Tag Archives: Trans

Roundup: Dubious procedural moves and political theatre

Posted on by

We are now on or about day sixty-four of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the big news is that Russia is cutting off natural gas to Poland and Bulgaria, ostensibly because they refuse to pay in rubles as Russia demands. The real reason is, of course, blackmail over support for Ukraine, as well as an attempt to divide Europe, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.

Closer to home, there is some procedural bullshit going down, and I’m unimpressed. The government has put forward an omnibus motion that would give them the power to start implementing late-night sittings right away, rather than in the few weeks before the break, and even more curious is the notion that they would give ministers the ability to adjourn the Commons for the summer with no notice, and a simple vote call. The late-night sittings—with the added language that those sittings can’t be obstructed with dilatory motions—makes a certain amount of sense in that the procedural warfare that plagued them last year has made a comeback, and they haven’t even managed to pass the budget implementation bill from December, which is not good. This is in a sense make-up time for all of the time wasted on dilatory motions—actions have consequences. But that ability for a minister to pull the plug for summer at any point really sticks in my craw, and I’m not mollified by Mark Holland insisting that this is only intended for use during the final week. It feels to me a lot like the ability to give themselves a nuclear option to hold over the other parties, including the NDP, if they don’t want to play ball in getting bills through. If Holland really wants this only for the final week, the motion should be drafted to say so.

At the same time, Holland also announced that they were going to move ahead with creating a special security-cleared committee for those Winnipeg Lab documents, whether or not the Conservatives agree to join in. But…this feels like theatre at this point, because the Conservatives stopped boycotting NSICOP, and that’s exactly the kind of thing that committee exists to deal with. And the government already turned over the unredacted documents to NSICOP, so what really is the point here? Aside from political theatre? Why can’t we have grown-ups in charge?

Continue reading →

Roundup: Pre-negotiation and a better debate

Posted on by

In advance of the debate, Justin Trudeau held a photo-op with one of his sons in a pumpkin patch in nearby Manotick, while Jagmeet Singh was at a bistro near Parliament Hill to outline his party’s priorities were they in need of negotiating in a hung parliament, and conveniently, they were all planks of his party platform. Of those six enumerated, four were wholly or in part provincial jurisdiction, one involves building an entirely new tax system, and the final would drive out competition in the mobile phone sector, and then they also decided that electoral reform should be in there as well. (Look for my column on this coming later today). So there’s that. Andrew Scheer had no events, but his party did say that their full platform will be released today, now that the debates are over.

And then the final French debate, which was a far cry better than the hot, hot mess that was the English debate. Possibly learning from the experience, the format changed up considerably, so that there were better questions, more direct engagement, and far less cross-talk (though that did start to creep in during the second hour, when Scheer was trying to go after Yves-François Blanchet). Scheer and May were noticeably weaker in French, while Scheer and Singh in particular kept up their focus on getting their canned one-liners delivered, even if it was tortured to get them in. Nevertheless, while we once again didn’t learn too many new things, it was a far and above better performance for all involved than the English disaster. (Here’s Paul Wells’ take on the night).

Continue reading →

Roundup: Importing the culture war

Posted on by

We’re not even in the writ period, and the imported culture war bullshit is already at a fever pitch. In order to capitalize on it being Ottawa Pride this weekend, the Liberals started passing around a video of Andrew Scheer’s 2005 speech denouncing same-sex marriage, under the rubric of Ralph Goodale calling on Scheer to attend his hometown Pride in Ottawa this weekend. (Note: We’ll see if Trudeau makes it to Ottawa Pride this year, as he may not be back from the G7 meeting in France. Trudeau has only ever appeared at Ottawa’s Pride parade once). And off they were to the races. Scheer’s director of communications said that Scheer “supports same-sex marriage as defined in law,” and would uphold it as prime minister – and then proceeded to name Liberals who previously voted against it.

