Tag Archives: Andrew Scheer

Roundup: Getting your Senate criticism wrong

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Endorsing the Brexitshambles

Posted on by

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Britain is currently in a state of utter omnishambles as they try to deal with Brexit. A potential deal that was reached resulted in Cabinet resignations, and some very real threats not only to Theresa May remaining as PM, but possibly toppling the government as a whole. It’s lunacy over there right now. Back here in Canada, Andrew Scheer has decided that this was the right time to reiterate his support for Brexit. Because “sovereignty.”

While Scheer can bang on about how much control the UK gave up to the EU, and repeating falsehoods like the canard about the EU having regulations around the curvature of bananas, he both ignores that the EU has created a peace that has been unknown in Europe for centuries, and the fact that much of the Brexit campaign was fuelled by straight-up xenophobia. It’s this latter aspect that is particularly relevant because it’s part of a pattern we’re seeing with Conservatives, as John Geddes pointed out a couple of months ago – that they have this inability to orient themselves in a plausible way with the current nationalist populist trends in conservatism globally. Add to that, there is this naïve notion that they can somehow play with just enough extremism without it going into outright xenophobia or racism (and we’re especially seeing this playout with Maxime Bernier who blows the xenophobia tuba and then acts bewildered that white nationalists start showing up in his new party). But you can’t play with “just enough” extremism, because you can’t actually contain it. And when you wink about things enough times, you can’t act shocked and surprised when your adherents spell out what you were saying – like that post from a riding association Facebook account that posted Harjit Sajjan’s photo with the tagline “this is what happens when you have a Cabinet based on affirmative action.” They’ve only stated repeatedly that ministers in the Liberal cabinet are only there to fill quotas (whereas everyone in the Conservative Cabinet was there “on merit,”) but the moment someone puts Sajjan’s face next to that, well no, that’s totally not what they meant at all. Sure, Jan. And that’s why you can’t actually claim that Brexit is all about “sovereignty,” because it absolutely wasn’t. You can’t divorce the inflated sovereignty concern trolling from the xenophobia – it’s the same mentality as trying to assert that you can use “just enough” extremism for your political ends, but not go all the way.

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne remains boggled by Scheer’s continued endorsement of Brexit, and wonders if he’s trying to appropriate some of its populist nationalism (the aforementioned “just enough” extremism).

Continue reading →

Roundup: Looking for a domestic MS-13

Posted on by

Over the past week, Andrew Scheer has been touting his latest pre-election policy plank, which promises to tackle the problem of gang violence – except it really won’t. His proposals are largely unconstitutional and fall into the same pattern of “tough on crime” measures that are largely performative that do nothing substantive about the underlying issues with violent crime, but that shouldn’t be unexpected. The measures go hand-in-hand with their talking point that the government’s current gun control legislation “doesn’t include the word ‘gangs’ even once,” and how they’re just punishing law-abiding gun owners. And while I will agree with the notion that you can’t really do much more to restrict handgun ownership without outright banning them, it needs to be pointed out that the point about the lack of mention of gangs in the bill is predicated on a lie – the Criminal Code doesn’t talk about “gangs” because it uses the language of “criminal organisations,” to which gangs apply (not to mention that you don’t talk about gangs in gun control legislation – they’re separate legal regimes, which they know but are deliberately trying to confuse the issue over.

I have to wonder if the recent focus on gangs as the current problem in gun crime is that they need a convenient scapegoat that’s easy to point a finger at – especially if you ignore the racial overtones of the discussion. Someone pointed out to me that they’re looking for their own MS-13 that they can demonise in the public eye – not for lack of trying, since they focus-tested some MS-13 talking points in Question Period last year at the height of the irregular border-crossing issue when they were concern-trolling that MS-13 was allegedly sending terrorists across our borders among these asylum seekers. The talking points didn’t last beyond a week or two, but you know that they’re looking to try and score some cheap points with it.

