It was the first time I’ve managed to get to Senate Question Period in their new chamber (previous attempts having been thwarted in one manner or another), and while the building is amazing, I find myself underwhelmed by the temporary Chamber itself. This having been said, the ministerial guest of honour today was Seamus O’Regan, minister for Indigenous Services, his first appearance in his new portfolio. Senator Don Plett led off, accusing the government of killing Indigenous jobs by rejecting the Northern Gateway pipeline, to which O’Regan stated that individual projects are as diverse as the diverse Indigenous communities, so you couldn’t make sweeping statements. He added that they work with Indigenous communities because it’s the right thing to do, and businesses want certainty, which is why the Conservatives’ environmental assessment legislation wasn’t working. On a supplemental, Plett accused the government of threatening future Indigenous projects with Bill C-69, and O’Regan took a swipe at the previous government’s record before regaling the Senate with the notion of doing regional assessments with the legislation.
Author Archives: Dale
QP: Why can’t you spend in Canada?
On a lovely Tuesday afternoon, and all of the leaders were present for a change. Andrew Scheer led off, and he accused the prime minister of showing weakness in the face of China, to which Justin Trudeau assured him that diplomatic efforts were ongoing, and that they would have new measures for canola farmers in days. Scheer then demanded that the government pull out of the Asian infrastructure bank, to which Trudeau read a script about who all is involved in said bank, and about green and inclusive growth. Scheer repeated his demand, comparing it to pipeline development in Canada, and Trudeau extemporaneously reminded him that the previous government couldn’t get pipelines to new markets because they didn’t understand that they needed to get the buy-in of Indigenous communities. Scheer switched to French to demand the same pull out, and Trudeau read the French version of his script. Scheer then read a question about the CBC story on decade-old illegal donations from SNC-Lavalin, and Trudeau used a script to note that they made changes to increase transparency. Jagmeet Singh was up next for the NDP, and he invoked the name of Jack Layton to complain about corporate tax cuts before demanding the Loblaws contract be cancelled. Trudeau reminded him that the private sector has a role to play in fighting climate change. Singh repeated the question in French, and got much the same answer. Singh then raised the issue of annual flooding in Kasheshewan and demanded the promised relocation take place, and Trudeau took a script to remind him that the minister has met with the community and they have been working with them on the relocation, starting with building the necessary road. Singh repeated the question in English, and Trudeau reiterated his response that work was underway in partnership with the community.
Roundup: Beating one’s chest over China
The current dispute with China doesn’t seem to be getting better, as the canola issue is apparently about to be compounded with things like soybeans and peas, and word has it that the Chinese government has been compiling a list of Canadian targets within the country that could face further retaliation, because we all know that this is about the arrest and extradition of Meng Wanzhou. While Trudeau says that more help for canola farmers is coming “in a few days,” China is taking its time in visa approvals for the scientific delegation Canada is trying to send in order to get answers from them on the supposed pests they found in our canola shipments.
Enter Andrew Scheer, who has declared that Justin Trudeau hasn’t done enough, and he demanded that a new ambassador be appointed (because that can happen at the drop of a hat), that the government launch a trade complaint against China at the WTO, and that the government pull its investment from the Asian Infrastructure Bank (never mind that Canadian companies are starting to win bids through it). Because beating one’s chest is obviously the way to deal with China, and there would be no possible consequences for doing so.
https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1123023732610613249
One gets the impression from watching this that Scheer – or whoever is advising him – has no serious ideas for how to deal with complex situations like this. I mean, Scheer has also insisted that he somehow could have gotten a better New NAFTA deal and that he could have somehow gotten the steel and aluminium tariffs lifted by now, which is ridiculous, and yet here he is, demonstrating how “serious” he is about foreign policy, this time with China. Even more risible is the way in which he characterises the current government’s position as “appeasement.” Erm, except appeasement would have meant that they would have freed Meng by now, or did that “crafty” thing about warning her before she could have been arrested so that she could have avoided the trip altogether (as certain former political players in this town later told the media that the government should have done). You would think that the person who wants to lead the country would try to be a bit more serious about his foreign policy, but this is where we are.
