Tag Archives: Arctic

Roundup: Unseen consequences and consolidating power

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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.

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Roundup: No, the LG can’t threaten the premier

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Sometimes you see a terrible column, and sometimes there’s such a piece of hot garbage that you need to don a hazmat suit just to approach it and get hosed off afterward like you just came out of a leaking nuclear reactor. The Toronto Sun’s Christina Blizzard delivered one of those yesterday.

That’s right – this columnist thinks that the lieutenant governor should threaten Kathleen Wynne to shape up or she’ll dismiss her, because 167 years of Responsible Government was just a failed experiment. One lesbian first minister in this province and we’ve decided that it was too much – time to hand power back to the queen and be done with it.

You see! Voters can’t be trusted! Obviously we’d be better off under absolute monarchy again because they won’t let such terrible governments to let themselves get elected and then implement the agendas that they were elected on. It’s like the fanboys in the First Order who remember the good old days of the Galactic Empire and preferred it to the messy democracy of the New Republic.

It’s called confidence. Whichever leader in the legislature or Parliament that can command the confidence of the chamber gets to advise the LG/GG/queen on how to exercise the powers of state. Not a difficult concept.

It is utterly galling that a columnist can be so utterly ignorant of basic civics that this is the kind of utter bilge that they spew onto newsprint. We do have a problem with basic civic literacy in this country, and when you have columnists like this spreading complete nonsense out of some sense of partisanship, it gives a warped impression to people who read this and makes them believe that it’s actually normal and expected that the GG or the LG can boss around a government that you don’t like. No. Absolutely not.

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So let me reiterate that Blizzard’s column is utter hot garbage. If the Sun had any shame, they’d pull it and apologise profusely for putting it out there, and Blizzard would be sent to a remedial civics course, but I doubt that’s going to happen because she’s just passionate about how bad Wynne is, or some bullshit excuse like that. So in the meantime, I’ll just leave this here:

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Roundup: Quality over quantity

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Every time I see a piece that presents the shockingly low numbers of women in politics in our country, I tense up a little. Not because the numbers are terrible – because let’s face it, they are – but because almost always, these tend to be quantitative lists trying to talk about a qualitative problem. Lo and behold, we have yet another of these in the Ottawa Citizen this morning, but there are a few figures in there that need to be unpacked a little more.

The one that really bothers me and deserves to be contextualized is the one percent change between number of women in this parliament and the previous one, and this is where the quantitative/qualitative aspect really comes into play. First of all, the House of Commons is larger in the current parliament by 30 MPs. This means that a one percent gain in a larger Commons means more women on an absolute numbers basis, and that matters. The other, more important fact, however, is the quality of the female MPs we elected this time around. In 2011, let’s face it – much of the increase came from the number of NDP MPs who were accidentally elected following the “Orange Wave” – candidates who hadn’t been properly nominated, had never been to their ridings, never campaigned in them, and were just names on a list that the party put there in order to ensure that they could max out their spending limits. When a wave of sentimentality overcame the Quebec electorate, they got elected. Much was made of the number of young women that were elected, but qualitatively, most of them were underwhelming MPs, whose only real skillset was in reading the scripts that were put in front of them and throwing tantrums in the media when they needed some attention. Most of them, fortunately, didn’t get elected again. That said, for the 2015 election, the Liberals put into place a system to seek out and encourage more women to seek the nomination and to support them in winning it. Qualitatively, you got better MPs who were not just names on lists, who proved they could fight and win both a nomination race and an election by doing the work of door-knocking and being engaged, and more of them wound up in the Commons. It’s a qualitative improvement that can grow further in the next election.

This is why suggestions about changing our electoral system to incorporate lists in order to get more women and minorities into the Commons frustrates me, because there is an implicit message that women and visible minority candidates can’t fight and win elections on an equal basis. I think that’s wrong, and targets the wrong problem because it ignores the complexities and realities of our nomination system and ways that it needs to be improved – such as how the Liberals started doing – and how that changes the game on the ground. The problems in our system when it comes to getting women elected are cultural, not mechanical. Simply changing the electoral system to artificially inflate the numbers of women won’t solve the underlying problems, but merely mask them. We should remember that every time these quantitative lists are released.

