Tag Archives: Abortion

Roundup: Lamenting the regional ministries

Posted on by

Agriculture minister Lawrence MacAulay told his local paper that he’s not too concerned that the minister in charge of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency isn’t from the region, but that he’s a Central Canadian, but hey, he’s gotten results so it’s all good. And then people went insane because how dare the government not have a regional development minister from the region, ignoring that the policy of this government has been to eschew the tradition of regional ministers writ large, and that all regional development agencies all report to the same minister – the industry minister – rather than spreading it around to a number of ministers of state (and bloating the size of cabinet while you’re at it). And then from there comes the perennial outrage that we have regional representation at the cabinet level, which ignores that cabinet positions are not actually something that requires subject matter expertise, but that it’s a political position that is largely based on managerial competence, which is fine, particularly under a system of Responsible Government that the legislature can hold them to account for the performance of their duties. After all, they have the civil service to do the subject-matter expertise part for them, and it’s the job of ministers to make decisions that they can then be held to account for. But a few of the exchanges were at least worth noting.

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/790304049916698624

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/790320546814824449

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/790323018631348225

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/790323328108130304

Most of those were all well and good, but this one from Candice Bergen caught my eye, because it actually highlights something that has largely been ignored.

While it may be a little overwrought, the point about centralizing power in the PMO is actually quite astute, and fits the pattern of centralization that Trudeau has been entirely underreported. Within the Liberal Party itself, Trudeau has convinced the party to abolish its regional powerbases and centralize it all within his own office under the guise of “modernization” and “being more responsive.” Once could very well argue that eliminating regional minister has a similar effect. That said, one could also argue that the purpose of regional minister was about pork-barrelling and doing the partisan work of securing votes from those very same regions for the government’s benefit, so their loss wouldn’t be too deeply felt in a move to make a system built to be more responsive to evidence than political consideration. Regardless, the propensity of this prime minister to consolidate power should not be underestimated, and this is something we should absolutely be keeping an eye on.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A warning or a betrayal?

Posted on by

Justin Trudeau made some comments to Le Devoir about the reduced sense of urgency around electoral reform, and a bunch of people – notably the NDP – freaked out. Trudeau said:

Under Stephen Harper, there were so many people unhappy with the government and their approach that people were saying, ‘It will take electoral reform to no longer have a government we don’t like’. But under the current system, they now have a government they’re more satisfied with and the motivation to change the electoral system is less compelling.

And then comes the parsing of the rhetoric – is he trying to walk back on his election promise that 2015 was the last election under first-past-the-post, or is he trying to give signals to the electoral reform committee as they begin to draft their report after their summer of consultations across the country? To the NDP (and Ed Broadbent of his eponymously named Institute), Trudeau’s comments are a betrayal because to them, he can only deliver proportional representation or bust. Their working premise is that Trudeau was saying that because the system elected Liberals it’s fine, but when it elected Conservatives, it was broken. But I’m not sure that’s what Trudeau was actually saying, because the prevailing popular discussion pre-election was that reform was needed because any system that delivered Conservative majorities was deemed illegitimate – one of those kinds of talking points that gives me hives because it presumes that electoral reform needs to be done for partisan reasons. And to that extent, Trudeau is right, that the sense of urgency has decreased because the Conservatives are no longer in power, so there’s less clamour for it to happen. There is also the theory that what Trudeau was signalling was that there are degrees of acceptable change, and that without as much broad support that smaller change like ranked ballots could be something he would push through (seeing as we all know that the committee is going to be deadlocked).