QP: Demanding tough talk on China
With Justin Trudeau at an auto announcement in Cambridge, Ontario, and Andrew Scheer, well, elsewhere, Candice Bergen led off after a moment of silence for the victims of the bombings in Sri Lanka, and she asked for an update on the flooding situations across the country. Ralph Goodale first noted that front line responses are the jurisdiction of the provinces, and that when the federal government is asked, they have stepped up. Bergen then moved on to read some criticism about the prime minister’s response on the canola file. Marie-Claude Bibeau stated that they are standing with farmers, and they are working with Chinese officials to resolve it. Bergen claimed that Scheer’s proposals would solve the issue, and Bibeau claimed that she has been working on the file since day one, while the Conservatives were asking questions on other things. Luc Berthold took over in French to demand they act on Scheer’s proposals, to which Bibeau repeated that the Conservatives were the ones asleep on the file. Berthold disputed her characterisation, and repeated his demand, to which Bibeau listed actions she has been taking to resolve the issue. Jagmeet Singh was up next, and he railed about evil corporations, demanding the Liberals implement the NDP’s pharmacare proposal (which, reminder, handwaves through all the actual implementation details). Jim Carr reminded him that they are working on implementation through the 2019 budget. Singh then demanded the government implement the NDP’s home retrofit plans to reduce GHG emissions, and Jonathan Wilkinson reminded him that he was a CEO in the green tech space for ten years and he knows the government’s plan is working. Singh then demanded an end to fossil fuel subsidies in a French, to which Wilkinson reiterated that the government’s plan was working. Singh then railed about corporations in French, and wanted the $12 million Loblaws got (after a competitive process) to go to “families,” and Wilkinson largely reiterated that the government’s plan is working.
Roundup: Untenable ideas that get print
There were a couple of pieces over the weekend that had me scowling a little, mostly because they don’t seem terribly well thought-through when you actually delve in a little. One of them was a piece in Maclean’s that used polling data to posit the idea of a Green Party-NDP merger which is a bit silly because the parties are nothing alike in the slightest. The premise that they both claim to care about the environment and appeal to youth is flimsy on its face, because the Greens aren’t really that “progressive” of a party seeing as the federal party came into being with a lot of disaffected Red Tories in their mix, and if you delve into some of their non-environmental policies, there’s not a lot of millennial progressivity in there. (Seriously, it’s a dog’s breakfast of things, as they discovered in the last election when it turned out that a bunch of their social policies were written by men’s rights activists, given that there is a lack of adult supervision when it comes to policy development in that party). Add to that, the party cultures are essentially night and day – the NDP are centralizing and are about solidarity at all costs (and they rigidly enforce it), while the Greens are decentralized to the point of practical incoherence. I get that there is going to be a bit of a fad in political circles right now that believes that Alberta “proved” that mergers work given the Progressive Conservative + Wildrose Alliance “merger” into the UCP was prototypical, but that would be looking at quantitative data over qualitative – and the UCP is still young.
The other piece that deserves some consternation was Justin Ling’s op-ed that suggested that co-leaders would be a great thing for parties to deal with the problem of presidentialised leadership politics, and look how great it’s working for Quebec Solidaire. Err, except the solution to our presidentialised leadership politics in this country isn’t to share power, but rather to restore the selection and firing process to the hands of caucus. The biggest flaw in Ling’s argument, however, is that it’s antithetical to the way in which our system is structured, which is that it’s about giving advice to the Queen (and by extension, the Governor General/lieutenant governor). That requires a single voice – which is why Cabinet Solidarity is a Thing – and it’s also to create a single point of accountability. If you have dual leadership, then it becomes harder to pin blame. It also has more than enough potential to create factionalisation within parties more than we have already, as different parts of the caucus align themselves behind one co-leader or the other in power struggles. As with so many of these kinds of reform ideas, they sound interesting on the surface, that’s about it.
Roundup: Anger over vilified legislation? Shocking!
Over on the Financial Post’s op-ed pages, Senator Richard Neufeld worries about all of the angry Canadians the Senate’s energy committee is hearing from over Bill C-69. I have no doubt that they are hearing from angry people, because there has been a massive disinformation campaign around this bill from the start. The Conservatives and their provincial counterparts in Alberta have dubbed it the “no more pipelines” bill, even though it’s nothing of the sort. Neufeld worries that the bill means that we can never have any more major projects in this country, which is absurd on the face of it, but hey, there are narratives to uphold.
I’ve talked to a lot of environmental lawyers about this bill, and the potential amendments that it could merit. It is certainly not a bill without flaws, and the government seems to have acknowledged that (and apparently there is some kind of gamesmanship being played right now, where the government has a list of amendments they want to introduce at the Senate committee via one of their proxies but they won’t release them ahead of time for some reason). This having been said, there seems to be no acknowledgment of a few realities – that the current system that the Harper government put into place isn’t working and has only wound up with litigation; that we simply can’t bully through projects past Indigenous communities anymore, because Section 35 rights mean something; and that the bill sought to eliminate a lot of heavy lifting by putting more consultation on the front end so that projects could be better scoped, and that it would mean not needing to produce boxes of documents that nobody ever reads in order to check boxes off of lists as part of the assessment process. This is not a bad thing.
