Tag Archives: Appointments

The (garbage) Reform Act won’t stop an autocrat

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Over the weekend, the Globe and Mail ran a lengthy opinion piece called “It Can Happen Here,” about how we are supposedly more vulnerable to an autocrat taking power in this country, under our rules, than the Americans were with theirs. I am dubious. While I very much respect the professor who wrote the piece, I worry that there were a few fundamental misunderstandings in some of the points he was trying to make. For example, there is a section about how we don’t have an impeachment mechanism in our constitution, and of course we don’t. Our system operates on confidence as opposed to a fixed clock, so we don’t need impeachment. If the government goes pear-shaped, Parliament can withdraw confidence and the government is out. If a caucus loses confidence in their leader, they can vote non-confidence in him or her at any point, and no, they don’t need the (garbage) Reform Act rules to do so.

Our rules can be pretty effective. For example, when Charles Tupper tried to hold onto power after losing an election, the Governor General refused to make any of the appointments that Tupper wanted him to, so he was forced to vacate the office. Oh, but what if the autocratic PM appoints a lapdog GG? People in serious positions tend to take up the seriousness of those positions even when everyone thinks they won’t. Not saying it’s an impossibility, but so far that’s been the case. And yes, some of our rules are “unwritten,” for which he suggests we need a Cabinet Manual to codify them, but I am dubious there too. Codifying those rules in such a manner invites people to look for legalistic loopholes rather than a principles-based system that makes it easier to point out when someone is trying to do through the backdoor what they cannot do through the front. I also find that the piece very much misread and oversimplified what happened with the whole SNC-Lavalin affair as one of the examples of how power can be abused, because in the end, it was Bill Morneau’s office that was lousy with SNC-Lavalin lobbyists and not PMO, and a more pliant Attorney General was not appointed and didn’t result in the deferred prosecution agreement. (In fact, when SNC-Lavalin eventually pleaded guilty, they got a lesser penalty than the DPA would have stipulated).

My biggest problem with the piece, however, is that it treats the (garbage) Reform Act as a kind of panacea that needs to be more widely adopted. It absolutely does not. What it actually does is put up a bunch of unnecessary rules and barriers to what is a simple vote of non-confidence, and more to the point, it tries to convince MPs that they have lost power over time, or that this will “empower” them when in fact it actually disempowers them because of its formalistic barriers. Yes, we do need to beware leaders who can become autocrats, but the Reform Act will not help avoid that in any way, shape or form.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-08-10T19:08:01.763Z

My Latest:

  • For National Magazine, I delve into the Alberta case that the Supreme Court of Canada has recently granted leave to appeal about lawyers’ oaths to the Crown.
  • My column points to the things that the sanitized tales of Conservative “infighting” over generational change are ignoring or glossing over.

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More hints about future Senate appointments

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There were a couple of bits of Senate news yesterday, one of which was that prime minister Mark Carney has made new appointments to the senate appointment committee, filling vacant spots for a number of provinces. One of those appointments is former Senate Liberal leader James Cowan, and as this blog is a big Jim Cowan fan, I say this is a good person to help vet candidates, but it will do nothing to quell the constant chattering about partisan appointments. We also learned from the Canadian Press reporting that Carney himself chose Tom Pittfield and Richard Martel for appointments, while the other two came from the former committee recommendations that had apparently been sitting for months, which makes a tonne of sense.

This was followed up by Carney’s Senate Leader, Senator Pierre Moreau, who said that while they’re not going to revive a Senate Liberal caucus, Carney might appoint more Conservative senators because they’re dangerously low and he believes in the role for the official opposition in the Senate as a “mirror” of the House of Commons (erm, no, that’s not how this work), which is again, incoherent. Don’t get me wrong—I am not opposed to partisan appointments on either side of the aisle, so long as it’s done properly. The House of Lords has managed a very good system where their appointments board can recommend both partisan Lords and non-partisan cross-benchers, and they keep the numbers fairly in balance so that no one swamps the Chamber, and that is something we should be striving toward. Of course, Carney has not articulated any of this, and we’re instead left with the ongoing incoherence of his position, because nobody knows what the hell they’re talking about (most especially some of the Trudeau-appointed independent senators).

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-07-15T13:08:04.280Z

My Latest:

  • My (belated) Loonie Politics Quick Take points to some of the signs of resilience in the Canadian economy over the past year, amidst so much turmoil.
  • My Loonie Politics Quick Take calls out Carney’s trip to kiss the ring of Prince Bonesaw, and why it’s a really bad look for Canada.

