Author Archives: Dale

About Dale

Journalist in the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery

QP: The Bombardier dichotomy

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For caucus day, the benches were mostly full, and we would see if the fire was back. Rona Ambrose led off, wondering about why the government was going ahead with a loan to Bombardier when they said it wasn’t necessary. Trudeau said that they had been discussion to see how they could help the industry with jobs and R&D, and to boost their global competitiveness. Ambrose wonders how it looked to other industries when they bailed out one business but not others hurt in the country. Trudeau noted the jobs he was creating through pipeline approvals in other parts of the country. Ambrose wanted to know how many jobs the loan to Bombardier would create, but Trudeau stuck to generalities. When Ambrose made a bald assertion about the loan, but without a question posed, Trudeau didn’t get up to offer a response. For her final question, Ambrose railed about the loan, and Trudeau kept up his happy, clappy talking points about high quality manufacturing jobs in the aerospace sector. Thomas Mulcair was up next, asking about refugee claimants crossing into Manitoba, and Trudeau noted his concern for the issue. Mulcair noted a Canadian Muslim family stopped and questioned at the US border, and wondered why Trudeau wasn’t standing up to defend them. Trudeau noted the 400,000 Canadians who cross the border every day and that a number of his ministers were engaged on the file, including defending their rights. Mulcair demanded to know what day he decided to kill electoral reform, and Trudeau noted that it was his signature on the mandate letter, not the minister’s. For his final question, Mulcair demanded an apology for misleading Canadians, and Trudeau parried with noting about other ways in which they were working to improve our democracy.

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Roundup: A painful lesson in committee cooperation

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News broke yesterday morning that rogue Liberal backbencher Nate Erskine-Smith had been reassigned from the public safety committee by the party whip, and immediately everyone was all “uh oh, this is totally because he spoke out against his party.” Yes, Erskine-Smith has been making all kinds of waves, talking about his disagreement with the approval of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, advocating for the decriminalisation of all illegal drugs to treat them as a public health as opposed to a criminal law issue, and most recently, prostrating himself before his electorate to decry his government’s decision to abandon electoral reform (and using the curious tactic of using language that both undermines his government’s legitimacy and advocates for a system that undermines the very agency he has as an MP to stand apart from his party, but whatever).

Of course, it also appears that none of those commenters from the peanut gallery actually bothered to read the story about why Erskine-Smith was yanked from the committee, and it had little to do with his outspokenness than the fact that he was overly naïve as a newbie MP if trying to make parliament a nicer place. In this case, he wanted to operate by consensus on the committee and tried to get the other parties onside for amending the bill on establishing a national security committee of parliamentarians. The problem was that in the process, he was manipulated by Tony Clement into deleting some of his government’s own provisions because, you know, consensus and working together! So yeah, painful lesson, and maybe he’ll learn to be a little less trusting the next time. I get that you want parliament to be a nicer place and politics to be done better, but if you’re not careful, your opponents will (metaphorically) shiv you because they have their own goals, and they don’t necessarily want to buy into your platform. And let’s not forget that the competition of ideas is part of what keeps our system vital and accountable.

Of course, the fact that the whip could take this step has the usual suspects up in arms about how too much power is in the hands of the leader (by way of the whip), and the standard calls about reforming committees were trotted out. The Liberal Party’s promises on committee reform – more resources, electing chairs by secret ballot, and ensuring parliamentary secretaries are no longer voting members – were pretty much accomplished, but Conservative leadership candidate Michael Chong has his own reform ideas (try to look surprised), but reading them over, I have doubts. In particular, his plan to take away the power to assign MPs to committees and replacing it with a secret ballot process is dubious, in particular because a) I can’t imagine trying to count those ballots, b) it won’t solve the problems of MPs all trying to get onto the “sexier” committees while leaving some of the less exciting ones to be scrounging for members, c) critics – which the leader assigns – are on those committees, so for a party like the NDP, the secret balloting process would be useless, and d) this is a typical Chong suggestion of a solution in search of a problem. MPs like to bitch and moan about being assigned to committees they don’t like, but rarely actually ask for committee assignments, nor do they seem to have an appreciation that sometimes the party has to spread out their talent to places where it’s needed as opposed to where MPs want to go.

