Category Archives: Political Roundup

What’s going on in Canadian politics

Roundup: Notley mandates a cut

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Alberta premier Rachel Notley decided that she will mandate an 8.7 percent production cut, starting on January 1st, in the hopes that it will help to finally drive the price of oil back up, seeing as this is a supply and demand problem and there is too much supply in the system. But as far as “immediate action” goes, waiting another three weeks doesn’t seem very immediate (though I’m not sure what is involved in scaling back production), and it’s not a solution that makes everyone in the market happy given that some players weren’t taking as big of a hit by the large price differential.

Reaction has been swift, and while Jason Kenney says he supports it, he and Andrew Scheer are quick to blame the federal government for the situation. Natural resources minister Amarjeet Sohi responded with a thread that basically said that they inherited most of these problems – and he’s right about that – but he laid out the supports they’ve given the industry. I’m not sure that in the race to pin blame that anyone is looking at the history of the industry – there was no push to sell oil to overseas markets before recently because America was always seen as an easy import market with an insatiable appetite, because nobody saw the shale revolution coming. That’s no one government’s fault, and it’s difficult to turn an industry around in a mere couple of years. And Kenney and Scheer keep insisting that if Trudeau hadn’t killed Northern Gateway or Energy East, things would be just fine – except of course that it’s just as likely that Gateway would still be tied up in interminable court injunctions because it was the more fraught project to begin with, and Energy East wasn’t economically viable once Keystone XL was back in the picture, but why spoil a narrative with facts?

Meanwhile, New Brunswick’s new premier is hoping to revive Energy East, under the belief that it was just regulatory problems that killed it rather than the economics, particularly because the proponent didn’t have enough supply contracts to fill both it and Keystone XL. Also, the proponents who think this will displace foreign oil know that unless they shell out to retool the existing refineries, it won’t actually serve their markets, and that they would also be demanding that Alberta swallow a $10/barrel discount, right?

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Roundup: Grewal gives some answers

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Just when the drip-drip-drip of new information and the grasping of straws around the Raj Grewal drama was reaching its expiration date, it all blew up anew last night on two fronts. One was the report that the RCMP had been asked to investigate a Brampton infrastructure project where questions are being raised about a land deal and that information had been passed along to both Grewal and Navdeep Bains (and in QP yesterday, Bardish Chagger called the reports false and warned that if allegations were repeated out of the House, they would be met by Bains’ lawyer); the other was that Grewal released an eleven-minute video, releasing it both to the Globe and Mail and to his Facebook page.

In the video, Grewal methodically went through not only his gambling habits, but also the loans (all of which were done by “transparently” cheque and since repaid), and then went through all of the allegations around property ownership, loans, his wife’s finances, the aforementioned Brampton infrastructure project, and even the questions he was asking in the finance committee study on money laundering and terrorist financing. A lot of the information puts to rest speculation and shows how grasping at disparate information and forming a sinister narrative can be when there are fairly simple explanations – explanations that Grewal probably should have been making over the past week as this was coming out, and answering media questions when they called (though one probably has a bit of sympathy for the feeling overwhelmed by it all). What is news out of this, however, is that Grewal said that while he’s leaving the Liberal caucus and taking a leave of absence for his treatment, his announced intention to resign may have been premature, and he’s going to be considering it over the next few weeks – but would have a definitive answer before the House resumes in January. (So maybe Jagmeet Singh made the right call after all in not immediately jumping back to Brampton in anticipation of that seat opening up). I’m not sure this will stop the hyterial questions – particularly the risible notion that he was some kind of national security threat – but it does seem like a lot more questions are now answered than not.