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Votes aren’t that important in the Senate

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On Friday morning, the CBC put out a deeply ignorant article that was Very Concerned about senators missing “key votes,” and that “some legislative changes pass with barely half of all senators casting a vote.” OH NOES! Except that there are pretty much no key votes in the Senate, and that very few legislative changes are so important that they need all hands on deck to vote. Legacy media and a number of academics who have spent zero time watching the Senate simply do not understand how it operates, and for the most part, votes are not all that important. Government bills are going to pass, unless it’s something extraordinarily egregious, so there is less impetus to vote for things, because nobody wants to cause a constitutional crisis by voting down these bills. There are almost no close votes in the Senate these days, unless it’s on some contentious procedural matters—such as what was being rammed through with some of those bills at the end of the sitting—but again, that was on the timing of studies and not on the bills themselves. The votes are not important—the committee work is, and that’s where senators focus most of their attention.

This being said, the fact that so many of these senators in the article had absences related to doing things like keynote speeches and engaging with certain stakeholder communities is in part a function of the kinds of appointments that Justin Trudeau made to the Chamber, which were a lot of type-A personalities who have some pretty specific interests, and sometimes pursing those interests mean that they’re not in Ottawa as a result. Also, a lot of senators are aged, and that means that some of them have more health issues and they miss sittings as a result, which also wasn’t really addressed. And articles like this one are going to leave the impression that they simply can’t be arsed to turn up, and isn’t it just like those attendance scandals of the eighties and nineties (which it’s not, and yes, the Senate takes attendance and those records are public, unlike the House of Commons). This isn’t the whole “taskless thanks” nonsense that certain past Senate figures *cough*Mike Duffy*cough* tried to make it out to be. It’s just really tiresome that this kind of story comes around every year, often from the same journalists, and nobody bothers to learn a gods damned thing about why the Senate is not the House of Commons.

My Latest:

  • For National Magazine, I delve into Friday’s Supreme Court of Canada decision where they upheld a mandatory minimum sentence (for a change).
  • My weekend column points to just how incoherent Carney’s first Senate appointments were in the broader context of the direction of the Chamber.

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The most cynical Senate appointments

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Yesterday, prime minister Mark Carney made his first four Senate appointments, and they were…a choice. After months of rumours, he appointed his principal secretary, Tom Pittfield, to the Senate—but not as a partisan Liberal to be in a revived Liberal Senate caucus, which is not happening, but as an “independent.” (Pittfield was also a childhood friend of Justin Trudeau as his father was once Clerk of the Privy Council to Pierre Trudeau, and was later appointed to the Senate; his wife is Liberal MP Anna Gainey). He also appointed Conservative MP Richard Martel, also to sit as an “independent” and not as a Conservative senator, plus cancer researcher Dr. Rodney Ouelette and CPA Geeta Tucker.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-07-07T13:50:42.850Z

Performatively distancing himself from Trudeau.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-07-07T14:01:38.222Z

I will have a lot more to write about this and the changes he’s making to the appointment process in the coming days, but for the moment, let me say how cynical this move was. There are those trying to spin Pittfield as somehow being needed to “quarterback” legislation in the Senate, but he’s not being made Government Leader, so that makes no sense. And legislation is not being delayed. Sometimes it takes a bit of time to actually study bills, but they’re not a rubber stamp. (There is also a weird little subplot about the pissing match that Pittfield and David Lametti had in PMO over being Carney’s principal secretary, Pittfield won and Lametti was sent packing to the UN, and months later, Pittfield is now getting a Senate seat). The appointment of Martel is to open up a winnable seat in the Commons, and it’s crassly obvious that was the reason. Poilievre got jammed by the move, and he’s instructed his caucus not to shit-talk the appointment (unlike what they did with Alain Reyes’ leaving caucus, for example, or any of the floor-crossers). Carney doesn’t seem to be coming from any place of principle here, and per his previous foreign policy moves, his “principled pragmatism” is that he can slough off his principles at the drop of a hat, and that seems to be exactly what is happening here.

He's totally not mad, guys.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-07-07T22:28:54.018Z

“Warrior not woke”

At his Stampede Conservative barbecue speech, Pierre Poilievre gave one of his tired lines about returning the Canadian military to “warrior culture, not woke culture” (which means what? That we should go back to the era of a toxic, sexualized culture marked by abuse of power?), but the fact that he was dressed in a white satin shirt with white embroidery and an ill-fitting white cowboy hat with a Conservative logo on the front drew many laughs. I find it amazing that Conservatives seem to have a hard time finding appropriate Stampede-wear (see: Stephen Harper’s two-sizes-too-small leatherette vest), while “woke, effete” Justin Trudeau never had a problem.

