Author Archives: Dale

About Dale

Journalist in the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery

Roundup: F-35s flare up again

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Talk of the F-35 fighters dominated the discussion yesterday, with Harper going full-bore on trying to say that Trudeau was living on some other planet if he thought that pulling out of the F-35 programme wouldn’t “crater” the country’s aerospace industry, while Mulcair – a vocal critic of the F-35s for years – suddenly said they should stay in the competition process. Of course, it sounds increasingly like Harper is trying to indicate the F-35s are the government’s choice all along no matter the procurement process that they’re going through right now with great fanfare, while Mulcair sounds increasingly like Harper – something Trudeau probably doesn’t mind. As a reality check, there are no contracts to tear-up, because we haven’t signed or committed to anything. As well, there is no guarantee that Canada pulling out of the F-35s would damage our industry because those companies supplying parts for the aircraft were chosen for quality, and because we paid into the development process, but didn’t commit to buying the full craft itself. Not to mention, any other plane we would go with (say, the Super Hornets) would have the likelihood of as many if not more regional industrial benefits. (And while we’re on the subject of reality checks, the Liberals apparently really bungled their costing figures for the F-35s in their own backgrounders). As for how you can have an open competition but exclude the F-35s? I don’t think that’s rocket science – it seems pretty clear to me that you simply add the specification to the procurement process that it needs to have more than one engine. That would rule out the F-35 pretty effectively, no? Suffice to say, it’s a lot of sound and fury, and plenty of flashbacks to the last election where this was an issue. Paul Wells writes more about it, and how it positions the leaders.

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Roundup: About those Senators who approached Mulcair

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Thomas Mulcair is telling people that he’s had senators approach him to say that they would be willing to work with him to pass a hypothetical NDP government’s legislation, but he won’t name names. While this may well be true, at least to a certain extent – we have been seeing numerous examples in the past couple of weeks of Mulcair exaggerating the truth – this should be unpacked a little bit. The first and most obvious thing is that we need to put aside the Harper Derangement Syndrome conspiracy theory that all of the Conservative senators are going to simply defeat any Liberal or NDP legislation that comes through because the fact that they were Harper appointees will apparently make them extra dickish, or something. Never mind that we’ve had plenty of parliaments where the party not in power held a majority in the Senate and lo and behold, things got passed with little difficulty. This will not change in the future. The second is that these Senators all know that they have a job to do, and that’s to scrutinize bills that come before them. Most of the time they pass. Occasionally they get amended and sent back. On very rare occasions, they get defeated, almost always because those bills are either fatally flawed, out of order, or unconstitutional and got passed on a whipped vote. And if the NDP holds up that climate change bill as an example of one the Senate killed, well, it’s because it was out of order and never should have been allowed to pass the Commons. That said, they are not rubber stamps, and won’t simply pass bills because the Commons did. It’s not their job, and if Mulcair has a problem with that, there’s a Supreme Court reference decision he should read. Third is that even if Senate Liberals formed a quasi-government caucus in the Senate should the NDP form government, it’s because the system needs to operate somehow. They are likely going to have to kluge together some kind of procedural workarounds to the fact that there won’t be an actual Leader of the Government in the Senate who can answer on behalf of the government, and if a hypothetical Prime Minister Mulcair doesn’t appoint a Senate Speaker, that is pretty much a constitutional nightmare waiting to happen. But Mulcair refuses to answer these fundamental procedural issues, while at the same time, he and his people continue to do nothing but hurl insults at the Chamber and its inhabitants while promising their abolition (which won’t happen, but they’re going to try anyway), while continuing to actively ignore the constitutional obligation to make appointments. So no, I’m not reassured by these senators who have allegedly approached him, because there’s more to it than just passing bills. We have a parliamentary architecture that he continues to ignore, and that should be worrying to anyone who cares about parliamentary democracy.

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Roundup: Niqab politics taking over

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The politics of the niqab have slowly starting taking up a lot of oxygen on the election campaign, on a number of fronts. While people over the Twitter Machine tried to skew Harper’s “old stock Canadians” remark as some kind of racist or dog whistle politics (I’m not sure that interpretation makes sense given the context of what he was saying), the government has decided to crank their petulance around the attempted niqab ban up to eleven by declaring that they will ask the courts for a stay of the Federal Court of Appeal ruling on the niqab-at-citizenship-ceremonies case, essentially to deny the woman in question the right to vote. It’s going to be tough for them to convince the courts that there is some imminent danger if they allow her to take the oath before October 19th, much less convince the Supreme Court of Canada to hear the case (and they almost certainly won’t, seeing as this is a fairly open-and-shut case of administrative law, where the minister overreached is authority to implement the ban). But while this pettiness digs in, the panic over the niqab has already begun to spread, with the Bloc launching an attack ad to warn that the NDP will mean pipelines and niqabs in Quebec, while an NDP candidate has stated that while Thomas Mulcair reopens the constitution to try and abolish the Senate (never going to happen), that he deal with the menace of niqabs at the same time. No, seriously. He added that he’s sure the party supports him on that, and as of posting time, the party has not repudiated the statement (much as they did not really repudiate it when Alexandre Boulerice made similar statements about banning niqabs earlier). Justin Trudeau, for his part, said he wouldn’t try to appeal the ban to the Supreme Court. So there’s that. Meanwhile, Tabatha Southey takes on the government’s attempted niqab ban, with her usual acid wit.

