Tag Archives: Auditor General

Roundup: Justifying a belligerent tone

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Two days after the American tariff announcements, and I found myself still struck by the tone that the federal Conservatives have adopted with this, squarely blaming Trudeau rather than the uncertainty engine known as Trump, and engaging in the same kind of disingenuous narrative-building to justify their stance. In particular, they have been trying to claim that when Trudeau made his tour of steel and aluminium plants earlier in the year, that it was a “victory tour,” which is vastly different from how I remember it. Back then, it was about reassurance and the prime minister wanting to tell them that he had their backs and given that the government was ready for these tariffs to happen and had a package of retaliatory measures ready to go, it means that they didn’t take the reprieve for granted – entirely negating the premise of the Conservatives’ attack lines. Not that facts matter. They are also insistent that the Trudeau government has allowed itself to get “distracted” by the feel-good chapters around labour and gender in NAFTA negotiations, which again, is novel if you pay the slightest amount of attention to what’s been going on. But this isn’t about truth – this is about building their narrative that Trudeau is a dilettante who is incompetent and that the Conservatives are the real grown-ups in the room (despite evidence to the contrary). And because people have let Scheer and company lie with impunity on all sorts of files for months now, they feel emboldened to take this course of action, despite how gauche or out of step with other conservative voices in the country it may be, because they see this as their long-term game plan. And we’ll see if any of those voices call them out on it.

As for the impact of the tariffs, it turns out that they could have a far less detrimental impact on Canada’s aluminium industry because it exports more product to the US than we do steel, and America’s own smelters are older and less efficient than Canadian ones, meaning that these tariffs won’t do anything to help support the US industry, and American producers say that they could do more harm than good. Steel, of course, is a different story. The whole tariff issue, meanwhile, could mean that the lock that the American arms industry has on our military procurement may be at an end, and that our Forces may start looking to Europe for equipment instead – something that may actually be more affordable, but the tendency had been to buy from American producers under the guise of “interoperability” with American forces. As for the American companies facing retaliatory tariffs, well, they’re still learning about them, but most don’t seem too concerned. At least not yet. And many Republicans and businesses are lashing out at Trump for the move – including anchors at Fox Business.

In further reaction, Andrew Coyne believes that the sheer size of the US economy means that our retaliation will come to nothing, and even if we coordinate with other countries, we’re unlikely to change Trump’s mind, so better to work to contain the US presidency. Susan Ariel Aaronson suspects that the tariffs will weaken America’s national security interests rather than strengthen them, as Trump has used as the excuse to enact them, while Andrew MacDougall thinks that Trump’s move may benefit Doug Ford, who pledges to lower taxes and cut red tape that may appeal to people who think this can help keep Ontario’s economy competitive.

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Roundup: Trans Mountain and Phoenix

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The government announced yesterday morning that they were going to acquire the Trans Mountain pipeline and the project to twin it from Kinder Morgan – but that this would be a short-term acquisition if another buyer can’t be found before August. In the meantime, a loan would be extended to Kinder Morgan to begin construction immediately. Rachel Notley cheered and said that it’s time for Albertans to pick up tools and get to work on building it. Morneau, incidentally, won’t say what those construction costs will be, as that’s commercially sensitive information that could undermine the process for finding a buyer for the pipeline. As for who some of those buyers might be, here’s a look at that question. The buyout – if it happens – won’t eliminate opposition, but it changes the legal situation for BC in that federal paramountcy is even more prevalent than it was before. BC premier John Horgan says that his fight will carry on, but he’s suddenly saying that this is all because the federal oceans protection plan isn’t good enough, which is…new, and not terribly convincing. As for Indigenous activists, some say that the announcement is tantamount to a “declaration of war,” but other Indigenous communities are seeing this as an opportunity to buy a stake in the pipeline to benefit their communities.

