Author Archives: Dale

About Dale

Journalist in the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery

Roundup: Don’t take conventions to court

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A group of East Coast lawyers has decided to launch a court challenge about the possibility that the government might appoint a new Supreme Court justice that is not from Atlantic Canada, and my head is already hitting the desk because while you can conceivably argue that the regional composition of the court may very well be a constitutional convention, by that very same argument, a constitutional convention is non-justiciable, so you can’t actually take it to court.

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So, to recap, until an appointment is actually made, the whole quixotic venture is premature. Constitutional conventions are politically enforceable but not legally, in part because we don’t actually want people to constantly take the government to court when they lose at politics (which already happens too much – and it’s almost as bad as writing to the Queen when you lose at politics). There was a court case not too long ago when Democracy Watch took the government to court because Stephen Harper went to the Governor General to call an early election despite the (useless) fixed-election date legislation having been enacted, and the courts dismissed it because prerogative powers are constitutional conventions (and while unwritten, are nevertheless still part of our constitutional framework).

And don’t get me wrong – I do think there is a very good case that the regional composition is a constitutional convention because it reflects the federalist principle that is necessary to give its decisions the political legitimacy necessary to be the arbiter of jurisdictional disputes in this country, and that is a pretty big consideration. But the courts are probably not the best place to solve this issue. Having the Atlantic premiers write the Justice Minister to warn her about breaching the convention is probably a better course of action, as would having backbench Liberal MPs from the region expressing their displeasure (though, for all we know, they may already be doing so behind closed doors in the caucus room). And a public campaign that lays out this argument (as opposed to just one centred around it being unfair or about maligning the political correctness of trying to find a new justice that better reflects certain diversity characteristics) wouldn’t hurt either. But this group of lawyers should know better than to try and make a non-justiciable issue justiciable.

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QP: Back in the saddle

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Everyone’s back, and raring to go, and how I’ve missed them all! Well, okay, not everyone’s back — the PM and several of his ministers are off at the UN General Assembly (where Canada’s Back™), but these things happen.

Rona Ambrose led off, mini-lectern on desk, decrying tax increases along with a potential carbon tax and CPP increases. Bill Morneau stood up to lament the challenges facing Canadians, and noted the reduction in middle-class taxes and the Canadian Child Benefit. Ambrose gave the doom statistics, and Morneau reminded her that investments and not austerity were geared toward future growth. Ambrose changed tactics and sounded the alarm about a peacekeeping mission in sun-Saharan Africa. Harjit Sajjan reminded her that it was dangerous, and that was why he was doing the necessary homework beforehand. Ambrose worried that troops were being used as pawns on a political chessboard in a bid for a UN seat. Sajjan reminded her that it was not just about troops, but a whole-of-government approach to peace operations and stability. Ambrose switched to French to demand a debate and vote on a deployment. Sajjan said they welcomed a healthy debate, but did not commit to a vote (as is proper). Thomas Mulcair was up next, decrying the “cuts” (read: changed escalator) to health transfers. Jane Philpott said she was talking with the provinces, but didn’t commit to restoring the old escalator. Mulcair asked again in English, got the same answer, and then Mulcair demanded that the government vote in favour of nuclear disarmament at the UN this week. Sajjan said that the best way was a pragmatic step-by-step approach. Mulcair demanded GHG reduction targets, and Catherine McKenna said that they were being transparent in their approach.

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Roundup: Productivity has context

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Parliament resumes today, and it’s going to be the start of a heavy legislative agenda, as the government’s months of consultations start wrapping up and decisions get to start being made. And if you needed a reminder about everything on everyone’s plates, here’s a handy piece about the priorities and challenges for the three main parties this autumn, and Kady O’Malley’s list here too. That said, a Huffington Post article was circulating over the weekend that set my teeth on edge, “proving” that the spring session was the least-productive in decades.

Why this is a problematic measure is that it’s focusing solely on the number of bills passed over those ten months (really, only about five of which was when Parliament was sitting). It’s a purely quantitative analysis that says absolutely nothing about the context of what happened, or about the bigger picture of what the government accomplished. And really, I will be the first person to say that the decision to pull the plug on the Friday they did was about forcing the Senate to pass the assisted dying bill, when they were actually scheduled to sit for a couple of more days, during which time they could have passed two more bills that were ready to go, but they didn’t, and that does deserve mention, but that’s not in there at all. What we get are Conservatives cherry-picking trips and “photo ops” – because who needs multilateral engagement, am I right? – rather than on some of the additional hurdles that the session faced. One of the biggest hurdles was around that assisted dying bill, and the fact that the opposition parties demanded far more hours of debate at second reading than the bill deserved (remember, second reading is about the principle of the bill, not the specifics), and they got huffy when the government tried to push those additional (useless) hours of debate into late nights to keep the agenda going, and when they tried to bring in a procedural hammer to move bills through, the Opposition blew their tops and we wound up with The Elbowing and the subsequent fallout from that. Let me remind you that the Conservatives fully participated in the days of psychodrama that followed, and now they have the gall to say that the government didn’t get enough done? Seriously? They were equal participants in determining the Commons’ schedule of what took place (especially the demands for more second reading debate on that assisted dying bill), and I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that when they were in government, they sat on that bill and didn’t move it despite its deadline. So yes, I find this whole accusation to be the height of cheek, and the analysis should have included far more context around the events of the spring.

