Roundup: Weak sauce mea culpa

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It only took a hundred days, but the NDP membership finally got some kind of a public mea culpa from leader Thomas Mulcair over the way the last election went down, and good news – he takes full responsibility for what happened! But much as Rebecca Blaikie’s interim report goes soft on what Mulcair did wrong, Mulcair’s own reckoning of events is still going pretty soft on things that happened as opposed to some of the myths that are being built up. Things like the balanced budget pledge, which Mulcair said overshadowed the “social democratic economic vision” where they thought they could squeeze all kinds of money out of corporate taxes, CEOs and tax havens, which any competent economist will remind you that you certainly can’t get the kind of money they’re talking from any of those sources. Mulcair goes soft on the observation that they lacked an over-arching narrative that could be easily communicated, when problem was less of a lack of an overall message, but a really poor message that they settled on, which was then badly communicated because, well, the message was poor to begin with. The message, of course, being “good, competent public administration,” and after Canadians had put up with a prime minister who had all of the pizzazz of dull wood varnish, Mulcair would show up to debates, smize like his life depended on it, and proceeded to look like someone on Valium because he was more intent on controlling his temper than he was in engaging with real ideas to present rather than some tired – and in come cases baffling – talking points. And this is what they sent up against most dynamic and charismatic political leader in over a generation. Couple this with some pretty disastrous policy rollouts – recall the initial release of their “costed platform” that didn’t actually have any breakdowns of numbers, but had some nonsense headings like “helping Canadians in need” that journalists rightly questioned, and when we did get numbers, they were based on some wrong assumptions. Campaigns matter, and both Mulcair and Blaikie have been downplaying that it was a poorly run campaign. Mulcair’s letter also contained some rather cryptic references to “overhauling the way caucus works,” but it’s vague, and isn’t owning up to their over-centralization that made the Conservatives’ centralisation efforts look elementary. That centralization has been carrying on to this day, which, when compared to the Liberals’ governing by cabinet rather than the leader’s office, and where their ministers are answering the bulk of their questions off-the-cuff and on their feet while the NDP (Mulcair included) have their scripts in front of them every time they rise in the Chamber, it looks stifling and controlling. So far, I’m not seeing much of a willingness to confront these truths so that they can do something to change them, which the party membership is going to have to weight when the leadership review comes in April.

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Roundup: Meddling in the committees

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I mentioned this yesterday in passing, but I’m going to revisit it today, which is the way that the Liberals are handling the issue of parliamentary secretaries at committees. And yes, they have stuck by their promise not to put them on committees officially, and they have written into their rulebook on government accountability and transparency that these parliamentary secretaries won’t be able to vote on said committees either – but they’re still showing up to them, and that is a problem. We saw under the previous government what happened under the previous government, where the parliamentary secretaries were on the committee, and their designated PMO staffer – used to help them with their additional duties – basically ran the committees, telling them how to vote, what motions to put forward, etcetera. And thus, committees started behaving not like independent bodies designed to scrutinise bills or hold the government to account for its plans, but rather to act as branch plants of ministers’ offices. It was a terrible perversion of what our system is supposed to do. The Liberals, so keen to look like they’re not emulating the Harper government’s practices, are nevertheless de facto carrying them on. Just because the parliamentary secretary isn’t voting, they and their PMO staffer are still in the room, directing the government side, even if they happen to call it “advice” and “offering the resources of the Privy Council” and all of those happy, clappy words. And while on Procedure and House Affairs, David Christopherson shouts himself into an apoplectic frenzy over it, he really has little room to talk, considering how the centralisation of operations in the NDP in the previous parliament meant that they had their own staffers from the leaders’ offices directing their MPs, providing scripts for them in the committee, and the like. Seems to me that it’s not really helping MPs be independent or letting them do their work without interference either (but this is also what happens when you get a caucus full of accidental MPs who don’t know what they’re doing, and that lack of experience made it easier to condition them to behave as the leader’s office wanted for the duration of that parliament). With the number of newbie MPs on the Liberal benches, that temptation is certainly going to be there as well – that because they’re so new, they’re going to need a lot of guidance, and hey, who better to provide it than the parliamentary secretary? No. Just no. This kind of thing needs to stop, and the Liberals promised that they were going to be better than this. So far, that promise to be better is proving to be a bit of a shell game, optics that say openness and transparency and leaning away from centralisation, but the core of it remains. Time to keep the parliamentary secretaries from the committee room, unless they’re there to help the minister with testimony. Let’s restore our institutions to their proper functioning for a change.