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The Conservatives immediately stated that this was all because of Liberal incompetence, that Kinder Morgan never said they wanted to sell, that they only wanted “certainty,” and then Andrew Scheer engaged in a bunch of revisionist history that falsely claimed that other pipeline projects never got government financing (it’s like he’s never read about the Trans Canada Pipeline construction in the 1950s, not to mention the development of the Hybernia offshore oilfield, or the development of the oilsands themselves). Oh, and Scheer’s definition of “certainty” that he would provide includes forgoing the current environmental assessment bill (has he talked to environmental lawyers or looked at the kinds of court challenges that the Conservative legislation has generated?) and his insistence that they could somehow “assert” federal jurisdiction by means of a declaration or a bill is ridiculous because they already had jurisdiction. The pipeline crosses a provincial boundary, thereby making it federal. Jurisdiction was never seriously in question. His MPs and other federal and provincial mouthpieces have been trying to spin this as some kind of conspiracy that Trudeau is only buying the pipeline in order to take control of it and shut it down so that they can shut down the entire oil sector. Seriously? You expect people to believe that, after Trudeau has staked an enormous amount of political capital on this very move? Really?

In other reaction, Andrew Coyne sees this as not all bad news (though I’m not sure how much more the Liberals could have done to avoid it), while John Ivison sees irony in the government “getting into the pipeline business” on the same day as the Auditor General blasted them for an inability to manage big projects. Tim Harper sees this as a potential precursor to tougher days ahead for Trudeau, while Jason Markusoff notes that this will make it hard for Albertans to sustain the narrative that Ottawa hates them (though by gods, the Conservatives in Ottawa are really trying). Andrew Leach also gives a very detailed analysis of the purchase in Twitter threads here, here, here, and here.

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QP: Investing in assets

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While the prime minister was away after this morning’s major announcement on the government decision to acquire the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline, all other leaders were present — for a change. Andrew Scheer led off, mini-lectern on desk, and he railed about the Trans Mountain announcement, before demanding to know that it wouldn’t cost more than the $4.5 billion. Bill Morneau responded with a bit more fire than we usually get from him, decrying the audacity of the Conservatives for demanding the pipeline get built and then complaining when they assured it would be. Scheer offered some revisionist history when it comes to governments paying for pipelines (there is in fact a long history of it), and Morneau reiterated that the project was in the national interest. Scheer played the economic nationalist card in that $4.5 billion going to “Texas” shareholders, and Morneau repeated the points about jobs and the economy. Alain Rayes took over in French, and demanded to know how much it would cost taxpayers, and Morneau repeated that it was important to invest in the project, that their investment ensured it would be completed. After another round of the same, Guy Caron got up to rail that this investment was a betrayal, rather than investing in the clean economy. Morneau said gave the usual line about the environment and the economy going hand-in-hand, and that while they invested in clean energy, this project was still necessary. After another round of the very same, Nathan Cullen got up to ramble sanctimoniously about what was in the public interest, and Morneau reminded him that they went through a robust process, and that people need to respect the rule of law. Caron piled on more sanctimony, and Morneau made points about stepping in between provincial squabbling.

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Roundup: The AG’s vacancy problem

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The Auditor General was on Power Play yesterday to talk about his recent examination of the Great Lakes Pilotage Authority, and how the lack of appointments to the board meant a lack of oversight for the CEO, who then abused his expenses. Michael Ferguson then went on to talk about the greater pattern of unfilled vacancies by this government (which will be the focus of one of his upcoming reports), and it’s a verifiable problem that this government has, in large part because as part of their reform of the system to ensure that more women and minorities were appointed, they changed to a system of seeking out nominees to having people apply for positions. For as much merit as ensuring more diversity among appointees has, the way they’ve handled it has been a gong show.

All of this is well and good to point out, but where I have a problem is where the AG suggests that if governments can’t fill these positions in a timely manner that we should consider a system where these boards have their own nomination committees to make their own appointments. This should raise a major alarm because it’s a sign of creeping technocracy and undermining accountability and responsible government. Government makes these appointments so that there is someone who can be held to account for them. Who is accountable if boards nominate their own members? How do we ensure that they don’t turn into cesspits of nepotism after we worked long and hard to ensure that we have taken patronage out of our current appointment systems?

