Tag Archives: Bank of Canada

Roundup: The struggle of independent senators

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Despite the news being a day-old yesterday, the departure of Senator David Adams Richards from the Independent Senators Group got a bunch of tongue wagging, and even more wannabe comedians making lame jokes about Senate independence. Richards stated repeatedly over the past two days that he wasn’t pressured to vote or do anything by the ISG, but wanted to be “truly independent,” though I’m not sure he quite understands what he’s signing up for. Amidst this, the memo written by Senator Gold to his ISG colleagues about his conflict with just how independent they can be without defeating government bills also hit the news (despite the fact that I wrote about this in my weekend column), which got even more wannabe commentators to start opining about who is really independent in the Senate without having a clue about what is going on. (I will credit Althia Raj as being the only person who did have a clue yesterday, so there’s that).

So, to recap, the Independent Senators Group don’t whip votes or force attendance but organize for the purposes of logistics and to advance the cause of Senate modernization. Logistics include things like allocating office space, and also things like committee assignments, because of the way the Senate operations work, spots are divided up between caucuses, and the ISG is granted their share of committee seats. Any senators outside of the three caucus groups have a much tougher time of getting those committee seats. This is something that Richards is going to face if indeed he wants to do committee work. If he doesn’t, well, that’s going to be an issue because much of the value of the Senate comes from their committee work, which is superior to committee work coming out of the Commons by leaps and bounds.

As for the struggle for how independent Senators should be, part of the problem is that they’re getting a lot of bad and conflicting information, much of it coming from the Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative,” Senator Peter Harder, who is deliberately misconstruing both the history of the Senate, the intent of the Founding Fathers, and how the Senate has operated for 150 years. Part of this stems from the fact that he refuses to do his actual job – he won’t negotiate timelines with the caucuses because he thinks that horse-trading is “partisan,” and he wants to ensure that government bills can’t get defeated by means of a Salisbury Convention so that he doesn’t have to do the work of counting votes to ensure that he can get those bills passed. And the Independent Senators are caught in the middle of this, too new to understand what is going on, and getting a lot of bad advice from people who are trying to force their own ideas of what the Senate should look like, and they’re afraid of accidentally defeating a government bill and having public opinion turn against them as being anti-democratic, and the like. So there are serious issues being contemplated, and the commentary coming from the pundit class right now, who think they’re being clever but who actually don’t have a clue about what they’re talking about, helps no one. And if people want to grab a clue, I have a collection of columns on the topic they can read up on.

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Roundup: Convention resolutions to be forgotten?

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Coming out of the Liberal policy convention, the party’s top five resolutions were pharmacare, mental health, decriminalizing small amounts of drug possession, decriminalizing sex work, and protecting pensions. Some of the resolutions are controversial to members of caucus, and there’s no guarantee that any of these will show up in the party platform (or the Order Paper beforehand) despite its what the grassroots members allegedly want (big caveats here given how centralized and top-down this process has become under their new constitution), but maybe there will be pressure to implement them. Maybe. Trudeau doesn’t seem keen on decriminalization talk while the marijuana bill is still being debated (and he’s expending political capital on it).

Their big exciting Obama-connected guest (because that’s what the Liberals and NDP have grasped onto for the past eight or nine years) was David Axelrod, who said that the party needs to show that they are still change-makers and not the status quo, while he and Gerald Butts talked about political life. Dr. Danielle Martin, who makes the case for healthcare in the US, spoke about the need for universal pharmacare in Canada. Among the ministers who got up to speak to delegates, Ahmed Hussen talked about being racially profiled while he encouraged Liberals to combat racism. Trudeau’s own speech to the faithful included its share of digs at the Conservatives as still being the party of Harper, so good thing they can still draw on that particular bogeyman. New party president Suzanne Cowan spoke about how they all needed to be fundraisers going forward. And hey, the rank-and-file members were expressing some particular concerns about the rash of self-inflicted wounds that the party keeps enduring.

And because it wasn’t all sunshine and roses coming out of the convention, MP Francis Drouin is now facing an allegation of sexual assault from an incident that happened during the convention, and he’s put out a statement to say that an allegation has been made and he’s cooperating with the investigation – nothing else. It’s probably worth noting that there were harassment workshops at the convention that both Justin Trudeau and Kent Hehr attended, and the facilitator of said workshops noted that Trudeau simply listened and took notes throughout, which impressed her. So we’ll see what transpires from here.