I’m also not keen on Chong’s plan to merge five committees to bring down the total number because there’s no actual need. We have 338 MPs and we don’t have a super-sized cabinet with a bloated parliamentary secretary brigade to match it, and in the previous parliament, they already reduced committees from 12 to 10 members apiece. There are enough MPs to go around, and merging the mandates of committees overloads them rather than letting them undertake studies of their own accord, which they should be doing. There’s no real crisis of overloading MPs with work right now (which was not always the case), so this particular suggestion seems gratuitous.

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Senate QP: Indigenous issues on the floor

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It was actually the second Senate ministerial QP of 2017, but I wound up missing last week’s for the McCallum/Dion farewell speeches. Alas. This week it was Carolyn Bennett’s turn to face the upper chamber and be held to account. Senator Beth Marshall started off, asking about only 12 percent of First Nations infrastructure funds being allocated. Bennett said that the regions can now approve up to $50 million without needing to get approval from the centre, but that 100 percent of the funding would be allocated and on its way out the door by the end of March. Marshall asked whether the projects would be posted on the department website so that there is some accountability, and Bennett indicated that it would be in a bit of a roundabout way, talking about the importance of water projects that would soon be announced.

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QP: Seniors and softwood

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Tuesday afternoon, and the benches were full for the grand inquest of the nation. Rona Ambrose led off, worried about that Vincent Lee, who beheaded someone on a bus several years ago (declared criminally not responsible) who is now freed and changed his name. Trudeau responded that they were working to ensure that all Canadians were kept safe. Ambrose pressed, and Trudeau said that he sympathized with the family of the victim, but wouldn’t commit to tougher measures, nor did he make any point that this was a case where it was someone suffering from a mental health issue and not a criminal case. Ambrose switched to tax measures for seniors and wanted assurances that Trudeau wouldn’t repeal them. Trudeau responded by listing measures that the have taken to benefit seniors, and when Ambrose called him on it, his answer didn’t change much. Ambrose closed off by worrying that softwood lumber talks were not in any new ministerial mandate letters, and Trudeau assured her that they were working with the Americans  on this and a number of trade files, ensuring that they know how many jobs rely on trade with Canada. Thomas Mulcair was up next, declaring that Trudeau had broken the law on his holiday with the Aga Khan and wondered if he had met with the Ethics Commissioner yet and what he told her. Trudeau reiterated that the Aga Khan was an old family friend and he would answer any questions she had. Mulcair pressed, but Trudeau stuck to his points. Mulcair moved onto the recommendation from Morneau’s advisory panel that they raise the OAS age back to 67, and Trudeau said they would not. Mulcair railed about how this was the recommendation and that Morneau didn’t rule it out, but Trudeau reminded him that it was a promise they kept.

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Roundup: Dealing with disappointment

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As the tears and recriminations continue over Justin Trudeau’s decision to scrap his electoral reform pledge, we’re seeing a number of pretty dubious messages emerging from those doing the wailing and gnashing of teeth. For as much as Elizabeth May shed tears about how this was a betrayal of youth voters, Justin Trudeau went before a crowd of university students yesterday and nary a word was spoken from those “betrayed” youths about electoral reform. Oops. I’m also a little disturbed by the point that has been made repeatedly by the likes of May, and Ed Broadbent on national television, that somehow the feminist Trudeau was shoving young women ministers “under the bus” over his broken pledge. One has to point out, however, that there is a bit of a sexist undertone to that bit of concern trolling, implying that neither minister was capable of handling themselves on this file, and it ignores that Maryam Monsef was effectively promoted for her performance, going from a make-work office out of PCO to a line department with a big agenda along with added responsibilities for assisting the minister of heritage, while Karina Gould was handed a pretty big new file to tackle in the democratic institutions portfolio, being the very real concerns about cyber-security in our electoral system. And if you don’t think that’s a problem, look at the fact that the BC Liberals suffered a major data breach over the weekend that compromised the files of countless voters.