What’s particularly cute about this defence of Scheer is that it does not say that Scheer’s views have evolved, and the use of “as defined in law” is that the law was a result of a Supreme Court of Canada reference, so there is no way that any government could try to repeal it without invoking the Notwithstanding Clause to escape a Charter challenge. But beyond that, Scheer’s people have not offered any kind of defence that he voted against the trans rights bill in 2016, which is more current and pressing of a rights issue than where we are with same-sex marriage. But it’s not really about same-sex marriage at all – it’s all about our political class being high on the fumes of the American culture war that they’ve been inhaling, and are trying desperately to recreate here because they all think it’ll be a political winner for them, rather than the fact that it will simply burn the house down around them.

In amidst this, Jagmeet Singh decided that he wanted to get in on the culture war action and declared that he wouldn’t prop up a Conservative government in a hung parliament based on this (fourteen-year-old) homophobia – which essentially means that he’s conceded that he’s not running to be the prime minister in the election, but is content to stay as the third party. There’s realism, and then there’s bad strategy. Singh then went on to list all of the Liberal failures on the LGBT file – except most of the ones he listed are in areas of provincial jurisdiction. Oops. This election is already so, so very stupid.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Traps and tantrums

Posted on by

Budget Day was a giant production, for a variety of reasons yesterday, starting with the long-awaited showdown at the Commons justice committee. Given that the Liberal members had released that letter the night before, we knew that they were going to wrap it all up – without a report, I might add – and on their way in this morning, they handed to the media a copy of the motion they were planning to move to start a new study on hate crimes (because this increasingly seems like what the Liberals want to fight the next election on). Well, this caused the opposition to storm out because that motion was supposed to be in camera (and we all know how much they’ve respected the notion that committee business be handled in camera of late), and then they came back and had their meeting, and the committee (read: Liberal majority) decided to end the study of the Double-Hyphen Affair.

This set the Conservatives off, and they warned that they would ensure that the budget was going to be delayed, mark their words, and they set up all manner of procedural trickery in which to do so. Except that the Liberals outplayed them, tabled the document just before 4 PM, right before the vote was being called that was intending to delay the budget speech, and then Bill Morneau marched out to the Foyer to start talking to all of the assembled media outlets and get his message out, while the opposition stayed in the Chamber to carry on their procedural shenanigans, to the point where they essentially held themselves hostage. When Morneau was able to give his speech, well over an hour later, the Conservatives did ensure that he was drowned out with noise so that he couldn’t be heard and that no clips were able to be captured for news media, but given how Morneau was doing the media rounds and Scheer wasn’t – indeed, after the fact, when he and his caucus marched out to the Foyer, they denounced the budget as a distraction from the Double-Hyphen Affair, and had nary a substantive comment on it. (Jagmeet Singh, incidentally, had the usual NDP talking points about how it wasn’t enough, but couldn’t really respond when pressed about specifics or implementation of their vision). So, take it for what you will, I’m not sure how well the Conservatives came across in the end yesterday, especially as Scheer walked right into Trudeau’s very obvious trap that about the Conservatives not wanting to talk about the economy.

Speaking of the budget, it was far more stimulus-heavy than I would have expected, but then again, targeting both seniors and millennials, and going some distance in doing more for skills training, though their housing affordability measures were weak sauce and will likely do nothing about the supply side of the issue (especially as they keep the focus on buying a home rather than simply having affordable housing writ large).

With that in mind:

  • The deficit will grow this year before shrinking again, but there is no path back to balance in the immediate future. (Debt-to-GDP continues to decline).
  • Here are the highlights for five key demographics.
  • Here are 23 key measures in the budget.
  • There was the start of Pharmacare, beginning with the Canadian Drug Agency to facilitate bulk buying – next steps coming with the Hoskins report.
  • Municipalities got a chunk of new funding (with shots taken at premiers who are holding up infrastructure agreements).
  • There are more funds earmarked for Indigenous services, not only with water but also child and family services.
  • The budget also outlines a plan to start targeting stock options for taxation as another way of soaking the wealthy.
  • There is a plan to start taxing cannabis products by the potency of their THC.
  • The budget has money to help veterans transition to civilian life, but doesn’t seem to have anything to deal with the disability backlog.
  • There was a big commitment on rural broadband, but implementation details remain fuzzy.
  • Here are ten things that may slip under the radar.
  • Here’s a fact-check of Morneau’s speech (but the sources could have been better selected).

