Tag Archives: Tony Clement

Roundup: Beware blinkered history

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There is always a danger in trying to look for lessons from history when you do so selectively. This is the case with a column by William Watson in today’s Ottawa Citizen. Watson – an economics professor at McGill and not a parliamentary observer, it should be noted – dug through the 1917 Hansard to look over the debates on bringing in income tax (remember, this was the “temporary” wartime measure that was introduced and then eventually became a permanent thing), and discovered that lo, the debate was so much more serious then and nothing like things are today, ergo Parliament was better in 1917 than it is today.

And then I bashed my head against my desk for a while.

This is what happens when you take a look at a narrow slice of history without actually looking at the broader context or picture. It’s easy to take a single debate and declare a golden age because hey, the government of the day was giving complex answers to complex questions, but that’s not to say that there weren’t antics that took place. Remember that this was not far removed from the days when MPs would light firecrackers and play musical instruments to disrupt the other side during debate. Hell, I was speaking to a reporter who was in the Gallery during WWII, and she said that there was far less professionalism in those days, and MPs who got bored would often break into song during debate. This was also the era before TV, before the proceedings were recorded in audio or video and able to be checked, so we don’t know what the transcriptionists missed. It was also an era where I’m sure that time limits for questions and answers were looser than they are now, and where MPs weren’t playing up for the cameras. Does that make it better? Maybe, maybe not. Parliament was also composed entirely of white men, mostly of a professional background – does that make things any better? You tell me. Parliament had very different responsibilities in those days as well, and government was much, much smaller. Patronage ruled the day, and government was more involved in direct hires of the civil service rather than it being arm’s length. Is this something we want to go back to? Watson kind of shrugs this important distinction off because they had more meaningful exchanges about income tax.

Declaring simply that Parliament was composed of “intelligent, informed adults” in 1917, and the implication that it is not so today, is a grossly blinkered view of history and of civics. I will be the first to tell you that the state of debate today is pretty abysmal when it mostly consists of people reading statements into the record, talking past one another, but that doesn’t mean that MPs aren’t intelligent or informed. Frankly, it seems like Watson is longing for the days of the old boys’ club if you read some of his nostalgic commentary. I’m not sure that’s proof that things were better then, and it certainly should be a caution about taking a blinkered view of history.

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Roundup: Not really elected, not really a betrayal

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Alberta Conservative Senator Doug Black announced yesterday that he was going to sit as an independent, and a bunch of tongues started wagging because Black is one of the “elected” (and I do use the term loosely) Senators. A number of people also said a bunch of boneheaded things about the move, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but first, a refresher on the “election.”

For those of you who were unaware, Alberta has run a series of nonsense “consultative elections” for “senators in waiting” a few times, and it’s a process that has been problematic on a number of levels, not to mention the fact that the whole thing is unconstitutional. I mean if you want to elect Senators, then there’s a process, which is the general amending formula of the constitution, meaning seven provinces that represent 50 percent of the population. That didn’t happen, however Stephen Harper appointed from this list. Among the quirks of these “consultative elections” is that the candidates were largely running on the tickets of provincial parties – you know, ones that don’t exist on the federal level, not to mention the fact that the provincial Liberals boycotted an unconstitutional process, and the NDP refused because they want to abolish the Senate altogether. So this last time around you Senators running under the provincial Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose Party, both of whom were pledged to sit as federal Conservatives, never mind that the two parties are different and don’t actually stand for the same things. And did we mention that this is an unconstitutional process? Because it is – you can’t do through the back door what you can’t through the front, never mind that Harper and the Alberta government at the time figured you could.

So what does this have to do with his decision to leave caucus? Well, people like Senator Don Plett are angry, calling this a “betrayal,” while his fellow “elected” Senator Scott Tanas was passive aggressive in his “disappointment” with the move. Plett went so far as to start saying that this was Black’s way of avoiding the whip as he apparently has a terrible attendance record (note: this could be verified, if one actually wanted, and I’m not sure that I care enough to go digging), and moaning that these “votes” have been “deprived of a Conservative representative.” And this is all very much like the floor-crossing debate, which is ridiculous. MPs are elected on an individual basis – our first-past-the-post system gives them enormous agency because they are elected as an individual, even if they are running on a party ticket. They are not there because their party won votes and they are apportioned the seat off of a list (which empowers the party, not the MP). For a senator, however, they are appointed with a great deal of institutional independence, because that is what their job requires of them if they are to be able to push back against a majority government when required, or speak truth to power without fearing for their jobs. And no, Black was not “elected” – he was appointed, despite it being on the basis of a sham “consultative” process. So guess what – with that institutional independence, he can choose whether he wants to sit in a caucus or not. It’s why a Prime Minister should be very careful in the vetting process before they appoint someone (and no, an election is not necessarily a good vetting process, particularly given the way that the Alberta process was run, and gosh, it’s not like bad apples have ever been elected before). So really, the fact that he claims to be “elected” is of little consequence with this move, other than as a kind of “fun fact.” If he wants to sit as an independent, then more power to him.