But like I said, there are problems with the bill, and Neufeld lists a few of them in passing while trading in more of the myths and disinformation around it. But so long as that disinformation campaign goes unchallenged – and this includes by ministers who can only speak in talking points and can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag because they’re too assured of their own virtues that they don’t feel the need to dismantle a campaign of lies – then the anger will carry on, and when this bill passes in some amended form (and it’s likely it will), then it will simply become another propaganda tool, which should be concerning to everyone – including those who are weaponizing it, because it will blow up in their faces.
Roundup: Undaunted by the facts
The Parliamentary Budget Officer issued a report yesterday that confirmed what the federal government has been saying – that yes indeed, because the federal carbon price backstop is legislated that 90 percent of proceeds must be returned to individual households, that the vast majority of Canadians will be better off as a result, and yes, this includes both direct and indirect costs, and he did a whole analysis based on input and output-based pricing, and confirmed it all with StatsCan data. The federal government might as well have said “I told you so.” But did this force a mea culpa from the Conservatives that perhaps they were wrong about the whole thing? Nope. Instead, both Andrew Scheer and Ed Fast, his environment critic, issued released that cherry picked a couple of pieces from the report, divorced of proper context, to say that it “proved” their false narrative about said price. Because of course they did. And did we see any fact checking about their statements? Not anywhere that I could see. Which is your preview of the coming election – that fact-free shitposts will continue to spin lies, and they will largely get away with it, even after they’ve been debunked.
This is a very selective/misleading reading of the report that ignores the Output Based Pricing System for large emitters, and the rebates that the PBO confirmed will leave most people better off. https://t.co/9O2gqWyPTf
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) April 25, 2019
Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail reports that Andrew Scheer and several of his campaign team were meeting up with oil and gas executives to help plot the demise of the Liberals in the coming election. And before you get any ideas about this being old boys with cigars in backrooms, it should be noted that these were executives from fairly junior companies and not the big players, who do support carbon pricing (for which Jason Kenney wants to go to war with them). (As an aside, one of these junior company executives is a fairly robust troll on Twitter, so that should give you a taste of what this was about). Much like Kenney’s rhetoric, the players at this conference discussed using litigation as a tool to fight their critics, but one has to wonder how they possibly think this is going to appeal to the centrist voters they need in key battlegrounds like the 905 belt around Toronto, let alone to have any hope of winning seats in Quebec. You would think that a meeting like this just confirms for Canadians the caricatures that they have about the energy industry and its lobbyists, and doesn’t really engender sympathy for the pain that the industry is feeling at present. But maybe I’m just missing something.
Roundup: Vetting judges? Oh noes!
Yesterday the Globe and Mail had a story about how the current government will run potential judicial nominees through the Liberal party’s voter database as part of the vetting process, which was followed by an analysis of how many appointees were Liberal donors. This first came up weeks ago when yet another Jody Wilson-Raybould-related leak revealed that she was trying to “depoliticize” the appointment process by not providing certain information to PMO when she passed along recommendations, which is a problem – not that it was framed that way. This current story follows up on that, and has a few framing issues of its own. There are a few things to unpack in this, but first of all, I’ll let Adam Goldenberg point out a few issues with this analysis:
https://twitter.com/adamgoldenberg/status/1121013782795497478
https://twitter.com/adamgoldenberg/status/1121013787128156160
https://twitter.com/adamgoldenberg/status/1121013789766369280
https://twitter.com/adamgoldenberg/status/1121024056663400448
With this in mind, I have a few thoughts of my own – first of all is that I think Goldenberg is correct in his reminder that vetting includes political vetting – and the party’s database (as Susan Delacourt noted on Power Play) contains more than who donated – they will collect all manner of information as part of their construction of voter profiles, so it makes sense that they would also run potential appointments through this. (The fact that parties don’t have stringent privacy rules around their databases is a discussion for another day). Why? Because the prime minister is ultimately politically accountable for all Governor-in-Council appointments, and that includes judges. And so long as the prime minister is politically accountable, I think it’s reasonable that his office does whatever vetting they deem necessary – and there’s nothing in here to indicate that they’re checking to ensure that they’re voting for Liberal partisans, which we need to keep in mind.
Re: Liberals appointing judges who were past donors (https://t.co/SptS88E5xx). Plus ca change. @janicetibbetts pic.twitter.com/WoaJjkkIuy
— Glen McGregor (@glen_mcgregor) April 24, 2019
The other aspect of his story that makes me a bit queasy is the implication that there is favour being shown to Liberal donors – and the math bears out a little bit that while seventy percent of appointees hadn’t donated to anyone, twenty-five percent of them donated to the Liberals, which is disproportionate to other parties. But we also need to remember a few things, the primary one being that we need to stop treating political donations as a bad thing. The donation limits in this country are quite small – you’re not going to bribe someone for $1200, let’s face it – and we donations are a form of engagement. Engagement is a good thing. The more we stigmatize past political donations – and those donations could be for a variety of reasons, such as an acquaintance running in a local campaign, or because they wanted the tax receipt – the more we send the message that engagement is bad, which is the very opposite of what we should be doing in a country where we already have abysmal levels of engagement, whether it’s taking out party memberships, donating, or volunteering (and yes, Samara Canada has done research on this). Pearl-clutching stories like this just reinforce this narrative, which is bad for democracy.