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Roundup: Globe Debate debacle

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The big “economic debate” was last night, hosted by the Globe and Mail, and well, it wasn’t exactly edifying on any account. The moderator was also commenting, he rushed segments so the leaders were alternating between slow points and rushing through, and then there was the shouting and the non sequiturs. And what non sequiturs they were – I’m not sure what C-51 had to do with taxation, but Thomas Mulcair brought it up anyway. Truth be told, much of the “debate” was leaders trying to go down their talking point and catchphrase checklists. Alas. Kady O’Malley offers advice for future single-issue debates, while Drake Fenton gives an ode to the moderator’s bell/egg timer. Reaction from the Citizen’s pundit panel, Paul Wells, and Micheal Den Tandt.

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Roundup: About that “costed” plan

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The NDP released their “costed” fiscal plan yesterday, which was not in fact the full costing that they had promised, but rather a broad-strokes framework, full of vague line item names like “Helping Families Get Ahead” and “Help Where It’s Needed Most” rather than actually talking about their childcare plan, and their promises around the healthcare escalator. (That escalator, incidentally, has confused a lot of reporters in the room). It’s kind of ironic that after a week spent baiting the Liberals on releasing their costed platform, the NDP didn’t actually deliver theirs. Suffice to say, the analysis to date seems to be that the NDP platform relies on the Budget 2015 numbers – numbers which are no longer relevant as the price of oil has crashed even further, and GDP growth is nowhere near what was projected and likely won’t be anytime soon, which blows a hole of several billion dollars into the assumptions. It also relies on the same austerity that the Conservative budget is built upon, despite what the NDP insists. The Conservatives and Liberals immediately panned the document, but that’s not a surprise. Being as I’m not an economist, I’ll leave the comments for those who are, and they have plenty to say (with some background on how to read these kinds of documents from Kevin Milligan here):

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644266217994215424

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644266726171869184

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644267141714149376

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644267656929918976

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644268654381563904

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644269099938283520

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644269679876288512

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644270215551848448

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/644258642158596096

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/644306950700724224

https://twitter.com/rolandparis/status/644332078855815168

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Roundup: The dream of tax simplification

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With the big economic debate coming up tomorrow, it’s with no small bit of amusement that noted economist Jack Mintz dropped a bomb in the middle of the election, and blowing open the pledges of most of the parties. In particular, Mintz says that the corporate tax rate should be lowered so as to keep those companies from shifting the burden in the form or lower wages or higher prices; raising the small business tax rate because it’s largely used by the wealthy to pay lower taxes; and eliminate a suite of investment tax credits to make the whole system simpler and fairer. In other words, doing pretty much the opposite of what the NDP has promised, and to a degree what the Conservatives have promised with their small business tax rate promises and more boutique tax credits than anyone knows what to do with. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find an economist who thinks that boutique tax credits are a good idea – particularly as Harper promised yet another bunch, this time for single and widowed seniors, and as Kevin Milligan explained, it’s pretty useless considering that a) it’s non-refundable and a lot of those seniors already don’t pay taxes, and b) we have a number of other income supports for seniors. (Also, I think this means that Harper is officially trolling singletons and childless couples, who are now the great pariahs of tax credits). The consensus would be that it’s better to eliminate the boutique tax credits and simply lower the overall tax rate – but how would parties be seen as rewarding “deserving” Canadians of those tax credits. (Again, it would seem that singletons and childless couples are not deserving.) Harper claimed that his boutique tax credits haven’t made tax forms too complicated. That sound you hear is every accountant in the country laughing, because it’s simply not true. We need major tax reform in this country, overhauling the system from top to bottom. (Same with the Criminal Code, incidentally). Too bad nobody is going to campaign on that.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/643841869735006208

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/643842726228680704

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Roundup: No, Chong’s bill won’t give us Australian leadership spills

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News of the leadership spill in Australia, ousting Tony Abbott as prime minister and ending the greatest political bromance of the Commonwealth countries (Harper and Abbott were quite the mutual admiration society), we were suddenly inundated with Twitter musings about whether that could happen in Canada, thanks to Michael Chong’s Reform Act which passed this summer. While Kady O’Malley offers the “in theory” answer, the in practice answer is that no, it couldn’t happen here, because Canada has a terrible system of leadership selection that purports to “democratise” the system with grassroots involvement, but instead created an unaccountable and presidentialised system of an overly powerful leader that has little fear of their caucus turning on them, because caucus didn’t select them. When it comes to removal, selection matters. A lot. Chong’s bill, perversely, makes an Australian situation less likely by raising the bar for leadership challenges to happen in the first place, and would instead give us situations like what happened in Manitoba where a sitting leader was challenged, and when it went to a leadership process where he still participated and won based on the grassroots support when his caucus was no longer behind him, well, it’s ugly and it’s down right unparliamentary given that a leader needs to have the confidence of his or her caucus, and when they don’t but stay in based on grassroots votes, the system breaks down. Paul Wells cautions that reforming a system usually replaces real or perceive problems with different problems, while Andrew Coyne points out that being able to dump a bad leader quickly is the lesser evil of being stuck with them.