— Pablo Hidalgo (@infinata.bsky.social) 2026-07-07T13:49:58.898Z

Pierre Poilievre’s Personal Assistant Explains His Calgary Stampede Outfityoutu.be/r-1lhkq3c3w

— Clare Blackwood (@clareblackwood.bsky.social) 2026-07-07T19:53:01.400Z

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The “dangerous bluff” of a referendum

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Prime minister Mark Carney made a housing announcement yesterday morning, when he was inevitably asked about the proposed Alberta referendum. Carney invoked his time in the UK and the experience with Brexit, that for people who think that this kind of referendum is just a way to send a message and that there are no consequences are playing a “dangerous bluff” that will have consequences. And yes, he would know, because he watched it happen and lived with the fallout. But will this actually help? Hard to say, but Conservatives have already been seeding the narrative that Carney created a lot of the post-Brexit economic damage with claims that he was “printing money” and fuelling inflation and so on, so the very people who need to hear the message have already been primed to ignore it. So that’s helpful.

Carney was also asked about the fourteen members of his caucus that sent him a letter about his environmental backsliding, and to this, Carney basically swatted the question away saying he has 160 other members of caucus who are just fine with his moves. This, however, starts to sound a wee bit arrogant for a party leader who has been patting himself on the back for listening to his caucus more than his predecessor did. You can pretty much guarantee that it’s not just these fourteen, but there are plenty more members of caucus who aren’t quite as willing to stick their necks out just yet but are similarly unhappy. They also learned a lot of lessons about pushing back against a leader when they started organising against Justin Trudeau in caucus, so the lessons are fresh, and Carney should remember that. As well, he’s betrayed the “Value(s)” he campaigned on and wrote a book about, so he’s already on thin ice with his voters on this issue. He may want to show a bit more contrition than this particular combative stance.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-05-25T13:08:03.361Z

My Latest:

  • My weekend column on Danielle Smith’s referendum, and why this is the culmination of decades of populism rotting the politics of the province.
  • My Loonie Politics Quick Take talks about the glut of senate bills hitting the Commons, and why MPs who complain about it have only themselves to blame.
  • For National Magazine, I looked at the appointment of the new advisory body for the next Supreme Court of Canada justice.

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Roundup: Taking what advice on appointments?

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Prime minister Mark Carney once again said on Wednesday that Senate appointments will be made “in due course,” which doesn’t help when nearly ten percent of the Chamber’s seats are vacant or will be before summer is out, but for the first time, he indicated that he would be preserving the independent appointment committees. Sort of. (Currently only the federal members of these committees remain in place, and those for Nova Scotia, but none of the other provinces). “I will take into account the advice of the independent advisory committee that was established by my predecessor,” was what Carney said.

The problem is that’s not actually saying anything. Taking advice into account? Either these committees will be providing short-lists for appointments that Carney will choose from, or they won’t be. That was the point—they took the applications (which was always a mistake—they should have been doing the searching for worthwhile nominees to tap on the shoulder), vetted them, and honed them down to the short-lists, which Trudeau would then choose from, because he remains constitutionally responsible for those appointments. But what “advice” are they supposed to be offering if not a short-list of candidates? Will he look at their list and then decide to choose one of his friends from another hedge fund or big bank? Will he give them a list to do due diligence on? Maybe. None of this is clear, and it looks like he either doesn’t understand this responsibility that is part of his office, or he doesn’t care, and I’m not sure which is worse at this point when he’s been in office for a year now.

Meanwhile, Carney also said that he’s waiting on the joint parliamentary committee report before coming to any decision on the MAiD expansion for irremediable mental health issues, but it cannot be understated that said committee has been an absolute sham process. The two co-chairs are hostile to MAiD and have stacked the witnesses to be overwhelmingly against it, and have sidelined groups like major national psychological and psychiatric organisations who might actually argue that they can provide adequate safeguards. This is just going to result in more Charter litigation, and so many people will continue to suffer needlessly because a bunch of MPs and senators were too squeamish to actually listen to evidence that they didn’t want to hear.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-05-06T19:08:02.023Z

