With the Senate back in the news, it’s like my own personal bat-signal, so let’s delve into it, shall we? First up is a piece about some Conservative senators talking about changes to national security legislation (formerly C-51, which we need to stop referring to it as, since it’s passed and with dissolution the number scheme slate is wiped clean). Despite the ominous headline that warns that they could “disrupt” the plan to change the anti-terror act, there is very little indication in the story that they intend to do just that. They say they’ll study the changes, and they’re not opposed to creating a parliamentary oversight body, so where is the actual plans for disruption? Oh dear. It seems that we may have torqued a headline for the same of drama. I mean, they could disrupt any bill, but they don’t. Try again. Meanwhile, Senate leader Claude Carignan is trying to get assurances that Conservative senators will be able to vote on the interim leader, seeing as that’s in the party’s constitution, particularly because they are now all that is left to represent certain regions of the country – like the Atlantic provinces, or Toronto and Montreal. They will also have a particular heft to their representation, with 47 senators to a current 99 MPs. So that’ll be interesting. (Also, are we really down to four non-Harper appointed Conservatives already? Time flies). Senator Runciman talks about party renewal including proposing that they have their own Kingston Conference to lay the groundwork for their return to power, much as the Liberals have done in times past. Historian Christopher Moore thinks the party should return to caucus selection for permanent leader rather than an expensive and lengthy membership-driven process (which I would agree with), but somehow I doubt the party will buy it.
Author Archives: Dale
Roundup: May already has a job
In the wake of Monday’s election results, a number of people have been trying to circulate a few petitions calling on Justin Trudeau to appoint Elizabeth May as environment minster. It’s so ridiculous I barely know where to begin. First of all, why would she cross the floor? There is no need for a coalition government, and for her to abandon the Green Party to join the Liberals would be a bit of a repudiation of what she stands for. It also demonstrates a lack of awareness of what it means to be in a cabinet, which means solidarity with the government’s decisions as a whole. If you don’t agree with all of the cabinet’s decisions, you resign, because cabinet solidarity is part of our system of government. With her many strident positions on various policy files, it’s hard, if not impossible, to see May agreeing with the Liberal positions on so many files. Most of all, this call demonstrates a complete inability for people to appreciate the role that the opposition plays in our system of government. It’s vital, because it holds the government to account – and why wouldn’t you want May to be holding the government to account over their environmental policies? Why would it be a lesser job for her to be doing the holding to account? In the romantic notion that people have that everything should somehow be done by consensus, they don’t appreciate that there is a role for accountability when there is disagreement. It doesn’t need to be nasty – which is unfortunately where we’ve wound up in recent years because of the kinds of culture that has been allowed to breed in parliament – but it can be principled and fair, and certainly May is providing that kind of opposition. Trudeau is making other inroads, such as inviting her and other opposition members to the Paris climate summit – former practice that Harper abandoned when he decided that only his ministers should be allowed to attend these kinds of things. Can May play a role in the system? Absolutely, and she does? That doesn’t mean that she needs to be given a seat at the cabinet table. That’s just ridiculous.
Roundup: Unrest in the ranks
There appears to be some unrest in the Conservative ranks, we’re starting to hear – both in the caucus and the party machinery itself. While it’s not unthinkable for a party that has just lost an election, they seem to be doing some questionable things. Things like trying to bar defeated candidates from one last caucus gathering that’ll allow them to vent and hug it out behind closed doors. Denied of that, they’ll likely start talking to the media, their muzzles loosed. It’s started, even with some that were not defeated (but more on that in a moment). Behind the scenes, there’s some rancorous finger-pointing going on with Jenni Byrne in the centre of it all. And while this takes place, Diane Finley stepped forward to make it known that she is officially interested in becoming interim leader, as Rob Nicholson has so far unofficially. What was curious was the way in which Finley went onto Power & Politics to make her case about needing to transition from a more “authoritarian” PMO to a “collaborative” OLO, and basically shrugging off her participation in said authoritarianism. She touts her management experience, but what I heard from civil servants during Finley’s first go-around as minister of Human Resources was that she walked into the building and told everyone that they were all Liberals and she was going to fix the joint up. Collaborative! (She later went to Immigration and broke the system, creating massive backlogs by refusing to make appointments to the Immigration and Refugee Board until she had re-jigged the selection process. Management skills!) Word also has it that both Jason Kenney and Kellie Leitch have their leadership teams assembled, so that race could easily kick off right away. Whether they wait to hash out what happened over the election that led to their demise, or they discuss what kind of reorganization the party needs before they get into the leadership process, doesn’t seem to be a concern yet at this point. We’ll see if that’s a problem going forward.