Unfortunately, this is not a surprise with Ferguson, whose recommendations around an external audit committee for the Senate ignores the detrimental effect that this would have on Parliament’s ability to be self-governing. I do think it’s problematic that you have an officer of parliament who keeps advocating for greater technocracy and the undermining of our parliamentary democracy (and worse, that nobody in the media will dare to call him on it, because apparently we worship auditors general and believe that they can do no wrong). His observations about the problems around appointments are valid, don’t get me wrong. It’s his solutions that are untenable in the extreme.

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Roundup: Justice bill under fire

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The big news over the long weekend was the Liberals’ major criminal justice reform bill, which was tabled at the end of last week. It’s a big bill because it’s a big topic, but also because the government decided to fold in two previous bills that have been languishing on the Order Paper so that they can all get passed at once. One of those bills has clauses that have been overtaken by a previous bill that again, languishes on the Order Paper. And yet, despite this major reform push, one of the biggest problems facing the justice system, mandatory minimum sentences, which are clogging the courts, remain intact because this bill doesn’t address them, and the minister is shrugging in terms of saying the debate is still ongoing with provinces and courts over those. Among changes in this bill are severely limiting preliminary inquiries, which could mean that a number of cases go to trial where they wouldn’t have otherwise given that the point of a preliminary inquiry was to determine whether there was enough evidence to secure a conviction. Another change is to eliminate peremptory challenges in jury selection, something which has gained a lot of attention in the past couple of months after the Gerald Stanley trial in Saskatchewan had an all-white jury.

None of this is without controversy, and defence lawyers are raising the alarm. Lawyers like Michael Spratt say the changes will not speed up trials, and will actually eliminate some procedural fairness from the system. The elimination of peremptory challenges is far more contentious, with some defence lawyers saying it won’t fix anything while another says it could eliminate the current abuses. One law professor calls it a good first step, but lists other recommendations to increase access to justice in remote communities and improve jury selection.

On a related note, it looks like Saskatchewan hasn’t been selecting juries in a way that complies with their own provincial laws. While this may not be enough to cause an appeal in the Stanley trial, which has put much of the focus on the issue of peremptory challenges, it does raise questions about jury selection laws in this country that are part of these reforms.

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Roundup: Giving the PBO confidential data

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In his report to parliament about the latest federal budget this past week, the Parliamentary Budget Officer made note that some of the information that they requested was given to them on a confidential basis – in order for them to check the maths, but not report on it public (at least for the time being). It’s a bit of an oddity that the PBO says it puts them in an awkward position, and it also raises questions about the government’s commitment to transparency.

Recently, the Department of National Defence gave the same kind of confidential information to the PBO regarding its 20-year expenditure plan, which one suspects may have to do with either sensitivities in the procurement process (remember that they have been insisting on particular secrecy declarations for those involved in the process), or not wanting to tip their hands on how they’re planning on rolling out their procurement just yet. Maybe. The government says that the budget information that was confidential was because it related to departments or Crown corporations whose information had not been approved by Treasury Board or vetted for release, which makes a certain amount of sense, and does give rise to concerns that the real stumbling block is the bureaucracy and not the government. Backing up this supposition has been complaints that Treasury Board president Scott Brison has made around his difficulty in getting departments onside when it comes to the process of reforming the Estimates, so that they reflect the budget rather than the previous fall economic update and subsequently relying on Supplementary Estimates in order to “correct” the spending plans to reflect said budget (and part of that problem has been ever-later budget releases that come after the statutory Estimates tabling dates). And our civil service, for all of the plaudits it gets internationally, is sclerotic and resistant to change, often exacerbating the “culture of secrecy” around any kind of transparency (though one also has to factor in a certain amount of incompetence around that secrecy – sometimes they’re not being secret for the sake of secrecy, but because they’re simply unable to find needed information).