Meanwhile, further to yesterday’s discussion about why MPs shouldn’t be subject to the same kinds of background checks as ministers, here is some more discussion about why it’s a Very Bad Idea.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1068485192149389312

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Roundup: Ginning up the Grewal resignation

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As the stories on Raj Grewal’s gambling debts and intended resignation continue to trickle through, a number of them have taken on a vaguely conspiratorial tone. A lot of facts that shouldn’t be out of the ordinary are treated as suspicious for absolutely no reason at all. For example, people keep wondering why he was reassigned from the finance committee in September “with no warning.” Gee, what else happened in September that would have affected committee memberships? Could it have been the fact that the parliamentary secretaries all got shuffled, so committee assignments need to be rejigged? Maybe? And whoa, he asked questions on catching money launderers to law officials and FINTRAC agents during a study on – wait for it – “Confronting Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing: Moving Canada Forward.” Such an amazing coincidence that is totally suspicious. And the latest “revelation” is that Senator Jean-Guy Dagenais says that a retired Mountie told him a year ago that he heard Raj Grewal was under investigation, and he therefore thinks PMO should have known then. Erm, except that neither the OPP nor the RCMP tell the PMO what they’re investigating because they operate at arm’s length, and more to the fact, Grewal was a backbench MP, which I cannot stress enough.

To that end, Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column looks at the issue of parties policing MPs’ off-hours, considering the Clement and Grewal situations, while Susan Delacourt cites those same two cases, and wonders if we need to do a better job of screening backbenchers. And I’m pretty dubious because backbenchers are not ministers. They don’t have access to secret materials (Clement, I remind you, is a former minister and thus a member of the Privy Council, and his activities on NSICOP are outside of the usual activities of a backbencher), nor are they public office holders. Their job is to hold government to account – they are not part of the government, and it doesn’t matter what committees they’re on. Treating them as the same thing is not only a gross overreach, but frankly it will give MPs a wrongheaded sense of their place in the system, which is already suffering because of civic illiteracy.

Are Grewal’s debts concerning? Yup. Is it a crisis that he was mentioned in passing as part of an investigation into other suspicious characters? Maybe, but we don’t know enough to say whether it is or not, and the baseless speculation and ginned up allegations aren’t helping. Should Trudeau and the PMO have been more candid from the start about the reasons Grewal was resigning? Probably, and given this government’s inability to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, their approach once again blew up in their faces. But treating this affair with clickbait headlines and spinning random facts out of context in order to make them seem sinister is bad reporting.

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Roundup: Island of Unintended Consequences

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Over at Maclean’s, David Moscrop profiled the “new” Senate, and in it was probably the best description of the institution in its present state – the “Island of Unintended Consequences,” as penned by Greg MacEachern of Proof Strategies. And that’s very much true about the state of the Chamber, but unsurprisingly, almost none of those unintended consequences were explored. The bulk of the piece was devoted to the notion that we don’t know how senators will vote anymore and they say they don’t want to defeat bills but who knows *handwavey motion*.

The problem is that it’s not just the uncertainty over how senators will vote – it’s the fact that the people being put in charge in that Chamber don’t really know what they’re doing. The Order Paper is becoming hopelessly behind with bills piling up, and because nobody wants to negotiate and do any of the horse-trading that gets bills passed, it’s getting worse. This has serious implications for the government trying to get their agenda through, but too many senators are busy congratulating themselves on the fact that they’re not whipped that they fail to see the a) that horse-trading is not partisan but rather how things get done; and b) that the pile-up of legislation is going to become a serious problem unless they get their acts together and start getting bills through the system. If you want an unintended consequence, that’s certainly a huge one, and one that Senator Peter Harder seems willing to let happen so that he can get his way with the creation of a “business committee,” which will just fob yet more responsibility off of his desk and onto another small cliques’ plate (but he needs his $1.5 million budget!) and won’t do any of the things he promises when it comes to avoiding the end-of-session legislative pile-up. The fact that the Independents now make up the majority of the chamber, most of them too new to know what they’re doing (and lacking proper mentorship), the Order Paper crisis is happening and they don’t understand that it’s happening. This is a problem, and we need more senators to wake up to it.

Meanwhile, Senator Paula Simons talks about her live-tweeting in the Chamber as a way of de-mystifying its work, thanks to her career as a journalist, and I for one applaud her for it (though I will offer her corrections as she goes along).

