Tag Archives: Undermining Parliamentary Democracy

Roundup: Sending in the wrong minister

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The shenanigans at committees on all sides are severely testing my patience, as things continue to spiral toward a potential contempt of Parliament charge, never mind that what’s being demanded is exceeding what is generally acceptable parliamentary norms.

The demands that staffers appear at committee are clearly outrageous and in violation of the sacrosanct notion of ministerial responsibility, but the Liberals are nevertheless pushing the bounds of what is acceptable in and of itself. Instead of sending staffers, they were offered the chance to send the prime minister instead – a bit of a long shot, but sending the Government House Leader was clearly testing the committee’s bounds. For them to then send the Minister for Middle Class™ Prosperity® on a second appearance is definitely pushing buttons, and they should know better. If you’re going to invoke the principle of ministerial responsibility, then gods damned well respect it and put the actual minister forward, and for PMO staff, then the prime minister is the responsible minister. Sending Mona Fortier is a deliberate slap in the face.

At the same time, I am also particularly at the end of my rope with the constant demand for unredacted documents, and the insistence that the House of Commons’ Law Clerk be the one to do any redactions. His office is already buried under the literal millions of documents that the Health Committee demanded, and now the Foreign Affairs committee also wants a piece of him and his time to do even more redactions when the non-partisan civil service is normally the body that does this work. This is generally beyond the scope of what the Law Clerk should be doing, and he’s already stressed his resources and staff to do work they shouldn’t be doing, and yet more MPs keep making even more demands. That’s not how this works, and not how this should work, and yet they keep hand-waving about “cover-up!” as though that’s some kind of talisman. I’m not sure what the solution here is other than telling MPs from all sides to grow up, but that’s where we are.

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Roundup: Cheering on an attack on institutional independence

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Yesterday, Senator Claude Carignan tabled a bill that seeks to strip Julie Payette of her pension, and would strip any former Governor General of a pension if they don’t serve at least five years (never mind that nine of our 29 past Governors General did not serve at least five years). It’s an attack on the institutional independence of an office that can serve as a check on government, and needs to be called out as such.

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1376970875031945217

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1376971807576711168

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But just how was it discussed on Power & Politics last night? Over several segments, each of them with different pundits, the common consensus that this was great populist politics to go after an unpopular figure like Payette, and digging into the issue of their other benefits – because nothing sells in Canadian media like cheap outrage and hairshirt parsimony. The most we got to the cautionary tale was to beware unintended consequences, and that a future GG may have to invent a medical reason for a resignation (which the bill states that Cabinet would have to approve, which is entirely bonkers). Not one person – not one – raised the issue of institutional independence, and why it’s a Very Bad Thing to open the door to governments being able to threaten their financial well-being as a way to hold power over them, most especially when the beneficiaries of this independence (not only the GG, but also senators and Supreme Court justices) provide a check on the power of government. This is the level of discourse in this country? Seriously? And even more to the point, the host of the show kept steering the topic to this kind of populist, vindictiveness rather than the actual consequences of making an action like this. It is absolutely boggling, but it gives you a sense as to why things have degenerated as they have. This bill represents an existential threat to our parliamentary system, and it’s being played for petty drama and populist cheap shots.

We need better pundits in this country, and better politics shows. This is horrifying.

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Roundup: Lying with statistics, quarterly GDP edition

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Statistics Canada released their fourth quarter GDP data yesterday, and it was surprisingly not bad – it far exceeded expectations for growth, with an annualized increase of 9.6 percent, and the estimates of January’s GDP numbers are that they will grow, in spite of renewed lockdowns/mockdowns across much of the country, which is good economic news. Comparatively, OECD data shows that Canada ranked second out of G7 countries in terms of GDP growth over the quarter – only Japan beat us. This should give rise to some cautious optimism about the direction of our economic recovery.

https://twitter.com/PhilSmith26/status/1366746936825548801

Erin O’Toole, however, declared that these figures just will not do, and that the country needs “economic leadership.” As proof, he cited that the country’s annual GDP fell a record 5.4 percent – the most since comparable data began being kept in 1961 – never mind that the economic shock was brought on by the global pandemic, plus the false notion that we have the “highest unemployment in the G7,” as well as high pandemic spending levels. The Conservatives keep trotting out these unemployment figures, but every country measures unemployment differently, so they are effectively lying with statistics. Even if we measured our unemployment by the same way the Americans do, the gap is consistent with the gap in figures that always exists between our countries. Meanwhile, we still have the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7, and our pandemic spending has insulated the economy so that it will be more resilient once we’re able to open – and hey, we also managed to have a much lower death count than most other G7 countries because we paid people to stay home. But part of the problem is that O’Toole (and most especially Pierre Poilievre) never gets called out for essentially lying with statistics, because the CBC has essentially given up on economics reporting, and the Financial Post largely sticks to getting their commentary from Jack Mintz and the Fraser Institute (with one or two exceptions). So O’Toole can stand at the lectern in the current ad hoc press theatre in the West Block and lie with statistics unchallenged, and media won’t call out the misinformation because they will either both-sides it, or just report it verbatim because they don’t know enough about the numbers to challenge it. It’s a sad state of affairs.

