Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: Absent other measures

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Yesterday, the Parliamentary Budget Officer released a report that unsurprisingly states that the federal carbon price will need to increase significantly, absent other measures. This is not news. We all know this is the case. We also know that the government is finalising all kinds of other non-price measures as part of their plans to exceed our 2030 Paris targets, including the Clean Fuel Standard, and we have Jonathan Wilkinson on the record stating that they are nearly ready and should be out before the end of the calendar year. Why the PBO and others feel the need to keep repeating that absent other measures the carbon price would need to increase significantly to meet those targets, I’m not sure, because all it does is start a new round of media nonsense about how awful the current prices are (they’re not), and that this is all one big socialist plot, or whatever. And there are more measures on the way, so the question becomes fairly moot.

Speaking of the Clean Fuel Standard, there was a bunch of clutched pearls and swooning on fainting couches over the past couple of weeks when a former MP and current gasoline price analyst indicated that said Standard would be like a super-charged carbon price, and a bunch of Conservatives and their favoured pundits all had a three minutes hate about it. What I find amusing is that these are the same people who a) claim to believe in the free market, b) oppose the carbon price which is a free market mechanism to reducing carbon emissions, and c) are calling for more regulation, which the Clean Fuel Standard is, even though regulations are opaquer as to the cost increases that will result. There is an argument to be had that the government should focus on increasing the carbon price over other regulatory measures (though I would disagree with the ones that say all of said measures should be abandoned in favour of the price), but getting exercised because the very regulatory measures you are looking for cost more money means that you’re not really serious about it in the first place.

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Roundup: Announcing a limited plastic ban

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The big news yesterday was that the federal government finally unveiled the first phase of their single-use plastics ban, focusing on six primary culprits – plastic bags, straws, stir sticks, cutlery, six-pack rings, and polystyrene take-out containers (though I’m not entirely clear if the can’t-recycle-in-this-country black plastic take-out containers would also be included). Most of these items are things for which there are alternatives that are fairly easily obtainable, and will likely become more affordable the more their production ramps up and they get scale in the economy that had thus-far been denied to them.

But there is immediate push-back. The Chemistry Industry Association of Canada bristles that in order to achieve the ban, the government is using the toxic substances mechanisms available to them, and the industry is aghast that they are in the same category as asbestos and lead – err, except that the proliferation of microplastics, particularly from plastics that break down, would quite probably fit that bill very well. The Alberta government is also grousing because they think this will affect investment in their petrochemical industry, even though the ban is quite limited and wouldn’t affect high-quality plastics which are will still see broad use, nor would it really affect their plans to turn Alberta into a hub of plastics recycling (which is important because there is very little plastics recycling in North America as we had relied on off-shoring the work to places like China, which shut their borders to it). The province’s energy minister also found it “ironic” that this announcement was made a day after Jason Kenney made his own announcement on plastics and recycling being part of Alberta’s “diversification” efforts, even though a) it’s not actually ironic, and b) this has been something the federal government has been talking about for over a year, did the necessary consultation process required under the Toxic Substances Act, and as a minister, she knows that these kinds of announcements aren’t dreamed up overnight but take some fair amount of planning and coordination. But Alberta is going to Alberta, whatever happens, so this is nothing new.

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Roundup: An escalation of props

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The moment that “remote sittings” began, which morphed into “hybrid” sittings, MPs began with the stunts. First it was signs in their backgrounds – which were ruled out of order as props, then it was dress code violations, and during the first “hybrid vote,” we saw MPs have their kids and dogs in the frame, and one of them was conspicuously driving while he voted. None of this is good for the practice of parliamentary democracy (and no, I don’t care what people say about how great it is they had their kids with them). And of course, one MP decided to take it to the next step.

https://twitter.com/davidakin/status/1313542759727484929

How this particular stunt wasn’t declared a de facto prop I’m not sure, but you can expect that this sort of thing is only going to escalate the longer it goes on unless the Speaker puts his foot down right now and stamps it out. And to be honest, when I’ve been cautioning against the problems that normalising “hybrid” sitting was going to bring, I didn’t think to include that MPs would start pulling stunts in the name of being “first” or “historic,” as they keep patting themselves on the back for these days, and yet they found new ways to surprise me. This is not a good thing. And because the Speaker didn’t say anything yesterday, I can only imagine how many more locales we’ll start seeing in the coming days, ever-escalating until someone comes to their senses and declares this to be the same as using props. Because honestly – this is going to be a very bad precedent.