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Roundup: A noble bill with problems below the surface

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It’s not often that I’ll go out of my way to comment on poor reporting (as opposed to columns), but in this particular case, I’m going to make an exception. The story is the fact that Rona Ambrose’s bill on mandatory sexual assault training for judges has been stalled in the Senate. Ambrose appeared on Power & Politics to express her shock and dismay, but there was very little research done in terms of the concerns that have been raised with the bill to date, and the fact that its passage through the House of Commons was problematic in and of itself (most especially the fact that it was referred to the Status of Women committee instead of the Justice Committee in order to ensure swift passage, with a committee that was sympathetic and didn’t have the expertise on the matter). The written story on the CBC website was simply a recap of Ambrose’s interview with no comment from anyone else, or recounting any of the concerns or pushback from the debates on the bill.

So I decided to take twenty minutes and skim over the Second Reading debates in the Senate on the bill, and lo, there are some pretty important concerns being raised. Senator Jaffer, who is a lawyer who has done judicial training, pointed to the fact that the bill mandating written rulings in all sexual assault cases not only takes away from the fact that there are procedures for clear oral rulings that can be appealed, but that it will cause other delays. The training also disadvantages rural lawyers, and can tip the hand of a lawyer in a firm that they are applying to be a judge.

Senator Joyal, a formidable constitutional lawyer who had a career fighting for minority rights (and who helped write the Charter of Rights and Freedoms) expressed some serious concerns about the powers given to a federal commissioner to determine what qualifies for training. He raised the very real point that the bill stipulates that training must be done by sexual assault survivors and organisations that support them, which automatically biases the training and the presumption of innocence (and others have raised the point that these trainers are often called as expert witnesses, which creates further biases). Joyal also noted the constitutional implications of the bill given that judicial independence includes the ability to maintain control over their education.

Senator Pratte, while not a lawyer, raised the salient logistical issue that for every 500 judicial applicants, maybe 50 make it through, meaning that if everyone needs training before they can be appointed, it delays assessment of applicants and has the potential to create problems with the quality if the training. He also raised the notion that if sexual assault survivors are needed for this training, how long will it be before other victims’ groups demand to be heard for other judicial training?

Senator Fraser, whose objections were briefly noted in the CBC piece, also made points about the inappropriateness of the bill mandating that reports on the number of judges who have taken the training be tabled in Parliament because judges report to Chief Justices in their regions, not to the minister. As well, because the majority of these cases are actually heard in provincial courts, this could qualify as interference in provincial jurisdiction.

The story also went onto state that Senator Joyal, who chairs the Legal and Constitutional Affairs committee, wouldn’t give a date for when the bill will be studied, but it didn’t mention that government bills always take precedence at committee, and as you can see from the committee’s schedule, they have a pretty full slate for the coming weeks, possibly months.

Frankly, I’m more than a little dismayed at the lazy reporting on this bill. While it may look like a slam-dunk issue on the surface, there’s a lot beneath the surface that’s not being reported on, which is actually fairly irresponsible. Would that political reporters at the CBC take twenty minutes to do some actual research on their stories than simply transcribe an interview.

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Roundup: Refusing to learn their lessons

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A former PQ minister wants to run for leadership of the Bloc, and I just cannot. Can. Not. The challenger this time is Yves-François Blanchet, who served in Pauline Marois’ short-lived Cabinet, and has since taken on a political pundit career since being defeated in 2014. He apparently met with the caucus yesterday, and the majority of them – including their past and current interim leaders – all seem to like him, but I keep having to circle back to this simple question: did you learn nothing from your last disastrous leader?

I can’t emphasise this enough. Since their demise in 2011, the Bloc have had a succession of seatless leaders, including Mario Beaulieu (who now has a seat, incidentally, and is the current interim leader), and while he stepped aside so that Gilles Duceppe could return (unsuccessfully), they keep going for leaders who aren’t in caucus, and time after time, it goes poorly for them. Every single time, I have to wonder why they don’t simply do as our system was built to do, and select a member from caucus. Constantly bringing in an outsider does nothing for their profile (ask Jagmeet Singh how that’s going), and their leaders keep being divorced from the realities of parliament. And time and again, they keep choosing another outsider. Why do you keep doing this to yourselves? Why do you refuse to learn the lessons that experience has to teach you?