https://twitter.com/maxfawcett/status/1366872106806349825

Meanwhile, in more news that O’Toole is unwilling to have an honest discourse, his staff penned an op-ed in his name in the National Post calling on the government to turn to India instead of China for future economic growth – but the piece was deafeningly silent on Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism, which has turned into pogroms against Muslims and mistreatment of Sikhs in the country. It’s a lie of omission to simply call India the world’s largest democracy and ignore the flagrant human rights violations going on there as well – but this is pretty much what we’ve come to expect from O’Toole and company, because We The Media have enabled them the whole way.

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Roundup: Heading down the same road to destruction

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As the American election results continue to grind along, there are a couple of things that have emerged that we should take to heart – one is that “Trumpism” wasn’t a fluke in 2016, and that it’s a real force that America needs to contend with honestly. The other is that the polarisation in the country has become so acute that adherents to each tribe party are now living in alternate realities, where facts don’t penetrate. This was punctuated by something that Gerald Butts has been saying over the past couple of days, that there are also two “information ecosystems” in the US, that perpetuate these alternate realities, in that each side’s news media is fairly disassociated from one another (and in some cases, facts and reality).

Why do I think this matters in particular? Because I see elements of this culture war bubbling up in this country, in somewhat inchoate and fledgling forms, but it’s there. We may not have the alternate forms of media in this country, but parties – Conservatives in particular – are building it over social media instead of traditional broadcasting (though they did make an honest effort with SunTV). The complete disregard for facts has well and truly wormed its way into the party’s discourse, and we’re now on their second party leader for whom bald-faced lying is now a daily occurrence, and this gets built into shitposts for those social media channels that they are promulgating, in some cases presenting their own alternate reality versions of situations. The NDP aren’t much better, importing wholesale the rhetoric of a segment of the American democratic party, and their own adherents refuse to believe the facts of situations (such as the existence of federalism in this country), as their leader deliberately misleads or omits facts to present the image of a government that simply doesn’t care to do things rather than the truth of their not having the jurisdiction to do them.

This is a problem that we have been complacent about addressing in this country, because we insist that it’s not as bad as in the US – and sure, we don’t have the same level of tribalism and political duality as they do, but just because we’re not as far down the road as they are doesn’t mean we’re not on the road here. There was an attempt to create that duality here – it wasn’t that long ago that the Liberals were considered to be a spent force, politically, and the Conservatives and NDP spent early Question Periods of the 41st Parliament patting themselves on the back that there was finally a real contrast in parties in the House of Commons (while the whole of the pundit class demanded that the remains of the Liberals merge with the NDP, as though the parties didn’t have fundamental ideological differences). We keep adopting Americanisms in our political systems and structures, and way too many political staffers (and more than a few reporters) spend their days LARPing episodes of the West Wing. Too many Canadians are keen to import all of the same problems that are turning America into a failed state because we think they’re more “exciting,” or somehow enviable in other ways. We should be repudiating this and shedding these American affectations from our politics, but nobody wants to do that, and this is going to cause an increasing number of problems the longer we go down this road. America is a giant flashing warning sign to turn back – can we do so in time?

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Roundup: A gesture toward pettiness

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There are a lot of symbolic gestures that politicians do that I cannot abide, but one of the most obnoxious and corrosive ones is the insistence on cutting their own pay when times get tough – and lo and behold, we have an Ontario senator who is moving a motion to do just that, asking both MPs and Senators to forgo statutory pay increases (to meet inflation) as a gesture. This is not really a symbolic or empty gesture – it is a signal to populist impulses that serve to devalue public life, and treats what they do as somehow being less valuable than people in the private sector – which is ironic considering how much less MPs and senators make than professionals and executives in the private sector.

Without entirely relitigating what I wrote on this before, I wanted to point out some of the fairly offensive characterizations of such gestures that were in the National Post piece, which describes the gesture as “important” for private sector and low-income workers, and the usual suspects at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation trying to insist that politicians aren’t making sacrifices when people are losing their businesses.

The problem with this line of logic is that these gestures don’t do anything. If anything, they come with a dose of schadenfreude, that if I’m suffering then watching politicians or civil servants being forced to suffer as well is satisfying, even if it ultimately makes things worse overall. What good does it serve to make everyone miserable or worse off? How does that make the situation better for everyone? It doesn’t. There are enough trade-offs that go with public life or public service that often make it a fairly unappealing to many people, so why pile on? Pettiness won’t solve the economic crisis or make people’s businesses reopen, and it certainly won’t make COVID go away, so why indulge it?