There have been complaints from the pundit class that the Liberals have subverted the PBO in this manner of giving confidential information, but I’m not sure that I’m ready to go there. They could have simply stonewalled, forcing an escalation of tactics, but they didn’t. They wound up caving and giving the PBO way too much authority and way, way too broad of a mandate when they reformed his office and turned him into an Independent Officer of Parliament, and I will reiterate that they did turn over the information. The question is does this start a pattern, or is this a kind of temporary status while they continue to push the departments into making this kind of data available in a timelier manner, much like the Estimates? I’m not willing to make a final pronouncement just yet, but I am going to consider this notice, and will keep an eye on how this progresses (particularly because I do think Estimates reform is vitally important to Parliament, and if we have the same kinds of problems, then it’s a sign that there’s a systemic issue that needs to be dealt with).

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Roundup: Procedural shenanigans beget the new anthem

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There has been some drama in the Senate over the past couple of days as the procedural shenanigans to bring the national anthem bill to a final vote culminated in a motion to call the vote, and eventually that happened. The bill has passed, and the new national anthem will be law once the Governor General gives it royal assent. But the procedural moves have the Conservatives in a high dudgeon, somewhat legitimately.

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My understanding of events was that the main motion to call the vote has been on the Order Paper for months, and was finally called Tuesday night. This was a debatable motion, and likely would have sparked a few weeks of adjournments and debate, but ultimately would have delayed the vote for only that long. But a second, also legitimate procedural move was used by another Independent senator immediately following, and Speaker apparently didn’t hear Senator Don Plett’s desire to debate it. What I’ve been able to gather is that this was likely a mistake given lines of sight, but were compounded by tactical errors on the Conservatives’ part in demanding to debate the first motion and not the second (or something to that effect). Points order were debated last night, but they had agreed to end the sitting at 4 PM in order to have the votes at 5:30, and when they didn’t get unanimous consent to extend the sitting, debate collapsed and when 5:30 rolled around, the Conservatives boycotted the vote in protest. According to those I’ve consulted, the moves were all legitimate but messy, and have the danger of setting up bad precedent for not allowing debate on this kind of motion.

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The Conservatives in the Senate, meanwhile, are caterwauling that their democratic rights have been taken away, and there is talk about conspiracy between Mélanie Joly’s staff, and other threads that are hard to track when they’re throwing them against the wall like spaghetti. And while I share the concerns about bad precedent, I can’t say that I have too much sympathy because they’ve used (and one could argue abused) procedure for over a year to keep the bill at Third Reading, with the intent to ultimately delay it until it died on the Order Paper. They insist that they offered the chance to amend it to the more grammatically correct “thou dost in us command” rather than the clunky “in all of us command,” but I find it a bit disingenuous, because it was simply another delay tactic. And I’ve argued before that this continued tendency to use procedural tactics to delay bills is going to end up biting them in the ass, especially because it plays into Senator Peter Harder’s hands in his quest to overhaul the chamber in order to strip it of its Westminster character. The Conservatives are overplaying their hand, and it’s going to make it very difficult to drum up enough legitimate concern to stop Harder when crunch time comes, and they should be very aware of that fact.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/958861523878789120

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Roundup: The cause, not the cure

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The particular turmoil of the Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership is difficult to turn away from, particularly given that right now it’s grappling with a fairly fundamental point about what is ailing our Westminster parliamentary system, which is the way in which we choose our leaders. Andrew Coyne lays it out really well in his latest column, which notes that another leadership contest won’t solve the party’s problems precisely because it’s the cause of those problems. And Chris Selley notes that with the inclusion of Doug Ford in this new race, that system of leadership selection is just as likely to result in a civil war within the party as it will do for anything else. (On a side note, Selley’s piece notes how Ford is attracting the evangelical endorsements in such an eerily Trump-like way).