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Roundup: Notley’s unconstitutional threats

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In Alberta, Rachel Notley’s NDP government had a Throne Speech yesterday that promised all manner of action to try to pressure BC’s NDP government when it comes to the Trans Mountain pipeline problem. Notley, however, decided to take some of Jason Kenney’s bluster and make it her own, promising the ability to block oil shipments to BC that they need for their domestic use. The problem? The Trans Mountain pipeline is regulated by the National Energy Board, meaning it’s federal jurisdiction, and that neither province can do anything to block it or affect what it carries. She’s also echoing the comments that the federal government needs to lean harder on BC, never mind that the NEB has quasi-judicial authority on the issue, and the fact that all BC has done to date is announce a study, or that the federal government has repeated “This pipeline will get built.” It’s a bunch of chest-thumping and borrowed demagoguery that ignores the historical context of what Peter Lougheed threatened in the 1980s, and is rank hypocrisy in that they’re threatening unconstitutional action to combat BC’s threatened unconstitutional action. It’s time for everyone to grow up.

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Roundup: Imagining a competent committee

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One of the most interesting pieces I read this weekend was a lament by financial journalist Kevin Carmichael, who imagined a parallel universe where a competent House of Commons finance committee could actually question the governors of the Bank of Canada about monetary policy decisions in the interests of accountability, rather than just juvenile point-scoring. And lament is really a good word for it, because this is the kind of thing that our committees should be doing – but they don’t. It’s all about who can try and get their party positions validated than dealing with the issue at hand, which in this case is the reasoning why the Bank of Canada is setting the rates where they are. As Carmichael points out, the Bank does hold press conferences and reporters can ask questions, and some of those journalists have a clue about what they’re asking, so that helps – but it would be great if our MPs could do the same. (Traditionally, senate committees tend to be where the serious questions get asked, but I’m not sure if the Bank appears before them regularly or not, and I haven’t had enough chance to see if the cohort of new independent senators has taken up the mantle of seriously questions – the kinds of questions that put fear into deputy ministers – just yet). Suffice to say, it’s a piece I encourage people (especially MPs) to read, and look at the kind of committees we could have, if enough MPs took the exercise as seriously as they should be.

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Roundup: Unifying the prohibitions across departments

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The federal government has issued new guidelines for foreign intelligence likely obtained through torture, so that it now covers the Canadian Forces, the Canadian Security Establishment, and Global Affairs Canada. This means that they are prohibited from using such information, except if it’s going to save lives either from an imminent terrorist attack or protecting Canadian troops on an overseas mission. This appears to harmonize direction handed down earlier to the RCMP, CSIS, and CBSA, so that all national security agencies (which are now under the same parliamentary oversight regime and will soon be under an independent arm’s length national security oversight regime) will have the same rules and restrictions. For some, it’s reassuring that the government is taking the issue seriously, but for others, the caveat isn’t good enough, and they need to issue a full prohibition, no caveats, no exceptions, full stop. Stephanie Carvin has more reaction to the announcement here:

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Roundup: Senator Greene’s lament

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Conservative-turned-independent Senator Stephen Greene took to the pages of the National Post yesterday to decry Andrew Scheer’s plans to return the Senate to a more partisan institution by making partisan appointments, should he ever form a government and be in a position to do so. Much of Greene’s op-ed makes a series of good points, but at the same time, I find myself a bit leery of his particular conclusion that partisanship is a bad thing period. I agree with his points that a too-partisan Senate can simply act as a rubber stamp, which there were many cases that it appeared to during the later Harper years, when they had a comfortable majority in the Upper Chamber and simply went on neglecting needed appointments while letting their caucus be whipped into continued votes in support of legislation, no matter how flawed.

