Author Archives: Dale

About Dale

Journalist in the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery

Roundup: MyDemocracy survey says…

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The results of the MyDemocracy.ca survey got published yesterday, and it’s full of some fairly contradictory results about people generally being reasonably satisfied with our system (or at least not wildly dissatisfied), preferring constituency connections and accountability (but also co-operation, which makes accountability difficult), while also wanting more diversity of views (unless it lets in radicals and extremists). Also, no mandatory voting, online voting, or lowering the voting age. (Full report here). So yeah. And already you’ve got Nathan Cullen sore that it doesn’t say “Canadians want PR” because that’s not what it was asking. Anyway, Philippe Lagassé is best positioned to weigh in on it, so here we go:

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/824086123882446848

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/824086588879728640

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/824086772934119425

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/824087957657292801

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/824089769835720704

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/824090165786316803

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/824091337930711041

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/824092165701857281

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/824096930552745984

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/824097049226387456

https://twitter.com/davidakin/status/824043118475546626

Reading through the methodology and the reasoning behind the questions was fairly illuminating and something the detractors of the survey should probably want to actually do before they scroll ahead to where they go “Why doesn’t it say that Canadians really want proportional representation? Stupid biased survey” because we know that’s what they want to hear.

Of course, if you ask me, this should provide enough justification for them to smother this whole thing in the cradle and wash their hands of it, saying it turns out that Canadians aren’t too concerned with reform and hey, it turns out it’s way more complex than we thought so yeah, bad promise, we’ll do better next time, and then move onto some actual topics of importance than just trying to appease a few sore losers.

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Roundup: The “dangerous” Senate

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Remember last week when John Ivison had that ridiculous column about the Senate apparently becoming such a terrible beast that the finance minister was being forced to change his upcoming budget to placate them, and then Andrew Coyne got the vapours about it? Yeah, well, over in the Vancouver Sun, they found a couple of people for whom that Ivison column made them utterly hysterical that they made it the BC angle. And as much as I like Peter O’Neil, who wrote the piece, it was really terrible and didn’t appear to challenge any of these so-called experts at all, or even what Ivison wrote – it took Ivison as gospel and went to town with it, despite the fact that it was torqued and wrong.

The “experts” consulted were a former BC Liberal leader, a law professor, and a recycled quote from the current BC premier. Said former BC Liberal leader spins conspiracy theories that because BC only has six senators, it means that the other senators are going to sneakily start amending bills to funnel BC’s wealth eastward.

No, seriously. He actually said that.

The law professor? He asserts that, apparently based on the Ivison column, that the “half-reformed” Senate is emboldened to exercise its powers without correcting the institution’s “considerable faults,” which aren’t. Never mind that we haven’t actually seen much in the way of them being so “emboldened” other than the fact that they’ve found legitimate flaws in government legislation and insisted that it be either corrected or removed. You know, like they’re supposed to because that’s the whole raison d’etre of the institution. And Christy Clark? She simply asserts that the Senate doesn’t work now. Erm, except that it actually seems to be considering that they’ve catching flaws in government legislation and dealing with it. Seems to be working to me.

Part of the problem with the framing of the article as well is the fact that it is coming from this particular grievance-based claim that BC is underrepresented in the Senate because it only has six seats when Ontario and Quebec each have 24. The flaw in this argument is that it ignores the regional construction of the Senate – it is not designed for provincial representation, but rather regional blocks – Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes, and the West, with the territories and Newfoundland and Labrador each being additional regions unto themselves. The reason why it was designed with regional rather than provincial equality in mind was to provide a counterbalance to the representation-by-population of the House of Commons, and if you look at the populations of each regional bloc (Newfoundland & Labrador and the territories excepted), they are roughly analogous. That’s not a bad thing, but BC is acting a though the Senate was designed in another way, which it was not.

The problem with pieces like this one is that the important facts and context are left out. We are left with a few tantalizing quotes that crank the hysteria up to eleven, but there is no actual civic literacy to counter any of it, whether that’s out of ignorance or by design I can’t say. But it’s not edifying. It’s cartoonish, and in fact promotes an ugly cynicism about our institutions that creates bigger problems of perception that are not based on fact, and that’s a problem.

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Roundup: Is there a regional trade-off?

