Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: Credulous takes on the “new” Senate

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Over in the Globe and Mail, John Ibbitson has declared that Justin Trudeau’s reforms to the Senate “worked,” and that Andrew Scheer should continue to appoint independents instead of partisans, and I just. Cannot Even. Reading the piece, it’s clear that Ibbitson has no real grounding in what the Senate is supposed to do on an actual basis, the various roles it plays aside from its legislative duties, and he has absolutely no conception of the broader scope of the problem that Justin Trudeau has unleashed on future parliaments – and how he has hobbled his own party in the future, while further centralizing his own power. But Ibbitson seems to have taken the word of Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, that this is how Parliament is “supposed” to work – Harder not exactly being a credible source – as well as an emeritus professor who has been a booster not only for these reforms, but who thinks it would be great to go even further and institute a business committee (which would be an even bigger problem going forward). So no, I’m not going to take Ibbitson’s word that this has “worked.”

While I’m not going to pretend that the Senate didn’t have its problems beforehand, a good many of the problems in recent years can be traced to the fact that Stephen Harper made some spectacularly poor appointments in his rush to populate the Chamber during the prorogation crisis of 2008, after he neglected to fill its seats for long enough that what Conservative senators there were in the Chamber at the time were clamouring for more members because there weren’t enough of them to adequately spread around the workload. And rather than make thoughtful appointments, Harper panic appointed a number of partisans who had no suitability to the role, and lo, problems and scandal ensued.

There is absolutely a partisan role for senators because they’re the institutional memory of parliament, and that especially includes inside the caucus room, and that also keeps a check on the leader because they don’t have to worry about their nomination papers being signed. And the Liberals are going to find out just how necessary those roles are when they’re no longer in power and have few people with the knowledge to help them rebuild. And yes, it will happen eventually. And as for the “new” system “working,” they can’t manage the Order Paper, and they have a crisis in front of them with the election looming. But hey, Peter Harder says it’s going swimmingly, so he’s the person we should believe. Okay then.

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Roundup: Disingenuous threats to national unity

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As bullshit political theatre goes, Jason Kenney continues to exercise it to its fullest as he released an “urgent letter” to the federal government yesterday, co-signed by five other premiers (four of them conservative, one of them without ostensible party affiliation) to demand that both bills C-48 and C-69 be withdrawn, and warns of consequences to “national unity” if they are not. And it’s a bit galling to play the national unity card, considering that it’s both groundless and petulant – like a tantrum where a child threatens to hold his breath until he turns blue to teach his parents “a lesson.”

Nobody is going to pretend that these are perfect bills, but for the purposes of what is being argued, neither can do the harm that Kenney and his allies are claiming. For example, C-48 will not landlock their resources, and there has been expert testimony to say that it would have a negligible impact on the oil and gas sector because there are no pipelines along that route, nor are there any planned (thanks in large part to how badly the Conservatives botched the Indigenous consultations on the Northern Gateway project). And C-69 is not going to make major infrastructure projects impossible – if anything, it would have a better chance of streamlining environmental assessments by ensuring clearer lines and better scoping of those assessments, so that there can be more focused work with the assessments. But the status quo is simply a path of more litigation because the current system is badly flawed. The branding it as the “no more pipelines bill” is and always has been disingenuous and an outright lie, but that’s what this all boils down to.

Kenney and company have lied repeatedly about the current government’s environmental programme – abetted by the fact that this government can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, and they somehow refuse to call Kenney, Scheer, and company, on their bullshit. And given that Kenney managed to win an election by whipping his electorate into a state of irrational anger with a diet of lies and snake oil – anger that won’t abate now that he’s in charge – the attempt to export that technique to the rest of Canada is dangerous, but they don’t seem to care. That is the real threat to national unity, and it’s Kenny and company who are stirring it up, and they should be called out for it.

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Roundup: Defence intelligence and their limits

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Some of you may recall that recently, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians submitted a report to the prime minister, which was later made public, about how military intelligence in this country is large and vaster than most people anticipate. The Canadian Press recently obtained the August 2018 federal directive about what kinds of personal information that defence intelligence is able to collect and keep, and it turns out that they can indeed keep some of that information, even if obtained by chance, so long as it supports a legitimate investigation. You may recall that at the time of the NSICOP report that there were calls for its activities to be bound by statute instead of by Crown prerogative, as it is currently. With that in mind, here’s Philippe Lagassé with some context on why that may or may not be a good thing.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1137787804979748865

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1137789288127631361

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Roundup: A line-by-line review