Where Greene’s analysis falls down, however, is the fact that while the tendency in a more partisan Senate to whip votes means there is less pushback against the government of the day, it fails to take into account that to a great degree, it’s not so much the final vote that matters in the bigger picture than what goes on the record. Courts rely on the parliamentary record to help determine what parliament’s intentions were when they are asked to interpret the law, and in cases where opposition parties in the Senate are unable to get enough votes to push through amendments to a bill, they can at least attach observations to it, and ensure that their objections are on the record – something the courts find valuable. The other aspect is that having senators in the caucus rooms provides a great deal of perspective to MPs because the Senate is the institutional memory of Parliament. Not having those voices in the caucus room, behind closed doors, can mean even more power for the leader because there are fewer people who aren’t constrained by the blackmail powers of that leader to not sign nomination forms, for example, who can push back and who can offer the cautions to the other MPs when the leader is overstepping their bounds. Not having those voices in the caucus room diminishes them, which is something that the Liberals have been dealing with (while Trudeau’s office centralizes yet more power as a result).

Greene also doesn’t seem to appreciate the fact that not having party caucuses in the Senate means that opposition is harder to organize, thereby advantaging the government of the day. It also makes ideological scrutiny of government legislation more difficult because a chamber of independents, especially when you have a mass appointed by a government on ideologically similar lines. That is an underappreciated element of the Westminster structure in the Senate that most modernization proponents continually overlook.

While I sympathise with many of his points, and I do recognise that there have been problems with how the Senate has been operating for the better part of a decade, partisan caucuses weren’t the sole cause of those problems. Breaking up the two-party duopoly has been a boon to the Chamber’s governance and management, and that’s why having a “crossbencher” component has proven to be extremely valuable. But doing away with party caucuses entirely is short-sighted, and causes more problems than it solves.

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Roundup: An astronaut for GG?

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Despite some MPs are agitating for the next Governor General to be Indigenous, it looks like it’s going to be Julie Payette, former astronaut. Payette is a woman and francophone, which fulfils the Anglophone/Francophone alternation that has been the pattern since we started naming our own Governors General, and the government’s desire to have more women in top spots. That she’s not Indigenous will be criticised by some, but I suspect that it may actually avoid other headaches because I do wonder if an Indigenous GG may not find themselves in an inherent conflict of interest given the relationship with the Crown that Indigenous people have which is as sovereign people in a treaty relationship, and being the Queen’s representative has the possibility of being far more complicated once you dig into it. As well, there would likely be pressure on an Indigenous GG from other Indigenous communities to exert influence on the government, given that the understanding of Responsible Government and heeding the advice of the government of the day isn’t all that well understood, and would lead to a lot of disappointment. Meanwhile, here’s Philippe Lagassé on some other aspects of the GG that are worth thinking about.

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While Paul Wells has a great piece about the message being sent with Payette’s appointment, Lagassé also makes a good point about how her appointment is being framed.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/885307090935451649

And this comment from Denise Donlon seems to sum up a lot of the sentiment I’ve seen:

https://twitter.com/donlon/status/885257880286486528

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Roundup: Chagger on fundraising

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Government House Leader Bardish Chagger talked to the Huffington Post, and the headline had all of my media colleagues grasping for their pearls as she declared that the House of Commons was not the place to discuss Liberal fundraisers. And if I’m going to go full pedant on this, she’s right – to an extent. On its face, fundraising is party business and really nothing to do with the administrative responsibility of the government. Why this current round of eye-rolling nonsense around so-called “cash for access” fundraising (which isn’t actually cash for access in the sense that we got used to talking about with Ontario) is because the opposition is trying to link those fundraisers with conflicts of interest from the government, all based on insinuation with no actual proof of quid pro quo. But because there is this tenuous connection, the questions are being allowed, and they get to make all manner of accusations that would otherwise be considered libellous before the cameras under the protection of parliamentary privilege. Indeed, when Ambrose accused the government of acting illegally with those fundraisers, Chagger invited her to step outside of the Chamber to repeat those accusations. Ambrose wouldn’t, for the record.

Where this might resonate are with memories of the previous parliament, with endless questions about the ClusterDuff affair, and the operations of the Senate, and those various and sundry questions that came up time and again, and which were rarely actually about things that were the administrative responsibility of the government. And every now and again, Speaker Andrew Scheer would say so. But contrary to the opinions of some, this wasn’t something that Scheer made up out of thin air.