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Roundup: O’Toole a possibility

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I’ve generally shied away from talking about these stories about perceived support for leadership candidates, particularly in the Conservative pool, but this one about the potential for Erin O’Toole stuck in my mind after I read it. I will fully admit that my initial reaction was “Erin O’Toole? Really? Why?” But it wouldn’t let go, and I thought about it more, and about O’Toole’s particular political trajectory. To a certain extent, he’s always been one who has been seen as a kind of saviour figure for the party – elected in a by-election to replace Bev Oda after she resigned in disgrace, O’Toole entered as someone who was going to start setting a new tone for the seat and the party. His credentials as a veteran and a lawyer were seen as impeccable and the kind of MP that the party not only wanted but needed as it had taken on the label of being a nasty party, and here was someone who was affable and a nice guy, and was a breath of fresh air for so many. When he made it into cabinet after some time as a parliamentary secretary, it was again in the role of someone who was there to fix things, this time taking over the Veterans Affairs portfolio after Julian Fantino had managed to earn the enmity of pretty much the entire veteran community across the country. (Then again, being a duotronic android will probably do that when you’re in a job that requires a great deal of empathy). O’Toole came in and immediately started to turn things around – well, as much as is possible in a department with a sclerotic culture (and I’ve heard things from some of the Liberals currently on that file about the way that the department runs and it’s a bit shocking).

So with this in mind, it’s actually not surprising that O’Toole would be considered a fairly reasonable choice for the Conservative leadership. He has some cred and some experience (but not so much that he’s carrying the legacy of the whole of the Harper years on his back), and his French is reputedly decent (but not bilingual, though he has some time yet to get it up there). And he’s avoided some of the missteps that dog certain other leadership candidates like Kellie Leitch, and his story is probably more compelling as a narrative than some of the others, nor is he a more marginal figure (like Michael Chong, who put himself on his party’s fringe by being reasonable more often than not). So it’s possible. We’ll have to see if he does throw his hat in the ring, and whether someone like Peter MacKay does throw his hat into the ring (though it’s starting to feel less likely the longer he waits, not to mention that I have a hard time understanding why he would be the frontrunner considering his own history). But if this is going to be a race without any big stars, then O’Toole may have a surprising resilience.

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Roundup: Revisionist history mythologizing

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The electoral reform committee was back yesterday and the “star” witness was former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, currently heading the institute that bears his name. If you’ve been out of the loop, Broadbent is an unabashed supporter of Proportional Representation, and figures that Mixed-Member Proportional is the cat’s pyjamas, and proceeded to regale the committee with any number of ludicrous statements about both the current system and the purported wonders of MMP, and then delivered this particular gem: that MMP would have spared the west the National Energy Programme in the 1980s.

I. Can’t. Even.

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The amount of mythologizing around the NEP in this country borders on psychosis. There was a time not so long ago that people also caterwauled that a Triple-E senate would also have prevented the NEP, with no actual proof that would be the case if you actually stopped to think about what would be involved in creating such an institution (particularly the imposition of party discipline because if you think you would be electing 105 independent senators, you’re even more delusional than the premise of the question belies). Most of these mythologies around the NEP forget that there was a history involved with global energy crises, broad support in the rest of the country, and that it was a global recession that happened around the same time that was largely responsible for the economic collapse that ensued as opposed to the NEP itself, but the two became conflated in the minds of most people. It didn’t happen in a vacuum or because Pierre Elliot Trudeau simply rubbed his hands and tried to come up with a diabolical plan to screw the West. For Broadbent to suddenly claim that a PR system would have ensured more regional voices at the table and common sense would have prevailed is simply revisionist history combined with the kind of unicorn logic that his preferred voting system would have been responsible only for the good things in history and never the bad. It’s egregious bullshit and needs to be called out as such.