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Roundup: The grasping of straws

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While we may be past the halfway mark in this campaign, we’re also well into the territory when things start getting a bit…surreal. Or utterly nonsensical. Take your pick. All of it done in the breathless hyperbolizing that parties do in order to try and make their rivals look bad. If you take a look at any Conservative press release, the sections comparing “Justin and Mulcair” are full of ridiculous non sequiturs that have little or nothing to do with the topic at hand. The Liberals are trotting out Jean Chrétien to say that Stephen Harper has “shamed” Canada (never mind that the rest of the world really doesn’t care). And the NDP have been taking the cake for some of their criticisms, which are starting to sound more like grasping at straws. They held a news conference with Charlie Angus to decry Justin Trudeau for “smearing” small businesses when he pointed out that wealthy people self-incorporate to pay lower taxes. And then Angus admitted that it’s a problem and they need to “tweak” the system, but still tried to insist Trudeau was smearing. Their line of attack about not being able to trust the Liberals not to make cuts is predicated on the 1990s, never mind the fact that the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is nowhere near what it was the. And now Thomas Mulcair is brushing off the concerns of the premiers for his plans, whether it’s Senate abolition (which most don’t support), or childcare (which the provinces are expected to pay 40 percent of), or even their balanced budget pledge, of which provincial transfers are an issue. But he’ll have a “mandate” he says. Never mind that he sounds like he’s already over-reading it when he hasn’t even been given one. Suffice to say, the talking points from all sides are getting ridiculous. And we still have a month to go.

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Roundup: May’s magical thinking

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It was Elizabeth May’s turn to go before Peter Mansbridge last night, and as with all other leaders, she too got the basics of government formation wrong – but unlike the others, May just got it wrong in a different way. She insisted that if Harper got a minority government, the opposition parties should be able to call the Governor General to insist that they get a chance to form government before Harper. Nope, that’s not how it works, because the incumbent remains the Prime Minister until he or she resigns. That’s because the position can never be vacant. Ever. Her Majesty must always have a government in place, and it’s the GG’s job to ensure that happens. So really, no matter the result on election night, the leader whose party wins the most seats isn’t invited to form government – the incumbent is still the government until they choose to resign, which may or may not involve testing the confidence of the Chamber first. May also revealed that she has the GG’s number and will make that call herself, as though he is obligated to take it. Remember of course that May has also previously written the Queen about issues, and treated form letter responses as vindication. It’s part of her particular problem of over-reading her mandate – she’s hugely conflated her role as an MP with that of being in government in the past, and it’s a problem with how she interacts with the system. It’s also part of her curious insistence that somehow, a handful of Green MPs sitting in opposition and not in a coalition cabinet would magically make a minority parliament a less fractious place. How, exactly? Did none of the proponents of more minority governments learn any lessons from the three minority parliaments prior to 2011? Apparently not, because the magical thinking prevails.

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Roundup: Uncomfortable tax truths

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It’s one of those funny things that happen during campaigns, when one leader tells an uncomfortable truth about an issue, and the other leaders rush to condemn him or her about it. In this particular incidence, it was Justin Trudeau telling Peter Manbridge that he was less keen on a blanket reduction in small business taxes than he was in tweaking the system, because a “large percentage” of those small businesses are wealthy Canadians using those businesses to pay less tax. And he’s absolutely right about it – particularly after changes were made to the system a few years ago that basically turned it into an income-splitting mechanism for some particularly wealthy Canadians. The Conservatives and NDP, however, are outraged, as they are promising small business tax cuts, the NDP going so far as to demand that Trudeau apologise for “smearing” small businesses – except that they don’t have the facts on their side. The Canadian Press’ Baloney Meter™ checked out Trudeau’s statement, and found it to be true, with minor quibbles about the meaning of “large percentage.” (Trudeau seems to be relying on the studies that say that up to 60 percent of small business filers are problematic). There is also the added contention that another good percentage of these filers aren’t actually job creators, like the Conservatives and NDP keep saying – mom and pop shops aren’t, for example. Economist Kevin Milligan delves further into the issue, and notes that Quebec has been making changes to their small business tax laws to ensure that companies have at least three full-time employees to be eligible – thus ensuring that it’s a “ job creator” and not a couple splitting income or a mom-and-pop shop that has no intention of hiring someone else. It is a problem that needs fixing and not platitudes, and it’s good that at least one leader sees fit to recognise that fact, and has so far stood up for it despite the heat he’s taking.

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