With that in mind, here is defence lawyer Michael Spratt explaining why Scheer’s latest proposal is a house of lies:

Or as another criminal defence lawyer, Dean Embry, puts it, if you’re going to make stuff up on this issue, then why not go all the way?

https://twitter.com/DeanEmbry/status/1062102941123907590

Continue reading →

Roundup: Immigration concern trolls

Posted on by

Amidst the other disingenuous, fear-based campaigns going on in the political sphere right now – Statistics Canada, and the carbon price, in particular – the issue of immigration is also threatening to get worse, in part because the simmering issue around irregular border crossers is being conflated with the government’s announcement of new immigration targets. And we need to drill this into people from the start – immigration and asylum are two very different things, and shouldn’t be treated or conflated. We don’t accept refugees because we think they’ll fill out our workforce – we accept them for humanitarian reasons, which is why the expectations that they’ll find work right away is also problematic, as usually they’re traumatized upon arrival. That’s why it’s especially problematic when you have partisan actors like Michelle Rempel standing up in Question Period to decry the new immigration targets as having some form of equivalency with the irregular border crossers – they’re not the same thing, and conflating them is using one to demonize the other. Even more problematic is the kind of concern trolling language that we’re seeing from other conservatives – that they “support immigration” but are concerned about the “confidence in the system.” There is a certain dogwhistle quality to those “concerns” because it implies that the “confidence” in the system is undermined by all of those bad newcomers arriving. It’s subtle, but the signals are still there.

To that end, the government decided to launch a pro-immigration ad campaign, which the Conservatives have immediately derided as an attempt to paper over the irregular border-crosser issue, despite the fact that they’re separate issues, and they’re actively undermining confidence in the immigration system that they claim to support by conflating it with the asylum seekers they’re demonizing. And this cycle of conflation and demonization gets worse when the federal minister pushed back against the Ontario minister’s politicizing of the issue and attempt to blame asylum seekers for the city’s housing crisis (and more importantly pushed back against her claims that “40 percent” of shelter residents are now irregular border crossers and that they used to be 11 percent as being fabricated because the shelter system doesn’t track that kind of data). The Ontario minister responded by calling Hussen a “name-calling bully” (he didn’t call her any names), and on it goes. Would that we have grown-ups running things.

Meanwhile, The Canadian Press’ Baloney Meter™ checks the government’s claim that they’ve reduced irregular border crossings by 70 percent (it was one month’s year-over-year data), and Justin Ling gives an appropriately salty fact-check of the political memes decrying the planned increase in immigration figures.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Proposing a debate commissioner

Posted on by

Yesterday the government unveiled their plan to establish an election debate commissioner, who would set about coordinating leaders’ debates during the next election, along with proposed around which party leaders could participate – rules that would give Elizabeth May an in, but could exclude Maxime Bernier unless he gets an awful lot of candidates in place, and his polling numbers start to rise. The proposed Commissioner is to be former Governor General, His Excellency the Rt. Hon. David Johnston, who is a choice that nobody is going to want to dispute.

Of course, that hasn’t eliminating the grumbling and complaints. The NDP are complaining that they weren’t consulted before Johnston was nominated (not that they’re complaining it’s him), and the Conservatives are calling this a giant affront to democracy and add this onto their pile of complaints that Justin Trudeau is trying to rig the election in his favour. (Not sure how this does that, and it seems pretty cheeky to make these claims when their own unilateral changes to election rules in the previous parliament were panned by pretty much everyone). And Elizabeth May is overjoyed because the proposed rules would include her. Of course, Johnston still needs to be approved by Parliament, and he will appear before the Procedure and House Affairs Committee, but all of this having been said and done, there remain questions as to why this is all necessary. Gould went around saying that this was because Harper didn’t want to do debates in 2015, except that he did debates – he simply didn’t want to do the same “consortium” debates that are usually done and decided by the TV broadcasters, and he most certainly didn’t want to have anything to do with the CBC. The key point they seem to be making is that the 2015 formats saw far fewer viewers than the consortium debates typically attract, for what it’s worth. Is this a reason to implement a new system, that neither compels leaders to participate or broadcasters to air? Maybe, and people will point to the debate commission in the United States.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1057344603861397506