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Canadian public affairs blog In Due Course published a piece on the weekend wherein Joseph Heath offers a few things to consider with how a Conservative party would deal with Quebec under a proportional representation system where the calculations are different. It’s interesting and he raises a lot of very good points. And predictably, proponents of PR went to question all of his points, particularly about the fortunes of the Bloc Québécois (and to a lesser extent the Reform Party) under the current first-past-the-post system.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/823244412100579328

The problem with cherry-picking individual election results like 1993 is that it doesn’t take a broader view of the system’s resilience as a whole. Over the longer term, regional parties in this country may do well for an election cycle or two at the most, but they have no capacity or room for growth, and that’s why the big-tent brokerage parties will always regain strength and power. What it also does is say that when these kinds of regional movements do take hold, that their grievances and desire to punish parties in power (which some Bloc votes have been about) is illegitimate.

Indeed, as Emmett Macfarlane points out here, focusing on geography misses the point when you look at how the big-tent parties are forced to craft policies that will appeal nationally and won’t explicitly write-off regions.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/823255411595821056

Coyne is also dismissive of “safe” ridings or regions, but I’m sure that we’ve seen time and again that there is almost no such thing as a “safe” seat or riding, particularly when there are swings in the public mood. Again, that’s not a bad thing, and one could argue that in a properly functioning House of Commons, “safe” seats can be a bulwark against too much power in the leadership because MPs with “safe” seats that have no prospect of getting into cabinet are more likely to push back against what they see as intrusions by the leader because they have little to lose. (Granted, this is more keenly demonstrated in Westminster because their leaders don’t have the ability to sign off on nomination forms like they do here, and their leadership selection process has been different until recently, but the point still stands).

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/823245496953114625

Part of the problem here, which Coyne does admit, is that defenders of different systems are approaching the issues in different ways. But defenders of the current system don’t necessarily foresee a future dystopia as warning that if you’re looking for changes to the electoral system to fix what is perceived to be broken here, you’re going to find that it’s not actually going to fix things, and it certainly won’t result in this kind of democratic utopianism that most PR advocates proclaim.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/823248806468685824

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/823248815754878976

There is also the fact, and I cannot stress this enough, that Canada is not the same as most other countries. While we are not Israel in terms of its politics, we are also not a Scandinavian country either, so expecting their results to translate here is just as much of an over-reach and a fiction.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/823256309755772929

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/823257579170172928

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/823257712351911937

That’s why we need to approach this very carefully. (Well, I say we need to smother the electoral reform consultations entirely, but that’s just me). Too many people are simply pointing to Norway or Sweden and saying “Look! See how great it is!” when they should also look at the vast dysfunction of Belgium (which is a far better analogy if you look at our systems and cultures), or even Australia, where their proportionally-elected Senate is an utter gong show. But cherry-picking data – on both sides – doesn’t actually help further the debate.

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Roundup: Entering the Trumpocalypse

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So, this is the Trumpocalypse. I didn’t really want to write anything about it, but that’s all anyone can talk about, so here’s the roundup. There have been a few different looks at how Trudeau’s cabinet shuffle was supposed to retool for the Trump era, but I will say that Maclean’s has one of the best ones, particularly because it doesn’t just focus on the shuffled ministers but also how Trudeau is redeploying his other ministers based on fascinations that the Americans have.

While people like Newt Gingrich have been saying that Canada will be “least affected” by changes to trade, what he seems to forget is that we’re as much a part of NAFTA as Mexico is, and that we’re likely to be hit with all manner of unintended blowback from other changes – especially on things like the “border tax” that Trump keeps talking about, and in places like our energy sector. Mind you, given the complexity of the problem, economist Jack Mintz doesn’t think that Trump’s border tax will actually end up happening.

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/822544617195393024

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/822546358515142661

https://twitter.com/rolandparis/status/822538848576143360

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/822537014167928837

And then there was the speech, with its talk of “American carnage” and “America First.” Colby Cosh questions some of the reviews given how terrible most inaugural speeches tend to be as they are geared more toward political signalling rather than oration. Andrew Coyne was struck by how paranoid and inward-looking it was. Scott Feschuk, meanwhile, gives you his satirical annotation of the speech.

Meanwhile, Stephen Saideman looks at how Trump’s real-estate agent behaviour will have great consequences internationally, while Ian Brodie reminds us that America had better do well under Trump or Canada will suffer. Patricia Treble finds a number of curious (if disturbing) parallels between Trump and Edward VIII. Paul Wells notes that the genius of the American Republic is that it won’t let one person accumulate too much power and that may yet save us all, while Scott Gilmore reminds us that America already went through this in the 1850s with populist demagogues, and that it will endure again.