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If the tweets of Cabinet ministers are to be believed, Cabinet is currently seized with doing a line-by-line review of the amended Bill C-69 that was sent back to them from the Senate earlier this week. By all accounts, the current form of the bill is a complete dog’s breakfast that includes a number if contradictory clauses, because the Chamber of Sober Second Thought didn’t bother to actually do the work of reconciling them because members of the environment and energy committee were keen to placate Jason Kenney and to credulously believe the oil and gas industry lobbyists who insisted that the bill’s original form, while not perfect, would somehow doom all future projects in this country. And you would think that actually getting a bill in reasonable condition back to the Commons would be kind of important to a body like the Senate, for whom this is their raison d’être as a legislative chamber who preoccupies itself with reviewing legislation, but no, they decided instead to sent it back to the Commons as is rather than to take the blame that Kenney and company will lay on them as he continues to lie about the bill and consider it a rallying cry for the implacable anger of Albertans that he sold a bunch of snake oil to during the last provincial election.

In the midst of this, you have senators like Conservative Senate Leader Larry Smith claiming that the Senate’s attempt to stop bills C-69 and C-48 are supposedly the last bastion of the provinces who are “under attack” by prime minister Justin Trudeau, which is hokum of the highest order. C-48 doesn’t landlock Alberta’s resources because the chances of a pipeline to the northern BC coast are virtually nonexistent given the Federal Court of Appeal decision on Northern Gateway’s failure, and the propaganda campaign against Bill C-69 is the completely divorced from reality, but hey – angry narratives to sustain. At the same time, Senator André Pratt is defending the Senate against accusations levelled from the likes of Andrew Coyne that they’re overreaching if they do kill C-48 (which they won’t), saying that they’re trying to do their job while being cognisant that they’re an appointed body. He’s not wrong, and it’s probably one of the better articulated pieces of late.

Meanwhile, the Conservative whip, Senator Don Plett, is denying that he’s stalling the UNDRIP bill, and he’s actually got procedure on his side for this one – the cancelled meeting would have been extraordinary, and there are reasons why the Senate doesn’t hold special committee meetings while the Chamber is sitting – which they are sitting later and later because they have so much business to get through because the Independent Senators can’t get their act together, and lo, we have the current Order Paper crisis that they are working their way through (though apparently not so urgently that they didn’t sit yesterday). Unfortunately, the media does love private members’ bills, and is focusing a lot of attention on them, no matter that most of them are actually bad bills that should probably die on the Order Paper (but people don’t like to hear that).

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Roundup: Amendments and dysfunction

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There is some movement on legislation in the Senate, with the amended fisheries bill heading back to the Commons, as is Bill C-69 on environmental assessments. This bill was passed on division (meaning no standing vote) and will let the government reject all of those amendments made at committee that were essentially written by oil and gas lobbyists, which nobody had the intestinal fortitude to want to actually debate, preferring the tactic championed by the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, to let someone else do the heavy lifting. That way the government can defeat the bulk of those amendments in the Commons on a whipped vote, and then Harder can say “the elected Chamber has spoken” while patting himself on the back for the amendments that did pass – likely only the ones the government itself proposed.

The bigger drama is being reserved for C-48, the tanker ban bill, as the whole Senate voted to overturn the committee report that recommended it not go forward, which was pretty much how I expected it to go. Given the torqued, partisan report that emerged, the talk about the committee being dysfunctional are ringing pretty true, but I’m not going to blame the Conservatives for that because the Independents aren’t stepping up. The likely next steps for this bill are for amendments to be debated at third reading, the bulk of which are likely to be defeated, and then the Conservatives will play procedural games with the debate so that Harder is forced to invoke time allocation on a final vote for it, because the Conservatives have set up that situation for him.

Meanwhile, there has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about the UNDRIP bill, particularly that the Senate didn’t vote to give the Aboriginal People’s committee permission to meet while the Chamber was sitting in order to discuss it – which isn’t actually a sinister plot. The Senate is set up so that the Chamber meets for only a few hours in the day and that committees don’t meet then, which also has major logistical considerations – they don’t have enough staff or interpreters to cover both, unlike the House of Commons. And to illustrate that, this thread by Chris Reed explains some of the procedural considerations of what happened. But also remember that in the midst of the Senate’s Order Paper crisis, nobody wants to take any responsibility and are content to blame the Conservatives for being “partisan.” They’re not the problem here.

