Tag Archives: Border

Roundup: Salaries are not cement

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As the debate over the proposed changes to the Parliament of Canada Act continues to roll along, some of us are struck by the fact that the whole framing of the debate continues to be utterly wrong – that the wrong headline on the Canadian Press piece about prime minister Justin Trudeau looking to “cement” the changes in order to make it harder for a future prime minister to roll them back is completely wrong, given that the PCA has nothing to do with the appointment process. And yet, here we are, once again debating the independent appointments commission, when the actual changes to the Act involve salaries for caucus leaders and some organisational issues. Virtually all of these have been extended to the Independent Senators Group, from committee chairs and assignments, to a role on the Internal Economy Committee, budget allocations for their leadership’s office (aka the “secretariat”), and so on. The only thing they can’t get currently, which they need changes to the PCA for is a higher salary for their leadership team. Fair enough, one might say, but considering that they eschew the label of a caucus, and the roles of both government and opposition, preferring to be neither fish nor fowl, it does make it a bit harder to justify that they should be on equal footing to them. In practice, they are very much a caucus, but this is what the changes they are asking for boil down to – it has nothing to do with “cementing” the changes to the institution, and it would be great if the pundits and journalists talking about this issue could grasp that basic fact.

With that in mind, Colby Cosh penned a fairly (deservedly) harsh piece about the changes to the Upper Chamber, and the fact that Trudeau is creating a Frankenstein’s monster that has more to do with his trying to absolve himself of his responsibility for the Chamber than anything. And Cosh is absolutely right – this has been about Trudeau washing his hands of any whiff of scandal in the Upper Chamber since he became leader, consequences be damned. And there have been real consequences – Trudeau centralised power within his caucus because he got rid of the voices with the most experience who could push back against him without consequences (it’s not like he can threaten not to sign their nomination papers), and got rid of the bulk of his party’s institutional memory in one fell swoop. He’s also losing his ability to get his legislation through the Chamber because he named someone inept as his “representative” (who should be a full-fledged Cabinet minister in order to ensure proper lines of accountability) who refuses to negotiate timelines on bills in the manner in which the Senate operates.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1074845188210622465

This having been said, I will again reiterate that what we should strive for is for the ISG to become like the crossbenchers in the Lords, but that depends on a strong enough Liberal and Conservative contingent to provide balance, and this prime minister has no interest in that, preferring to continue with this experiment in Frankenstein’s Monster until he gets burned by it. And while I’m sure that there will come a reckoning, that the ISG will fracture, and eventually some of its members will drift to an established caucus, it may be some time before that happens and sanity starts to prevail in the Chamber. I just wouldn’t count on this prime minister to provide any of it.

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QP: All about Scheer

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For what might be the final QP of the year, the galleries were full — press gallery included — and the benches were full. Andrew Scheer led off, repeating yesterday’s lead around the PBO’s contention that the deficit could be higher than reported. Trudeau got up and recited by rote his well-worn talking points about investing in Canadians and making life better for the Middle Class™. Scheer switched to English to ask again, and Trudeau hit back about “phoney budget balance” the Conservatives delivered that hurt veterans and families. Scheer accused him of offering falsehoods about the Conservative record (which is rich coming from Scheer, whose capacity for mistruth is quickly becoming legendary) before demanding a balanced budget. Trudeau castigated the Conservative record on growth while his government oversaw growth. Scheer insisted that Trudeau inherited a good economy (not true), to which Trudeau found it curious that Scheer wanted to double down on a plan that Canadians rejected in 2015. Scheer retorted that it was Trudeau who was doubling down on a failed plan before calling him a trust fund baby, and Trudeau replied that you can’t grow the economy with cuts to services, and listed the investments they made that led to record-low unemployment. Guy Caron was up next for for the NDP, and he worried that the CRA has not recouped anything from the Panama Papers. Trudeau picked up a script to read about the investments made in CRA to combat tax evasion, and that CRA has risk-assessed over 80 percent of the 3000 identified files and that criminal investigations were ongoing. Caron switched to French to reiterate the question, and Trudeau read the French version of the same script. François Choquette worried about Canada’s climate performance, to which Trudeau, sans script, talked about putting a price on pollution and helping families adapt. Linda Duncan repeated the question in English, and Trudeau grabbed a script to list measures they have made and investments made.