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Roundup: “Prominent” Canadians demand unicorns

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Yesterday, the “Every Voter Counts Alliance,” which is a proportional representation umbrella group that includes our friends at Fair Vote Canada got a group of “prominent Canadians” to call on the government to implement a “made-in-Canada” PR system. And while most of these “prominent Canadians” are the usual suspects, they got a few added names including a former Chief Electoral Officer (whom I will note has tried promoting a “rural-urban proportional system” that the Supreme Court would immediately frown upon). Meanwhile, here are a few reminders about just what a “made-in-Canada” PR system is referring to.

Handwavey. Nonsense.

The reason why people like these keep going back to his notion that there’s a “made-in-Canada” system that we can somehow devise that will somehow manage to overcome the constitutional obstacles and at the same time providing their precious proportionality and will somehow deliver all of the supposed goodness that comes along with it despite the fact that we’re a vast country with a sparse population and fairly entrenched regional divisions, is because they don’t actually know how it will look. They just expect someone to figure it out and then present it to them, and it will be so wonderful that there will be no unintended consequences, we won’t wind up with thirty splinter parties, that it won’t give rise to far-right parties like pretty much every other PR system has, that it will lead to stable coalition governments that won’t have big policy “swings” every few years, and there will be no problems. No actual trade-offs. Just a new golden age of democracy.

But if they’re trying to pin their hopes on the Electoral Reform committee and its work, well, I wouldn’t hold my breath. As I’ve discussed elsewhere about why it’s a bad idea from a governance and accountability point of view, and as Kady O’Malley reminds us that the committee never actually came to any kind of consensus, and as I will remind you yet again, their report was a steaming pile of hot garbage. It’s not going to happen. What they’re asking for is magic. Unicorns and gumdrops, and not reality.

It’s time to let the demands for proportionality go. They won’t actually improve governance or representation, because it’s built solely on the emotional response of sore-loserism. We have a system that functions (and would function even better if we undid the “reforms” that were supposed to improve things but only made them worse). Trying to break it even further to satisfy this emotional need for perceived “fairness” which is not actually a Thing is only going to do just that – break it. Time to grow up and actually learn how the system works.

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Roundup: Divorcing commentary from policy

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So, it’s now official that Kevin O’Leary is throwing his hat in the race (though, it should be said, he still hasn’t filed his paperwork and paid his entry fees). And already, he’s making outrageous statements like how all of his previous commentary doesn’t count because it was just commentary and not policy that he’ll be judged on (not sure it works that way). But he keeps saying “That was good television but it’s not policy.”

Or there’s already the bald-faced wrong numbers he’s pushing, whether it’s around the country’s fiscal situation, certain programmes like defence spending, or even growth figures.

https://twitter.com/cfhorgan/status/821802645514027009

And while that’s all well and good, Chris Selley makes some very good points about the places where O’Leary diverges from the party’s base, whether it’s on CBC, peacekeeping or not being concerned about terrorism. That could make him a tough sell with them, particularly on issues that they’ve been vocal about for the past couple of decades.

But despite that, I have to say that it’s not only his name recognition that gives him and advantage in this race, but the fact that he’s going to appeal to a particular demographic in the party that fetishizes businessmen in politics (as though the skillsets were remotely similar, which they’re not), and particularly brash businessmen are swelling everyone’s trousers of late, especially when they boast about things like the “language of jobs” or being able to “read a balance sheet” (which O’Leary has yet to provide concrete evidence that he can, given that he apparently couldn’t read the actual context of that fiscal projection that got him so alarmed that he just had to join the race).

https://twitter.com/lazin_ryder/status/821863599245115395

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/821708589316325377

He’s also been playing his cards right, as Adam Daifallah points out here, whether it’s with the “phony war” by staying relevant while “thinking about” his decision, his social media execution, his upstaging the French debate and lowering those expectations for himself. And more than anything, the race, with its 14 candidates, most of them dull and beige, has been a bit of a snooze (Kellie Leitch’s constant nonsense aside), and O’Leary is going to shake that up. The other candidates have been telegraphing that they’re afraid of him for a while (hello Lisa Raitt’s “Stop Kevin O’Leary” website), and that means something. We’ll see just how much it means sooner than later.

https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/821728909280550912

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Roundup: Butchered applause lines

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Now that the French “debate” has passed, it looks like today is the day that Kevin O’Leary will announce his candidacy for the Conservative leadership – something most of the other candidates will probably welcome given that it will divert everyone’s attention from the embarrassing debacle that was the “debate,” and I do use the term loosely. As with previous events in this contest, there was no debate, just a line-up of talking points, only this time it was mostly in mangled French, some of which was utterly incomprehensible.