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Roundup: Less helpful suggestions to fix QP

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At this time of year, we’re starting to see a number of reflective pieces about the state of our democracy, and over on The Agenda, they gave a thinkpiece about the state of Question Period in advance of an episode on the subject. While the piece is geared toward the state of things at Queen’s Park, there is applicability to Parliament, and the suggestions that the polisci prof that they cite in the piece makes don’t really offer anything constructive, in my opinion.

For example, he wants more questions from more members and no supplementals. I disagree, because if we were running things properly, supplementals offer decent back-and-forth exchanges where you can get better accountability by drilling into answers (or non-answers) provided. And as demonstrated in Parliament, especially on Fridays, just having more MPs asking questions doesn’t necessarily improve things because they’re all reading the same scripts, so you just get more MPs asking the same questions – which in turn becomes fodder for them gathering clips to be distributed over social media. He suggests that the parties determine who asks questions for the first two thirds and then the Speaker determine for the final third – well, that doesn’t actually help with the ability of the Speaker to “not see” frequent misbehaving MPs, as they will be the ones the party puts on their list. It needs to be all or nothing. Having the Speaker rule on the relevance of answers and to police friendly backbench suck-up questions? Nice in theory, and if we could get MPs to give the Speaker the power to the determination, all the better, but if we’re not careful, it just creates an opportunity for parties to whinge about the Speaker. (I’m kind of in favour of empowering the Speaker in this way, but it needs to be done very carefully). Banning applause? Yes, absolutely.

What’s missing in this is the reliance on scripts, which we need to do away with entirely. Parties argue that they need to come up with plans and narratives and tactics, but to be frank, that’s bullshit. Plans and tactics don’t enhance the accountability function of QP – it just ensures that it will be theatre, and not good theatre at that. Banning scripts plus empowering the Speaker to choose who asks questions for the whole of QP (and sure, he can continue to divvy them up according to a set formula in the interests of fairness) is going to be far more effective than most of these suggestions – but the trick is to convince MPs to move to that system, which would involve their leaders giving up their powers to direct the show, and that is part of where the bigger problem lies.

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Roundup: An unusually partisan report

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The saga of Bill C-48 continues its strange trek through the Senate with the release of the report from the transport committee that recommended that the bill not proceed. Or at least that’s what it should have stated – that based on the tie vote, that the committee could not recommend the bill proceed. What they got instead was a lengthy screed about how allegedly terrible and the bill was for national unity, and it cherry picked comments from witnesses to “prove” that case, and strangely omitted any witnesses that stated – with facts – that the bill would have almost no impact on the energy industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan. In fact, the report was so partisan that it raised eyebrows among my sources in the Senate, who could not recall the last time that they had seen such a blatantly political document.

Naturally, not everyone on the committee was in favour of this report, and there are accusations back-and-forth about conversations regarding whether those who disagreed could write a dissenting report, and the eventual reluctance to bother because it would likely have tied things up in committee for even longer, as the clock ticks down. (Things are so bad on the Senate’s Order Paper that the need to sit well into July is now pretty much guaranteed). Of course, delaying this bill to death is part of the Conservative game plan, and everyone knows it – in fact, they pretty much have set up a situation where the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, will have to invoke time allocation to get it passed.

The shenanigans with this bill aren’t done yet. There will be a great deal of debate when this report gets debated in the whole Senate, where it is doubtlessly going to be rejected, but not without a great deal of noise and accusations that the Independents are just Liberal stooges, and so on. And it’s going to be so annoying when it’s all over.

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Roundup: The report and its “legal imperatives”

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As expected, the MMIW Inquiry report was delivered in a ceremony yesterday morning, and the prime minister accepted the report at the ceremony and promised that a national action plan would be developed in concert with Indigenous people – but the fact that he didn’t echo the use of the word “Canadian genocide” from the report had everyone trying to make an Issue out of it (though he made a qualified use of the term at a speech later in the day in Vancouver). The overall theme of the report is that there needs to be a “decolonization” in order for things to get better – which is easier said than done. The report’s 231 recommendations are phrased as “legal imperatives,” but some of them are tremendously problematic or impractical. Some of it is useful – suggestions around policing (which the RCMP promises to review carefully), some specific recommendations about the “man camps” that accompany resource development projects in Indigenous territory, more Indigenous prosecutors and judges (but less helpful is the suggestion that they may require a separate judicial system). But far less practical “imperatives” included things like demanding that the government create jobs in Indigenous communities (because we have a command-and-control economy?), or the creation of a basic income for all Canadians (erm, you know how much that would actually cost, right? Right?). How those kinds of recommendations can be phrased as “legal imperatives” is in and of itself a problem.

