Tag Archives: Access to Information

Roundup: A few notes on the state of the Brexit drama

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Given the state of the drama in Westminster right now, I thought I’d make a couple of points about why we’re here now. It’s pretty unprecedented for a government to lose a vote – badly – on a major foreign policy plank without automatically losing confidence, and yet, thanks to the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, that’s exactly the case. And because Theresa May squeaked out a confidence vote, that leaves her in something of a precarious situation about not really having a mandate to continue on the path she was on, while not being able to take anything to the people in a general election, as might ordinarily be the case under our share Westminster system. The FTPA has made Parliament untenable, and enables bad actors to game the system, which would ordinarily have been avoided by the sheer fact that they would have been keen to avoid shenanigans that the Queen would need to be involved in.

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It seems to me that if the Westminster parliament were functioning normally, then May could have taken the question of proceeding with Brexit to the people in an election, given that she lost the vote of confidence. Of course that would necessitate Labour to come up with a coherent position (and perhaps a more coherent leader, which their current bastardised leadership selection process also gave them). That would have given the winning government a popular mandate to overtake the referendum if need be, but again, that’s now off the table because of the way the FTPA has distorted the Westminster system. With the practice of Responsible Government being blunted by this statute, it’s clear that it must go.

Meanwhile, Chantal Hébert looks at the Brexit omnishambles and compares it to the plans for Quebec sovereignty back in the day, and how this seems to be dampening any sovereigntist sentiment in the province even further (while getting in a few jabs about Andrew Scheer’s Brexit boosterism along the way). Andrew Coyne likewise looks to the Brexit drama as an object lesson in how seccession from any union is far from painless.

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Roundup: Foreign policy complacency

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There has been some musing of late about Canada’s place in the world, and a couple of things jumped out at me. First is Paul Wells’ most recent column, which responds to a Globe and Mailop-ed from a former trade negotiator that wrings its hands at the way the current government is handling China. As Wells points out, said former negotiator is all over the map in terms of contradictory advice, but most gallingly, suggests that we break our extradition treaty with our largest and closest ally in order to appease China. And Wells quite properly boggles at this suggestion we break our treaty, while at the same time taking a moment to reflect on how there is a different way in which Ottawa seems to operate when it comes to these matters, particularly in an era where major corporations with investments in China are no longer calling the shots by way of political financing.

At the same time, Stephanie Carvin makes some particularly poignant observations about Canada’s foreign policy complacency in this era of the Americans retreating from their obligations on the world stage (never mind the Brexit-mired UK). We talk a good game, but have no follow-through, and in the past, she has quite rightly pointed to the fact that we won’t invest in the kinds of things we talk about the importance of globally (most especially “feminist” foreign aid). The government’s actions in Mali are another decent example – putting on a big song and dance about how important it is we go there, spend a few months there doing low-risk medevac, and then refuse to extend the mission for a few extra months so that our replacements can get properly established, meaning there will be a gap in services there.

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I do have to wonder about some of the crossover between what Wells and Carvin are talking about – that Wells points to the rise of crowd-pleasing populism freeing governments from the go-along-to-get-along complacency, but Carvin points to the fact that we are not actually free of that complacency, though perhaps there are different sorts of complacency that we are grappling with when it comes to our place on the world stage. Something to think about in any case.

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Roundup: A victory for the status quo

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Christmas came a few days early, courtesy of British Columbia, which rejected the referendum to change their voting system. A decisive 61.3 percent of British Columbians voted to keep First Past the Post, which one hopes would shut up the proportional representation Kool-Aid drinkers for some time – not that it will. They’ve already begun the ritual grousing over Twitter about how a) the referendum was the problem and people rejected it and not PR; and b) that voters are just too stupid to get that “PR is lit,” to coin a phrase. The provincial Green Party leader, Andrew Weaver, says that he gets the message and that they won’t be raising it “anytime soon” – but he also didn’t want a referendum in the first place and wanted it imposed, so we’ll see how long before he starts agitating for that option.

Next up for attempts at electoral reform are Quebec – where François Legault promised it sans-referendum with the support of other party leaders – and PEI, where PR narrowly “won” a poorly attended plebiscite, on the late round of a ranked ballot, hence the government plans to run another referendum during the next provincial election.
But seriously, guys. We need to stop this mythmaking about the current system, and this belief that PR is the only “good” system. Most of the gripes about the current system stem from ignorance and disengagement with the process that has allowed bad actors to co-opt the system to their own ends (and this is especially because of the bastardised leadership selection system that we have gravitated toward despite is demonstrated toxic effect on our system). PR doesn’t solve these problems – if anything, most PR systems simply exacerbate them and create whole new problems. Time to focus our efforts toward civic literacy and using grassroots engagement to fix the problems that we’ve allowed to creep into our system. And hey, I wrote a book on this as a primer for you.