Not to say that there wasn’t some artificial drama during the horror show. Kellie Leitch in full butchered French and Steven Blaney both had their sight set on Maxime Bernier and attacked him out of the gate (while Erin O’Toole, in very slow sentences, pleaded with them not to fight), and for the first 45 minutes at least, all anyone could talk about was supply management, before the moved onto softwood lumber – because apparently dairy and forestry are Quebec’s only two industries. And then when it came to questions of national security, it was all manner of fumbled pearl-clutching (and it was like you could watch them grasping for that strand of pearls and missing it every time) as a number of them insisted that they were for immigration but wanted to ensure that they weren’t letting in terrorists. Brad Trost decided to go full-Trump and declare that we ban immigration from “pro-radical Islamist” regions (but don’t worry, he doesn’t hate all immigrants – he married one!).

https://twitter.com/stephaniecarvin/status/821520113786621953

If you’re looking for a professional evaluation of everyone’s proficiency in French, CBC assembled an expert panel to grade everyone, and based on my own personal observations, Lisa Raitt did better than most expectations (but was still mostly reading her responses), and Chris Alexander, for all of his other weaknesses in this race, had one of the best grasps of the language of any of them. Rick Petersen, the other also-ran who doesn’t have a seat, also had a really great grasp of French and was one of the only people speaking off the cuff – doubly impressive given that he’s an Anglo and not Francophone. And as for Deepak Obhrai, people keep saying “points for trying!” or “At least he showed up, unlike O’Leary!” well, there were actual times when he was just uttering phonetic gibberish – and pointing while doing it.

But, as Martin Patriquin writes, none of this is going to matter after a few hours today because once O’Leary is in the race, none of it is going to matter.

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Roundup: Framing Senate efficacy

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Occasionally a headline will give me pause, and sometimes the framing of the story beneath it will make me shake my head. This is one of those times. “Liberals tailor upcoming budget to pass through empowered Senate,” the headline reads. And the story is framed in such a way that this is the unintended consequence of Trudeau changing the appointment process for Senators so that there are now all of these independent senators that the government has to contend with who won’t simply roll-over when asked.

The case-in-point isn’t so much the assisted dying legislation as it was C-29, the government’s fall budget implementation bill, wherein a few senators started to dig in their heels about the section in the bill related to changes to the Bank Act that would have given the federal government the power to change consumer protections in the banking sector, and Quebec objected. The rub here is that part of Quebec’s objection was that the Supreme Court of Canada had already ruled that this was an area of provincial jurisdiction and the federal government was clearly trying to bigfoot this. Eventually the finance minister backed down and took the section out of the bill, and the Senate passed it as amended. In other words, they did their jobs by ensuring that a problem in the legislation got fixed.

But that’s not how this is being framed. No, it’s all about how senators are flexing their muscles and not being rubber stamps, and now government “policy-makers” have to be more attuned to senators’ particular agendas so that they can be accommodated. And I’m shaking my head at this because it’s deliberately misconstruing what happened with C-29, and it’s making the suggestion that things were better before when governments could ram flawed bills through the Senate because they could ostensibly whip their caucus to pass it (although I will caution that such whips were voluntary – no senator has ever really been bound by a whip the way MPs are). What is galling about the pundits who are buying this line and framing their pieces to fit that line is that it’s tacitly agreeing that the Senate should not be doing its job, and that it’s fine for governments to ram through flawed bills for some reason. This is why we have a Senate – to provide the check on bills that the Commons won’t because of the party whips. Because these senators put up a fight and insisted that the government take those sections out and at least put them in a separate bill, they wound up saving the government the cost of what would have been another years-long fight in the courts going all the way back up to the Supreme Court to rehash this very same fight over jurisdiction and probably losing. And I have to ask – why is everyone so offended by the notion that the Senate is doing what it’s supposed to be doing? I have yet to hear a good answer, and no, hand-waving and shouting “democracy!” is not an answer.