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/788788763854077952

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/788789074228371457

Kady O’Malley, on the other hand, thinks that Trudeau is signalling to the NDP and Greens that they should be willing to compromise on PR during the committee deliberations, or he’ll deem it a stalemate and either walk away or put it to a referendum, where it would almost certainly be doomed. Rona Ambrose says that it could signal that Trudeau is backing down, which the Conservatives would like (and to be perfectly honest, I would too because the system is not broken and electoral reform is a solution in search of a problem). That he may have found the excuse to back down and admit this election promise is a failure – and then move on – would be the ideal move in my most humble opinion.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Unseen consequences and consolidating power

Posted on by

In discussions around the Senate modernization report earlier this week came the question of fallout from Justin Trudeau’s decision to kick his senators out of national caucus, and how that spurred part of the reform discussion within the upper chamber (the interminable Duffy-and-company related expense issues being another of those triggers). While Paul Wells notes some of those consequences and how the decision was a good foretelling of Justin Trudeau’s management style, comments made by Senator Serge Joyal also caught my attention, particularly around the unintended consequences of the banishment.

One of the things about having senators in national caucus is that they have the benefit of being the institutional memory of parliament, because they’re there over the course of several parliaments and aren’t prone to a lot of turnover like the House of Commons is. That means they’re not always finding their feet like MPs are, or concerned about their own re-election, like MPs are, and they’ve also been there and done that with a lot of proposals that keep coming around. Kicking senators out of caucus is to forgo a lot of that knowledge and experience which is bad enough, but Joyal pointed to another problem, which is that it points to even greater centralisation of power by the leader’s office because there are no longer senators in the room to tell newbie MPs when they are or aren’t bound to follow leaders’ orders. And that’s actually a pretty salient point considering the context of Trudeau and the his own power consolidation.

By being chosen in the manner that he was – by “supporters” as opposed to caucus or even party membership, Trudeau is accountable to nobody, his selection base being so diffuse and nebulous that it could not be replicated. That allows him to argue that he has the “democratic legitimacy” to do what he wants, and demands that caucus fall into line as a result. One of his earliest actions was to kick out senators, while ostensibly about making the upper chamber “more independent,” which in a sense it will, but it also removes those voices from his caucus that can speak up about any way in which he may be inappropriately using his powers as leader. Add to that the way in which he and his team managed to push through changes to the party’s constitution that centralises policy-making into his office (under the rubric of being “more responsive” and “more modern”) and eliminated any regional power bases that could challenge his supremacy as leader, well, the picture starts getting all the more clear, that he has consolidated a very great amount of power at the expense of his party’s grassroots and caucus, more than any other party leader has in this country thus far, and that should be concerning to anyone who respects the particular accountability mechanisms inherent in the Westminster system. Joyal is right to make this point, but one suspects that few people are willing to listen, chalking his concerns up to the wounded feelings of being turfed. They’re not, and we should be paying attention to this consolidation of power.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The Sophie Grégoire Trudeau problem

Posted on by

The issue of assistants for Sophie Grégoire Trudeau has become a bit ugly in social media, and overblown in the political arena while opposition parties on both sides of the spectrum try to cast the prime minister’s family as being these out-of-touch elites (some of it completely speciously, as the Conservatives try to equate Trudeau’s statement about not needing government funds for childcare and suddenly billing for nannies was hypocritical, despite the fact that he wasn’t the leader of a G7 nation before), because if there’s nothing that this country loves, it’s cheap outrage. And really, that’s what a lot of this is, combined with some garden variety sexist expectations that she should be a doting wife and mother in the home, taking care of meals and childcare on her own without any public profile. But before we delve into it further, a couple of important reminders.

Seriously, for the love of all the gods on Olympus, stop calling her the First Lady. We don’t have a First Lady in Canada because we have a royal family, and the closest equivalent – aside from Prince Philip as the Royal Consort – is the somewhat antiquated term of the Chatelaine of Rideau Hall.

No, this is completely wrong. We don’t elect governments or parties in this country. We elect 338 MPs, who come together in a parliament that forms a government. So in essence, we did elect the family that came along with the MP who was able to form a government.