Meanwhile, Senator Patrick Brazeau’s suspension is now over and he’s back to work, vowing to “clean up” the Senate – which gives one flashbacks of an acquitted OJ Simpson vowing to catch his wife’s killer. And no, Brazeau’s legal troubles aren’t over.

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Roundup: Values versus mechanics

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I am just about at my limit for hot takes on both Brexit and electoral reform here in Canada, and lo, the Citizen has an op-ed out that combines the two of them. How scintillating! Except not. After dire warnings about what Brexit did for referendums, we get an appeal for a discussion on “values” rather than mechanics when it comes to discussing electoral reform.

Nope. Nooooope.

When I’ve finished banging my head against my desk for the sheer ridiculousness of the piece, I’ve got a couple of bones to pick with it.

The mechanics of any electoral system are important to understand what it produces in terms of government, kinds of parties and representatives. The guide also discusses design variations, which could be good if citizens were being asked to design a system. But citizens are not being asked to do that when they hold these informal meetings. And an obsession about design mechanics only perpetuates the wrong-headed nature of the conversation. It’s like arguing over the options on a car before you’ve chosen the model.

The problem is that nobody is actually talking about the mechanics. Sure, you have a couple of people griping over MMP versus ranked ballot, but nobody is talking about the bigger picture. There is no obsession about design mechanics – it’s all been about feelings and “fairness,” and this fantasyland notion that somehow parties will be forced to be more cooperative under whichever system is eventually chosen (which is utter tripe) or that voters will somehow turnout more (also tripe), and nobody talks about what it means that you are no longer voting for an MP in a direct and meaningful way that gives them direct agency. Mechanics matter, and nobody is discussing it, so I don’t know where this prof is getting the idea that there’s an obsession with it.

The focus of these town halls should be on what values matter most to Canadians in an electoral system. I think citizens care less about the allocation of seats than they do about how each system embodies principles such as accountability, fairness, simplicity and inclusiveness.

Wait – how much ink has been spilled to date over the allocation of seats? It’s the very first thing that the sore loser brigade starts whinging about. So yes, apparently Canadians do care about it insofar as they misunderstand how the current system works and are being told that it’s unfair based on the fantasy number of the popular vote (which we’ve already established is not a real number). Also, nobody is talking about what actual accountability means (like being able to turf a government) rather than the fuzziest of notions about your MP responding to you as a voter. And there’s that “fairness” word again, which is that emotive word that people whinge about without understanding how the system works – just that the party they support didn’t get as many seats as they feel they deserved, based on numbers that don’t exist in reality.

Should an electoral system offer greater voter choice, create effective parties, be simple and practical or offer fairness of representation? These are ideals that both reformers and non-reformers can rationally discuss without getting lost in the weeds of how votes are transferred under single transferable vote.

And here we get to the part where we apparently want a discussion about unicorns, because that’s all these ideals are. Everyone wants a magical electoral outcome, but they don’t actually understand how the system works now, so this is all about wish fulfilment and fantasy projection. This is why a discussion about mechanics matters. We can talk values until doomsday, and it will be worthless because unless you have a solid conception about what your vote actually means from a mechanical perspective, then it might as well be pixie dust.

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Roundup: Automatic disqualifiers

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It has been talked about before on this blog, and will probably be talked about again, but the selection process for those 19 vacant Senate seats is now open, and the process allows people to nominate themselves if they so choose. There’s a good piece about this and how it contributes to selection bias in the appointment panel, but the head of said panel insists that they are reaching out to all manner of groups to get names to consider but they are using the individual application process to help broaden the search to ensure that they don’t miss out on anyone who is worthy of the job. Of course, self-selection should probably be considered as criteria for elimination off the start – usually it tends to indicate a particular over-inflated sense of self (and yes, I do know of a couple of people who have been looking to get their names submitted as part of this process, and yes, they are a bit narcissistic), and a betrayal of what a Senate appointment should be about. Really, it should be about a way of contributing to public service when one’s career is winding down, and of being able to contribute to the public dialogue given a particular perspective. It’s almost like a form of recognition for doing good work over a lifetime, and being given an opportunity to give back a little more (because really, the salary isn’t as generous as people like to portray it as, given the amount of work that tends to be involved). It’s always been a bit contentious when prime ministers appointed people in terms of their age and place in their career. Some, like Chrétien, tended to appoint them too old so that they only had a short time to contribute, which hurts the ability to have the Senate serve as a chamber of institutional memory and longer-term vision. But sometimes they appoint people far too young – Harper’s appointment of Patrick Brazeau being but one shining example of how poor of a choice that really was. Let’s hope that this is one of those considerations that the independent panel becomes a bit more cognisant of as they move ahead with this next phase of their task.