In budget hot takes, Chris Selley calls it the budget of a government that is no longer selling utopia – just buying votes, whereas Alan Freeman simply calls it a “do no harm” budget. John Geddes details the spending surprises in the document, while Andrew Coyne grouses about the how there seems to be more concern over the quantity of spending over the quality of it, given there is nothing in the budget about things like productivity. Heather Scoffield takes note of the Liberals’ attempt to frame the budget as a response to anxieties – economic or otherwise – that Canadians are feeling. Kevin Carmichael cautions that there budget leaves very little wiggle room for economic downturns, given how sluggish growth already is. Paul Wells notes the sprinkling of spending throughout the document, and the big bomb for political journalists in there. There are also worthwhile threads from economist Kevin Milligan here and here.

Continue reading →

Roundup: More Bernier fallout

Posted on by

Because we can’t stop talking about the Maxime Bernier “ouster,” if it can really be called that since it was more a demotion than anything, but it still got all of the tongues wagging, and all of the reporters cornering every Conservative they could find. And most of those Conservatives downplayed the whole thing, Erin O’Toole going so far as to say that hey, there are other shadow cabinet changes coming so no big deal. The underlying message was that Bernier “broke his word” about the book chapter, which is a semantic game, but given some of the various dynamics in play, it’s hard not to try and find additional drama into the whole affair.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1006872600994123777

That Rob Silver tweet may be even closer to home than most people want to admit. I have to say that there have been some pretty spectacular expectations heaped on Bernier, particularly because he speaks to a certain slice of the party, but perhaps in a more superficial way than they want to believe. After all, many of the Ayn Rand-readers are desperate to attach themselves to someone in the party who represents them (never mind that this isn’t a party of libertarians or even economic conservatives, but right-flavoured populists), so he was someone that they could pin those hopes to, ignoring a lot of what he actually said and did. His lack of judgment when he was foreign affairs minister under the Harper government was stunning, both in his intemperate comments in Afghanistan, or with the security of documents with his then-girlfriend. During the leadership campaign, he would sign off on social media campaigns that dogwhistling to MRAs before claiming he didn’t know about the connotations of “red pills” and so on (and knowing who was running that campaign, they couldn’t not know what it meant). And his constant self-promotion in opposition to Scheer post-leadership is another sign of poor judgment. And really, we shouldn’t discount this particular bit of reasoning.

In further analysis on the whole brouhaha, John Ivison keeps his ear to the ground in the caucus and wonders if Bernier’s ouster from shadow cabinet may force a rift in the party given how close the leadership vote was. Chantal Hébert notes that it was probably a matter of time before things with Bernier came to a head (as she suggests he’s not too well-liked among his Quebec colleagues) and that the by-election timing made it something Scheer couldn’t ignore. Andrew MacDougall sees this as a failing by Scheer to manage his caucus, not properly communicating with Bernier when necessary, and keeping him outside of the fold at a time when he should have drawn him in to get his cooperation on the issue at a time when it’s under attack by the likes of Trump. Andrew Coyne similarly sees this as a failing by Scheer, but for the fact that he has bought into the line that caucus must sing from a single song sheet, particularly on an indefensible policy like Supply Management. Colby Cosh sees not only political games from Bernier, but explicit quid pro quo from Scheer for his dairy supporters who (allegedly) put him over the top in the race (though I’m not sure we have any actual proof of this), and that those dairy lobbyists have successfully leveraged intra-party dynamics to their advantage.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Procedural shenanigans beget the new anthem

