Tag Archives: Bank of Canada

Roundup: Procedural secret ballots?

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Suggestions for improving the way things work in the Commons are relatively common, and mostly a load of nonsense, but then Kady O’Malley comes along and pitches a new idea that I’d never heard of before, so I figured I’d deconstruct it a little. Essentially, she takes a never-before-used-but-on-the-books procedural tactic and looks to expand it – in this case, secret votes in the Commons on procedural matters. The one on the books is an appeal mechanism for MPs to use when their piece of private members’ business is deemed non-votable by both the subcommittee and the full committee that determines these things. Why this hasn’t been used before is because MPs generally know to keep their PMBs within the rules – federal jurisdiction (which they try to get around with the creation of national strategies) or by creatively trying to ensure that they don’t spend money (though some of those suggestions are too-cute-by-half, and yet they try anyway *cough*That NDP climate change bill that they won’t let die*cough*). O’Malley argues that this secret ballot process, extended to other procedural votes on things like time allocation and splitting complex bills into smaller parts, will somehow embolden MPs and ensure that House Leaders have to convince their caucuses rather than crack the whip. And while this sounds great in theory, I’m not buying it. For starters, even if we think that secret ballots for MPs under limited circumstances will somehow miraculously embolden them (and I’m highly doubtful about that one), it also takes them off the hook when it comes to voting for unpopular things like time allocation or keeping omnibus bills intact. Their voters should see them do it so that they can hold them to account for it. The larger problem, however, is that this is a suggestion that largely re-litigates the last parliament. The issue of omnibus bills this government has promised to amend the Standing Orders to prevent (and that’s a promise that we can hold them to account for), while the issue of time allocation is almost certainly to be handled differently, because frankly, we’re not seeing a return to the days of an incompetent House Leader, like Peter Van Loan most certainly was. And frankly, even it that wasn’t the case, I doubt we would see too many outliers on contentious bills being put before a procedural vote because they tend to buy their party’s decision on matters and will find a justification if it ever comes to that. So while it’s a nice idea in theory, I just can’t see this as anything other than yet another well-meaning bit of tinkering that will only serve to eventually make things worse through its unintended consequences. No thanks.

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Roundup: The problem with private members’ bills

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I’ve written a lot about the problems with private members’ bills, and in my column this week over at Loonie Politics, it came up again given that the lottery for the Order of Precedence was posted. I wrote about it back in the spring when there were a number of problematic ones that the Senate was possibly going to kill (and in some cases did when the clock ran out on them) for good reason – because they were bad bills. While interviewing Liberal Senator George Baker yesterday for a story I was writing, he offered this, which I unfortunately wasn’t able to include in the piece, but every MP should nevertheless read it and take it to heart:

“Here’s a real problem with these private member’s bills: if there’s a fault in the bill, if there’s a word out of place, if there’s an error in the wording or in the intent of a sentence of paragraph – if it’s a private member’s bill, then the Senate is in a quandary because if they amend the bill, then they will in all likelihood be defeating the bill. If you amend a bill in the Senate, if it’s a private member’s bill, it goes back to the Commons and it goes to the bottom of the list for consideration, and then the private member will come to the Senate committee and say you’re going to pass this bill. We had it happen three times in the past two years. They say you’re going to defeat the bill, so the Senate turned around and passed the bill, given the tradition of not defeating something that’s legitimately passed in the House of Commons, and Senate ignored the necessary amendments and they passed bad legislation.”

Baker is absolutely right in that there is a problem – MPs don’t have them drafted very well, and then don’t do their due diligence because these bills are automatically time-allocated by design. That a number of these bills died on the Order Paper in the Senate one hopes might be an object lesson to MPs that they need to do better, but unfortunately, the lesson too many MPs took is that the “unelected and unaccountable Senate” didn’t just rubber-stamp a bill because it passed the Commons. Except, of course, it’s not their job to rubber stamp, and we’ve had an increasing number of bad bills getting through the cracks based on these emotive arguments, and not a few hissy fits along the way *cough*Reform Act*cough*. And now we have bad laws on the books because of it, apparently content to let the courts handle it instead. It’s sad and a little pathetic, to be perfectly honest. We should be demanding out MPs do better, and when they screw up, they need to take their lumps so that they’ll do better next time. Otherwise they won’t learn – or worse, they will take the wrong lesson, and our system will be worse off.