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Roundup: Precious conformity

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Conservative MP Garnett Genuis penned an analysis piece for Policy Options that tried to explain why MPs vote in lockstep, and it’s just so precious you can barely stand it. Genuis dismisses the talk of heavy-handed PMO and whips offices, and after some lengthy discussion, concludes that it’s the human nature of conformity that’s at play. His mode of analysis was the voting record on C-14, the highly contentious medical assistance in dying bill.

It’s not that Genuis doesn’t have some good – if somewhat infuriating points – in the piece, talking about how MPs are so busy with their constituency work that they just don’t have the time to sit down and study the legislation that they were elected to be considering. That one nearly made me blow a gasket, considering that constituency work isn’t actually part of an MP’s job description and its growing importance has come at the expense of their actual jobs of holding government to account. That Genuis uses it as an excuse for having MPs let the “experts” in their leaders’ offices tell them how to vote is utterly galling. I can see why they would use this excuse, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good one or one that we should let them get away with (but then again, almost nobody knows what an MP’s actual job description is, least of all the MPs themselves, and yes, that is a Very Big Problem. His better points, however, included that sometimes it’s good for local nominations to see that an MP will be willing to break ranks from time to time, but it’s a mixed bag when they also need to be seen to have a united front with the party. It is a tension that he doesn’t delve deeply enough into.

But so much of his thinking is flawed, in part because he relies on the data of votes on a single contentious bill rather than a broader sample, which would produce a more thoughtful discussion, and also because he ignores the other incentives for why MPs will vote in lock-step. For some parties, like the NDP, the need for solidarity in all things means a much more conformist voting pattern in all things, and there is an internal culture of bullying to keep MPs in line so as not to be unseemly with dissent. With government backbenchers, there is the hope that toeing the line enough will earn you a post in cabinet or as a parliamentary secretary, because the ratio of cabinet-to-backbench seats is still too low in Canada to encourage a culture of more independent backbenchers in safer seats willing to do their job of holding government to account. There is also the pressure – which We The Media shamefully perpetuate – that you don’t want to be seen as breaking ranks lest it reflect poorly on the leader (though this seems to be a bit less so under Trudeau who has been vocal about encouraging more free votes). There is no discussion about the blackmail of a leader that can withhold their signature from an MP’s nomination papers during the next election (or whatever the mechanism is post-Reform Act, because there is no actual clarity in law there any longer). So yes, while there is a human tendency to conformity, it is informed by a whole lot of other factors that Genuis ignores, and that taints his analysis to a pretty fatal degree.

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Roundup: Chagger vs Bergen

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The big news yesterday was Rona Ambrose shuffling up her shadow cabinet after the summer of leadership announcements, and naming Candice Bergen as the new Opposition House Leader in the place of Andrew Scheer. What is of particular interest is that you have two fairly inexperienced people in the role in both the government and the official opposition, which could make for some very interesting times going forward.

To refresh, the role of the House Leader is to basically determine the agenda of the Commons (deputy leaders fill this role in the Senate), when it comes to determining what items will be up for debate on what days, the scheduling of Supply Days for opposition parties, and basically doing the procedural management. Why the fact that two relatively inexperienced MPs will be doing this is interesting is because we’ll see what kinds of ways that they prioritise things. (Bergen does have experience as a parliamentary secretary and minister of state, but little in the way of procedural experience as far as I’ve been able to determine). What everyone will be paying attention to in particular, however is tone. The fact that for the first time in history, it’s two women in the role is going to have people waiting to see just how that affects tone (as Rosemary Barton gave as her item to watch in this week’s At Issue), because we have been fed a number of gender essentialist narratives that women do things differently and without as much of the partisan acrimony – not that I necessarily believe it, given that Bergen herself is a pretty die-hard partisan. The added spoke in this wheel is the NDP’s House Leader, Peter Julian, whom I have it on good authority is unreasonable to work with at the best of times. When the tension between the House Leaders boiled over into Motion 6 in the spring (and the subsequent The Elbowing that broke that camel’s back), I have little doubt that it had a lot to do with Dominic LeBlanc losing his patience with both Scheer and Julian (who totally insisted that they weren’t even being obstructionist, which I find a bit dubious). So will they be able to work together to push through what promises to be an extremely busy legislative agenda? Or will Bardish Chagger need to start resorting to procedural tactics to ensure that bills can get passed without endless Second Reading debates that the opposition refuses to let collapse so that they can get to committee (which was constant in the previous parliament when the NDP were official opposition). I’m not going to make any predictions, but it is something that I am very curious to watch as the era of “openness and cooperation” rolls along.