Meanwhile, here’s a look at the Senate’s revamped communications effort and the team they’ve assembled to do the work, which is moving away from bland and safe to being more response and proactive in reaching out to showcase the work of the Senate and of individual senators.

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Roundup: Rebutting the reformers’ complaints

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If it were possible for someone to write a column that was basically one long subtweet, then I’m pretty sure that it’s what Andrew Coyne did with his column on electoral reform, with me as his unspoken target – particularly as he parroted several of my arguments (that no one else seems to be making) without actually getting their substance correct. So here we go.

When proportional representation advocates complain that the allocation of seats among the parties in the legislature does not resemble their relative shares of the votes cast — with the especially unhappy effect of allowing a minority of the voters to rule over the majority — first past the post’s defenders reply: why should it? Members were elected in 338 separate riding elections, not in a single nationwide vote.

Yes, and that’s pointed out for a number of reasons – that the vote share figure that reformers cite as evidence is not actually real (hence its use as evidence is meaningless), and the fact that each MP is elected to a single seat in a separate election has a particular meaning that gives them individual agency rather than making them a thrall of a particular party. This is an important consideration in the electoral system because it gives a clear line for how MPs are empowered, which is what we keep insisting we want. It also demonstrates that if the complaint is that MPs aren’t empowered, it’s because it’s their own choice or ignorance – not the electoral system that is at fault.

When reformers point out the imbalance this creates between voters — in a given election it typically takes many more votes to elect a member from one party than another — first-past-the-posters look positively mystified: everyone gets one ballot. And when the former observe that under first past the post the votes cast for anyone but the leading candidate in a riding are “wasted,” in the sense that they do not contribute to electing anyone, the latter lose all patience. How could any of the votes have been wasted, they ask, if all were counted? The candidate who was elected may not have been everyone’s choice, but he still represents everyone.

Here Coyne adopts the same specious math that the Broadbent Institute was pushing over Twitter yesterday, which ignores how ridings actually work, and that elections are 338 separate events, and mashes the figures together and divides by 338, pretending that it’s a number with meaning when it’s not – just like the popular vote. It’s pretty much like bringing a unicorn to a logic exam. As well, he doesn’t make a compelling argument about why votes are “wasted” because it ignores the broader political ecosystem. It has little to do with the fact that the MP who won the seat represents everyone, but that the vote itself is but one small piece of political engagement. Casting a vote is not the end-all-be-all of political engagement. Rather, the system is built for people to be joining parties and engaging at a grassroots level to develop policy and for riding associations to act as interlocutors between the local community and the caucus, even when they don’t have a local MP in that party. As well, the percentage by which the MP won the seat is a figure that matters. If it’s by a slim margin, then those votes against are certainly not “wasted” – they have a meaning in the message that it sends to the MP about where his or her support lies. That matters.

To reformers’ complaints about how the system works, in other words, the answer commonly offered is: that’s how the system works. It is as if that were not just the system we have now, but the only system there is. And of course if you assume that then yes, reformers’ objections become literally incomprehensible. They might as well object to the weather. If only one member can be elected per riding, then obviously it’s silly to talk about wasted votes, or to complain that voters who supported another candidate are not represented. That’s life. Suck it up. The resulting parliament was not proportional? That’s not how our system works.

No, that’s not why one has to point out that it’s how the system works – one needs to point that out because you need to understand how the system works before you go about changing it, which usually means breaking things and making them worse. It has been proven that every time we tinker with our system, we make it worse, which leads us to want to tinker with it more, breaking it even further. Why? Because people don’t understand how the system works, so they assume that it’s broken, particularly if they get emotional that it doesn’t do what they think it should. This is the whole premise of my book – that we need to stop and understand how and why things work the way they do before we go about messing with the system some more because history has shown repeatedly that tinkering makes it worse. Ignorance is literally killing our democracy, and no matter how well intentioned its reformers tend to be, they almost always make it worse.