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Roundup: Niqab politics taking over

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The politics of the niqab have slowly starting taking up a lot of oxygen on the election campaign, on a number of fronts. While people over the Twitter Machine tried to skew Harper’s “old stock Canadians” remark as some kind of racist or dog whistle politics (I’m not sure that interpretation makes sense given the context of what he was saying), the government has decided to crank their petulance around the attempted niqab ban up to eleven by declaring that they will ask the courts for a stay of the Federal Court of Appeal ruling on the niqab-at-citizenship-ceremonies case, essentially to deny the woman in question the right to vote. It’s going to be tough for them to convince the courts that there is some imminent danger if they allow her to take the oath before October 19th, much less convince the Supreme Court of Canada to hear the case (and they almost certainly won’t, seeing as this is a fairly open-and-shut case of administrative law, where the minister overreached is authority to implement the ban). But while this pettiness digs in, the panic over the niqab has already begun to spread, with the Bloc launching an attack ad to warn that the NDP will mean pipelines and niqabs in Quebec, while an NDP candidate has stated that while Thomas Mulcair reopens the constitution to try and abolish the Senate (never going to happen), that he deal with the menace of niqabs at the same time. No, seriously. He added that he’s sure the party supports him on that, and as of posting time, the party has not repudiated the statement (much as they did not really repudiate it when Alexandre Boulerice made similar statements about banning niqabs earlier). Justin Trudeau, for his part, said he wouldn’t try to appeal the ban to the Supreme Court. So there’s that. Meanwhile, Tabatha Southey takes on the government’s attempted niqab ban, with her usual acid wit.

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Roundup: An questionable call to the Governor

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While I often cringe about the media’s reluctance to refer to Stephen Harper as prime minister during the writ period (as he remains prime minister and will until he offers the Governor General his resignation) out of an exaggerated sense of fairness, there was an incident yesterday where Harper himself blurred that line between being prime minister, and being the Conservative leader campaigning for his own ends. For the first time that I can recall, we got a press release that mentioned that the Prime Minister called up the Governor of the Bank of Canada. While the text was pretty banal, talking about “ongoing developments” in the global economy and the recent declines in the markets, it was still unusual because we never get these kinds of releases. Ever. There is a very clear separation between government fiscal policy and the monetary policy set by the Bank of Canada, and the two should never meet – in fact, there is an issue in Canadian history where the Prime Minister tried to interfere with the Bank of Canada, and the Governor of the day ended up resigning in protest as a result. While the purpose of Harper’s call to Governor Poloz is not mentioned, the fact that it came on the day where Harper’s campaign message was all about how only his party could be trusted to weather this global economic turbulence, well, it’s pretty icky. Harper subtly politicizes Poloz by using him as a campaign prop – look at my economic credentials! I’m talking to the Bank of Canada Governor, like an economic boss! For all we know, Harper and Poloz have a weekly call where they talk trends and forecasts, and so on, but if that’s the case, we never hear about it. This time, Harper made sure that we knew about it. I’m having a hard time trying to see how this is acceptable in any way.

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Roundup: The anti-intellectual warning shot

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The markets are crashing, the dollar continues to plummet and the price of oil seems to be in free-fall, but what is it that has the Canadian commentariat entranced – well, aside from the latest Duffy minutiae? The fact that Doug Ford may be contemplating the federal Conservative leadership if Stephen Harper fails to win the upcoming election. It kind of makes me want to weep. “Oh, it’ll be hilarious!” the Twitter Machine keeps relaying, but no, it wouldn’t. It would be heartbreaking for what it means to democracy. As we saw with the Rob Ford years in Toronto, and as we’re seeing play out with the Donald Trump primary race in the States, what more rational people see as hilarious and unbelievable is being embraced by a share of the electorate who are disengaged and who believe that all politicians are liars, so they would rather someone who stands up there and “tells it like it is,” never mind that what they’re telling them is completely divorced from reality and also generally false. We are already dealing with an overload of anti-intellectualism in the Canadian discourse (and no, not just from the right-leaning populists – you should see the abuse heaped on the economists who dared to debunk the NDP’s minimum wage proposal earlier in the week). Do we need it compounded on the federal scene by such an individual? While people may treat it like a joke, it’s a legitimate threat. Remember that Rob Ford got elected mayor because the very people who dismiss the Ford brothers can’t seem to grasp that they do strike a chord with voters, and I can’t think of anything more terrifying for the future of federal politics.

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Roundup: A contraction and a rate cut

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While he didn’t use the word itself, Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz essentially said that Canada is in a recession, and he cut the interest rate by another quarter of a percent, leaving prime at 0.5 percent. Poloz said that we are in a contraction, but there should be growth in non-energy sectors in the second half of the year. Nevertheless, shrinking the growth outlook for the year by a full percentage point of GDP blows billions of dollars out of the projections that were built into the government’s budget, which almost certainly will push it into real deficit territory (as opposed to the paper surplus that it was sitting in after raiding the contingency reserve and EI fund in order to pay for those family tax breaks and still make it look like there’s a surplus). Where the real kicker could come in is the fact that the Bank of Canada is trying to use monetary policy to stimulate the economy to help it grow, while the government is cutting in order to achieve its balanced budget rather than stimulating at a time of contraction to prime the pump, as it were, and there was talk about how it meant the government was basically undoing the work the Bank was trying to do. So there’s that. Also not helpful is the government then coming out to attack Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair as a means of trying to distract from their economic record, so that they can make the pitch to be allowed to stay in office after the election. Maclean’s assembled an expert panel to discuss the rate cut, while Andrew Coyne fears the damage that all of the election promises will end up causing the economy by the time the vote is over.