And this really is the important point. We have a constitutional monarchy so that the royal family takes on the ceremonial and celebrity functions and prevents the Head of Government from becoming a cult of personality. Unfortunately, in this age of media and social media, where the Trudeaus are consider bona fide celebrities in their own right, it has created a kind of cult of personality (which is only worsened by the fact that the fact that Trudeau was elected by a nebulous “supporter class” means he is accountable to nobody and he knows it). So when the public comes looking for Grégoire Trudeau to do speaking engagements and to do the kind of celebrity outreach that members of the royal family do so well in the UK (but certainly less so here because of their relative absence), how are we supposed to react? What expectations do we put on her as the spouse of the Head of Government, who has no defined role? While I have no objections to the nannies or single assistant (Trudeau is prime minister of a G7 country, and demanding that his spouse do all of the domestic work is frankly odious, particularly given her diplomatic expectations), I find myself torn about the need for additional help. I have no doubt that she needs it, because she has chosen to parlay her celebrity toward charitable causes. And it’s less about the taxpayer’s money that rubs me the wrong way, but the fact that this is getting uncomfortable under our system of government and constitutional traditions. That we have a prime minister who has formed a kind of cult of personality is very uncomfortable, but it’s not a problem with an easy solution, short of insisting that members of the royal family start spending more time on our shores to do the work of the celebrity face of our constitutional order. Is the solution to have the party pay for her added assistants? Maybe. Or to charge speaking fees on a cost-recovery basis? One can imagine the howls out outrage that an “elite” is charging charities money already. There’s not an easy answer, but the discomfort around the larger problem of where our system is headed is something that we should be talking about. Unfortunately, that conversation is being drowned out by cheap outrage and the June and Ward Cleaver crowd, which is only making this whole exercise reek.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Peter Harder’s ham-handed problems

Posted on by

First it was the curious announcement from long-time Liberal Senator (and one-time leader of the provincial Liberal party) Grant Mitchell was stepping away from the senate caucus to sit as an independent. For someone as nakedly partisan as Mitchell, it was a curious move that raised a number of questions for me. Then, later in the evening, news came down that Peter Harder, the “government representative” in the Senate, will be naming a deputy and a whip, and that whip was to be Mitchell. (The deputy was named as Diane Bellemare, who was a Conservative senator who quit that caucus a couple of months ago and became a founding member of the Independent Working Group). In amidst a number of smartass remarks going around the Twitter Machine about how an independent whip was supposed to work, I will offer again the reminder that in the Senate, the job of the whip is more about logistics and administration with things like assigning offices and parking spaces, and with organizing committee assignments and seeing that absences are filled on committees than it is about telling senators how to vote. Likewise, deputy leaders in the Senate are much more equivalent to House Leaders in the Commons, where they help determine scheduling of debates on bills and so on. But given that Justin Trudeau was looking to shake up the way the Senate operates, thus far it has mostly been about rebranding the office of Government Leader in the Senate under a new name and maintaining the “not a minister in name only” fiction that Harper employed when he wanted to put distance between himself and the Senate. Add to that the odd insistence that Peter Harder sit as an independent while taking on this role, which is problematic at best. But if his job is just to represent the government, and to shepherd legislation through the Chamber, then why does Harder need a second person to do the House Leader-equivalent work, or a whip for the independents – particularly when the Independent Working Group has been working on developing a system of administrative representation for those unaligned senators. It smacks to me that Harder, whether with the blessing of Trudeau or not, is trying to impose a top-down organisation for unaligned senators in the chamber rather than letting the bottom-up process that the Working Group is engaged in run its course. While I’m not indulging the conspiracy theories that this is all a crypto-Liberal charade playing out, I do think that Harder is overstepping here by a great degree. Sure, it looks greatly symbolic that he got a Conservative and a Liberal with him to do these tasks, but it does look like he’s trying to impose something on the new independent senators that currently goes against what the Senate rules allow (being of course a caucus organisation that is not tied to an existing federal political party). As with Harder trying to get an inexplicably big staff for the job he says he plans to do (as opposed to the old job of Government Leader), this new move is problematic. It could very well be that Harder doesn’t know what he’s really doing and how the Senate operates, which was always the going to be a problem when Trudeau insisted that his “representative” would come from the first batch of independent appointments. But these ham-handed moves are making that problem all the more glaring. This is an increasingly obvious example of Trudeau not thinking through his Senate plans and ballsing it up as he goes along because he doesn’t understand the institution either, and that is a problem.