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Meanwhile, Shachi Kurl of the Angus Reid institute breaks down the polling around the referendum, and should put to bed a few of the myths.

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Roundup: $1.6 Billion instead of a magic wand

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Yesterday, the federal government announced $1.6 billion in help for the Alberta energy sector – but insisted it’s not a subsidy. $1 billion of it was in loans for exporters to invest in technologies and address working capital needs or exploring new markets; $500 million from to help smaller oil and gas businesses weather the uncertainty, $50 million from the Clean Growth Program, and $100 million in economic diversification projects. It wasn’t something like federal funding for companies to remediate orphan wells, for example. And predictably, Rachel Notley and various other Conservatives immediately dismissed this as not asking for money but wanting “the handcuffs removed,” which seems to me to be code for waving a magic wand to get pipelines built immediately, despite the fact that unless they plan to bulldoze through the Indigenous consultation process, is something the government can’t do. And Andrew Scheer? He went full drama queen with a petulant press release that accused Trudeau of trying to destroy Alberta, sounding very much like a jealous suitor wailing “He can’t love you like I will!”

More to the point, the federal government can’t just ram through the approvals for Trans Mountain, given that the last time they tried to cut corners, the Federal Court of Appeal objected and rescinded their approvals and would do so again, hence why they’re going the route of doing what the court laid out, and that takes time. There is no magic wand. Killing Bill C-69 won’t solve anything because the current system isn’t working, and while the bill is flawed and open to amendment at the Senate, Conservative senators have not consented to any committee hearings before the Senate’s slated (late) return in February (and I have heard various reasons for this, both in opposition to the bill, and because they are pushing back against the committee chair, who they accuse of doing the bidding of Senator Peter Harder). The tanker ban on BC’s north coast? That’s demanded by many of the coastal First Nations. Scrapping the carbon tax? Won’t change anything because it has nothing to do with the oil price differential and oil companies have been asking for a carbon price so that they can have predictability when it comes to climate demands. And then there’s the bogeyman about foreign funded “paid protesters” that the Conservatives blame for everything, despite the fact that they don’t control the courts or the economics of projects. That won’t stop Scheer or Jason Kenney from offering the people of Alberta another vial of snake oil, promising quick approval on pipelines that they can’t actually deliver on.

Meanwhile, amidst more lies and grievance narratives around the federal equalisation programme, Trevor Tombe drops a reality bomb about how the system works and why. Because amidst the demands for magic wands and offering snake oil, the Jason Kenneys of this country will continue to lie about how equalisation works to keep people angry in the hopes of getting electoral advantage for it. We need more people to tell the truth about the system if we’re to keep a lid on the anger and try to do something meaningful to address it rather than simply bow to grievance culture and fabrications.

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Roundup: The inaugural NSICOP report

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The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians tabled their redacted report on the prime minister’s India trip yesterday, and, well, there were a number of redactions. But what wasn’t redacted did paint a picture of an RCMP that bungled security arrangements, and that didn’t have good lines of communication with the prime minister’s security detail, and where they left a voicemail for someone who was on vacation, while someone else in Ottawa decided to not bother trying to reach out until the following day because it was the end of their shift. So yeah, there were a “few issues” that the RCMP fell down on. And because of the redactions (done by security agencies and not PMO, for reasons related to national security or because revelations could be injurious to our international relations), we don’t have any idea if the former national security advisor’s warnings about “rogue elements” of the Indian government were involved was true or not.

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The CBC, meanwhile, got documents under Access to Information to show what kind of gong show was touched off with the communications side of things as the government tried to manage the fallout of the revelations of Atwal’s appearance on the trip (and in many senses, it wasn’t until the prime minister gave a very self-deprecating speech on the trip at the Press Gallery Dinner that the narratives started to die down). Because remember, this is a government that can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag.

In order to get some national security expert reaction, here’s Stephanie Carvin and Craig Forcese:

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It should also be pointed out that the opposition parties are trying to make some hay over the redactions, and are intimating that they’re the product of PMO for partisan reasons. It’s not supposed to work that way, but hey, why deal in facts when you can proffer conspiracy theories, or in Andrew Scheer’s case, shitposts on Twitter?