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Roundup: Flirting with unconstitutional legislation

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The bill to mandate sexual assault training for judges was a bad idea from the start, when Rona Ambrose first tabled it years ago, and the current iteration that this government is putting forward is little better, especially now that MPs have decided they need to start amending it to add other things. While Ambrose’s initial bill was blatantly unconstitutional (that the Commons passed on a whim because of the political syllogism: Something needs to be done, this is something, therefore we must do this), and needed to be gutted in the Senate to make it acceptable, the current version was more or less acceptable (barring one or two possible issues), but it seems that MPs want to make it blatantly unconstitutional again.

Former Supreme Court of Canada executive legal officer Gib van Ert warned back in February that this bill would be an invitation to demand that judges take training in other areas than just sexual assault, and lo and behold, we are there, with demands for the “social context of systemic racism.”

https://twitter.com/btaplatt/status/1321246603781570560

van Ert makes the point that if judges need to be seen as independent, then bills like this, where politicians appear to be giving them marching orders, is a bad look and will undermine the justice system. But since when to populist impulses consider the consequences of their actions? They don’t.

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Roundup: Another paralyzing motion

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In the wake of Wednesday’s confidence vote, Erin O’Toole was strutting around saying that his party was going to focus on “issues” instead of “playing politics” – as though the stunt of the so-called “anti-corruption committee” was anything other than playing politics, or the fact that he has to continually lie about non-issues in order to make people angry than focusing on some of the actual issues that this government is getting wrong. And to that end, O’Toole and Michelle Rempel Garner spent yesterday on another Supply Day motion, this time geared toward ordering the health committee to conducting a wide-ranging study on the federal government’s response to the pandemic. Rempel Garner insisted that this was “non-partisan” and free of the hyperbole of the previous motion (and the government is not treating this as a confidence motion), but I still have issues with it (and I do not agree with Kady that this is “100% shenanigan-free).

For starters, many of the items enumerated by the order are the kinds of things that the Conservatives have been engaging in a campaign of revisionist history around, so I absolutely do not consider their intentions to be pure and honourable regarding them, and I suspect there will be many a fishing expedition based on this order, particularly to satisfy the conspiracy theorizing that the Conservatives have engaged in around the role of China and the WHO. The motion also orders a massive production of documents going back to January 2018 in some cases – something that the government has warned would be physically impossible in the time allotted (because we need to remember that nobody is working from their offices, and access to many of their files is limited to non-existent because nobody can get to their offices for “health and safety” reasons). I don’t think that Patty Hajdu was being too hyperbolic herself when she said that this kind of order would grind the department to a halt. As Kady mentioned in her tweet, the protocol of ordering ministers to appear is bad and setting a terrible precedent, and I’m increasingly uncomfortable with orders that the Law Clerk handle redactions on a very limited basis, meaning that there is no room for Cabinet confidences under the order, and the fact that he may not necessarily have the right knowledge to know about national security exemptions, or commercial sensitivity as Anita Anand pointed out yesterday around some of the negotiations for contracts, whether it’s PPE or vaccines, and publicly releasing that information could undermine ongoing negotiations with other suppliers.

The vote on this won’t be until Monday, and it looks like the other opposition parties are lined up in favour of supporting it, as they have with most other Supply Day motions (that weren’t declared confidence). I do worry that these kinds of motions are going to start becoming commonplace, and that very bad precedents are being set for the future.

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Roundup: Special committee games

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The competing offers for special committees got even more crowded yesterday as the Liberals suggested their own possible special committee to examine pandemic spending, in a bid to jam both the Conservatives and NDP as they make their own offers. The Conservatives, you may recall, are employing a stunt to call for a special “anti-corruption committee,” as though the penny-ante bullshit that happens here were actual corruption that happens in other countries, and called explicitly for the purpose of decrying any lack of support for this committee idea as being in support of corruption. The NDP have their own proposal for a pandemic spending committee, but it was intended as a kind of super-committee to draw in not only the WE Imbroglio, but to revisit other non-scandals such as the Rob Silver affair (which the Ethics Commissioner declined to investigate), or the fact that one of the many pandemic procurement contracts went to a company whose owner is a former Liberal MP (whose departure was a bit huffy and drawn out at the time, one may recall).

The Liberal plan is to offer a “serious committee” to do “serious work,” which is a political gambit in and of itself – citing that if the other parties don’t agree to this particular committee (whose terms of reference one expects will be fairly narrowly circumscribed), then it proves that they are simply motivated by partisan gamesmanship rather than helping Canadians. And they’re not wrong – that’s exactly what both the Conservatives and NDP are looking for, at a point where they can only expect diminishing returns the longer that they drag on the WE Imbroglio (though, caveat, they do have a legitimate point in the Finance committee about producing the unredacted documents because that was the committee order that the government didn’t obey, and risks finding themselves in contempt of parliament over; the Ethics Committee demands are going outside of that committee’s mandate).