Ukraine Dispatch

In spite of Ukraine giving Russia an early start to their Victory Day ceasefire, Russia attacked several cities in eastern Ukraine, killing at least 27 people. The new Hungarian government returned to Ukraine the confiscated $82 million USD in cash and gold that was seized while transiting the country.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/2051983745297617183

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Roundup: The new GG, Louise Arbour

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Yesterday morning, at the National Gallery, prime minister Mark Carney announced that the King had approved of his choice of Louise Arbour to be the next Governor General. Arbour is a former Supreme Court of Canada justice, but has had a long and varied career both in Canada and internationally. Highlights include working with the Law Reform Commission, associate dean at Osgood Hall law school, appointment to the Ontario Superior Court and Court of Appeal, war crimes prosecutor at the Hague, prosecuting Rwanda and Yugoslavian war criminals, and secured the first genocide conviction since 1948. She was then appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, and after a few years, left that post to become the UN Human Rights Commissioner for a term, where she was attacked for calling out Israel’s actions during the war with Lebanon in 2008, even though she also criticised Palestinian militants’ rocket attacks against civilians. (She has also been portrayed on film by Wendy Crewson).

In the time since, she has served in a number of other capacities including working on several reports for the federal government, most recently around the transformation of military justice, particularly as it relates to sexual assault. At 79, she is the oldest appointee to the office in Canadian history, however that’s not necessarily a bad thing—we have had a spate of appointing Governors General who are too young, leaving them with a big question mark of what to do when their term ends when they should fade quietly into retirement. (Seriously—Ed Schreyer was made GG in his thirties, and he tried to run for office afterward, which is very bad form).

Most of the grumbling that did come from this appointment seemed to come from the fact that she is from Quebec and not from out west (even though by tradition, this was to be a francophone appointment), though I’m not sure how many reasonably high-profile Franco-Albertans/Saskatchewanians/British Columbians that had the right combination of experience and other factors there are out there. Regardless, this could have been something that a properly constituted vice-regal appointment committee might have tried to address, but we have no idea what kind of search mechanism was used to come up with this appointment, so that kind of black box doesn’t help in trying to understand Carney’s thinking here.

Starting with Massey, the birthplaces of governors general:Toronto, OntMontreal, QueLacombe, NWT (now Alberta)Saint-Anicet, QueBeausejour, ManPrud'homme, SaskSaskatoon, SaskMemramcook, NBVictoria, Hong KongPort-au-Price, Haiti Sudbury, OntMontreal, QueFort Severeight, QueMontreal, Que

— Aaron Wherry (@aaronwherry.bsky.social) 2026-05-05T21:45:00.042Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Ahead of Russia’s ceasefire, they made a glide bomb attack on Kramatorsk, Zaporizhzhia and Chernihiv, killing at least 17 civilians and wounding 45 others. There was also an attack on Dnipro that killed four.

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Roundup: Poor widdle baby oil companies

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The oil and gas sector in Alberta has decided that with the situation in Iran going on, and the federal government’s stated desire to export more in order to be the so-called “energy superpower,” that they are going to flex their muscles more, and demand that carbon pricing or other regulatory measures need to go. It’s a load of bullshit, however there are a whole lot of people who will uncritically believe that the sector are just widdle babies who are so hard done by and that any carbon pricing is just too much for them to handle.

Energy economist Andrew Leach is calling bullshit, because if they are so fragile that they can’t withstand pennies on a barrel (because remember, they are also generating a tonne of credits under Alberta’s carbon pricing system) then it’s incredibly suspect. And these are the companies who also insisted that Pathways was their future, and that with that technology, they could increase production without emissions. Now they’re claiming it’s impossible to do without the federal government paying for the whole thing, which is pretty much just tearing off the fig leaf—either they were lying the whole time (which is why they panicked when greenwashing legislation came into effect), or they simply think they can get away with crying poor and that the federal government needs to pay for everything. Neither case looks good on them, but they figure they have the leverage, and they fully intend to use it.

https://twitter.com/andrew_leach/status/2051299335846178946

https://twitter.com/andrew_leach/status/2051304919945371814

May the 4th

In past years, a lot of government departments got in on the action. This year? Hardly any. StatsCan used the opportunity to launch the census, and CSIS of all departments put out a tweet, but that seemed to be it. Which is too bad. Departments used to really get into it, and you had some really good tweets, and some abysmal ones, and it was fun to rank them. (Also, valiant effort by CSIS, but they got the wrong photo. That’s not Cracken—this is. They got Blount. And yes, I am a Star Wars nerd).

https://twitter.com/Canada/status/2051312054875603265

https://twitter.com/StatCan_eng/status/2050983876684554321

Ukraine Dispatch

A mid-morning Russian missile attack hit the Kharkiv region, killing two and wounding over thirty. Russia also hit five energy facilities in the past day. Data shows Russia has targeted port facilities ten times more than the past year. Russia claims they will observe a ceasefire for their Victory Day festivities, and Ukraine says they will abide by it.