And then there’s the cynicism argument. Not only have the youth been betrayed by this move, but this breeds cynicism because the rug has been pulled out from those who were engaged in the process, and we have studies that show that people get disengaged when they have bad experiences. But I’m going to challenge that a bit, because as much as you had a group of people that were engaged by the process, the vast majority who have been vocal about it have been selective in their reading about what went on. People insist there was consensus in the report, but the fact that every party walked back on what it said shows that it was not actually consensus. PR advocates not only stacked the witness lists, but most over-read the mandate of the committee and gave some particularly creative interpretations of just what Trudeau’s electoral promise was, deciding that it meant that their preferred system was the only acceptable outcome – in other words, they have only been hearing what they want to hear. When they don’t get it, they blame others for breeding cynicism. As for the disengagement brought on by disappointment, I’ve read those studies too and the common denominator that I found was that much of that disappointment is brought on by the fact that people don’t know how the system works. They get discouraged because they approach the wrong level of government to deal with a particular problem, or that they are simply impatient to deal with the waiting lists caused by limited resources. I get that unrealistic promises might be disappointing when they don’t happen, but people need to be better educated to know when promises are disappointed so that their expectations can be tempered (though politicians should know better than to make stupid promises in the first place).

Meanwhile, I will point you to a must-read, which is a post by UBC political scientist Christopher Kam, who writes a spectacular takedown of an NDP ten-percenter extolling the virtues of proportional representation. It not only takes it apart piece by piece, but provides a good fact-check on some of the PR talking points that were circulating during the electoral reform committee hearings, including debunking some of the studies that were cited continuously to “prove” the points about how great PR governments are.

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QP: No responsible path forward

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After the prime minister spent his morning hearing from youth about their issues (and, interesting enough, electoral reform was not brought up), he was in QP, ready for the grand inquest of the nation. Rona Ambrose led off, bringing up the Globe and Mail investigation on “unfounded” sexual assault complaints in the country, and about ensuring that the RCMP have sufficient training to deal with it. Trudeau said that they were working to address gender-based violence and sexual assault and making changes at the institutional level. Ambrose changed topics to fears that jobs would end sent south for lower taxes and slashed regulations, to which Trudeau pointed out their record of tax cuts and enhanced child benefits. Ambrose pressed the topic on trade issues, and Trudeau pointed out how many American jobs depended on trade with Canada. Denis Lebel went for another round in French, got the same answer, and for his last question, Lebel worried about softwood lumber. Trudeau noted that he has talked about it with the Americans constantly, and that they remain engaged on the topic. Nathan Cullen led off for the NDP, wailing about proportional representation. Trudeau reminded him that there was no consensus and no responsible path forward. Cullen railed about broken promises, and Trudeau pointed about other progress on the democracy file before reiterating that there was no consensus. Alexander Boulerice picked up to give the angry denunciations in French, and Trudeau hit back by talking about working in the best interests of the country. He then tried to insinuate that the PM was lying and got cautioned by the Speaker for it, not that Trudeau’s response changed.

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Roundup: O’Leary’s debate debut

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Saturday night was another Conservative leadership “debate,” and again I use the term loosely because there was very little debating going on. Yes, this particular event did offer more chances for rebuttal, but given that it was staged and structured like the most boring academic conference ever (all it was missing was a line-up at the floor mic for people to give fifteen minute speeches in the guise of asking questions to the panel), we still didn’t get a lot of candidates challenging one another. Not that it didn’t happen – it did, but most of the candidates spent their time taking shots at either Kevin O’Leary (particularly deriding him as not being a Conservative), and Maxime Bernier (most especially around his ideas about equalisation, which, to be fair, are a bit daft).

Going after Bernier may not seem like the think you would expect, but he has been leading the race in terms of fundraising, which is not an insignificant thing. One does have to wonder, however, if there are enough self-described libertarians in the Conservative Party to give him the edge he needed. Bernier, incidentally, says he was being attacked because his opponents are afraid of his position on equalisation. And to be fair, he’s probably right, but not for the reason he thinks, but rather because it has the potential to severely damage the party in the more “have not” provinces of the country, most especially in Atlantic Canada, where they already have zero seats.