Roundup: A hung parliament in PEI
The PEI election did not result in a Green Party majority, because shockingly, the polls were wrong. It did result in a hung parliament, which has never happened before in that province, and yet every single media outlet and then the prime minister himself declared that the progressive conservatives had won a minority. Err, except we don’t know the composition of the next government yet because the lieutenant governor hasn’t invited anyone to form government, and the seat distribution – 12 PC, 8 Green, 6 Liberal – is one where it’s not actually clear that the PCs will form government, as a Green-Liberal coalition remains more than possible. Which isn’t to say that it will happen, but there is a way in which government formation works in a Westminster system, and simply winning the most seats, even if you don’t win a majority, doesn’t mean that you get a chance to form government. It doesn’t work that way! And it would be really great if the media would stop creating this false sense that it works that way, because it doesn’t. And even if the PCs do form government, they will need one of the other parties to prop them up, and that will have a significant effect on the shape of that government. Pre-empting the lieutenant governor’s call simply invites confusion, which we should probably be avoiding.
“Premier-designate”? Has the lieutenant governor asked King to form a government yet? #civicliteracy https://t.co/LUTxNNIq8G
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) April 24, 2019
Happily, the province’s electoral reform referendum also went down in defeat (and this is another place where the urban-rural split will likely be evident). Hopefully this means that the advocates will shut up about it because they keep losing. I know they won’t – they’re convinced that people just don’t understand or are too stupid to realise that PR is so good for them (it’s not), but you would hope that the constant defeats would be some kind of dissuasion.
Roundup: Cluelessly demanding reforms
Over the long weekend, Independent Senator Tony Dean posted an op-ed over on iPolitics to decry the supposed partisan attempts to block reform in the Senate – but it’s a dog’s breakfast that betrays a complete lack of understanding about the institution. It’s indicative of the attitude of a cohort of the new senators who think that they know best, despite not having a working knowledge of Parliament as a whole, or the Senate in particular, and yet they feel as though they know definitively how it needs to change. And more dangerously, Dean brings up that recent poll to show how Canadians apparently love the “new” Senate as a means of bashing Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives, who have no intention to continue the new appointment process – in effect campaigning for the Liberals, which should be uncomfortable for “independent” senators.
The core of Dean’s argument is that the Senate needs a business committee in order to get things done – which is both wrong, and wrong-headed. He complains that individual senators can delay bills, which he fails to grasp is the whole point. The Senate does not exist to rubber-stamp government bills, and yet Dean seems to miss that point. It’s not just that the Conservatives are partisan and therefore Bad – it’s because the Senate has a constitutional role to fill, and a business committee won’t stop delays. All it does is institute time allocation on all legislation before the Chamber – and it’s ironic that he’s pushing for that notion because in the very same piece he complains that the Conservatives were draconian about time allocation when they were in charge. He complains that there is no “TV Guide” for the Senate because debates aren’t organised, which is another wrong notion because the whole point about the way in which the Chamber has operated, where there are days between speeches between proponents and critics on bills is because it allows for thoughtful responses rather than the canned speechifying that happens in the House of Commons. And “organising” debates for the sake of TV is just time allocation in disguise. Which he fails to grasp.
Pointing to the programming motions on the assisted dying or cannabis legislation are not necessarily good examples of programmed debate in the Senate, because those were extraordinary bills, which the majority of Senate business is not. Dean was also known for insisting that the Conservatives would refuse to let those bills go to a vote when the Conservatives were proposing timetables for negotiation (and we all know that neither the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Peter Harder, nor the Independent Senators Group, seem to believe in negotiation or horse-trading to get things done in the Senate, because they mistakenly believe it to be “partisan,” which it’s not – it’s how stuff gets done). A business committee is a bad move for the Senate, and Dean needs to get a clue about that. It won’t stop the Conservatives from being partisan, and simply time allocating all business could set a bad precedent for when the Conservatives get back into power – which they will one day – and the impulse to return to some of the “draconian” measures of the Harper era come back, and suddenly they may feel differently about time allocating everything. But this cohort of new senators doesn’t get that because they’re not familiar with how parliament works, and they need to get on that because change for the sake of change may sound like a good idea in the moment, but can have lasting, damaging consequences for the institution as a whole.