chronicle Herald to talk about just that – their process of modernising the Upper Chamber by non-constitutional means. While much of the op-ed is pretty standard stuff, he did say a couple of things that intrigued me, so I’ll make brief mention of them. First is that as they contemplate changes and incorporating the increasing number of independent senators, that they need to recognise that since the Senate is not a confidence chamber, it doesn’t need to organise itself on party lines in the same way that the Commons does. This is an important point, because as much as it is an important concept to have a government and opposition side in our Westminster system of government, the role of the Senate means that it doesn’t need to hew as closely to that model. Now, I do still think that the Government Leader in the Senate should have remained a cabinet minister for the sake of there being someone who can answer for the government in the chamber, as well as to properly shepherd government legislation through the Chamber (the minister-in-all-but-name model that Harper used for Claude Carignan was very much a poor idea that limited the exercise of Responsible Government), the fact that the Senate is not a confidence chamber does blunt my criticisms to an extent. McInnis also dropped hints about one of the modernisation committee’s goals being to strengthen the role of being an “effective” representative for regions and provinces. This is interesting because I do wonder if it means that there will be a push to form regional caucuses within the Senate, as is occasionally brought up. I’m not sure how it would really work – essentially having four or five party-like structures (Ontairo, Quebec, the Maritimes, and the West each being 24-seat regional divisions, plus the additional six seats for Newfoundland and Labrador and one each for the territories could either fold into one of the other regional caucuses or forming a caucus of their own), and how they would then translate that into the committee memberships and so on, but it is an idea that has been mentioned before, so we’ll see what kind of appetite there is for it, or if the new Independent Working Group will hold more sway in terms of keeping the current structure but giving more power to independent senators for committee memberships and the like. With there being no opposition MPs from the whole of the Atlantic provinces, this is where the Senate’s regional role becomes more important – and they have been flexing those muscles when ministers have appeared before them in the new Question Period format – but it remains to be seen how this will translate into workable reforms. Suffice to say, these are conversations that are being had, and we’ll see what the committee reports back in the weeks ahead.
Roundup: Smart, engaged, and too free for comfort
It’s not the first piece that raises these questions, and I’m sure it won’t be the last, but I am starting to become a bit weary of the constant think-pieces that considers it a terrible woe that Justin Trudeau is putting smart and accomplished people in the Senate without the yoke of party discipline to constrain them. And lo, Chris Waddell’s over on iPolitics raises many of these same questions, worried about the lack of a democratic mandate (hint: It’s something called Responsible Government) and being fuzzy on the way the Senate actually operates.
Do Canadians want a more activist Senate composed of people who, while accomplished, have no democratic mandate to act? Do we want to see anyone who was not elected to office regularly rejecting or amending legislation passed by elected representatives? If so, on what basis should they do that? Their personal opinions? The views of others? If so, whose views?
In short, a) the democratic mandate comes from the constitution and our system of Responsible Government, where the government that holds the confidence of the Chamber can make such appointments and be responsible for making them; b) This fear that the Senate will suddenly start rejecting bills is nonsense. They’re aware of their role and the fact that they’re not elected, and they tend to exercise their powers with a little too much restraint if you ask me; c) They should do so on the basis of the constitution and whether it’s bad legislation. And yes, elected representatives do pass bad bills where Senators actually read them and find out that hey, it’s a bad bill and needs to be either amended, delayed, or outright stopped; d) Why does a party whip make the Senate rejecting or amending bills any more legitimate than if they do so on the basis of their lifetime of expertise in a given field or based on concerns that aren’t related to whether it’ll get them elected the next time around? Because seriously, that’s part of what “sober” in “sober second thought” means – having a more critical eye that isn’t just about trying to appease the public for short-term electoral gain when there could be bigger things at stake.
Senators don’t just review legislation. They can introduce bills as well — but without a party infrastructure to push such bills through the Senate and then get the attention of the Commons, how many of those bills will be debated in the House, let alone passed?
Yes, they can introduce bills, but they tend to introduce very few, and even fewer of them get very far because they are at the bottom of the list of the Senate’s priorities. And they can get into the Commons by the very same process they do right now – an MP sponsors it, and it goes through on the Order of Precedence. Party infrastructure has nothing to do with it (though the Conservatives did try some shenanigans by all signing up to sponsor Liberal Senate bills in the hopes of delaying and killing them, only to attach their names to bills that were never going anywhere and could backfire on said MPs in that it looked like they were putting their names behind things like stopping the seal hunt, which is political poison). Senate bills are considered Private Members’ Business. This isn’t rocket science.
Once appointed, senators can self-identify the issues they want to pursue in office. Simply by doing that, they make travel costs and expenses incurred in pursuit of those issues Senate business — expenses they can claim, in other words. But those issues are never earmarked by elected officials — so what makes them important enough to be paid for by taxpayers?
Despite the attention paid to Senators’ expenses of late, I’m not overly moved by this line of concern. Without electoral constituencies to concern themselves with, Senators adopt causes, and those causes usually wind up being reflected in committee studies, bills, and reports. And as we’ve found, from both Justice Binnie’s report and the Duffy trial, there are questions raised when Senators start claiming anything as “Senate business,” and yes, there is much more transparency now than there was before, and more rules and reporting yet to come.
Perhaps the fact that we lack answers to these questions of substance is the reason why the Trudeau government has passed just one bill through the Commons for Senate consideration in the five months since it was elected — legislation tabled last December giving it the authority to spend money.