To that end, here’s Chris Selley asking some of those very questions, looking at some of the problematic behaviour from broadcasters in response to the changed formats from the 2015 debates, and offering some suggestions as to how this all could be avoided.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Kenney and Scheer vow to repeat mistakes

Posted on by

There was a conference in Calgary yesterday called “Energy Relaunch,” during which both Jason Kenney and Andrew Scheer laid out plans for how they propose to get the province’s oil and gas industry “back on track” if they were to form government. The problem is that they seemed to have learned absolutely no lessons from the past few years about where the problems and bottlenecks in the process lie, and what to do about them. Their solutions tended to be to use bigger bulldozers and to gut more legislation, and Kenney more specifically included funding the legal challenges of resource-friendly First Nations communities and targeting “foreign-funded” organisations that opposed development (because it’s all one big conspiracy by the Tides Foundation, and however else makes a convenient scapegoat). But if anyone has paid any attention to the court decisions over the past number of years, especially over Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain, the theme that emerges is that they have been slapped down because successive governments have attempted to cut corners and weasel out of their obligations rather than doing the hard work of proper assessments and consultation with Indigenous communities that would get them the approval they were looking for. The current Liberal government seems to get this fact and is proceeding accordingly when it comes to Trans Mountain, while Scheer and Kenney wail and gnash their teeth about how they didn’t appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada (without articulating what the error in law was), or somehow legislating away the problems (never mind that retroactive legislation will lead to more litigation, and you can’t legislate away your Section 35 duty to consult obligations).

Kenney also promised that if made premier, he would launch a “war room” to counter any critics of the oil sands in real time. The problem is that hasn’t worked to day, and won’t work going forward, but Kenney refuses to grasp that reality.

Energy economist Andrew Leach was also presenting at the event, and has some thoughts as to what he heard as well:

Continue reading →

Roundup: The big climate reveal

Posted on by

Yesterday was the big day, where Justin Trudeau unveiled the final details of his carbon pricing plan, and how the rebates would work for the provinces subject to the carbon backstop, which are going to be Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, with the Yukon and Nunavut also kicking in slightly later. (You can find breakdowns here). The Conservatives and their provincial premier allies immediately chimed in to predictably call this some kind of scam, and that nobody believed the rebates would happen, and so on, and so on. Also of note is that Trudeau’s nominal ally, Brian Gallant in New Brunswick, has also grumbled about the carbon price (but if he loses and Blaine Higgs forms government, he too is opposed to it). Manufacturers and small businesses are grumbling, despite the fact that there will be rebates for small and medium-sized businesses under the scheme. Also getting larger rebates will be people in rural communities, given that they have higher carbon costs (and it’s no secret that the Liberals have a harder time winning votes there).

https://twitter.com/davidakin/status/1054753060336078848

With this in mind, here are some noted climate economists who can put some of yesterday’s announcement into proper perspective. (Additional thread from Kevin Milligan here, and Nic Rivers here).

Meanwhile, here’s a look at whether Trudeau can escape the problems of Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift, with points to Trudeau being a better communicator (but I’d argue that journalists prefacing every explanation of the Green Shift with “it’s complicated” didn’t help either). Chris Selley notes that this is the issue that could make or break Trudeau in the next election, which is why he needs to get it right. Paul Wells drops a bit of reality on the language that Scheer and Ford are using, and wonders whether the carbon backstop rebates will start catching on with other provinces.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Dredging up deficit panic

Posted on by

We’ve seen a return of questions in the past few days about the federal deficit – while the Public Accounts have shown that it was a little smaller than projected, it’s still there. The Conservatives hope to make hay over this in the next election, and as part of his “one year to go” speech over the weekend, Andrew Scheer repeated the lines that Stephen Harper mockingly performed over the election about how the Liberals promised just a “tiny little deficit” and well, it doesn’t look like they’ll make balance next year like they initially promised. Mind you, Scheer and his crew also ignores the fact that the Liberals were handed a $70 billion hole in GDP when they took over, so their spending promises are pretty much in line with their promises, but they made the choice to simply borrow to make up the difference – and yes, governing is about choices. Kind of like how the Conservatives chose to underfund a number of major projects in order to achieve the illusion of a balanced budget, that the Liberals had to then pick up the pieces on (Phoenix, Shared Services), and that’s also part of why they’re in the red. But you know – details.