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Roundup: Wai Young, Conservative fabulist

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Yesterday it was revealed that Conservative MP Wai Young spoke at a church congregation to tell them that Harper was doing things in the same vein as Jesus, and used Bill C-51 as an example. Because Jesus was really concerned about giving inordinate powers to intelligence agencies without any kind of oversight, and about preventing terrorist attacks – oh, wait. No he wasn’t. While Young’s terrible theology sparked the usual ridicule over the Twitter Machine, it was her other statement that was perhaps most alarming, which was her claim that CSIS knew there was a bomb on the Air India flight 30 years ago, but were forbidden from sharing that information with the RCMP, and 400 people died as a result. Except no, none of that is true, they didn’t know and they could share information. Oops. Young later claimed that she “misspoke,” but that seems to be code amongst Conservative MPs for making stuff up. You know, like when that other Conservative backbencher apologised to the House for “misspeaking” when he claimed that he has directly witnessed people taking voter identification cards out of the recycling bin with the intention of casting fraudulent ballots. Turns out that one wasn’t true either. But hey, political fabulism is apparently okay so long as you apologise for “misspeaking” when you get caught. Truth and debating on the strength of your ideas doesn’t matter – no, you can just invent things out of whole cloth, repeat complete fabrications against your opponents (income splitting for seniors, anyone?) and say it often enough in the hopes that people will start believing it’s true (Hello, 2011 election). Why wouldn’t a backbencher like Young think it’s okay if this is the behaviour that she’s watching get rewarded by everyone else around her? It’s a sad indictment of the state of our political discourse.

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Roundup: Loans and borrowing without oversight

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Government programmes that allow their Crown Corporations to lend money are growing without any parliamentary oversight, and certainly no statutory review once these programmes have been in place, whether it’s student loans or business development loans. Now, the Parliamentary Budget Officer is sounding the alarm, because it’s one more way in which parliamentarians have lost control over the public purse and have little ability to hold the government to account for any of these loans that they are giving out. Add to the fact that they have already lost the ability to hold the government o account for any borrowing that the government does – they took that bit of oversight away a couple of years ago as part of an omnibus budget bill, despite it being a fundamental part of our Westminster democratic traditions, and now any borrowing simply requires a nod from cabinet – hardly an effective check on government’s financial decisions. Further add to that the fact that the government has been putting out budgets with no numbers in it, and Estimates not attached to any budget so that there is no comparison or examination of what’s in it in a fiscal perspective, and it all adds up to parliamentarians not doing their jobs, and being able to control the purse strings of the government of the day, making Parliament a shadow version of itself. This should alarm everybody in this country because this is the parliament that you’ve elected not doing their jobs.

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Roundup: Rate cut, dollar drop

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In a move that surprised pretty much everyone yesterday, the Bank of Canada lowered their already rock bottom prime interest rate to 0.75 percent as a means of dealing with the effect of falling oil prices on our economy, and in response, the dollar dropped even further. Bank Governor Stephen Poloz said that the upsides of lower oil prices could have positives, but as the economic forecast was also downgraded, he said that it could delay recovery by at least a year. Opposition reaction to the rate cut was that it showed the government was mismanaging the economy, but Justin Trudeau also wouldn’t say if he would run deficits, nor would Thomas Mulcair indicate how he would pay for his childcare promises. Andrew Coyne is not bothered by the falling dollar, saying we’ll adjust, though as I watch my purchasing power evaporate before my eyes at the iTunes store, I can’t say I’m too happy about it.

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Roundup: Doubling down on cognitive dissonance

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With some of his trademarked clownish theatricality, Charlie Angus described his exasperation with We The Media for apparently getting the headlines wrong about the NDP’s promises around restoring the long-gun registry. Describing his reaction as having “banged his head on the table,” Angus tried to insist that no, they weren’t going to bring back the registry. Really! But they still plan to put in a system to track every gun, which is pretty much a registry, even if they don’t want to call it such. (The cognitive dissonance! It burns!). And while Angus and others try to double down on their senseless attempt at holding contradictory thoughts in their heads, it’s starting to look a lot like a facile attempt to please everyone – to play to their Quebec base (for whom the registry is a very big deal and tied to the École Polytechnique massacre), to keep their urban voters happy with their penchant for gun control, while trying to ensure that what few rural and northern voters that they have, who objected to the registry, aren’t similarly put out (and to ensure that they don’t have any other MPs rebel like Bruce Hyer did before they ousted him for standing up for his constituents wishes and thus going against party orthodoxy). It can’t really be done, certainly not how they’re describing, and yet here we are, pretending that their registry proposal isn’t really a registry, as though we’re idiots. It’s a nice try, but no.

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