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Roundup: Carney’s Forward Guidance

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On Sunday morning, prime minister Mark Carney released a ten-minute piece on his YouTube channel called “Forward Guidance,” because he’s still doing his central banker shtick, and it was a direct-to-camera (with three other cameras intercutting) discussion about the place we find ourselves in. Most of this was not new, repeating the same lines from past speeches including the one at Davos, while promising to never sugarcoat things—but he kind of did. I also have to question why this had to be over YouTube and not a speech in the House of Commons, which is why there is allotted time every day for ministers to make statements if they so choose. This could have been done there.

Carney pointed to a “statue” of Isaac Brock that Mike Myers gave him, but by statue he meant two-inch figurine, and that led him to launch into a whole War of 1812 narrative about the people who built this country, which, okay, sure, but you’re not doing much to show you’re not just the second coming of Stephen Harper. When he talked about the building of big things in the post-war period, this is again where things got a bit sugar-coated because there was still complexity to these old projects, and usually practices that would be unacceptable today for good reason. (I also noted that he mentioned universities being built in this period, without mention of the fact that provincial governments are in the process of dismantling our university systems). He also spoke about protecting social programmes (except for letting the funding of a bunch of groups who deliver services lapse), and he mentions pharmacare like it’s not limited to two types of drugs in a handful of provinces. And further sugar-coating was essentially by omission—the fact that so many Canadian businesses have become apathetic to growth or increasing productivity because they have taken the lesson that all they need to do is become rent-seekers.

Predictably, Pierre Poilievre decided he was going to have something to say about this, and that it was all just an illusion because nothing has actually been built yet (because you can build things overnight). He railed about Carney just enriching “well-connected elites,” but Poilievre’s whole scheme is to double down on trickle-down economics, which by definition enriches a small group of elites because the money does not, in fact, trickle down. Melissa Lantsman put out her own rebuttal that included the incredulous and false claim that the Liberals have cost the economy a trillion dollars in the past decade, which is completely fiscally illiterate, but that’s how the Conservatives roll.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-04-19T23:08:01.392Z

Ukraine Dispatch

There was a massive overnight attack Saturday on Chernihiv which killed a sixteen-year-old boy, and wounded others. Ukraine is continuing its own drone strikes on Russian oil facilities in Samara, occupied Crimea, and the Baltic Sea.

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Roundup: The benefit of the doubt for Gladu

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The Liberal convention is happening this weekend in Montreal, and it’s in part a way that prime minister Mark Carney is putting his stamp on the party now that he’s been leader for a year. It’s a different kind of convention—claimed to be the largest policy convention in the party’s history, and there are no American Democrats giving keynote speeches for the party faithful to fangirl over for a change—the keynote was Canadian Rick Hansen, which again, is a marked shift from years past.

Of course, so much of the oxygen is being taken up by the recent floor-crossers, Marilyn Gladu most especially, and while you have news stories talking about a “mixed reaction,” there is nevertheless a sense that pervades the quotes across news stories that delegates are Carney fans, and that they’re giving him the benefit of the doubt for welcoming them into the party, particularly if it gets them to a majority parliament that will being some stability. Chris d’Entremont and Matt Jeneroux have made comments of their own about feeling secure in their decisions, while progressive Liberals like Karina Gould and Stephen Guilbeault are couching their reservations about Gladu into an optimism that she knew what she was signing up for when she crossed over. For her part, Gladu is also talking about how she hopes this move will benefit her riding, though governments aren’t really supposed to favour only ridings they hold (even though it happens, especially provincially).

As for policy, it has been noticed that there isn’t much talk about Trump, even though he continues to dominate the political airwaves and is giving Carney much of his raison d’être for what he’s doing. There are policy resolutions on banning social media for minors, or limiting use of chatbots (but nobody seems to understand the massive problems associated with age verification).

Ukraine Dispatch

President Zelenskyy says that they are facing pressure both military as spring arrives, but also diplomatically as allies want them to stop hitting Russian oil and gas facilities as prices are so high. Farmers in Ukraine are now being hit by high fertilizer prices thanks to the Iran conflict.

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