Rideau Hall

In an unusual move, Governor General Julie Payette has contracted the services of former Supreme Court of Canada justice Michel Bastarache to be a “constitutional advisor” in the ongoing saga of the investigations of her office for harassment and bullying issues. It’s very odd and problematic, and here is professor Philippe Lagassé to provide some added context:

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1313577963565322240

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1313578978368802820

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1313581941103493121

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Roundup: Conflating the “leader’s courtesy”

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New Green Party leader Annamie Paul is running for a seat in the upcoming Toronto-Centre by-election, and this has already caused a bit of a friction between outgoing leader Elizabeth May and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. Why? Because May argues that Singh should repay the courtesy that the Greens extended him when he was running for his own seat in a by-election in the previous parliament and not run a candidate to oppose him. The problem? That May’s conception of “leader’s courtesy” is not really what she thinks it is.

First of all, “leader’s courtesy” largely only existed when it came to government or official opposition – third, fourth, and fifth-place parties are not really owed any particular courtesies. Second, what this particular courtesy involves is a member of the new leader’s own party voluntarily resigning their seat so that the new leader can run there in order to get into the Commons as soon as possible – it’s generally not about unheld ridings, even if it just happens to coincidentally be the same riding where Paul ran in the last federal election. The Liberals are certainly not obligated to not run to keep their own seat for the sake of giving Paul a seat, no matter if she is a Black woman. Hell, they’re running a Black woman of their own in the riding. Not to mention, less than a year ago, during the election, Paul came in a distant fourth place in the riding with a mere seven percent of the vote-share. Bill Morneau, incidentally, got 57 percent, and the NDP came in second at 22 percent – even if Singh did the “classy” thing, as May demanded, and didn’t run a candidate, it’s still unlikely that Paul would win – especially when she’s running against a legitimate media personality like Liberal candidate Marci Ien.

I would also add that demanding that the other parties surrender their candidates so that Paul can win it because she’s a Black woman leader smacks of tokenism, and is an implicit declaration that she couldn’t win the seat on her own. Not to mention, it deprives the voters of the riding the chance to make the decision on who they want to represent them. Again, the historical “leader’s courtesy” was about a riding that the party held, and it was usually intended to be a short-term measure so that the leader would have a seat, and would then run in their intended seat in the next election and return the riding to the MP who stepped aside for the leader. This is clearly not what is happening in Toronto Centre, so unless May wants to resign her own seat so that Paul can run there, she’s conflating just what exactly this “courtesy” really is.

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Roundup: The coded language of “social experiments”

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There was an analysis piece published over the weekend that wondered about why Erin O’Toole is talking about “social experiments” as part of his rejection of the Throne Speech, but while the piece went on to look at polling data and so on, it merely said that O’Toole didn’t exactly say which part of it was the “social experiment.” Of course, you’d have to have been living under a rock to not realise that small-c conservatives have been using this language for a while, particularly when it comes to things like gender equality.

Much of the thinking around this language is that the “social experiment” is the disruption of the so-called “natural” state of family life – that women in the workforce and childcare outside of the home is going to be some kind of sociological destabilizing force – and much of that line of reasoning also goes hand-in-hand with some garden-variety homophobic nonsense about same-sex marriage somehow “devaluing” regular marriage (as though straight people weren’t already doing that on their own). And let’s face it – the Throne Speech was heavy on inclusive growth and the need for childcare as part of its main themes. Of course, this isn’t really “experimental” at this point either – we have plenty of data to show the economic benefits of women in the workforce and what subsidised childcare can do to facilitate it. And if O’Toole is really that concerned about the deficit and economic growth, you’d think that he would be enthusiastically supporting plans to expand subsidised childcare and early learning because it’s been proven to have far greater economic returns than what it costs a government.