Posted on by

There has been some drama in the Senate over the past couple of days as the procedural shenanigans to bring the national anthem bill to a final vote culminated in a motion to call the vote, and eventually that happened. The bill has passed, and the new national anthem will be law once the Governor General gives it royal assent. But the procedural moves have the Conservatives in a high dudgeon, somewhat legitimately.

https://twitter.com/larrywsmith36/status/958840131481423872

My understanding of events was that the main motion to call the vote has been on the Order Paper for months, and was finally called Tuesday night. This was a debatable motion, and likely would have sparked a few weeks of adjournments and debate, but ultimately would have delayed the vote for only that long. But a second, also legitimate procedural move was used by another Independent senator immediately following, and Speaker apparently didn’t hear Senator Don Plett’s desire to debate it. What I’ve been able to gather is that this was likely a mistake given lines of sight, but were compounded by tactical errors on the Conservatives’ part in demanding to debate the first motion and not the second (or something to that effect). Points order were debated last night, but they had agreed to end the sitting at 4 PM in order to have the votes at 5:30, and when they didn’t get unanimous consent to extend the sitting, debate collapsed and when 5:30 rolled around, the Conservatives boycotted the vote in protest. According to those I’ve consulted, the moves were all legitimate but messy, and have the danger of setting up bad precedent for not allowing debate on this kind of motion.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/958853911888080898

The Conservatives in the Senate, meanwhile, are caterwauling that their democratic rights have been taken away, and there is talk about conspiracy between Mélanie Joly’s staff, and other threads that are hard to track when they’re throwing them against the wall like spaghetti. And while I share the concerns about bad precedent, I can’t say that I have too much sympathy because they’ve used (and one could argue abused) procedure for over a year to keep the bill at Third Reading, with the intent to ultimately delay it until it died on the Order Paper. They insist that they offered the chance to amend it to the more grammatically correct “thou dost in us command” rather than the clunky “in all of us command,” but I find it a bit disingenuous, because it was simply another delay tactic. And I’ve argued before that this continued tendency to use procedural tactics to delay bills is going to end up biting them in the ass, especially because it plays into Senator Peter Harder’s hands in his quest to overhaul the chamber in order to strip it of its Westminster character. The Conservatives are overplaying their hand, and it’s going to make it very difficult to drum up enough legitimate concern to stop Harder when crunch time comes, and they should be very aware of that fact.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/958861523878789120

Continue reading →

Roundup: A complex figure

Posted on by

I really didn’t want to write about this topic, and yet we’re swarming with stories and thinkpieces about it, so in the interest of that, I’ll say a few words, however clumsy and inexpert. On the subject of Sir John A. Macdonald and the current vogue of removing his name from things, I find myself annoyed by so much of it. Part of it is because the sudden rush to start doing this smacks of the me-tooism that so often plagues our political discourse, especially on the left or “progressive” side of things. Having a discussion about Macdonald and his role in the cultural genocide of Indigenous people is not the same thing as removing Confederate monuments in the United States, and yet there is a kind of equivalency being proffered, including by a number of self-righteous activists. They’re different conversations, and trying to equate them does nobody any favours.

Second, Macdonald is a complex figure on pretty much every level. While there has been increasing agitation in his role in promulgating residential schools, or the much-repeated quote about reducing food aid to starving First Nations on the prairies following the collapse of buffalo herd populations, all of that all of this ignores context. While people keep insisting that Macdonald was the architect of genocide, any reading of history that I’ve done is that Macdonald was trying to prevent it, having seen what happened south of the border. The problem is that there was little conception as to how to go about doing it, and there was a great deal of political opposition to his doing do, when there were a great many voices who would have preferred that they starve. That Macdonald mitigated these calls and actually did deliver food aid (which was something that governments were certainly not in the business of in the 1800s), and tried to come up with plans to get them to transition to farming once they couldn’t hunt bison any longer (which didn’t take), and to give them the vote in order to involve them in the political life and decision-making of the country despite that they didn’t own land and would otherwise not eligible under the existing electoral laws of the time (leading to howls that he was giving them “special” rights, which subsequent Liberal governments stripped) – it all should mean something. Yes, what we recognise now as being cultural genocide was an attempt at staving off actual physical genocide. It’s why Macdonald created the Northwest Mounted Police – to ensure that there were orderly treaties rather than the mass slaughter done by the Americans in order to clear lands for settlement. We know this now as the violence of colonisation, while it was trying to do this without the loss of life in the United States is a complicating factor.