Nope. Nope, nope, nope. This is utterly specious. The government has only passed one bill because they’ve only introduced seven thus far, and are taking them one at a time. That bill was spending estimates, and it had to go through, and lo, the Senate found that the Commons ballsed it up by sending an incomplete bill to them, missing the actual spending schedules. You know, doing their job of oversight when MPs couldn’t be bothered as they passed it at all stages in the span of a few minutes. So if anything, it’s a sign that the Senate is necessary and doing their jobs. Can we please stop this insistence that the only way we want smart and engaged people to have a hand in the parliamentary process is if it’s under the whip? The Senate isn’t a confidence chamber. The pundit class should know these basic facts.
QP: A death in the House
The death of Conservative MP Jim Hillyer shocked Parliament Hill, and all plans for the day were cancelled. The Conservatives cancelled their national caucus meeting to mourn instead, and it was agreed that the day in the Commons would be cancelled after a few brief statements of condolence. Hillyer died in his office on Sparks Street at some point either last night or this morning, likely from a complication to a bone infection that he was suffering from, yet nevertheless insisted on coming to Ottawa for budget day.
The flowers on Jim Hillyer's desk #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/SEbJfFtszv
— Cormac Mac Sweeney (@cmaconthehill) March 23, 2016
Roundup: Expenses arbitration comes back
At long last, former Supreme Court Justice Ian Binnie’s report on his arbitration of Senate expenses was released yesterday, and it should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention that the amounts that many of those senators owed was slashed by a considerable amount. (For others, not so much, but we’ll get to that in a moment). Why? Because in the course of his audit, the Auditor General and his staff made a series of value judgments as part of their report, particularly in instances where senators added personal businesses to Senate-related travel, or when spouses travelled with them. Binnie re-evaluated those claims with more information and a broader mindset and found that indeed, many of those claims were actually reasonable, and he let them go through, cutting the demanded repayments significantly in many cases. In other cases, notably Senator Colin Kenny, he remained unconvinced and ordered them to make their repayments with little or no reductions in the amounts owing. After saying that he wasn’t hired to look into motives of these Senators, he did admit that he felt that for the most part, nobody was actively trying to game the system, but that there were some disagreements in how rules were applied. An interesting turn of events is the fact that Senator Dagenais plans to launch a complaint against the AG for the way in which the audit was conducted, which has most pundits and journalists aghast, because they like to think that the AG can do no wrong (when that is obviously not the case, particularly if one starts digging into some of the value judgments made in the Senate audit). The AG’s response to Binnie’s report was that he thinks that the Senate still needs to follow up on all of his recommendations, including the external oversight body, but I will again raise the point that an external body is a violation of parliamentary privilege, and that the institution needs to be self-governing. This is not a technocracy, and the suggestions by some of an audit committee that is still majority Senate-controlled is a far more acceptable solution. The other bit of interest was the way in which he, intentionally or otherwise, blew holes in the defence offered by Mike Duffy’s lawyers, that the Senate was this lawless and inscrutable place that would have anyone confused. Nonsense, said Binnie – there were rules that mostly required a bit of common sense in their application. One wonders if this is something that Justice Vaillancourt will take note of as he deliberates on Duffy’s fate.
Senator Dagenais’ plan to file a complaint about the Auditor General is an interesting turn of events. #SenCA pic.twitter.com/pbD6kKvu1v
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) March 21, 2016
Roundup: Process questions and straw men
Because it was making the rounds yet again on the Sunday morning politics shows, I figured I should reiterate a few points, plus make a couple of new ones, concerning the new Senate appointments, and the role of the new “government representative.” The first point is that yes, the Senate is going to have to change a few of its rules, and that is a process that has already started and probably won’t be concluded for a few more weeks or months. That we have a name and a face to go with this new role may accelerate the process rather than it being nebulous with Dominic LeBlanc and Maryam Monsef just shrugging and declaring that they were confident that the Senate could work it out. With Peter Harder now in the picture, with an idea about how he wants to tackle his role, there is something a little more concrete in terms of how he wants to shape the new rules to suit his purposes. His budget as “government representative” as opposed to Leader of the Government in the Senate is also up for some debate, particularly within the Internal Economy Committee, just as they are going to have to take up what to do with the new “Independent working-group” and how they want to organise and style themselves so as to give a voice to the independent senators who are currently being frozen out of decision-making processes. (This goes as well for the Rules Committee, which has already been undertaking the question of how to better allow independent senators onto committees, as that process is mostly done behind closed doors by the caucus whips). Harder’s decision to remain officially an independent while taking on this role does complicate things, but nothing is so difficult that it cannot be solved with a little more diligence, and hopefully it won’t be too impeded by some of the more partisan senators on either side of the aisle whose feelings have been bruised by the talk of independence being an improvement on the way the Senate operates. The final point is this constant concern trolling that somehow the budget won’t get passed, or that the government won’t be able to get its agenda through if nobody is there to crack the whip. It’s a lot of specious reasoning predicated on a number of straw men, ignorant of history and civic literacy. Apparently every time the governing party in the Senate was in the minority there was some kind of constitutional crisis, which is false, and no, budgets were not held up or defeated. The Senate is very reluctant to stop any bill because they are aware of their democratic legitimacy (and yes, they do have it by virtue of Responsible Government so don’t even go there), and when they have defeated legislation, it is generally for good reason, such as constitutionality, the legislation being out of bounds, or the fact that the country was not on side with it, and it needed to be put to a test (such as with free trade in the 1980s). They have a job to do. I’m particularly galled at those concerned that the Senate is going to suddenly be empowered to use their constitutional veto powers if they are more independent and less beholden to the government of the day, never mind that the Senate has not abused its veto in decades. They were given those powers for a reason, and yes, sometimes elected legislators get things wrong and there needs to be a mechanism to stop their legislation. But this pearl-clutching about the new state of affairs really needs to stop.