But we also need to remember that O’Toole is beholden to the social conservatives in his party for his leadership win, and he’s spent his time as leader trying to play both sides on a lot of issues – talking about the importance of free trade while promoting protectionist “Canada First” policies, or saying he’ll go to Pride – but only if they allow uniformed police to march, or that he opposes conversion therapy but won’t support that particular bill because of hand-wavey discredited reasoning. I am not unconvinced that this isn’t more of the same – O’Toole winking to his social conservatives using their own coded language about “social experiments” without actually saying what it is out loud so that he can’t be called out on it by those who know that things like enhancing childcare is sound economic policy, and that this recession, which has disproportionately affected women and minorities, won’t be solved by the same tired bro-recovery that provides stimulus for bro-jobs. To dismiss the kinds of inclusive policies that this economic recovery demands as “social experiments” gives a clue as to who O’Toole is pandering to.

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Roundup: Learned helplessness sets into the Senate

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News that the Senate has been suspended until the end of the month, and that they have only met fourteen times since March, is deeply irritating to me on numerous levels. My primary irritation is that the Senate has work it can do, but hasn’t been doing it both because they’ve been unable to get their committees up and running, and because there have been virtually no government bills that were not COVID-related or Estimates that have headed their way. On the committee front, it would seem that much of the drama that happened in the early part of the year in the Selection committee has largely resolved itself because the Progressive Senators Group has been revitalized and is now a viable caucus again, meaning that Senator Yuen Pau Woo’s attempt to exclude them from committee seats has been for naught, and they should be able to come to an agreement about equitable distribution of seats now that he’s not able to screw them over. As for government bills, this has largely been a question of timing – bills in process did not advance very far before the pandemic hit – but the government has a very full agenda and should introduce one or two of its bills in the Senate as they are capable of doing, in order to get the ball rolling on them. There is no excuse for them not to.

As for the lack of sitting days, this is largely the prerogative of the Leader of the Government in the Senate, and in the current pandemic state, I find that a kind of learned helplessness has been setting in, in both chambers. The Senate, disadvantaged on the part of resources, particularly when it comes to thinks like IT and video capacity, has taken a back-seat while the Commons has been gobbling up those resources to get its own operations going remotely, and yet the Senate could very well have come up with ways to meet in-person safely. The concerns about travel could be mitigated by just having senators stay put, but they have thus far refused to make allowances in their Internal Economy committee to let them do so that won’t cost them out-of-pocket if they don’t already have an apartment or condo in town. The current demands for “hybrid” sittings, in spite of the problems that have developed with them in the Commons, seems to be barrelling ahead in spite of the objections of the Conservatives, and despite the fact that simply creating a parliamentary bubble is the cheaper, easier, and better option.

The bitter irony in all of this is that for all of Justin Trudeau’s talk about a more “independent” Senate, the last eight months have turned the Chamber into one big rubber stamp, as process gets abused time and again in the name of emergency legislation because they refuse to create a parliamentary bubble. People should be angry about this, but most everyone is just shrugging and playing into the learned helplessness that has set it, making me all the more irritated by it all.

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Roundup: O’Toole and his conditional support

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As part of their need to get bills that died during prorogation back on the Order Paper, the Liberals yesterday reintroduced the bill that would ban “conversion therapy” as a criminal offence. Erin O’Toole insists that he’s against this pseudo-science – really! – but in the same breath claims that this bill is terribly flawed and that the Liberals are just introducing it to set a trap for him. His claim that the bill is problematic is dubious, because he claims that it would criminalise conversations about sexuality or gender identity between a minor and their parents or faith leader, when that’s clearly not the case. This, however, is a pervasive bogeyman that the social conservatives in the Conservative caucus want to put forward, and we’ve seen versions of it for years. Remember how they were so opposed to the government’s legislation allowing for same-sex civil marriages, and how they were rending their garments and howling that this was going to mean that their pastors and preachers were going to be forced to perform these marriages, or that their sermons would be denounced as hate speech? Did any of that happen? Nope. But there is a constant need to beat the drum that their religious freedoms are being trampled by the LGBT community because said community simply wishes to exist unmolested.