So yeah, Macdonald is complex, and you can’t just mark him down in the column of “racist promoter of genocide” and leave it at that, which is why we need conversations about history, but most of what passes for it over social media, between the woke voices crying genocide and their opponents decrying the erasure of history, is not a proper conversation. It also requires a recognition that history is an evolving process, and that adding voices to the narrative isn’t erasing it – it’s adding to it, even if it makes the picture more complicated (not that I’m seeing a desire for nuance on either side). And we’re going to have a lot more conversations about this going forward, if this guide of problematic figures is anything to go by. But given the state of the debate right now, I don’t have high hopes that it’ll be constructive in the immediate term.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Mike Duffy, white knight

Posted on by

Oh, Senator Mike Duffy. For his suffering, he has decided to launch a $7.8 million lawsuit against the RCMP, the Government of Canada, and the Senate itself. It’s not just about the two years of suspension without pay, or the reimbursement or legal fees, or indeed about the further clawbacks of his salary that the Senate undertook for his abuse of expense claims, or about the lost income from speaking fees that he could have claimed had he not been dragged through the process. No, Duffy is so concerned about the lack of Charter rights for those who work on the Hill that he’s willing to take on this multi-million-dollar lawsuit for the principle of the matter.

Such a hero.

https://twitter.com/alisoncrawford5/status/900772376023113729

https://twitter.com/alisoncrawford5/status/900772544394997760

Now, I will be the first to admit that yes, the way in which Duffy’s suspension handled was hugely problematic, and that his rights to due process were trampled on because of political expediency, it cannot be argued that the Senate was illegitimate in the way it acted because as a self-governing parliamentary body, the Senate not only has the ability to police its own, it is in fact the only body that can police its members because of parliamentary privilege and institutional independence.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/900782489937084416

While Duffy’s lawyer was effusive in his characterisation of Duffy’s acquittal, I’m not sure that it completely passes the smell test – Duffy was found not to have met the criminal test for fraud and breach of trust, but you cannot say that no rules were broken. The Senate has pointed to numerous examples where this was the case and fined him appropriately, and while he claims that the rules were too loose and vague, that is certainly not the case with all of his rejected claims. And it will raise questions if this suit goes ahead because the judge’s ruling was indeed problematic (and I know for a fact that there are other judges on that same bench who were not keen on it), and without an appeal being raised, that could raise more questions with this trial – if it goes to trial.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/900796074029395971

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/900796765833756673

Of course, we can’t deny that perhaps Duffy is looking for a settlement of a couple of million dollars, but I’m not sure that of the parties involved, the Senate would bite and go for it. They are still pretty sore about the whole thing and are keen to continue to prove that they are taking a hard line to those who abuse it. I would wager that they are more likely to fight this to the bitter end on principle, come what may.

Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt sees an odd parallel between Duffy and Omar Khadr in that their rights were violated (which is a bit of a stretch, legally speaking), while Christie Blatchford suggests that perhaps Duffy is indeed owed something because his rights to due process were robbed.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/900915036637593600

Continue reading →

Roundup: Senator Greene’s lament

Posted on by

Conservative-turned-independent Senator Stephen Greene took to the pages of the National Post yesterday to decry Andrew Scheer’s plans to return the Senate to a more partisan institution by making partisan appointments, should he ever form a government and be in a position to do so. Much of Greene’s op-ed makes a series of good points, but at the same time, I find myself a bit leery of his particular conclusion that partisanship is a bad thing period. I agree with his points that a too-partisan Senate can simply act as a rubber stamp, which there were many cases that it appeared to during the later Harper years, when they had a comfortable majority in the Upper Chamber and simply went on neglecting needed appointments while letting their caucus be whipped into continued votes in support of legislation, no matter how flawed.