Diane Finley makes it official re: interim leadership bid. #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/fO5J2AbOS3
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) October 23, 2015
Roundup: Threats from the Senate
There are a couple of issues arising out of the Senate right now, both of which deserve a bit of exploration. The first is over the selection of the party’s interim leader – the party president has indicated that the Commons caucus would make the selection (per the provisions in Michael Chong’s lamentable Reform Act). Senator David Wells says that no, the party constitution says that an interim leader would be chosen by the Parliamentary caucus, which would include senators. Why is this important? Because right now, the party has no East Coast MPs, nor any from the GTA or Montreal, whereas they have Senators from those regions who can provide some of that input. (In fact, it’s yet another reason for why the Senate is valuable – for years, it used to mean that the only Albertans in the Liberal caucus were from the Senate, until of course Trudeau’s Great Expulsion). And as Wells points out, this is an issue in the party’s own constitution, which makes the party president’s position that much more untenable. The other issue is certain Conservative senators trying to flex their muscles and saying that they’re under no obligation to pass Liberal legislation, much as in 2006, Liberal senators were giving the Conservatives a hard time with some of their bills. This whole thing is problematic for a number of reasons. First of all, this is likely someone talking out of their ass (and I have my suspicions as to who it is). With Harper no longer leader, and no longer PM, any leverage that he had with the Senate has pretty much evaporated. Newer senators no longer have someone to feel beholden to, and there is no longer the emotional blackmail of “You want to support the PM, don’t you?” Those non-existent levers of power that the PMO was trying to exercise (per Nigel Wright’s complaints) no longer have anything to back them up when it comes to threat or reward. And then there’s the matter of 2006 that these oh-so-brave “senior senators” are referencing, particularly the Accountability Act. The problem was that it was a bad bill that had all kinds of problems and loopholes, but they didn’t get fixed on the Commons side? Why? Because the Liberals of that era were so cowed by their election loss that they left the fight up to the Senate rather than take the blowback themselves, while Pat Martin was the Conservatives’ accomplice, giddily rubber-stamping the whole affair in order to punish the Liberals some more. So the Liberals in the Senate did the battling for the needed amendments, most of which they actually got. I’m going to be optimistic and say that the legislation coming from this crop of Liberals is likely to be of higher calibre because they’re not opposed to listening to civil service advice for kneejerk reasons. On top of it all, there has to be enough shreds of self-awareness in the Conservative senate caucus to know that if they start playing games, they’ll damage themselves and the Chamber’s reputation as Trudeau tries to rehabilitate it, and everyone will lose as a result. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t take these threats too seriously.
https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/657348537873735682
Roundup: Campaign autopsies in full swing
Not that we’ve had a day to catch our breaths (more or less), the campaign post-mortems are beginning, especially from the Conservative camp. Things are starting to leak out, such as this gem from the Conservative camp, which tells about their considering and ultimately rejecting the Hail Marry pass of having Harper say that he wouldn’t run after this campaign. It also tells of the Conservatives trying to offer advice to the faltering NDP campaign about how to attack the Liberals, lest the Liberals win out over both of them, and lo and behold, they did. Ron Liepert – a former provincial cabinet minister who turned federal to take out Rob Anders at the nomination race – talks about a campaign where the central party wasn’t respecting the local candidates or listening to their concerns on the ground. Andrew Coyne writes that the party defeated itself with a “deep, unrelenting, almost poisonous cynicism.” Not surprisingly, Conservatives like Michelle Rempel are questioning the tone of the campaign. As for the NDP, they are starting their own process, but some, like now-former MP Craig Scott, are less gracious in defeat.