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Roundup: Compromising positions vs oversight

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As the fallout from his sexting “scandal” continued, MP Tony Clement was booted from caucus yesterday, which shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. First thing in the morning, Andrew Scheer said that he was assured that it was a one-off so Clement would be allowed to stay, but by Question Period, Clement was out, meaning that more stuff has come to light (possibly the raft of women over social media describing their creepy encounters with Clement online).

While Cabinet ministers including Ralph Goodale don’t believe that this incident with Clement actually breached national security, the bigger worry by experts in the field is the fact that the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians is still nascent and building trust, and the fact that Clement was a member of that team and obviously ignored the training he was provided about not putting himself in compromising positions could shake the domestic trust of this new committee, especially given that this level of parliamentary oversight of our national security is new and largely untested.

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Susan Delacourt notes the three ways in which Clement has damaged himself, and possibly his party as well. John Ivison ponders the security implications of this whole sordid affair. And on Power Play, Stephanie Carvin explains why this is an issue with national security considerations.

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Roundup: Yet more dubious suggestions hosted by the GRO

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Over on the Government Representative Office website, Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative” Senator Peter Harder has been hosting suggestions from former senators of late on how to “reform” the Senate. Because of course he has. And not all of the suggestions are particularly helpful, or good for the Senate in the long run. The latest example is from Senator Pierre De Bané, who was a senator for thirty years and an MP before that. De Bané seems to think that what the Senate needs more than anything is the independent oversight body that the Auditor General wants instituted before voluntarily neutering its powers by passing a motion to only use a suspensive veto. Because hey, if it’s good enough for the UK…

I’ve written numerous times that the notion of an independent oversight body risks the senate’s status as a self-governing parliamentary body. I would be okay with an audit committee that includes outside members but is still made up with a majority of senators in order to ensure that it remains in Senate control because it’s important that our parliamentary bodies retain self-governing status. Otherwise we might as well turn power back over to the Queen, because we obviously have no business governing ourselves. I’m also forever baffled by the notion that we should neuter the Senate’s ability to exercise hard power and defeat a bad government bill when necessary. It’s part of their necessary duties to hold government to account, and before you say that it’s good enough for the House of Lords, the Canadian Senate is a vastly different body than the Lords, with a very different history, and the Senate was never the primary legislative body as the Lords was for centuries. These are differences that can’t be papered over.

De Bané’s other suggestion is that the Senate start creating a series of special committees tailored to senators’ special interests to…do advocacy work, apparently. I’m not opposed to senators undertaking an advocacy role on issues that are of particular interest to them, I am less keen on the proliferation of special committees because I worry that it will draw the focus away from the actual legislative responsibilities of senators – especially in an environment with independent senators who are beholden to nobody and who aren’t able to be corralled into getting work done. We’re already having problems getting bills passed in a timely manner because the leadership within the Senate refuses to do things like negotiate with one another – now imagine that these senators are otherwise engaged with busywork of their own interest rather than with the boring work of scrutinising legislation or holding government to account. I do fear that creating an environment where personalized committees can proliferate will have a detrimental effect on the Senate overall, and I’m a bit surprised that a former senator doesn’t see this possibility.

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Roundup: Cluelessly disparaging parliamentary privilege

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Sometimes you read an op-ed so clueless that it burns. This piece by lawyer and part-time law professor Daniel Tsai about the Mike Duffy lawsuit is one of those pieces. Tsai argues that the lawsuit is an opportunity for the courts to make changes to the Senate that, according to him, will make it “more accountable.” As his evidence, he cites statements from Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative” Senator Peter Harder darkly musing that some senators may want to protect their friends, and Senator Marilou McPhedran’s quest to root out harassment in the Senate as “proof” that the problem is the Senate’s parliamentary privilege. But he also cites former Senator Don Meredith as a case of harassment without also acknowledging that it was because the Senate has parliamentary privilege that they’re able to discipline their own, and that they had recommended expulsion for his breaching the Senate’s ethical code, and that forced his hand to resign. This is a feature, not a bug.