To an extent, though, this is the Liberals throwing the cat among the pigeons, because it’s going to be O’Toole’s first big test as leader when it comes to whether or not he’ll appease the social conservatives to whom he owes a debt for their support of his leadership, or whether he’ll keep trying to project the image that his is a big, welcoming party that wants to draw in members of this community. From previous conversations with insiders when previous private members’ bills on banning conversion therapy were introduced, that this sends the Conservative caucus into a panic because they know it’s going to sow divisions in their ranks, and these usual fears about religious freedoms rear their heads. And it’s not like the Liberals came up with this specifically to cause O’Toole headaches – it was introduced in the previous session, and got derailed by the pandemic.

I also feel the need to point out that during the leadership, there were a lot of profiles in the mainstream media that kept repeating that O’Toole had pledged to march in Pride parades without mentioning that he made that pledge conditional on uniformed police also marching, which eliminates all of the major Pride parades in this country owing to the current climate and conversation about policing. It also shows that his support is transactional, much like his insistence that he’s pro-choice but voted for a bill that would open a backdoor to criminalising abortion was shrugged off in the mainstream media rather than called out for the bullshit weaselling that it was. O’Toole is going to try to play both sides on this bill, and I suspect that he’s going to concern troll his way out of it – that his “concerns” about this “criminalization” will carry the day and he’ll insist that he’s being principled and weasel out of standing up to the social conservatives that he is beholden to.

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Roundup: Holding the right feet to the fire

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As the pandemic rolls along, I find myself increasingly irritated with news stories that fail to mention jurisdictional issues. Case in point yesterday was a look at how the federal commercial rent subsidy is ending, but nowhere in the story did it mention that rent is actually a provincial jurisdiction. Part of why the federal programme was so problematic and underutilized is because the premiers signed off on the rules while the federal government put up funds by way of the CMHC, because that was pretty much the only lever they had at their disposal. The only time the provinces are mentioned in the story was in relation to that the moratorium on evictions in certain provinces were expiring – which is important, but the fact that this whole mess is really the provinces’ responsibility is not mentioned. The very same thing happened about a week ago around the problems related to the federal government’s disability payments, that again, because this falls under provincial jurisdiction, the only lever the federal government had at their disposal was the federal disability tax credit, which is why everything was not great and complicated.

I’m all for holding the federal government to account, as anyone who reads this blog will know, but we also need to be holding the right feet to the fire, and the provinces have been consistently getting a pass on the rent issue in the media (and the disability issue for that matter as well). Most of the premiers have ballsed up the response to this pandemic, on an epic scale in some provinces, but there seems to be very little appetite to deal with that. Instead, we get pieces (that I won’t link to) about how Doug Ford surpassed everyone’s expectations and how he’s no acting like a partisan bully any longer, and I’m sorry, but he hasn’t done his gods damned job in this pandemic, and just sounding avuncular at press conferences is not cutting it. And the federal government isn’t helping keep accountability where it belongs either because they keep retreating to this refrain that “we don’t want a fight over jurisdiction,” when no, you don’t have jurisdiction, you don’t have policy levers, so why are you being assigned the task of dealing with the issue at all? (And the first person who raises the spectre of emergency legislation as a means of the federal government asserting jurisdiction can leave right now).

So while I get that news organisations are trying to shine a light on these problematic federal programmes, omitting key pieces information like matters of proper jurisdiction, are not actually helping anyone. (And no, it’s not a conspiracy with the Conservatives, so you can stop that right now). Accountability is important, but holding the right people to account is just as important, and unless your article identifies who those right people are, and places it in that context, then you’re just confusing issues and muddying the water, which does the opposite of accountability. I also refuse to bow to this notion that “nobody cares about jurisdiction in a pandemic.” Sorry, but no, we have a federal constitution that clearly defines roles and responsibilities, and the federal government can’t invent levers of power out of thin air. Jurisdiction absolutely matters, and pretending otherwise is actively helping those who’ve ballsed up their responses evade accountability. That seems to me to be the opposite of what is trying to be achieved here.