There is one current MP who is considering a run, Michel Boudrias, and if the Bloc was smart, they would choose him by virtue of the fact that he’s in the caucus, he’s in the Commons, and he knows how Parliament works. Of course, if they interested in ensuring he’s accountable (especially given just how big of a gong show their last leader was), then it would be the caucus that selects him so that the caucus can then fire him if he becomes a problem (again, if history is anything to go by). But that would take some actual political courage by the party, and given their apparent reluctance to learn the lessons from their mistakes, that may be too much to ask for.

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Roundup: Pausing the birth tourism hysteria

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You probably heard last week about the recent report that incidents of “birth tourism” in Canada are higher than previously reported, owing to collecting data from hospital sources rather than local statistical agencies. Given that this became a flashpoint at the Conservative policy convention a few months ago, it’s probably safe to assume that this will become a topic of debate in Parliament in the coming weeks (though it depends on whether or not Andrew Scheer decides this will be the next issue he decides to chase down a rabbit hole, as is his wont). One does hope, however, that we may have a reasonable debate around this, and while Chris Selley may point to the fact that we may want to do something (that won’t violate human rights and create stateless persons), economist Lindsay Tedds has another view that may also be worth considering, especially if we look at the issue over the longer term.

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Roundup: Getting your Senate criticism wrong

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In light of Independent Senators Group “Facilitator” Yuen Pau Woo’s comments in the Globe and Mail last week about wanting to make Senate modernisation an election issue, Konrad Yakabuski penned a column in the Globe’s pages to point out that for all of the appointment of Independent senators, the institution remains as political as ever. Which is true – it is inherently a political body, no matter what some of its more recent denizens may think of it (much like the Supreme Court of Canada is itself a political institution, though people don’t like to think of it as such). And there are a lot of problems with Woo’s attempt to turn this into an issue, or his belief that Independent senators are somehow apolitical, or that a “non-partisan” Senate is even desirable (hint: It’s not). But Yakabuski’s column falls apart in several areas because, once again, you have pundits who know nothing about the institution passing judgment on it.

The key lines from the column that betray its ignorance are not difficult to spot:

Mr. Trudeau has effectively transformed the Senate by appointing 45 senators in just three years in office, almost all of whom sit as independent members. But just how independent are they, really, when they consistently vote in line with the Liberal majority in the House of Commons? Frankly, there is no way of knowing, given that the workings of the “new” Senate are even more opaque than those of the old one, when almost all senators were clearly aligned with one of the major parties and sat in on party caucus meetings.

Yakabuski has fallen into the trap of not understanding how Senate votes work, and how they can be different from those in the Commons. And I will be fair in pointing out that Conservatives, particularly a number of them in the Senate, have been playing a bad-faith game of portraying the votes in this light. What people ignorant of the institution don’t realise is that because the Senate knows they’re unelected, and will defer to the House of Commons on most occasions, they will rarely vote against government legislation, but will instead focus their attention on their role around scrutiny and any kinds of amendments to bills they can make – and this is even more so in the current era, where you have a government that has stated that they are open to those amendments. They also know that if they did vote down a government bill, there would be tempting a constitutional crisis, which is why they will only do it in exceptional circumstances. Simply counting votes ignores this reality of the Senate’s workings (which is both lazy journalism and poor qualitative political science in a qualitative body, and what the Conservatives agitating against the ISG are counting on). This is also to add that Yakabuski is off-base in describing the workings of the Senate, “new” or status quo, as being “opaque.” It’s not, and you have to go out of your way to ignore the workings if you think it is.