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Roundup: Carrying on the co-opting

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Justin Trudeau and three ministers announced the new plan to fight ISIS yesterday, and while the CF-18s are coming home in two weeks, the surveillance and refuelling planes will remain along with triple the number of special forces trainers, plus ministerial advisors in Iraq and capacity building in neighbouring Jordan and Lebanon, along with a lot more humanitarian assistance on the ground, and small arms and ammunition to our Kurdish allies. Its’ an approach that the Americans praised (despite Rona Ambrose’ dire warnings), but there is something that is troubling, which is the fact that Justin Trudeau has declared that he will still call a vote on the matter in the House of Commons. Why is this important? Because it has to do with the practice of Responsible Government. Under our system, the government – meaning the cabinet – takes a decision, and the Commons gets to hold them to account for it. But what Stephen Harper decided to start doing back in 2006 is to put things which are normally the prerogative of the Crown – things like military deployments – to a vote in the Commons, for purely political reasons. Part of those reasons were about trying to drive a wedge in the Liberal ranks over the mission in Afghanistan, and he did it very effectively. The other part was that it gave him political cover. When things went wrong, and they did, his ministers stood up to remind the House that they voted for that Afghan mission. Because that’s what insisting on votes does – it co-opts the House’s accountability role, and launder’s the government’s prerogative so that they can help avoid being held to account. It was bad enough that the Harper government, it’s worse that the Trudeau government, which says a lot of good things about restoring the proper functioning of our parliamentary system, to not do so in this case – especially after saying that he understands the role of the executive in military matters, and then goes on to promise a vote anyway. (I would also add that it’s mind-boggling that the NDP would continue to insist on a vote despite the fact that it co-opts them, but mind-boggling is what a lot of their positions tend to wind up being). One imagines that the language of the vote will be one which simply expresses support in the mission rather than has the language of authorisation, as Harper did with the previous Iraq vote, but it’s still terrible all around, not only for optics, but the proper functioning of our system of government.

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Roundup: Trying to game the committee

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As we heard late last week, the NDP’s democratic reform critic, Nathan Cullen, has been pushing his new idea of a “proportional” committee to better examine electoral reform options and come up with an idea that can be presented to Canadians. It’s a gimmick, of course, and it one has to be cognisant of Cullen’s agenda, which is of course a certain kind of proportional representation system that his party favours, just like Cullen’s other suggestion of “trying” an election with a new system and then asking voters for forgiveness by means of a referendum after the fact. It’s trying to game the system in a way he prefers, as Colby Cosh pointed out over the weekend, which should raise any number of red flags for those who take Cullen’s proposition seriously.

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Roundup: Making adjustments on the fly

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Lots of developments in the Senate, so let’s get to it, shall we? Kady O’Malley looks into the ways that the Senate is going through the process of reshaping itself to fit the new reality that they find themselves in, and so far they’ve been doing it in a fair-minded way, tempering some the partisan excesses of the previous parliament while they start adjusting their rules around things like Question Period in the new scheme they’ve developed. I’m still a little hesitant, considering that they’re losing some of the pacing and ability to make exchanges that made Senate QP such a refreshing change from Commons QP, but we’ll see once they start working out the kinks. Meanwhile, the Senate is trying to adapt its Conflict of Interest committee to a reality where there are no “government” senators, and more debate about how to include the growing number of independent senators into that structure. We’ll see how the debate unfolds in the next week, but this is something they are cognisant about needing to tackle, just as they are with how to better accommodate independent MPs with committee selection as a whole. Also, the Senate Speaker has ruled that the lack of a Leader of the Government in the Senate does not constitute a prima facia breach of privilege, convinced by the argument that the lack of a government leader doesn’t affect the Senate’s core ability to review and amend legislation, and that the primary role of the chamber isn’t to hold government to account. I would probably argue that it may not be the primary role, but it is a role nevertheless, but perhaps I’m not qualified enough to say whether that still constitutes an actual breach of privilege, as opposed to just making the whole exercise damned inconvenient and leading to a great number of unintended consequences as they venture into this brave new world of unencumbered independence. At this stage, however, things are all still up in the air, and nothing has really crashed down yet, but it’s a bit yet. By the time that Parliament rises for the summer, we’ll see if all of those broken eggs wound up making a cake, or if we just wind up with a mess.

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Roundup: Application versus consultation

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The head of the new Senate Appointment Advisory Board appeared at the Procedure and House Affairs committee yesterday, and has raised a few issues about this new process that are a bit troubling, which has to do with applications – rather, that there seems to be an emphasis on application rather than nominations arising out of consultations. In particular, the ability for people to apply for a seat on their own seems to be at odds with some of the design of the advisory process. Emmett Macfarlane notes that this wasn’t how he envisioned the process when he was asked to help design it, and that it not only overly bureaucratizes the process, but it sets it up for a particularly unsavoury sort to want to apply, which I concur with. Why is this important? Because we’ve only spent the past number of months watching the trial of a certain Mike Duffy, who was well known for wanting desperately to become a senator for decades, and how he viewed such an appointment as a “taskless thanks” which would also provide him with all manner of perquisites – and witness how he managed to monetize all of his relationships as a result of his appointment, as we’ve witnessed in testimony. We also lived though the bizarre spectacle that was Bert Brown, “elected” senator whose self-appointed crusade for Senate reform comprised largely of unsolicited meetings with provinces to convince them of his plan (on the Senate’s dime), and taking to the op-ed pages to basically call his detractors Nazis (I’m not sure how else you take it when he reminds you of his family’s military service in WWII as a rebuttal). Some of the best senators we’ve seen are those who never expected an appointment, and who never would have sought office on their own – people like Roméo Dallaire. It’s also why I’m not sold on the NDP fear that this process will just be elites nominating elites – a broad enough consultation will bring people of accomplishment and expertise in a wide variety of fields than just academia. But at the same time, the Senate should be a place that rewards experience and expertise rather than being a repository for randoms, given their role to scrutinise legislation and act as the country’s premier think tank. I have a hard time seeing how hot dog vendors can fulfil those roles, no matter how many people they interact with in a day.