https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/657050622504472576
https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/657050927812075520
Roundup: Setting a new tone
The first day “on the job,” as it were, and Justin Trudeau was out to set a different tone from his predecessor from the get-go. While he and his cabinet won’t be sworn in until November 4th, the job of transition started today, but that didn’t stop Trudeau for being at the Metro station in his riding first thing to thank the voters there, and to pose for photos – something that Harper is pretty much loathe to do if it’s not in a controlled space. (One imagines that Trudeau’s RCMP detail is going to start freaking out really shortly). From Montreal, he flew back to Ottawa for a rally with supporters and local winning candidates (who pretty much swept the region here, with Pierre Poilievre’s riding being the sole exception), and then up to Parliament Hill to make some calls with international leaders including President Obama, where talk ranged from the ISIS mission to pipeline projects, with the message to the world being that “Canada is back.” Well, with a number of high-level international conferences coming up, Trudeau has high expectations being placed on him by those other world leaders. There is also a great sense of optimism with the premiers as well, so that looks like it could be a changing tone there as well. From there, Trudeau held a press conference in the National Press Theatre – something Stephen Harper hasn’t done since 2009, when he was trying to strike a deal with Michael Ignatieff not to topple his government over the summer (resulting in that Blue Ribbon panel on EI reform, which ended up collapsing thanks to the antics of Poilievre). He also walked there from the Hill as opposed to taking a motorcade. (Harper will take his motorcade across the street from 24 Sussex to Rideau Hall). Trudeau took questions for about 25 minutes – including follow-ups, and then promised that he would be back for more. It’s a completely different way of running things that most of the younger journalists on the Hill (myself included) aren’t used to. Not only that, but he promised that these would be regular appearances. It’s resetting the tone with the media, and it’s a hopeful signal that the tone really will start to change around here, and maybe we’ll start getting back to the way things used to be, before the dark times.
A pleasure to thank Montrealers for their support today. I'll be proud to represent Papineau as Prime Minister. pic.twitter.com/qBDGFTyUXA
— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) October 20, 2015
Readout of @POTUS' Call with Prime Minister-Designate Justin Trudeau of Canada pic.twitter.com/RodBCJVXU2
— Obama NSC- Archived (@NSC44) October 20, 2015
This is odd. There's a prime minister taking questions in the National Press Theatre with a journalist chairing. pic.twitter.com/lvvF677Tb8
— Terry Milewski (@CBCTerry) October 20, 2015
Welcome Back, Wallin
Note: This is a piece I wrote on spec a few weeks ago for publication that didn’t get picked up. I figured I would share it here, and hopefully it’s not too dated.
With her suspension lifted after the dissolution of parliament, Senator Pamela Wallin is reportedly back on the job. Shortly after her suspension was lifted, it was reported that she had requested her BlackBerry back, and my own Senate sources confirmed this fact. And recently it was reported in the Toronto Star that she is back at work, splitting her time between Saskatchewan and Ottawa.
You’ll forgive me if I shake my head a little at this news, because I’m not exactly sure what it is she expects to do with Parliament currently dissolved and there literally being nothing she can do. Just what she has to “catch up on” for the past two years is a little unclear because she literally hasn’t had an office to be away from. If it’s two years’ worth of activity in the Senate, well, I’m not sure why she couldn’t have kept abreast of it during her suspension given that everything is public: reports, committee hearings, the audio stream of the Chamber itself during debates. If she had nothing better to do for the past two years, then I’m not sure what she exactly missed.
Roundup: An unprecedented majority
I’m not going to write too much about the election because I already filed a late story, and I’m still processing everything, but I’m not sure that anyone saw this result. A Liberal majority. Harper resigning as leader but intending to stay on as MP for the time being. The NDP decimated, but Mulcair staying on – for now. The Liberals sweeping the entirety of Atlantic Canada and much of Quebec in seats that they hadn’t held in decades. The Bloc had a bit of a resurgence, but not much, and Duceppe didn’t keep his own seat. Liberals elected in Edmonton and Calgary. I will say that we are likely to see an era of fewer constitutional challenges and a greater respect for parliament and its institutions – which hopefully means a restored relationship with the media. Hopefully there will be fewer bills that will be subject to Charter challenges because the new government will have a better respect for civil service advice. The one thing that I do worry about is the fact that there are so many rookie MPs in this new parliament – some 140 or so of the newly elected Liberals don’t have federal experience, and that always leaves openings for the party to start exerting more control than it should. That said, most of these new MPs have impressive résumés going into the job, so that may suit them in good stead, but we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, the next couple of weeks are going to be a whirlwind of transition, and with any luck, we’ll see Parliament summoned within a few weeks in order to get the ball rolling on the Liberals’ ambitious legislative agenda (along with taking care of things the Conservatives left too long, like the assisted dying legislation). With any luck, it’s going to be a lot of fun…
Without Peter Stoffer, that leaves the "Most Congenial MP" slot *wide open* in next year's Parliamentarian of the Year awards. #elxn42
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) October 20, 2015
I would have pegged her as a leadership hopeful. Apparently no longer. RT @RosieBarton: Megan Leslie has lost to the Liberals. #elxn42
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) October 20, 2015
Journal cartoonist Malcolm Mayes has the best take on tonight's election results. #yeg #elxn42 pic.twitter.com/NXCrfCoVsQ
— Edmonton Journal (@edmontonjournal) October 20, 2015
https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/656307070224826368
It looks like Louis Plamondon remains Dean of the House. He will preside while they elect a new Speaker. #elxn42
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) October 20, 2015
Here's the official Conservative Party statement about their upcoming leadership contest. #elxn42 pic.twitter.com/HMiLHzNuMt
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) October 20, 2015
@jengerson Moral of the story: Be careful what you wish for. You may just get it.