As for O’Leary, this was his first real event on the campaign, and he didn’t exactly sparkle, but he did stand out from his competitors a few times, both when he refused to criticise the country’s justice system, pointing to his experience abroad, and in the kinds of shots he took at the current government, which were of a more brash tone than other candidates were taking. He also played his ethnic cards, saying he would consider it a personal failure if Lebanese Canadians didn’t all take out party memberships and declaring that he “owns the Irish vote.” Okay then. Will his brashness that help him? Maybe, considering how very milquetoast most of his competition has been, and the crowd who laps up this populist demagoguery seems to love people who “tell it like it is.” O’Leary, meanwhile, shrugged off the attacks and kept his cool, and didn’t take the bait and made a point of directing his attacks to Trudeau (and premiers Wynne and MacNeil) instead of his fellow candidates.

And the rest? Lisa Raitt had her best night ever, possibly bolstered by the fact that it was a bit of a hometown crowd for her, and she seems to be making her working-class roots that much more of her narrative, but I’m still having a hard time seeing what kind of direction she proposes to lead the party in other than “I’m everything Trudeau is not.” Also, props for bringing up that Globe and Mail piece on “unfounded” sexual assault rates and challenging the government to do something about it. Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux were laughable, Chris Alexander seemed to be doing a lot of “me too” to the points of other candidates – most especially Raitt – but had nothing really new to say. Andrew Scheer made a point of being parochial, Michael Chong remains the grown-up at the table which probably dooms his campaign, and for as middle-of-the-road as he is, everyone was quoting Erin O’Toole’s big line of the night saying “We don’t beat the celebrity-in-chief with another celebrity-in-chief.” The problem is that nobody quoted the second half of his statement where he brought up Robert Stanfield as the model to follow. Remember Stanfield? Who never beat the celebrity PM of his day (being Pierre Elliott Trudeau) and who never became prime minister? Yeah, not sure that was the wisest analogy. Also, O’Toole kept making Silence of the Lambs references, but completely wrong ones. He thought he was being funny by calling all 32 Atlantic Canadian Liberal MPs “lambs” who were “silent,” when Silence of the Lambs is about a cannibal and a serial killer. Not sure that was appropriate. Oh, and about eight or nine candidates need to drop out by oh, yesterday, because at this point, they’re going to start doing more damage than good.

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Meanwhile, Peter MacKay says that Leitch’s immigration policy is going to damage the party, while Michelle Rempel lists the things she’s looking for in making a decision about a leadership candidate (and spoiler: Kevin O’Leary wouldn’t make the cut).

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Roundup: For fear of extremists rising

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In damage control mode, the Liberals have sent out senior sources to talk about why they pulled the plug on electoral reform, and have brought up the relatively new talking point about concerns for the rise of extremist parties, while cabinet was opposed to a referendum (not surprisingly given the referenda we’ve seen globally lately) and to a PR system in general. I say relatively new talking point because it was raised as part of the MyDemocracy survey, but as Paul Wells stated on Power & Politics last night, for a government that purports to be eloquent, they never made the case. I also suspect there was the added problem that in making it known that he was open to being convinced, Justin Trudeau allowed Nathan Cullen and others to steal the narrative away from him, which is a big reason why the Liberals completely lost the plot on that file.

Colby Cosh goes through the promise and given the choice as to whether Trudeau was being sleazy or stupid in making that promise, Cosh goes on the side of stupid – for which I would agree – and notes that a retreat was the best he could hope for rather than some truly unsavoury outcomes, particularly with regard to a referendum or a more purely proportional system. And here we get back to the rise of extremist parties.

Canada is not immune to this rabid and toxic populism that is going around globally, and we’ve seen examples of it manifesting in this country, from the election of Rob Ford, to some of the identity politics being attempted in previous elections both federally and provincially. Just because it has been relatively contained and not entirely successful doesn’t mean it can’t succeed in the future, particularly with its proponents feeling emboldened by what’s happening south of the border. And while Nathan Cullen insists that the rise of alt-right parties is “a load of crap,” he is blinkered by this notion, primarily coming from the left-wing, that a PR system would incentivise all of these left-wing and progressive parties that would somehow always form nice coalition governments. Right now we’re seeing something very different playing out in Europe, with all of their myriad of PR systems producing growing hard-right parties on the verge of winning power in several countries. Trudeau has every right to be concerned about that in Canada, and we have demonstrated proof that our current system has blunted their growth because they can’t command enough broad-based support to dominate our big-tent brokerage parties. That’s not a bad thing.