In light of all of this fear-mongering, Kevin Milligan does the math on deficits, and well, it’s not quite the doom we’ve been thinking, as the debate remains trapped in the nineties and isn’t catching up to current realities.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1053691438829985794

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1053692158564163585

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1053694039445274624

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1053695340774223872

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1053696086911541249

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1053697398403358721

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne worries about the deficits, with the recall about how the not-so-big deficits of the seventies suddenly metastasized out of control in the eighties, but he doesn’t math out his fears either.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Hitting the one-year mark

Posted on by

Yesterday marked the one-year point before the next fixed election date, which is one of those things that I find terribly annoying because in a confidence-based system like ours, fixed election dates are anathema to how our system should work. And instead of providing some illusory “stability” for opposition parties to plan for an election when a government could theoretically call for a “snap” election at any point, all a fixed-election date has managed to do is shift the incentives for governments to back-load their programmes and has made the pre-writ period a year-long campaign (at least), much as the election calendar south of the border has done. So yay for that.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1054109748310601728

To mark the occasion, Andrew Scheer held a campaign rally to fire up his troops for said year-long campaign, and with it, he predicted it was going to “get nasty,” and repeated the usual canards that “The Media” and the pundits were on the Liberals’ side (which is both ridiculous and factually untrue, and hey, remember how all of those editorial boards endorsed the Conservatives last election? No?). Of course, it should also be remarked that Scheer has a propensity for untruth that is unparalleled in recent memory in Canadian politics, so his lying about the media should come as no surprise, while he spent the day shitposting disingenuous bullshit about the carbon price framework. But remember, it’s the other guys who will be “nasty.”

The other grating thing about the year-long election campaign is that the obsessive interest in polls will only get worse, as the analyses of polls have already begun, never mind that a year is a very long time in politics, and campaigns matter. And yet, that’s where we are and will continue to be until We The Media start covering actual issues instead of polls in our usual flawed way (followed by the usual lamentation about how the polls didn’t predict the outcome and wondering what happened). Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s going to be a slog of a year.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Getting the TPP to the finish line

Posted on by

The bill to enact the Trans Pacific Partnership has passed the House of Commons and arrived in the Senate, and the race is on for its swift passage, as there is a desire for Canada to be among one of the first six countries to ratify the deal (currently three others have ratified). In the Commons, the NDP were the prime opponents to the deal, but they’re not a force in the Senate. The Conservatives in the Senate are just as keen on its swift passage as their Commons counterparts were – and they tried on more than one occasion to pass the bill at all stages without debate (because hey, who needs to do the job of scrutinising bills and holding government to account?)

While we can expect a bit more scrutiny in the Senate, I have to wonder where any delays will come from. When it comes to the Independents, one of their own are sponsoring the bill, so he will likely lead a push within that caucus in the way of organising briefings and trying to muster votes, so it would largely be an issue of whether any of them want some particular extended study on issues in the bill. The Senate Liberals tend to be free-traders, but they will want to insist on some scrutiny, as is their forte – they can often be counted on to do some of the heavy lifting that MPs are unwilling to do. So while I don’t expect them to hold up the bill, I would expect them to do their due diligence, which means it won’t sail right through, though I wouldn’t expect it to take long.

So where would I expect any delays to happen with this bill? With the Leader of the Government in the Senate’s office, given his reluctance to do any negotiation of timelines for bill passage. If there’s to be any delays, I personally would expect them to come from bottlenecks of other bills that are languishing because they can’t manage to get them passed at a reasonable pace because nobody wants to do the actual negotiation of timelines. Delays will come from incompetence, rather than malice. We’ll have to see how severe it will be, but that seems to be the state of things in the Senate these days.

Continue reading →