To add to the possible drama, the Liberals are also contemplating making the Conservatives’ upcoming Supply Day motion on their committee demand a confidence vote, which will wind up forcing the hands of one of the opposition parties into voting against it because nobody wants an election (and that could mean a number of Conservative MPs suddenly having “connectivity issues” and being unable to vote on the motion to ensure its demise). Of course, there is always the possibility of an accident – that seat counts weren’t done properly and the government could defeat itself, though that’s highly unlikely in the current circumstances. Nevertheless, this game-playing is where we’re at, seven months into the pandemic.

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Roundup: An escalation of props

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The moment that “remote sittings” began, which morphed into “hybrid” sittings, MPs began with the stunts. First it was signs in their backgrounds – which were ruled out of order as props, then it was dress code violations, and during the first “hybrid vote,” we saw MPs have their kids and dogs in the frame, and one of them was conspicuously driving while he voted. None of this is good for the practice of parliamentary democracy (and no, I don’t care what people say about how great it is they had their kids with them). And of course, one MP decided to take it to the next step.

https://twitter.com/davidakin/status/1313542759727484929

How this particular stunt wasn’t declared a de facto prop I’m not sure, but you can expect that this sort of thing is only going to escalate the longer it goes on unless the Speaker puts his foot down right now and stamps it out. And to be honest, when I’ve been cautioning against the problems that normalising “hybrid” sitting was going to bring, I didn’t think to include that MPs would start pulling stunts in the name of being “first” or “historic,” as they keep patting themselves on the back for these days, and yet they found new ways to surprise me. This is not a good thing. And because the Speaker didn’t say anything yesterday, I can only imagine how many more locales we’ll start seeing in the coming days, ever-escalating until someone comes to their senses and declares this to be the same as using props. Because honestly – this is going to be a very bad precedent.

Rideau Hall

In an unusual move, Governor General Julie Payette has contracted the services of former Supreme Court of Canada justice Michel Bastarache to be a “constitutional advisor” in the ongoing saga of the investigations of her office for harassment and bullying issues. It’s very odd and problematic, and here is professor Philippe Lagassé to provide some added context:

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1313577963565322240

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1313578978368802820

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1313581941103493121

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Roundup: Unnecessary closure, and problematic reports

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The new session of parliament is not yet a week old, and it is already mired in shenanigans, and this government is the author of so many of its current misfortunes. Right out of the gate, the Liberals declared Bill C-4 to be a matter of confidence and invoked closure – not time allocation, but actual closure – which of course ate up hours in debate on the motion followed by an hour-long vote. They got their closure motion because the NDP sided with them, but wait – the Conservatives moved a motion to concur in a (problematic) report from the Ethics Commissioner about former MP Joe Peschisolido, citing that he broke the Conflict of Interest Code for MPs, and said motion would also call on Peschisolido to write a formal apology to the Commons. This motion passed with NDP support, which further delayed the debate on C-4, thanks to more hour-long votes, and C-4 wasn’t expected to pass until at least 3 AM (by which time this blog has been put to bed). And to think that this could have been avoided by a) not proroguing for five weeks, and b) not ham-fistedly ramming more legislation through the Parliament. But this government seems intent on not learning any lessons.

As for that Ethics Commissioner’s report, well, it shouldn’t actually exist, because Peschisolido hasn’t been an MP for over a year, and he’s not covered by the Conflict of Interest Act because he wasn’t a public office-holder. As an MP, he was subject to the MPs’ Conflict of Interest Code, which is part of the Standing Orders, and thus not applicable to him since he’s no longer an MP, and Mario Dion doesn’t seem to grasp this basic and fundamental fact that is at the heart of his duties. This is a problem (and the former Commons Law Clerk agrees). Also, calling Peschisolido to apologise to the House is also a problem, given the report is out of order and the Commons doesn’t actually have the power to compel him. So, yeah. This is not a good look for anyone.

Meanwhile, down the street, the Canadian Senators Group is completely fed up with having bills rammed down their throats with no time for them to actually do their jobs and study them or offering amendments, because everything is an “emergency.” To that end, they will be moving a motion in the Senate that until the end of the pandemic, all legislation will require a minimum of one week’s worth of debate in the Senate before it will be passed. It’s bold – but they are absolutely right to insist on it. I can easily see both the Conservatives and the Progressive caucuses in the Senate signing on, but the real question will be the Independent Senators Group, and how many of them will feel beholden to the prime minister. Trudeau gets to reap what he’s sown with his “independent” Senate, and I’m quite hoping that this makes him as uncomfortable as possible.

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