At any rate, it’s worth debating. Some might argue that single-member ridings give constituents a clearer sense of who to take their problems to, and who to hold to account. Others might reply that, with several members competing to represent them, constituents might get better service: if one didn’t answer your letter, another might.

From here, Coyne goes off about how maybe multi-member ridings would be better, possibly sprinkled in with single-member ones where they would be too large (hello, all of rural and remote Canada), which immediately brings up questions about how that could possibly be considered a more fair system. And while he touches ever so briefly on accountability, he gets the premise wrong – an MP’s job is not to “service” one’s constituents. It’s about holding the government to account. This, however, is lost on the reformers, whose fetishisation with fantastical notions about “representation” overshadow all other aspects of how the system works in its broader ecosystem. Yes, representation is a part of it, but it is not the totality, and yet that is what all of their reforms are geared toward with no regard for the bigger whole.

So no, it’s not about whether other systems are possible – it’s about not making things worse because you don’t understand how things work now. That’s a very different thing entirely.

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Roundup: Everyone’s an expert

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More amendments to C-14 in the Senate, and the very real threat from senators that they would rather veto a bad law (such as the bill as originally drafted) than let it pass and have to head back to the courts, is prompting everyone to consider themselves an expert on the Senate and how to reform it. After days of clutched pearls by pundits and the odd bit of praise (such as Martin Patriquin’s grudging admission that the Senate is a necessary evil), we’re also starting to get some pretty bizarre pieces out there, like one from iPolitics, where they got a mining company CEO to weigh in on reforming the chamber.

No, seriously.

Apparently, according to this “expert,” Trudeau has gotten it all wrong by creating a situation with “no enforceable rule,” and apparently we’ve never had a situation in the past 149 years where bills bounced back-and-forth between the chambers. Err, except that there have never been real levers by which a Prime Minister could control the chamber, only sentiment on the part of senators in his or her caucus, and we’ve had plenty of situations where bills went back-and-forth, including to having conferences between chambers (a situation which is unwieldy in the current configuration of the Senate). And while Trudeau has made mistakes, he is not to blame for the Senate’s actual constitutional powers, which are currently being demonstrated.

But wait – there’s more!™

Our CEO “expert” says that the solution is not Triple E (thankfully), but rather to reduce senators’ term limits to 12 years, to give provinces a veto on their nominees to represent them, and to ensure that a nomination panel ensures that “a new Senate is younger, more representative and better qualified for the work by credentials and life experience.”

Term limits are a solution in search of a problem because they reduce institutional independence. The problem, identified in the Ontario factum to the Supreme Court reference, is that a senator nearing their term limit can start to curry favour with the government in hopes of a post-Senatorial appointment to a tribunal or diplomatic posting. By ensuring that their end date is age 75, it scuppers those plans and keeps Senators from sucking up. Provincial vetoes? Well, senators are not there to represent provincial governments. They are not even technically representing provinces, but rather regions, and their representation tends to be for minority communities, be they linguistic, ethnic or even religious, which was the express purpose for why the Senate was built in the way that it was. And demands for a younger Senate clash with the desire to get accomplished Canadians to serve in its ranks toward the end of their careers so that they can draw on their decades of experience, and if you look at some of the qualifications of our current senators, they are on the whole a very accomplished group indeed (some exceptions apply).

So rather than get some CEO to bloviate without any actual institutional knowledge or awareness, perhaps we should all brush up on our civic literacy and learn about the chamber as it currently exists before start weighing in on how to fix something that is not actually fundamentally broken.

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Roundup: Peter Harder’s ham-handed problems