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Oh, PR proponents claim. We’ll just raise thresholds so that these parties can’t get seats! But that’s just as problematic because if the thresholds are too low – say below three percent – you’re likely to cut off the Greens and the Bloc, for which they would cry bloody murder. (Their self-interested insistence that more people would vote for them if they knew they were guaranteed PR seats doesn’t help their case). It’s also another way of saying that you want to game the system to produce party configurations that you like, which again is self-interested, and doesn’t make the case for how it makes the system better.

In related news, Paul Wells looks at Karina Gould’s new mandate of cyber-security for our electoral system now that electoral reform is out of the question, and no, it’s not a trivial matter even if we don’t use any kind of electronic ballots in this country. Both Elections Canada and the various parties all have databases, and the party databases most especially are vulnerable, in part because they aren’t subject to any federal legislation which deals with privacy or information security, and that could prove to be a problem in the future.

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Roundup: The measure of a political promise

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There’s been a lot of hay made, ink spilled and electrons converted into pixels over the last 36 hours or so about the value of political promises, and how terrible it is when politicians break them. It makes people so cynical, and it’s no wonder that people hate politicians, and so on. We had Liberal MPs Nate Erskine-Smith and Adam Vaughan prostrating themselves about how sorry they are that the promise was broken, voter reform groups wailing about how terribly they’ve been betrayed, and columnists pontificated on broken promises (though do read Selley’s piece because he offers some great advice, not the least of which is telling PR advocates to tone down the crazy. Because seriously).

But in the midst of this, we had Conservative leadership candidates laying out a bunch of promises of what they would do if they a) won the leadership, and b) won the next general election, and some of those promises were hilariously terrible. For example, Maxime Bernier thinks it’s cool to freeze equalization payments so that the federal government can tell provinces how they should be managing their own fiscal houses, or Andrew Scheer saying that he would enshrine property rights by using a novel approach to amending the constitution through the back door, as though the Supreme Court of Canada would actually let that pass.

And while everyone was tearing their hair out over Trudeau’s “betrayal” and “lies,” what were these two other, equally implausible promises as Trudeau’s on electoral reform, met with? A few pundits tweeted “good luck with that” to Scheer. And that was about it. So forgive me while I try to calibrate my outrage meter on political promises here, as to which ones we should take seriously and which ones we know are bad or wholly improbable but can safely laugh off.

To be clear – I’m not looking to give Trudeau a free pass on this one, and I’ve written elsewhere that I think he needs to own up to the fact that it was a bad promise made when he was a third-place party who were blue-skying a number of things. And I think that it should give parties and candidates pause so as to caution them against being overly ambitious in what they promise (preferably, though, without draining all ambition out of politics). But come on. Let’s have a sense of proportion to what just happened here.

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QP: Big files demanding facile answers

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There were no leaders, permanent or interim, present for Question Period today, most at the funeral for victims of the Ste-Foy shootings, leaving it to be a much more subdued atmosphere in the Chamber. Denis Lebel led off, worried that softwood lumber and the TPP were not included in the new round of mandate letters. Chrystia Freeland responded by pointing out trade victories they have achieved so far as that they would continue to fight for softwood lumber. Lebel switched to English to ask the same thing, and François-Philippe Champagne stood up to insist that they would fight for new markets. Lebel worried that Canada wasn’t competitive enough to attract jobs, to which Navdeep Bains listed an auto deal that they just signed to get more jobs. Candice Bergen was up next, concern trolling that the government wanted to legalize all drugs. Jane Philpott assured her that they made evidence-based policy, and their marijuana legislation was based on strict control and regulation. Bergen pressed, and Philpott said there were no plans to legalize any other drugs. Alexandre Boulerice led off for the NDP, railing about the loss of electoral reform. Karina Gould read a reply that there was no broad support from Canadians. Boulerice reiterated, and so did Gould. Nathan Cullen tried to insist there was consensus for proportional representation, and that the government didn’t have a mandate to abandon it, but Gould kept reading her points.

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