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) October 20, 2015
https://twitter.com/scottfeschuk/status/656320029911203840
Speech and party spokesperson confirm: NDP Leader Tom Mulcair will not step down. Will continue as leader despite poor results. #elxn42
— Emma Loop (@LoopEmma) October 20, 2015
Roundup: Vote – and then stay involved
This is it – after that interminable election campaign (79 days! Eleven weeks!) it’s finally time to vote. And yes, you totally need to vote because that’s your duty and obligation for living in a democratic society like ours. When you do vote, remember that ours is a system whereby you are electing a person to fill a seat in Parliament, so that is always your primary consideration – party and leader should always be a secondary concern, and while important, the MPs you’re electing is your representative, and not the representative of the party to your riding. And then once the election is over, you get to hold that person to account. Not only that, but if the person or party you support didn’t win in your riding, fret not – your vote wasn’t “wasted,” as some would have you believe, because vote margins matter in the mandate that your local MP received. And so does your ongoing participation. Our system of democracy is not simply voting once every three or four years, but rather, it depends on constant grassroots participation, and that means you need to go out, join a riding association, help your chosen party determine future policy, help decide on who your riding’s next candidate is going to be (even if you have a sitting MP – let them know that they can’t take you for granted), and if things go the way they look determined to today, two of those parties just might be in leadership contests soon, and that means even more of a role for party members (as much as I disagree with membership selection of party leaders). In other words, voting today is just the beginning. But it starts with your casting a ballot, so go out and do that.
Roundup: Endorsing a unicorn
It was newspaper endorsement time yesterday, and it was a pretty baffling scene all around. Postmedia’s papers had a centrally-dictated series of endorsements for Harper – in spite of all of his myriad of woes and abuses – because economy. Never mind that I’ve written pieces talking to economics professors who’ve said that the Liberals are probably the better party when it comes to the markets because of the lacklustre performance of the Conservatives and their willingness to engage in protectionist behaviours and shut down foreign acquisitions and the like while preferring regulation to carbon pricing – but the management decision of the chain is this reflexive nonsense that the Conservatives are best for the economy. As if that weren’t enough, we got a baffling incompetent endorsement from the Globe and Mail that the Conservatives deserve re-election, but not Harper, so by all means elect them but he should step down immediately after. Because that will totally happen. It’s as incompetent as the time that there was an endorsement for a minority government – because Canadians can totally choose that option on their ballots. What’s also mystifying about the Globe endorsement is that it seems to be endorsing the Progressive Conservative party of yore rather than the modern party, which is neither progressive nor even really conservative, but rather is more of a right-flavoured populist party. It is also wholly the creation of Harper and shaped to his vision. He has so marginalised and pushed out the majority of leadership contenders that it becomes an exercise in futility to promote the party minus him because he is the glue holding the party together. And does the Globe have a successor in mind that they would prefer? Would they prefer an equally divisive figure like Jason Kenney instead? It’s sad that instead of engaging in a reasoned analysis, we got that instead. Way to go. Elsewhere, former Globe and Mail editor William Thorsell pens the editorial he would have written if he were still in the business, and Robert Hiltz offers some thoughts on the endorsement game.