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Roundup: Unnecessary closure, and problematic reports

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The new session of parliament is not yet a week old, and it is already mired in shenanigans, and this government is the author of so many of its current misfortunes. Right out of the gate, the Liberals declared Bill C-4 to be a matter of confidence and invoked closure – not time allocation, but actual closure – which of course ate up hours in debate on the motion followed by an hour-long vote. They got their closure motion because the NDP sided with them, but wait – the Conservatives moved a motion to concur in a (problematic) report from the Ethics Commissioner about former MP Joe Peschisolido, citing that he broke the Conflict of Interest Code for MPs, and said motion would also call on Peschisolido to write a formal apology to the Commons. This motion passed with NDP support, which further delayed the debate on C-4, thanks to more hour-long votes, and C-4 wasn’t expected to pass until at least 3 AM (by which time this blog has been put to bed). And to think that this could have been avoided by a) not proroguing for five weeks, and b) not ham-fistedly ramming more legislation through the Parliament. But this government seems intent on not learning any lessons.

As for that Ethics Commissioner’s report, well, it shouldn’t actually exist, because Peschisolido hasn’t been an MP for over a year, and he’s not covered by the Conflict of Interest Act because he wasn’t a public office-holder. As an MP, he was subject to the MPs’ Conflict of Interest Code, which is part of the Standing Orders, and thus not applicable to him since he’s no longer an MP, and Mario Dion doesn’t seem to grasp this basic and fundamental fact that is at the heart of his duties. This is a problem (and the former Commons Law Clerk agrees). Also, calling Peschisolido to apologise to the House is also a problem, given the report is out of order and the Commons doesn’t actually have the power to compel him. So, yeah. This is not a good look for anyone.

Meanwhile, down the street, the Canadian Senators Group is completely fed up with having bills rammed down their throats with no time for them to actually do their jobs and study them or offering amendments, because everything is an “emergency.” To that end, they will be moving a motion in the Senate that until the end of the pandemic, all legislation will require a minimum of one week’s worth of debate in the Senate before it will be passed. It’s bold – but they are absolutely right to insist on it. I can easily see both the Conservatives and the Progressive caucuses in the Senate signing on, but the real question will be the Independent Senators Group, and how many of them will feel beholden to the prime minister. Trudeau gets to reap what he’s sown with his “independent” Senate, and I’m quite hoping that this makes him as uncomfortable as possible.

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Roundup: A continued abuse of process

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The myriad ways in which this government continues to abuse process for the sake of expediency in the face of the current pandemic never ceases to amaze. After the unnecessary five-week prorogation during which things could have been accomplished, the government needed to act with alacrity to get the CERB replacements out the door, and this meant very little time for a proper legislative process – and that should have been a red flag right there. They introduced their bill, and then set about ensuring additional negotiations with the NDP that required amendments to said bill. But rather than go through a proper amendment process, the government simply tabled a new, tweaked version of the same bill, and then pushed through a motion to see it fast-tracked through the Commons with a mere four-and-a-half hours of debate and no committee process, so that it can pass in a single day – today – and head to the Senate tomorrow for rapid passage and royal assent.

This is not normal. This is not good. The Conservatives even put forward a motion last week that would see the Commons meet on Sunday so that they could do Committee of the Whole and maybe even have a proper amendment process as part of that, but the Bloc denied consent. Rather than negotiate and try again, they went with this route instead, which is a problem. This kind of nonsense may have made a limited amount of sense for the emergency legislation that passed through the early part of the pandemic when Parliament was ostensibly suspended, but it’s not suspended any longer. And the opposition parties have largely stated that they don’t want to be seen as impediment to getting people their needed benefits, so it’s not like a proper process would drag on forever – maybe an extra day to do things properly. But no.

My patience for this state of affairs is pretty much exhausted. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be running proper legislative processes, and why Parliament can’t bubble and operate in a largely normal capacity like they should be. These shenanigans are weakening Parliament, and it’s not a good look.

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