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In fact, Scheer was too lenient for many of these questions, and there are sometimes that I think that Regan is even more so. Most of the NDP questions asked during the height of the ClusterDuff affair were blatantly out of order, asked for the sake of grandstanding. That the questions with the current fundraising contretemps have made this tenuous link to government operations and decisions is the only thing that makes them marginally relevant to QP. That said, the hope that this will somehow tarnish the government or grind down their ethical sheen generally depends on there being actual rules broken or actual impropriety, which there hasn’t been. Meanwhile, a bunch of issues that the opposition should be holding the government to account for are languishing because they need to put up six MPs a day on this. But hey, at least they’re providing clips to the media as opposed to doing their jobs, right?

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Roundup: A bad term-limit promise

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Senator John Wallace announced yesterday that he’s keeping his pledge to Stephen Harper and resigning after eight years in the chamber despite the fact that he won’t have reached the mandatory age of 75. Of the other cohort of Senators that Harper appointed in late 2008, only Pamela Wallin has indicated that she plans to also end her term after 8 years – but not including the time she was suspended, so she’s got a couple of years left to go. Other senators from that cohort have either said that their pledge was conditional on Harper’s reform plans, which went down in flames after the Supreme Court of Canada shot them down spectacularly, or that they still have things left to accomplish, which is fair. But you know there is a whole crowd of people waiting for them to fail to live up to this “promise.”

Here’s the thing – it was a bad promise that Harper never should have extracted because short term limits are antithetical to the design of our senate, and that a mandatory retirement age of 75 is actually part of its structural guarantees. By having security of tenure, senators are able to exercise institutional independence, and by ensuring that they have employment until age 75, there is not the temptation for them to try to curry favour with the government in order to try and win some kind of post-Senate appointment (be it a diplomatic posting, or heading and administrative tribunal or commission). The lack of term limits like Harper was proposing were part of what is supposed to keep senators more independent and less beholden to the party leaders than MPs are. But it’s not like Harper was trying to undermine the Senate’s ability to be independent – oh, wait. He spent his nine years in power doing exactly that. So no, I will not be joining in the chorus demanding these senators resign, and in fact, I think Wallace is making a mistake in doing so.

Meanwhile, the Senate has grave concerns about bill S-3 on gender inequities in registering First Nations identity with the government, which the minister herself has acknowledged has problems but she wants them to pass it anyway because there’s a court deadline which she said they couldn’t extend, but now it looks like they’re going to. Also, this was a government bill introduced in the Senate so you can’t even claim that it goes against the will of the Commons. Once again, the Senate is doing its job, and oh, look – Andrew Coyne is furiously clutching his pearls over it, while National Post reporter’s description of the current state of the Senate is that they’re moving away from rubber-stamping bills which was never their role in the first place. Honestly, my head is about to explode about this. Again.

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Roundup: Reporting the terror threat

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The government released their 2016 Public Report on the Terrorist Threat to Canada yesterday, and there are a few items of note, particularly that there are more Canadians who are suspected of travelling abroad to engage in terrorist activities, more women are joining the cause, and more of them are returning to Canada after some time abroad, all of which needs to be monitored. The biggest threat remains those lone wolves who are “inspired” by terrorist ideology rather than being directed from abroad, because quite obviously it’s much harder to detect and monitor. Apparently it’s also news that Ralph Goodale is calling ISIS “Daesh” in the report, but some terror experts will note that this is just a bit of name-calling. On a related note, RCMP are talking about their roadblocks in the fight against terrorism, which is a lot about the difficulty in turning evidence gathered from partners like CSIS into something they can admit to the courts, which is apparently harder than it seems. I’m not really sure that I’ve got a lot to add on this one, just that despite the various howls from both the Conservatives and the NDP in how the Liberals have been handling the terror file – the Conservatives insisting that the Liberals have given it up and are running away from the fight (objectively not the case), and the NDP caterwauling that C-51 needs to be repealed full stop – that the Liberals do indeed seem to be taking this seriously. While experts have been praising them on their go-slow approach rather than legislating in haste, I think it’s also notable that they are making reports like these public in order to give a realistic picture of what is going on, rather than relying on hysteria in order to try and build public support that way. We’ll no doubt see a lot more from them in the next couple of months as the new national security committee of parliamentarians is set up, and consultations on the state of our anti-terror laws transition into legislation, but this was a good reminder that things are in the works. In the meantime, here are some more thoughts from a real expert on these kinds of things, Stephanie Carvin.

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