Another point that Coyne gets to is this particular fetishization of the membership figures that Brown was able to attract to the party, but it ignores the fact that most of those who are signing up memberships have little connection to the party itself, and are little more than tools to be used by the leadership winner who sold them those memberships. And the point that I would add is that these memberships don’t actually strengthen the party because they’re being used to justify central control by the leadership rather than being a vehicle by which the riding associations are interlocutors between the grassroots and the caucus. These “rented” memberships are meaningless and do little to enhance the party, the way the chatter would otherwise suggest. If anything, they weaken the meaning of what the grassroots is supposed to represent. That’s why we need to get back to the proper working of a Westminster system, and restore caucus selection, so that we can reinvigorate the meaning of the grassroots.

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Roundup: The coming Senate legislative crunch

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While the legalized cannabis bill passed the House of Commons last night and is off to the Senate, questions about the kind of reception it will find there are sure to be buzzing about in the days to come. While the bill’s Senate sponsor wants a process akin to the medical assistance in dying bill to take place (something I find overzealous and ignores the context of what happened then), it’s unlikely to happen that way, and we may see the Conservatives in the Senate trying to dig their heels in. But it’s still early days, so we’ll see.

With this in mind, I wanted to turn to Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column yesterday, where she looked at how the Senate could gum up the government’s end-of-season legislative plan, as they try to push through a number of bills before the Commons rises in just under three weeks. The Senate is already seeing a growing backlog of bills on its Order Paper (a function I’m told has to do largely with the Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative” and his unwillingness to negotiate with the caucuses in there on timelines), and will likely sit up to the 22nd to try and get most of them passed. But what O’Malley described in the refusal by the Senate to engage in pre-study of the budget implementation bill as being a sign that of uncertainty, I will note that the circumstances around this demand for pre-study were unusual from a procedural standpoint. As he outlined in his speech against the pre-study motion, Senate Liberal leader Joseph Day pointed out that the point of pre-study is for the Senate to do a parallel committee process and send recommendations to the Commons before they complete their own study so that they have the chance to make amendments that the Senate proposes at that time. The problem is that this particular bill had already reached Report Stage in the Commons before the motion to pre-study was moved in the Senate by Senator Harder, meaning that the opportunity to offer amendments had already passed, and there was no actual cause for pre-study, and what Harder was looking to do was short-circuit Senate procedure for his own scheduling purposes, and well, the Liberals were having none of it. And in the end, neither were the Conservatives and several of the Independents.

And this is one of the things that I think O’Malley missed in her column – that part of the problem in the Senate right now is that the leadership (meaning Senator Harder) is not exactly doing the government any favours with his inability to manage the legislative agenda in that chamber, especially when he tries to do an end-run around the rules to suit his purposes. It will be a problem if he keeps this up, because the veterans in that chamber won’t stand for it.

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Roundup: Some actual accountability

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If there’s one committee of the House of Commons that I wish I could spend more time following, it’s the Public Accounts committee. It may not be one of the sexier committees tackling the hot issues of the day, but instead, it’s the heart and soul of what parliament is about – holding the government to account. Alas, my day-to-day work means that I don’t have the time to follow it like I did in years gone by, but I try to keep an eye on them when I can.

In the wake of the latest Auditor General’s report, the committee’s vice-chairs – NDP and Liberal, as the Conservatives chair this particular committee, as one might expect for a committee dedicated to holding the government accountable – are vowing that they will hold hearings on each chapter of the latest report (rather than just selected ones) because they are concerned about his level of frustration that departments aren’t keeping their focus on how services are delivered to citizens (rather than their own internal processes), and more than that, they plan to keep calling back senior civil servants to ensure that they’re shaping up. This can only be a good thing.

Over the past few years, that committee has been more stringent in ensuring that they get progress reports from departments on implementing recommendations from AG reports, but now it looks like they’re willing to go a bit further, which is encouraging. This is the kind of work that frankly, we don’t see enough of from MPs, so I’m glad it’s not only getting done, but getting a bit of attention. That can only bode well for parliamentary democracy.

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