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Roundup: The business of selling seats

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Kevin O’Leary went on television on the weekend, because of course he did, and then said a bunch of nonsense. Because of course he did. This time, it was to whine about how it’s not fair that rich people can’t fund their own campaigns, and to say that he thinks that the Senate should be a profit centre rather than a cost, and charging people $100K to $200K per year for the privilege of sitting there. No, seriously. He has said he thinks it’s fine to sell seats in a house of Parliament, and nobody challenged him on that point of the fact that it’s grossly unconstitutional. (Only a later update of the story added quotes from Emmett Macfarlane that appeared to be what he tweeted on the subject).

Not only that, but you immediately had a bunch of chuckleheads showing up on the Twitter Machine going “a plain reading of the constitution would say this is allowed” without any hint that they are being ironic. Before Leonid Sirota beat me to the punch, I was going to remind everyone that the idea of selling Senate seats came up during the Supreme Court of Canada hearing on the Senate reference, where Justice Cromwell cornered the government’s lawyers on the question of “consultative elections” and how they wouldn’t require a change in the constitution. “If consultative elections are allowed, then why not a consultative auction?” asked Justice Cromwell, and well, the government lawyer had to basically swallow that one. (To remind you, they ruled that consultative elections are not allowed without a change to the constitution).

I would also add that for as much as we’ve (rightfully) lambasted O’Leary on this ludicrous idea, the NDP and others have been floating around a similar idea in the past about defunding the Senate and making it a volunteer position – you know, so that just like O’Leary’s plan, it becomes available to only the super-rich who have the time and resources to devote to doing the work. Because that’s exactly the kinds of people we want to fill those seats. Not to mention, if O’Leary thinks that Senate seats should be up for sale, why not any other federally appointed position – judges, heads of tribunals, Commissioner of the RCMP? All profit generators instead of a drain on the taxpayer, right? Yeah, no.

On a related note, O’Leary said that if he does win the leadership, he wouldn’t be in any rush to run in a by-election but would spend time crossing the country to gather support. Because this is what happens when you don’t insist that the leadership be from caucus. It elevates the position above what it should be, and diminishes the role of caucus and the value of a seat in parliament. Leadership races should be by caucus selection, not membership vote. We’ve bastardized our system enough, and we need to reign it in.

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Roundup: Housakos vs Harder

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It took a couple of weeks, but I will say that I was encouraged to read that Senator Leo Housakos was in the press pushing back against Senator Peter Harder’s comments that the Senate hasn’t been implementing changes to its processes as recommended by the Auditor General. As chair of the Internal Economy committee, Housakos has corrected the record to point out that yes, a lot of changes have happened (and in fact were happening since long before the now infamous audit happened), and also hit back at the issue of an audit committee. Harder it seems has bought into the AG’s wrong-headed notion that an external audit body be formed, which I will reiterate is absolutely an affront to parliamentary democracy. The Senate is a parliamentary body, and parliament is self-governing. It needs to be, full stop. Making senators answerable to an outside body puts a stake in the ability to be self-governing, and pretty much says that we don’t deserve to be a self-governing country anymore, and should just hand all of the power back to the Queen. That Harder can’t see that is blind and a little bit gobsmacking. While the Senate does plan to announce an audit body soon, it will be of mixed composition, and if they’ve paid attention to Senator McCoy’s proposal to mirror the House of Lords’ body – basically three senators and two outside experts – then we’ll be fine. But make no mistake – such a body must be majority senators and be chaired by a Senator. Otherwise let’s just start the process of shuttering parliament, and no, I’m not even being dramatic about it.

While we’re on the topic of the Senate, I just wanted to give a tip of my hat to now-retired Senator Nancy Ruth (who was on Power & Politics yesterday at 1:49:00 on this link). Nancy Ruth (that’s one name, like Cher or Madonna) was one of my early entry points into political journalism, when I came to the Hill writing for GLBT publications like the now-defunct Outlooks and Capital Xtra. As the only openly lesbian parliamentarian, and the only openly LGBT member of the Conservative caucus who wasn’t media shy, she was my point of contact into that caucus and that particular political sphere. The relationship I built there gave me my first by-line for The Canadian Press, and I eventually moved into more mainstream outlets. She was an absolute joy to cover, and I will miss her terribly.

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