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QP: Endlessly repeating

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Thursday, and Trudeau was again not to be seen in the Commons, as he was off in Calgary meeting with industry stakeholders. Not that it’s not important, but he was only in QP one day this week, and that’s something more reminiscent of his predecessor than he promised to be. Rona Ambrose led off, script on mini-lectern, and read a question about the Port of Quebec. Marc Garneau agreed that it was significant, and said they we examining the request being made. Ambrose then raised her concern that Trudeau said that he wouldn’t promise to approve Energy East if the NEB approves it. Bill Morneau responded, chastising the former government for not being able to get resources to tidewater in ten years. Ambrose tried again, and got the same answer. Gérard Deltell was up next, asking about funding for the National Optics Institute, to which Navdeep Bains praised them and promised a timely response to their request. Deltell wondered again about funding, to which Bains listed the various sectors they were helping. Thomas Mulcair was up next, demanding action for residential school victims cut off from compensation by a loophole. Jody Raybould-Wilson assured him that she had instructed her officials to find a resolution. Mulcair turned to the TPP and the issue of drug costs, to which David Lametti assured him that they were undertaking consultations. Mulcair lamented the theoretical affects of the agreement on intellectual property, and Lametti reiterated his response. Mulcair again hammered on the signing of the TPP, and Lametti again reiterated the consultation process.

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Roundup: Looking to avoid mistakes

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The defence minister’s slow rollout of the new plans going forward in the Iraq mission to combat ISIS has been providing the government an opening in which to be attacked by both sides, but when Harjit Sajjan hits back against the government, there have been a few cries by the Conservatives that are a wee bit defensive. When Sajjan suggests that there were failures, the Conservatives wonder aloud if that means the girls who are going to school, or the humanitarian work that’s been done over the years. Sajjan, who was on the ground in Afghanistan for three tours, and has mused openly about looking to avoid the same kinds of mistakes, has plenty of ammunition to choose from. Read any book about the mission, and you’ll find countless examples of problems of poor management, poor communication, and as Sajjan has noted, unintended consequences of actions we’ve taken that helped our enemies in the longer term, particularly with recruitment. That he wants to take the time to get a new mission on the ground in Iraq right is hardly surprising in this context, but everyone demands answers. Meanwhile, Canada’s in the bottom third of allies in NATO for defence spending, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, though it has noted that capability and spending levels are not necessarily the same thing, and that countries who meet spending targets are generally useless.

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Senate QP: A bold experiment

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The Senate had already exhausted its Order Paper for the day, and was recessed until the big show as ready to get underway. When Fisheries minister Hunter Tootoo arrived and the Chamber reconvened in Committee of the Whole, so that Tootoo could be on the floor of the chamber, things got underway. Senator Carignan led off, asking about the promise for marine protected areas, and whether there would be compensation for fishers who could no longer fish in these waters. Tootoo first wanted to note that he was honoured to appear before them, and noted his years of service in a consensus-based government made it even more fitting that he was the first minister to answer questions there. Tootoo then turned to the question, and spoke about working with local communities and industries that are affected. Carignan noted that consultation was one thing, but compensation was another. Tootoo said that protecting these areas was the right thing for Canada, and because the process would be open, there would be no surprises.

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QP: Digging in on the haymaking 

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The 100th anniversary of the great Centre Block fire meant that it was the wooden mace on the table today, to mark the destruction of the original mace. Justin Trudeau was absent, however, as he was in Edmonton to meet with Premier Notley there. Rona Ambrose led off, mini-lectern on desk yet again, and she read a question about Energy East, surprising no one. Bill Morneau answered, somewhat surprisingly, and he mentioned his meetings in Alberta recently, promising a new approach. Ambrose noted the resolutions of support passed in Saskatchewan, to which Morneau mentioned the meetings Trudeau was having with the Alberta premier. Ambrose gave an overwrought plea for jobs for people who are suffering, and Morneau insisted they were helping get social licence for groups who want to get resources to tidewater. Steven Blaney was up next, asking about job losses in French, and Morneau assured him that they are working together with affected provinces. Blaney accused the Liberals of abandoning workers, bringing in shipyards, to which Judy Foote assured him that they remain committed to the national shipbuilding strategy. Thomas Mulcair was up next, noting his visit to La Loche, Saskatchewan, and demanded funding for Aboriginal languages. Carolyn Bennett noted the importance of the visit, and she vowed to get those languages into schools. Mulcair moved onto the TPP and raised the opposition of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton to the deal. Lawrence MacAulay noted that the signing was just a technical step that allows greater debate. Mulcair switched to French to ask again, and this time David Lametti responded in kind with much the same answer as MacAulay. For his last question, Mulcair demanded immediate changes to the EI programme, for which MaryAnn Mihychuk assured him that changes were coming.

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