Where Greene’s analysis falls down, however, is the fact that while the tendency in a more partisan Senate to whip votes means there is less pushback against the government of the day, it fails to take into account that to a great degree, it’s not so much the final vote that matters in the bigger picture than what goes on the record. Courts rely on the parliamentary record to help determine what parliament’s intentions were when they are asked to interpret the law, and in cases where opposition parties in the Senate are unable to get enough votes to push through amendments to a bill, they can at least attach observations to it, and ensure that their objections are on the record – something the courts find valuable. The other aspect is that having senators in the caucus rooms provides a great deal of perspective to MPs because the Senate is the institutional memory of Parliament. Not having those voices in the caucus room, behind closed doors, can mean even more power for the leader because there are fewer people who aren’t constrained by the blackmail powers of that leader to not sign nomination forms, for example, who can push back and who can offer the cautions to the other MPs when the leader is overstepping their bounds. Not having those voices in the caucus room diminishes them, which is something that the Liberals have been dealing with (while Trudeau’s office centralizes yet more power as a result).

Greene also doesn’t seem to appreciate the fact that not having party caucuses in the Senate means that opposition is harder to organize, thereby advantaging the government of the day. It also makes ideological scrutiny of government legislation more difficult because a chamber of independents, especially when you have a mass appointed by a government on ideologically similar lines. That is an underappreciated element of the Westminster structure in the Senate that most modernization proponents continually overlook.

While I sympathise with many of his points, and I do recognise that there have been problems with how the Senate has been operating for the better part of a decade, partisan caucuses weren’t the sole cause of those problems. Breaking up the two-party duopoly has been a boon to the Chamber’s governance and management, and that’s why having a “crossbencher” component has proven to be extremely valuable. But doing away with party caucuses entirely is short-sighted, and causes more problems than it solves.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The Canadian pathology meets Rolling Stone

Posted on by

Justin Trudeau was on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine yesterday, which set off the Canadian Twitter sphere along its usual predictable paths. Journalists sniffed at the overly fawning tone of the piece (dismissing it as “political fan fiction”), while also pointing out the factual errors in the piece (apparently, Trudeau leads the “Liberty Party”) and ranking its cringe-worthy moments. The woke crowd railed about how Trudeau really isn’t progressive and how much of a terrible promise-breaking failure he is. And the Conservatives, predictably, acted with usual partisan disdain, so much that it strained credulity (Lisa Raitt in particular took the bizarre track of insisting that this was more damaging to coming NAFTA negotiations than her fellow MPs racing to American media outlets to decry the Khadr settlement). So, really, it was a fairly standard day of social media faux outrage.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/890284884283060229

This all having been said, the one thing that kept going through my head while this was all going on was just how perfectly this whole thing fit into the particular Canadian pathology of demanding approval from the Americans – especially when it comes to our artists or actors. Until they’ve decamped for the States and make it there, we largely tend to treat them with disdain, that they’re some kind of Podunk bush leaguers who obviously aren’t successful enough to have left Canada yet. And yet, the moment they do go to the States and make it big, we turn around and go all tall poppy syndrome on them and tear them apart for thinking that they’re better than us, and how dare they. And this whole Trudeau-Rolling Stone thing smacked of that entirely. The Americans are noticing him, so yay, we’re on the world stage, let’s mark the occasion by writing wire stories about the story and magazine cover, but how dare he seek the spotlight, and how dare they comment on his looks, and how dare they write a puff piece, etcetera, etcetera. Same pathology entirely. It’s boring, guys. Get a grip.

Meanwhile, here’s Robert Hiltz to throw some more cold water on the whole thing.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/890217322966904832

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/890217785137274880

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/890218700128874496

Trudeau, incidentally, also appeared on the West Wing Weekly podcast, and John Geddes dissects Trudeau’s responses and what they all portend.

Continue reading →