I would also add that Yakabuski also closes his column with praise for the design of the American Senate, citing that “The separation of powers and checks and balances built into the U.S. system expose the vulnerabilities of our own.” Nope. I would rather a system based on confidence and Responsible Government than their “balanced constitution” at any point, and if he thinks their system works better, he hasn’t paid the slightest bit of attention.

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Roundup: A sudden dilemma for Singh

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Liberal MP Raj Grewal made a surprise announcement last night, that he’s resigning his seat because of “personal and medical reasons,” which the PM later called “serious personal challenges” – a phrase that only raises the number of questions about what it could be. Aside from losing one of the best-dressed MPs on the Hill (Grewal is a frequent recipient of sartorial snaps on this blog), where this announcement gets very interesting is the bind that it places on NDP leader Jagmeet Singh.

Singh had initially stated that he wanted to run in Grewal’s riding during the next election, given that it was his riding provincially (note to non-Ontarians: in this province, the federal and provincial ridings are identical with a couple of exceptions in Northern Ontario), and for almost a year, he kept stating that he was “comfortable” not having a seat and waiting to run in that same Brampton riding in 2019. That is, until his party’s poll numbers started tanking and he realized that he needed to actually be present in Parliament if he hoped to regain any traction. (Also of note, his brother now holds the seat provincially.) But in August, Singh committed to run in Burnaby South, and has been spending some time there campaigning, and recently announced that he found a rental property there.

So this leads us to wonder – will Singh abandon Burnaby South, where he has already expended some effort and expense, or will he decide that since Brampton is now back on the map, that it’s the smarter decision to run in given his roots and history in the riding? This just as Singh learned that he’ll get the byelection in Burnaby South that he’s been (belatedly) demanding in February. So there’s a choice to make, and we’ll likely hear all about it in the coming days. (Also, expect the Conservatives to push conspiracy theories about just how “convenient” it was for Grewal to suddenly resign now, and how this must mean the Liberals really want him in the House because they think it’ll give them some kind of advantage; this line of baseless speculation was proffered on Power & Politics last night and I expect to hear it repeated in the coming days).

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Roundup: Deficits vs spending choices

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It was the autumn fiscal update yesterday, and it should be no surprise that the deficits are going to continue for foreseeable future. It was also notable for the measures that were implemented to compete with the US corporate tax cuts without making similar cuts in Canada, and these were measures that were designed to keep businesses investing in growth rather than simply offering share buybacks or dividends, as we’ve seen in the US. These targeted measures included immediate write-offs of new machinery and equipment, certain clean-energy equipment, and writing off some assets more quickly than before, with the calculated marginal effective tax rate of these measures apparently besting the US’ rates. So there’s that. There were also some tax credits for digital subscriptions in media, and a $600 million fund to offset the cost of hiring staff as part of that. There were also measures around removing internal trade barriers (yet again) and improving supports for businesses looking to export. On top of that, it also noted that the Trans Mountain Pipeline has earned the government $70 million since it bought the pipeline, and is on track to earn it some $200 million per year.

The deficit issue is one that we’ll continue to hear about, and it’s probably more complex than just a “deficits bad” kind of debate to have. On the one hand, the Liberals took government at a time when the books were $70 billion worse off than initially advertised (not to mention the Conservative “surplus” booked a bunch of false savings) so the 2015 promises met a different reality. On the other hand, they are spending any revenue growth rather than paying down the deficit faster, insisting (not incorrectly) that a declining debt-to-GDP figure is a more important measure, and we should remember that the deficits are really quite modest in comparison to the size of our economy. But they are making spending choices, and we should judge them on that. Here’s Kevin Milligan with some more context and analysis:

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John Geddes offers his summary of the update, while Andrew Coyne pans the government’s propensity to spend any new revenues it gets rather, meaning that their deficits continue to be by choice rather than necessity. Kevin Carmichael says that in spite of the deficit problems, the most audacious part of the update was the plan to tackle the overhaul of federal regulation. Susan Delacourt notes the difference in tone between the federal fiscal update and that in Ontario last week.

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