The whole piece demonstrates that, lawyer or not, Tsai doesn’t understand what privilege is, the importance of Parliament’s need to be self-governing (if it’s not, we might as well just turn power back over to the Queen), or the fact that the institutional independence of the Senate (which allows it to hold the government to account) requires it to have a robust set of privileges that can police its own members rather than subject the institution to threats of lawsuits from its various members when they’ve feeling sore by the fact that they’ve been disciplined. Weakening privilege won’t make the Senate more accountable – it will make it vulnerable to vexatious litigation, and along the way, weaken the House of Commons’ own parliamentary privileges as well (because the privileges of the Senate and the Commons are inextricably linked).

None of this is to suggest that the Senate is perfect – it’s not, and there have been bad apples that generally have been made to resign when the going gets tough. Tsai completely ignores the constitutional role of the Senate and the way in which it’s constructed with a defined purpose in mind in order to engage in some populist pandering to the myths that surround the institution. His “solution” about a judicially-imposed limitation on the privileges that are embedded in the constitution (seriously?!) would make things worse, not better.

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Roundup: Decrying unfairness while ignoring logic

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As the countdown to Kinder Morgan’s deadline for some kind of reassurance around the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion draws near, we’re starting to see a lot of angry commentary from Western conservatives, and not all of it is very well thought out. Yesterday, former Wildrose leader Brian Jean took to the Financial Postto say that Alberta needs to demand a “fairer deal” from Canada…but made a litany of errors and misrepresentations, and gaps in the logic of his own conclusions. Andrew Leach laid out many of them here:

I would add that Jean also disingenuously ignored the fact that the Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the Northern Gateway process didn’t adequately consult the First Nations to a constitutional standard, which was entirely the fault of the Harper government and not Trudeau. And for his complaints around Energy East, he also ignored the fact that while the NEB said that they would look at downstream emissions as part of their analysis, Cabinet broadcast that their criteria for approval had not changed, and it did not include those emissions profiles. It also ignores the economics of the situation, that Energy East was the most expensive option now that Trans Mountain and Keystone XL had been approved. It also gives the false notion that it would allow Alberta oil to flow to Eastern refineries for the sake of “energy security” when those refineries are not built to handle the kind of heavy crude that Alberta exports, and thus the majority of it would not wind up in Canadian gas tanks. But hey, why do facts matter when you’re trying to stir up anger?

And anger over equalization is so easy to stir up when you constantly misrepresent the issue. It’s not a cheque that the province hands over – it comes mostly out of personal income taxes. It’s a federal programme, and the reason Alberta pays more into it and doesn’t get it is because Albertans have the highest incomes in the country, and the fiscal capacity that their government can offer the same level of services as other provinces without crippling taxes. And when Premier Moe starts tweeting about “shipping out” equalization dollars, I think it’s fair to ask if he thinks that his province wants either the lower incomes or the reduced fiscal capacity that it would take for them to be a net receiver of equalization. (Note: He does have a point about the rail backlogs, and the federal government could have taken measures to deal with that months ago if they so chose). But seriously – these equalization/fair deal gripes are not grounded in fact or logic, and we need to remind people of that.

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QP: Border concerns at the fore

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All leaders were present, and before QP got underway, Guy Caron, Andrew Scheer, and Marco Mendicino made statements about the van attack in Toronto yesterday. After a moment of silence, Scheer led off, concern trolling that the government of Quebec had to go to the media to get action on irregular border crossers. Justin Trudeau said that they had been rebuilding the relationship with the provinces, and that they were working on the issue with them. Scheer demanded to know why nothing had been done over the past year to stem the flow of migrants, and Trudeau took up a script to list the fact that the previous government made cuts to CBSA and the IRB that they were still investing to clean up. Scheer worried that legitimate refugees or immigrants were not getting processed because of these backlogs, and Trudeau didn’t use a script to call out the Conservatives for having broken the system. Scheer protested that the Conservatives had a “generous” refugee resettlement programme, but Trudeau reiterated the cuts that the previous government instituted. Scheer tried one last time, and Trudeau noted that the backlogs now were as a result of those cuts, while his government was cutting processing times while still respecting the rules around international asylum claimants. Guy Caron was up next for the NDP, accusing the government of rigging the Trans Mountain approval process, to which Trudeau deployed a platitude about energy and the environment going together. Caron switched to French to repeat the question, and Trudeau took a script this time to chastise the NDP for their incoherent position before retreating to the platitudes. Hélène Laverdière was up next to demand the suspension of the Safe Third Country agreement, to which Trudeau took up a new script to read about how they were investing in accelerating processing and strengthening the border. Jenny Kwan reiterated the question in English, to which Trudeau worried that the NDP may be trying to stoke fears around asylum seekers as well, before repeating his previous points sans script.

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