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Roundup: No, the LG can’t threaten the premier

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Sometimes you see a terrible column, and sometimes there’s such a piece of hot garbage that you need to don a hazmat suit just to approach it and get hosed off afterward like you just came out of a leaking nuclear reactor. The Toronto Sun’s Christina Blizzard delivered one of those yesterday.

That’s right – this columnist thinks that the lieutenant governor should threaten Kathleen Wynne to shape up or she’ll dismiss her, because 167 years of Responsible Government was just a failed experiment. One lesbian first minister in this province and we’ve decided that it was too much – time to hand power back to the queen and be done with it.

You see! Voters can’t be trusted! Obviously we’d be better off under absolute monarchy again because they won’t let such terrible governments to let themselves get elected and then implement the agendas that they were elected on. It’s like the fanboys in the First Order who remember the good old days of the Galactic Empire and preferred it to the messy democracy of the New Republic.

It’s called confidence. Whichever leader in the legislature or Parliament that can command the confidence of the chamber gets to advise the LG/GG/queen on how to exercise the powers of state. Not a difficult concept.

It is utterly galling that a columnist can be so utterly ignorant of basic civics that this is the kind of utter bilge that they spew onto newsprint. We do have a problem with basic civic literacy in this country, and when you have columnists like this spreading complete nonsense out of some sense of partisanship, it gives a warped impression to people who read this and makes them believe that it’s actually normal and expected that the GG or the LG can boss around a government that you don’t like. No. Absolutely not.

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So let me reiterate that Blizzard’s column is utter hot garbage. If the Sun had any shame, they’d pull it and apologise profusely for putting it out there, and Blizzard would be sent to a remedial civics course, but I doubt that’s going to happen because she’s just passionate about how bad Wynne is, or some bullshit excuse like that. So in the meantime, I’ll just leave this here:

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Roundup: Sound the independent thought alarm

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Every time I read these headlines, I sigh and shake my head a little, because here we go again. “Indigenous Liberal MP breaks ranks with government on BC’s Site C Dam” it reads. The MP is Robert-Falcon Ouellette, and by “breaking ranks,” he has questions for the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans – who grants approvals for these kinds of things – and he plans to ask him in caucus next week. Oooh, someone had better sound the independent thought alarm!

It seems that most of my fellow journalists have forgotten that it’s the job of backbenchers – even those of the governing party – to hold the government (meaning cabinet) to account. They’re supposed to ask questions and to not just give them a pass. Ouellette is doing his job. But by sensationalizing it (which this headline clearly does), and portraying it as “breaking ranks” (which he’s not – there have been no votes that he’s gone off-side with) is both demeaning to his job, and it reinforces the notion that MPs are supposed to be drones parroting the lines of their leaders, which is absurd. Not only that, but We The Media nevertheless insist that MPs are supposed to do their jobs and represent their constituents and address issues and not just parrot talking points, and yet we call them out the moment that they do just that. Why? Seriously – why are we doing this? We’re actively being destructive to our democratic system when we pull this kind of nonsense. There are far better and more effective ways that this story could have been framed that don’t privilege party discipline (which again, not actually being broken here) and this notion that MPs must be in lockstep. It shouldn’t be that difficult to do. And yet here we are.

Honestly, we need to do better if we expect better democratic outcomes in this country. We are part of the problem, and we should stop being just that.

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Roundup: Quality over quantity

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Every time I see a piece that presents the shockingly low numbers of women in politics in our country, I tense up a little. Not because the numbers are terrible – because let’s face it, they are – but because almost always, these tend to be quantitative lists trying to talk about a qualitative problem. Lo and behold, we have yet another of these in the Ottawa Citizen this morning, but there are a few figures in there that need to be unpacked a little more.

The one that really bothers me and deserves to be contextualized is the one percent change between number of women in this parliament and the previous one, and this is where the quantitative/qualitative aspect really comes into play. First of all, the House of Commons is larger in the current parliament by 30 MPs. This means that a one percent gain in a larger Commons means more women on an absolute numbers basis, and that matters. The other, more important fact, however, is the quality of the female MPs we elected this time around. In 2011, let’s face it – much of the increase came from the number of NDP MPs who were accidentally elected following the “Orange Wave” – candidates who hadn’t been properly nominated, had never been to their ridings, never campaigned in them, and were just names on a list that the party put there in order to ensure that they could max out their spending limits. When a wave of sentimentality overcame the Quebec electorate, they got elected. Much was made of the number of young women that were elected, but qualitatively, most of them were underwhelming MPs, whose only real skillset was in reading the scripts that were put in front of them and throwing tantrums in the media when they needed some attention. Most of them, fortunately, didn’t get elected again. That said, for the 2015 election, the Liberals put into place a system to seek out and encourage more women to seek the nomination and to support them in winning it. Qualitatively, you got better MPs who were not just names on lists, who proved they could fight and win both a nomination race and an election by doing the work of door-knocking and being engaged, and more of them wound up in the Commons. It’s a qualitative improvement that can grow further in the next election.