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Roundup: Not a hellscape, not a utopia

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Because this is the summer of electoral reform editorials, we are treated to yet another gem by Andrew Coyne, who admonishes electoral reform’s detractors by reminding them that no, it won’t produce some kind of dystopian hellscape. Obviously. And most of the editorials opposing reform we’ve seen to date have been pretty ridiculous because they are talking about pure PR systems that are not really on the table here or in most places, and they raise the spectre of Italy of Israel as countries where these are problems. But the rebuttals to these kinds of arguments, including from Coyne, are just as bad because they cite Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Iceland, and so on as great places where PR works in stable countries, which also just happen to be ethnically and linguistically homogenous and are fairly small in terms of geography – things that do not apply to Canada. I was surprised that Coyne brought up both Austria and Belgium as examples of countries where PR works, because Austria is currently grappling with far-right parties attempting to form governments, and Belgium is a country that is linguistically and ethnically divided and which has had problems forming a government over the past decade, sometimes going for over a year without a government in place because a stable coalition can’t be formed among the resulting parties. Coyne also cites the metric of how many elections have been held in a number of these countries, which is misleading, when the metric should be how many ministries there have been. Part of the problem with PR systems is that they can form governments where a central party stays in power for decades and merely shuffles around its coalition partners from time to time – something that is a very bad thing for accountability (unlike our current system in Canada, which gives voters the ability to throw the bums out every decade or so). But by all means, admonish us for falling for the caricatures of Israel and Italy – just be aware that citing Scandinavian countries is just as much of a dishonest portrayal for ignoring the cultural contexts of those systems or the problems that they have that are simply different from the ones that we have. Canada is not a Scandinavian country, and citing their electoral systems as a model for our own is just as blinkered an exercise. PR may not produce a hellscape, but let’s not pretend that it will actually fix our woes either.

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Roundup: Gowns for influence

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The celebrity status of Sophie Grégoire Trudeau gained some internal clarity within government circles as new ethics rules were published with regards to her as it pertains to gifts and loans of the clothes and jewellery she wears. As a woman with a certain profile, Grégoire Trudeau has done the politic thing to do and showcase Canadian designers, because we all know that she would immediately be subject to criticism if she didn’t. And when a person of a certain profile makes that kind of decision about showcasing designers, she tends to be presented with dresses, outfits, and jewellery to showcase at different high-profile events – often for loan, but occasionally as a gift as thanks for the exposure she gives those designers, so it makes sense that there are some rules around it, as an extension of the fact that her husband is a public office holder. I get it.

What I do not get is this notion that somehow accepting the loan or rental of a gown, outfit or piece of jewellery is going to somehow corrupt the ethics of the government of the day and put them in some kind of impossible conflict of interest. And yet, here we are, once again quoting Duff Conacher, head of the Parliamentary Thought Police, giving credence to this kind of lunacy:

“In terms of personal ethics she shouldn’t be accepting these gifts. She should decide, and she will likely decide, to wear Canadian designers quite a bit to showcase them as others have … [but she should] not be tainted with even the appearance that’s she’s up for sale and happy to receive free gifts when she can afford to buy her own clothes and jewelry.”

Are. You. Serious? Aside from the fact that such a shopping habit would quickly become very expensive and become the subject of all manner of other gossip pieces (and let’s face it – the PM’s salary isn’t that generous, no matter what you may think), fashion is an industry that is not static. It’s very difficult to buy a few pieces and then just recycle them endlessly while you’re in the public eye and being seen to promote designers. That invites its own kind of damning criticism. But how, pray tell, is she “up for sale?” What influence does she wield that this is some kind of ethical dilemma for the operation of the government? She’s promoting the industry, and she is circumscribed from accepting items over $1000 (which are surrendered to the Crown collection unless she chooses to purchase them), and gifts over $200 are disclosed, which is fine. But “up for sale”? Seriously? Do you think they’re seriously going to ask her husband to send along subsidy cheques? Then again, this is from the mind of someone so paranoid that he thinks that $1500 can buy influence in government, and that capping donations at $100 will somehow fix the system rather than drive financing to less reputable channels (as it did in Quebec, which is the model he curiously admires). The disclosure rules are sensible. Let’s leave it at that.