And then we’re back to the “genocide” issue, which has sucked up a lot of the oxygen. The Commissioners asserted that it’s a different kind of genocide than the Holocaust or what happened in Rwanda (which had Roméo Dallaire objecting), but wanted to remove the qualification of “cultural” genocide that was previously used in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, and which was accepted by pretty much all facets of Canadian society. Expect this particular polarizing language to continue to dominate the discussion in the weeks ahead.

In hot takes, Chantal Hébert worries that the report’s fairly hardline, all-or-nothing approach will be an excuse for people to tune out rather than engage with its findings (much like the apocalyptic language around climate change has not had the desired effect of spurring action). Chris Selley, meanwhile, points out some of the glaring omissions in the report, the lack of some context when it comes to rates of murders of Indigenous men, for example, and some of the contradictory recommendations such as being against mandatory minimum sentences because they disproportionately affect Indigenous people – while calling for mandatory minimums that are punitive if victims are Indigenous women, never mind that most of the perpetrators will be Indigenous men.

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Roundup: Mild consequences for an outburst

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It took several days, and the announcement happened fairly late on a Saturday night, but Andrew Scheer decided to strip Michael Cooper of his committee duty – but not deputy critic portfolio – after his committee outburst last week, when he lashed out at a Muslim witness who suggested that conservative commentary was in part responsible for radicalizing some white supremacists, including the shooter of the Quebec City mosque. Cooper’s outburst, you will recall, was to attack the witness and quote from the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto, not only naming him (as the New Zealand government has been reluctant to do) and reading part of that manifesto into the record, so that it will forever be part of the archives of the Parliament of Canada. Scheer said that he was satisfied with Cooper’s apology (which was tepid at best), and that he considered the matter closed now that he removed Cooper from the committee. Funnily enough, Cooper described it as “agreeing” with Scheer that he shouldn’t sit on that committee, which doesn’t sound like it was that punitive (and I’m not sure that removing someone from duties is really that punitive. Putting him on permanent Friday House duty would be more punitive than giving Cooper less work to do).

The witness at the receiving end of Cooper’s outburst, Faisal Khan Suri, says Scheer’s response is not good enough, and says that Cooper should be booted from the caucus. And to that end, Scheer made his big point about showing people the door if they don’t believe in equality (and Cooper reading from a white supremacist manifesto would seem to be a line that was crossed), but well, the matter is “closed.” Not that the Liberals will let them forget it, but this is politics these days.

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Roundup: Problematic leaked recommendations

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On Monday, the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women will give its final report, and judging from the leaked copy, there will be some consternation with the conclusions, particularly that it considers the deaths as the victims of a “Canadian genocide.” While previous inquiries and even statements by the former Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin, have used the term cultural genocide, this report allegedly drops the qualifier. That will likely be a hurdle because there would seem to be an implication that a genocide implies an organised effort – which there was on the cultural side (because it was inconceivable to think that they shouldn’t be converted to Christianity and “civilised” because that was the dominant cultural framework), but I think it will be hard to stretch that to deaths that are more attributable to poverty and intergenerational violence – we can’t forget that the vast majority of perpetrators of these deaths were Indigenous men (and that there are even larger numbers of Indigenous men who have are missing and murdered).

As for recommendations, the headline one also appears to be problematic – that instances of domestic violence against Indigenous women that result in death be regarded as first-degree murder – and that the use of “Gladue principles” be reviewed with cases of deaths of Indigenous women. That again will be problematic because the Supreme Court ruled on those principles as a way of addressing intergenerational violence that leads to higher rates of incarceration for Indigenous people, and again, if the majority of perpetrators of violence against Indigenous women are Indigenous men, does this recommendation then not demand that more Indigenous men be incarcerated? While the recommendation is rooted in the principles of denunciation and deterrence, I’m not sure that’s sufficient given the broader implications. As well, some of the recommendations like making Indigenous languages official and on par with English and French don’t seem to grasp the practical considerations of ensuring that there be federal services provided in 60 different Indigenous languages.

It also sounds like the government isn’t going to readily accept all of these recommendations Carolyn Bennett has been pre-consulting on what she’s been hearing out of the Inquiry, and she’s not in favour of harsher sentences because it goes against evidenced-based policy as to what is effective. She also noted that their bill on changing child welfare systems for Indigenous communities will do more to prevent the intergenerational violence that the current broken system does. We’ll see what the formal report and its apparent 230 recommendations entail, and what the government’s response will be, but this leak and Bennett’s response sounds like they won’t be endorsing the whole thing.

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