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First it was the curious announcement from long-time Liberal Senator (and one-time leader of the provincial Liberal party) Grant Mitchell was stepping away from the senate caucus to sit as an independent. For someone as nakedly partisan as Mitchell, it was a curious move that raised a number of questions for me. Then, later in the evening, news came down that Peter Harder, the “government representative” in the Senate, will be naming a deputy and a whip, and that whip was to be Mitchell. (The deputy was named as Diane Bellemare, who was a Conservative senator who quit that caucus a couple of months ago and became a founding member of the Independent Working Group). In amidst a number of smartass remarks going around the Twitter Machine about how an independent whip was supposed to work, I will offer again the reminder that in the Senate, the job of the whip is more about logistics and administration with things like assigning offices and parking spaces, and with organizing committee assignments and seeing that absences are filled on committees than it is about telling senators how to vote. Likewise, deputy leaders in the Senate are much more equivalent to House Leaders in the Commons, where they help determine scheduling of debates on bills and so on. But given that Justin Trudeau was looking to shake up the way the Senate operates, thus far it has mostly been about rebranding the office of Government Leader in the Senate under a new name and maintaining the “not a minister in name only” fiction that Harper employed when he wanted to put distance between himself and the Senate. Add to that the odd insistence that Peter Harder sit as an independent while taking on this role, which is problematic at best. But if his job is just to represent the government, and to shepherd legislation through the Chamber, then why does Harder need a second person to do the House Leader-equivalent work, or a whip for the independents – particularly when the Independent Working Group has been working on developing a system of administrative representation for those unaligned senators. It smacks to me that Harder, whether with the blessing of Trudeau or not, is trying to impose a top-down organisation for unaligned senators in the chamber rather than letting the bottom-up process that the Working Group is engaged in run its course. While I’m not indulging the conspiracy theories that this is all a crypto-Liberal charade playing out, I do think that Harder is overstepping here by a great degree. Sure, it looks greatly symbolic that he got a Conservative and a Liberal with him to do these tasks, but it does look like he’s trying to impose something on the new independent senators that currently goes against what the Senate rules allow (being of course a caucus organisation that is not tied to an existing federal political party). As with Harder trying to get an inexplicably big staff for the job he says he plans to do (as opposed to the old job of Government Leader), this new move is problematic. It could very well be that Harder doesn’t know what he’s really doing and how the Senate operates, which was always the going to be a problem when Trudeau insisted that his “representative” would come from the first batch of independent appointments. But these ham-handed moves are making that problem all the more glaring. This is an increasingly obvious example of Trudeau not thinking through his Senate plans and ballsing it up as he goes along because he doesn’t understand the institution either, and that is a problem.

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Roundup: Friendly fire death

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With news of a death by friendly fire in Iraq, one can pretty much imagine how this is going to become the fodder of QP over the coming days – much of it likely to be condemnation about a mission where these special operations forces were never supposed to be near the front lines in the first place, and a government that will be urging patience for the outcome of the investigations into just what happened that night when our troops came under fire. To add insult, the Kurdish forces took to their local media to blame the Canadians for the incident, but there are already dissenting reports, saying that their version doesn’t fit with the facts on the ground, including the maxim that “special forces don’t freelance” – hence why the government will be urging calm until an investigation happens. Just don’t hold your breath when it comes to requests not to politicise this death, because we’ve already crossed that line.

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Roundup: Two suspensions and a resignation

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Two Liberal MPs – Scott Armstrong and Massimo Pacetti – were suspended from caucus yesterday following complaints of harassment by two NDP MPs. Thus kicked off a firestorm of calls for independent investigations, bringing in the Speaker, and yes, political gamesmanship. There was, of course, a time when this kind of thing would be handled by the whips and party leaders behind closed doors, but in light of the Jian Gomeshi allegations and the conversation the nation is having about sexual harassment more broadly, Justin Trudeau felt he had no choice but to suspend the members pending an investigation, so that justice was seen to be done. But the fact that he didn’t inform the unnamed accusers – who had brought the matter to his attention in the first place – that he was doing this is suddenly bringing up accusations that he “re-victimised them,” as opposed to leaving him open to accusation that he did nothing when he was made aware of the allegations. The details of all of what happened remain sketchy, and the NDP are even more opaque on what happened and won’t confirm the details that the Liberal whip has revealed, and even the allegations are mostly couched in terms of “personal misconduct,” which both suspended MPs deny, Pacetti going so far as to say that he still don’t know what it is he’s being accused of. Aaron Wherry has collected the various letters and statements that were put out from the Liberal Whip, the Speaker, Thomas Mulcair, Trudeau, and the two suspended MPs. Chantal Hébert recalls the kinds of harassment that was on open display when she first arrived on the Hill in the late 70s. The Ottawa Citizen editorial board says that this story, now part of that conversation about sexual harassment an assault in this country, will hopefully start to bring about change. Similarly, Canadian Business discusses the need to stop treating sensitivity training with mocking, but rather as a way to shift reporting away from the victims alone and putting more onus on bystanders.

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Roundup: Funerals and personal trainers

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Mike Duffy’s charge sheet has been released, which gives us a few more details about the 31 charges he is now facing. Some of those include the contract he gave to a friend for little or no work, of which some of those funds were funnelled elsewhere – including to a make-up artist and personal trainer – and that some of the claimed expenses were to attend funerals or other such ceremonies. Duffy of course denies any wrongdoing. Here is an updated timeline of the whole expenses scandal in the Senate.

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