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Senate QP: Sajjan takes the heat

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Senate QP invites a minister, round three, with special guest star National Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan. There were a few technical issues with the earpiece at the centre desk on the floor, and the Liberals invited Sajjan to use a desk on their side instead. Senator Carignan agreed, saying that it was technically the government side of the chamber, and once Sajjan was settled, Carignan led off, asking if Canada was officially at war with ISIS as France and the United States were. Sajjan gave a personal definition of war as being what we remember with the World Wars, and that this conflict was not of the same scale, but that didn’t lessen the commitment to the fight.

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Roundup: TPP a Caretaker conundrum

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The Trans-Pacific Partnership talks are taking place right now, with the possibility that a deal could be struck with Canada while we’re in a writ period. The optics of this are a bit fraught, because if the government gets the deal signed, then they can crow about their prowess on the campaign trail, and how they’re signing deals to boost our economy. But the flip side of that coin is that a really big deal may be a kind of violation of the Caretaker Conventions that govern how an incumbent government operates during a writ period. Remember that we can never be without a government even when Parliament is dissolved – they just need to exercise restraint, and can’t implement major policy changes or make appointments during that period. This time around, however, the government released the Convention guidelines publicly while adding specific exemptions about negotiating trade deals. On the one hand, there is a certain amount of sense – do we really want to hold up the eleven other countries while we are in an extra-long election period? (Note that there seems to be a desire to conclude the deal before the American election gears up to full-on insanity mode). One of the arguments is that there should at least be some kind of consultation with opposition leaders if the negotiations continue during the writ period, and there are complaints that the TPP negotiations are unprecedented in their secrecy. What is not mentioned is that secrecy is deliberate considering how game changing this pact could be, particularly when it comes to weakening some of the tough subsidized markets in several member countries. And if you look at the reactions that rumours of deals around weakening Supply Management or auto parts content rules, and promises by other party leaders to maintain those protectionist policies, it’s hard not to see why they want to keep a lid on things until they’re finalised – particularly if the goal is actual trade liberalisation rather than just lip-service. It’s a delicate balance, and arguments can be made on both sides of the propriety of the government’s negotiations under the Caretaker Conventions. For example, Susan Delacourt argues the government is going beyond the Conventions. I’m not sure I have any answers, but I guess we’ll see what gets decided, and let the chips fall where they may.

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Roundup: A baffling public service pledge

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In a bid to win over the public service vote in the Ottawa region, the NDP have pledged a “code of conduct” for ministers and their staff, as well as an end to cuts to the public service, a Public Appointments Commission to end patronage appointments, a restoration of collective bargaining rights, and putting an end to contract staff. Oh, and an end to muzzling “scientists and other public service employees.” And that sends off my alarm bells because it’s a massive reorientation of the role of the public service. While the NDP thinks that they’re trying to remove the politicization around the public service that has been developing, empowering public servants to speak against the governments that they are supposed to serve is mind-boggling. The issue of just what we’re muzzling in terms of scientists was thoroughly hashed out a few months ago when Andrew Leach went against the countervailing wisdom and challenged the “white coat” privilege that these kinds of pronouncements assume, that it’s all a bunch of benevolent climate scientists who can’t speak about their work. What it ignores is that there are other kinds of scientists – like economists in the Department of Finance – for whom this is not even a consideration. Just because it’s politically convenient to think that we want these white coats to denounce the government’s environmental policies, does that mean it should be okay for government economists to denounce fiscal policy? Or government lawyers to denounce the government’s justice policies? (It’s also why their candidate, Emilie Taman was denied a leave to run – the Public Prosecution Service was created to remove the perception of political bias from Crown prosecutions, and having one of your prosecutors running for office defeats that purpose). Public Servants serve the Queen and carry out their duties in a neutral fashion. Making it easier for them to start denouncing the government is a mystifying promise. Also, the promise to bar temps is short-sighted and makes it harder for young people to get civil service jobs. Those temp jobs are often the best way to get one’s foot in the door in the public service and get some experience that can translate into a job, considering how byzantine and nigh-impossible the outside competition process is if one wasn’t lucky enough to get bridged in through a school programme. Conversely, getting new staff in a timely manner or for a specific project is also a ridiculous process for managers. Banning temps makes no actual sense.

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