Continue reading →

QP: Women ask the questions 

Posted on by

It being International Women’s Day, one could be sure that outside of the leader’s round, we would see a majority of women MPs asking questions, and lo and behold, that was the case. Rona Ambrose led off, mini-lectern on Scheer’s neighbouring desk, and she asked about the Yazidi women targeted by ISIS and bringing them over as refugees. Justin Trudeau reminded her of the commitments they made to bring over refugees, and that they achieved their goal of 25,000 Syrian refugees . Ambrose repeated yesterday’s question about his visit to the Centre for American Progress, to which Trudeau responded that when he was there two years ago, he spoke out in favour of Keystone XL. Ambrose then tried to insist that Trudeau help Bombardier by agreeing to their supply day motion on the Toronto Island airport. Trudeau asked her not to pit region against region for political gain. Kelley Block was up next, and insisted that the Liberals let the Toronto Island airport expand so that Porter can buy Bombardier C-series jets (as though the tens that they would buy would totally make the difference). Marc Garneau praised Air Canada’s intent to purchase those jets, and when Block asked again, Garneau chastised her for not respecting the tripartite agreement with the city and provincial governments. Thomas Mulcair was up next, and demanded a childcare plan. Trudeau hit back that Mulcair would be deciding what to cut if he had been elected in order to balance the budget. Mulcair then used women’s access to EI to badger the government for defeating their opposition day motion. Trudeau responded that they were taking action, and there would be more to come in the budget. Mulcair raised the issue of tax cheats getting amnesty deals, and Trudeau noted it was under the previous government and they would investigate if need be. Mulcair demanded action, citing special treatment for the rich, and Trudeau reminded him of his pledge to give childcare dollars to millionaires.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Boutique tax credits for everyone!

Posted on by

The very first Private Members’ Bill up on the docket to be debated is one that give me a real headache, and it’s one that should be disallowed from being voteable, all because of a wee little loophole in the rules. The bill, from Conservative MP Ted Falk, aims to increase the tax rebate which charities receive to match the same level that one gets for political donations. The problem? That this is really an expenditure, and private members’ bills are forbidden to spend money without a royal recommendation (though MPs have gone to increasingly ridiculous lengths in recent years to try and contort logic to pretend that those bills don’t spend money when in fact they do). The even bigger problem? That a loophole currently exists in the rules that makes it technically possible for these bills asking for a tax credit to bypass the spending rules because technically (and under the way that procedure is interpreted) the bill seeks to reduce tax paid, not increase or expend taxes. That’s not actually true, mind you – ask the Auditor General or any decent economist and they’ll tell you in no uncertain terms that tax credits are actually expenditures, and unfortunately there is precedent on Falk’s side, particularly with a certain PMB from Dan McTeague several parliaments ago where he got a tax deduction in under that technicality and it was deemed to be in order. The government repealed the measure in their next budget, but the bill got though when really it shouldn’t have. Unfortunately it opened the door to these kinds of bills that are looking to create new boutique tax credits, and that’s a problem. Our tax code is already thousands of pages, and far too complex. Boutique tax credits are actually terrible policy, but governments have decided that they’re good politics because they feel like they’re rewarding certain groups for certain behaviours, and damn the consequences. The Auditor General has sounded the alarm that these measures aren’t being properly tracked because they’re not deemed expenditures (even though they are), which means that they’re not being given proper parliamentary oversight to ensure that it’s money that’s being well spent – and he found many cases where it’s not. But as Falk is demonstrating, the floodgates are opening, and it won’t be long before the Order Paper is replete with these PMBs demanding new boutique tax credits for everything under the sun, to encourage all manner of behaviour that they deem a social good, under the rubric that they’re not spending any money and thus within the rules. It’s a loophole that Parliament needs to set upon itself to close for the sake of the tax code and parliament’s ability to hold these kinds of spending measures to account. Sadly, one suspects that in their self-interest, MPs won’t make the needed rule change and we can expect this situation to get worse with every passing parliamentary session.