This is why suggestions about changing our electoral system to incorporate lists in order to get more women and minorities into the Commons frustrates me, because there is an implicit message that women and visible minority candidates can’t fight and win elections on an equal basis. I think that’s wrong, and targets the wrong problem because it ignores the complexities and realities of our nomination system and ways that it needs to be improved – such as how the Liberals started doing – and how that changes the game on the ground. The problems in our system when it comes to getting women elected are cultural, not mechanical. Simply changing the electoral system to artificially inflate the numbers of women won’t solve the underlying problems, but merely mask them. We should remember that every time these quantitative lists are released.

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Roundup: Nuance versus brand damage

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As the Conservatives head to Halifax for their caucus retreat, the Kellie Leitch/Canadian Values question is threatening to expose some of the caucus rifts – particularly as Leitch feels a bit put out that Rona Ambrose decided to distance herself and the party from Leitch’s proposal, and Leitch has been musing openly about filing a formal complaint with the party that Ambrose has essentially involved herself in the leadership campaign in this way. There are a couple of things that I would note from all of this – one is that we place way too much emphasis on caucus solidarity on all things in this country, and blow any disagreement between party members out of all sense of proportion, usually with some variation of “Is [insert party leader here] losing control of their caucus?!” It’s hyperbolic and it’s nonsense, and it enforces the perceived need for everyone to always be in lock-step, which is terrible for democracy. The other thing I would note is that this is that Ambrose was scrambling to prevent damaging the Conservative brand, and Leitch’s inability to grasp nuance is apparently also a sign that she isn’t able to grasp the magnitude of this floodgate that she’s opened. The fact that she keeps insisting that this isn’t what it clearly is – directed toward certain Muslim communities (remember kids, a dog-whistle is a coded message, while this one is right out there in the open) – while saying that it’s about trying to find a “unified Canadian identity” and not about identity politics (no seriously, she said this – you can check the video), continues to highlight that she is completely and utterly tone deaf. Ambrose is being left to pick up the pieces of Leitch crashing around like the proverbial bull in the china shop, because Leitch is too tone deaf to see what she’s doing to the party brand. So sure, there are rifts in the caucus being formed as a result. While we shouldn’t try to pretend that parties need to be uniform in all things, Leitch should also realise that some rifts are bad for the brand you’re trying to build and probably shouldn’t be papered over.

And while we’re on the subject of Leitch, John McCallum calls her anti-Canadian values screening proposal “Orwellian.”

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Roundup: Leitch the desperate, hollow shell

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Apparently we’re still talking about Kellie Leitch and her “anti-Canadian values” screening, because why not? The Canadian Press kicked off the day by putting Leitch’s assertion that it would be akin to “asking some simple questions” to their Baloney Metre™, and lo and behold, the experts they spoke to pretty much laughed it out of the room, earning Leitch’s supposition a rare “full of baloney” rating. It seems that “a few simple questions” just teaches people how to lie to give the “right” answers, and that proper interviews with people trained to know whether people are lying is so prohibitively expensive that it’s never going to happen. So there’s that. Much later in the day, Jason Kenney decided to weigh in from Alberta, and pretty much eviscerated Leitch by saying that this position is a new one for her that she never articulated before in cabinet or caucus, and that she doesn’t understand the nuance around the issue. But then again, we’ve pretty much established that Leitch lacks any real semblance of emotional quotient or self-awareness, so her inability to grasp nuance should not be a surprise to anyone.

Meanwhile, Peter Loewen reminds us that we’re not as perfectly tolerant as we like to believe, and he has the data to prove it, which is why Leitch’s message will find a home in places. Scott Reid looks over the record of Leitch’s campaign manager, who helped Rob Ford get elected, and notes that by this point, Leitch is less of a candidate than a strategy in human form (which is kind of what Jason Kenney is hinting at when noting that this position is all new for Leitch). Paul Wells notes the low ceiling for the kind of rhetoric that Leitch is now taking on, and while he sees the strategic value in such a position, he also offers some ideas for better choices than Leitch. Tabatha Southey offers her particular acid take on the Leitch situation, and her insistence on digging so much that she is in danger of becoming a mole person. And of course, there’s the At Issue panel looking at Leitch as well.

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