https://twitter.com/avelshi/status/704465684797915136

Continue reading →

Roundup: Establishing a wedge narrative

Posted on by

It really was a little bit embarrassing – or would be, if he had even a millilitre of shame. Pierre Poilievre rushed everyone to a microphone yesterday morning to announce the “next part” of the Trudeau Tax™ that he’s trying to push as a talking point – that Justin Trudeau said that he would impose a new mandatory “payroll tax” for pensions like is happening in Ontario, with a dollar figure attached and everything. Which, of course, is a complete fabrication as Trudeau said no such thing. I know, because I was there sitting in front of him when he talked about CPP enhancement in his Wednesday press conference. And throughout Members’ Statements and Question Period, as many Conservatives as possible tried to make this very same claim – Harper going so far as to call it a “$1000 pay cut” – even repeating it in response to NDP questions. Way to make them feel relevant! Much in the way that Trudeau’s supposed “gaffe” about fairness was a legitimate point of philosophical difference that is being turned into an attack line, this hint at a policy discussion yet-to-come, which would need to be discussed with the provinces in any eventuality, is being morphed into something sinister and being associated with specific dollar figures where no pronouncement has been made – not that facts have ever mattered to the Conservative attack machine. (Witness “budgets balance themselves” which actually followed the phrase “when the economy grows,” which is true and the Conservatives have said so themselves on numerous occasions). So while we again have an area of legitimate philosophical difference – whether Canadians are saving enough, whether a mandatory plan is the best vehicle to fund retirements – it’s being turned into this dumbed-down populist talking point that obliterates nuance or the truth about what was actually said. But apparently veracity doesn’t matter because election. Or something. (But if you want to discuss nuance and policy, Jennifer Robson is glad we’re talking CPP expansion again.)

Continue reading →

QP: Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.

Posted on by

Despite it only being a Thursday, the major leaders were elsewhere in the country, busy campaiging instead of doing their jobs. Megan Leslie led off, bringing up job losses at Bombardier and wondered why the government wasn’t doing more for manufacturing. Pierre Poilievre gave a pro forma expression of sympathy before touting the government’s job creation record. Leslie asked again in English twice again, got the same answer, and then Alexandre Boulerice took another kick at it in French. Poilievre was just as adept in repeating the good news talking points in French. Marc Garneau led for the Liberals, also asking about the job losses, and Poilievre put a “Liberals would raise taxes” spin on his same talking points. Judy Sgro took a kick at it, naming some of the other closing plants and job losses, but Poilievre kept insisting the Liberals would raise taxes and kill more jobs.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A vow to do away with message control

Posted on by

In his year-end interview with The Canadian Press, Justin Trudeau has promised an end to message control if he were to form government, and the unmuzzling of bureaucrats. It’s a bold promise, and one that we’ll have to see to believe because we have to remember where many of these directives come from, which is largely because Conservative candidates were making boneheaded statements to the media during campaigns, which sunk the party’s chances until message discipline became the order of the day. Once media could no longer jump on their every utterances, people weren’t exposed to what they were saying, and the Conservatives eventually got into power, where the discipline continued in order to keep their place. Likewise, after the 2011 election when a busload of accidental NDP MPs got elected, that party went into message lockdown in order to ensure that they didn’t have any particular bozo eruptions. If more Liberal candidates start saying things that causes the party some embarrassment – especially as We The Media can jump on said quotes and run with them rather mercilessly – then we’ll see how long they go without message control. Trudeau makes a point about the fact that you can’t be a government from a single person, and he has made a concerted effort to showcase the team around him, probably to mask any perceived weaknesses he has on the policy front (though I would say that most people underestimate his intellectual capacity). I also think that Harper’s spokesperson disputing Trudeau’s assertions and claiming that ministers are available to speak to the media is utterly precious. The last time a minister responded to my phone calls was pretty much never, and I’m not the only one who has to make do with a bland talking point from their spokesperson rather than getting an actual quote from said minister, let alone a briefing on a new piece of legislation.

Continue reading →