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Senate QP: Bland assurances from Morneau (part eleventy)

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Things got underway a few minutes early, as finance minister Bill Morneau arrived in the Senate for what promised to be a day full of pointed questions and pabulum answers – Morneau’s particular specialty. Senator Larry Smith led off, asking about the $9.5 billion budgeted in the fiscal update for “non-announced measures,” and Morneau responded with bland assurances about getting the right balance in the budget. Smith noted that he didn’t actually answer the question and that they needed to hold government to account, to which Morneau said quite right, but again didn’t answer, and offered more pabulum talking points about dealing with challenges while still trending the deficit downward.

Senator Batters was up next, and brought up the PM’s comments on social impacts of male construction workers to rural areas, citing that she only sees benefits. Morneau first cited that they look at employment on projects, and then noted gender-based lens for impacts, but didn’t elaborate on the construction worker issue.

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QP: Taking allegations outside

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While the PM took a personal day after his return from the G20, Andrew Scheer was off in Winnipeg to talk guns and gangs. Pierre Poilievre led off concerned about the PM’s supposed “celebrity lifestyle” that referred to the pre-planned tweet around funds for women and girls’ education, before he suddenly pivoted to Bill C-69, demanding it be scrapped. Amarjeet Sohi reminded him that the system the Conservatives put into place that wasn’t working, so they were working to get a one project-one-review process. Poilievre railed that the PM was at the G20 talking about how there were negative consequences when male construction workers went to rural communities,  before returning to the demand to scrap C-69. Sohi reiterate his response, and when Poilievre went for another, more boisterous round of the same, he got much the same answer. Alain Rayes took over to ask about the report in the National Post about a potential investigation on a land deal that might involve Navdeep Bains and Raj Grewal, to which Bains told him the allegations were false and invited him to repeat them outside of the Chamber. Rayes tried to insist on Liberal connections to the situation, to which Bardish Chagger read a statement that functionally repeated Bains’ response. Guy Caron was up next for the NDP, railing about high-protein milk under Supply Management, to which Lawrence MacAulay deployed his usual lines about defending the system. Caron then turned to the Oshawa closure and demanded action by the government, to which Bains read that the sector was strong, that they had the auto innovation fund if GM wanted to use it. Tracey Ramsey demanded action on Oshawa, to which Bains reiterated his previous response. Ramsey then railed that steel and aluminium tariffs were still in place, to which Mélanie Joly read that the NDP celebrated the deal behind closed doors.

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Roundup: Grewal gives some answers

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Just when the drip-drip-drip of new information and the grasping of straws around the Raj Grewal drama was reaching its expiration date, it all blew up anew last night on two fronts. One was the report that the RCMP had been asked to investigate a Brampton infrastructure project where questions are being raised about a land deal and that information had been passed along to both Grewal and Navdeep Bains (and in QP yesterday, Bardish Chagger called the reports false and warned that if allegations were repeated out of the House, they would be met by Bains’ lawyer); the other was that Grewal released an eleven-minute video, releasing it both to the Globe and Mail and to his Facebook page.

In the video, Grewal methodically went through not only his gambling habits, but also the loans (all of which were done by “transparently” cheque and since repaid), and then went through all of the allegations around property ownership, loans, his wife’s finances, the aforementioned Brampton infrastructure project, and even the questions he was asking in the finance committee study on money laundering and terrorist financing. A lot of the information puts to rest speculation and shows how grasping at disparate information and forming a sinister narrative can be when there are fairly simple explanations – explanations that Grewal probably should have been making over the past week as this was coming out, and answering media questions when they called (though one probably has a bit of sympathy for the feeling overwhelmed by it all). What is news out of this, however, is that Grewal said that while he’s leaving the Liberal caucus and taking a leave of absence for his treatment, his announced intention to resign may have been premature, and he’s going to be considering it over the next few weeks – but would have a definitive answer before the House resumes in January. (So maybe Jagmeet Singh made the right call after all in not immediately jumping back to Brampton in anticipation of that seat opening up). I’m not sure this will stop the hyterial questions – particularly the risible notion that he was some kind of national security threat – but it does seem like a lot more questions are now answered than not.

Meanwhile, further to yesterday’s discussion about why MPs shouldn’t be subject to the same kinds of background checks as ministers, here is some more discussion about why it’s a Very Bad Idea.

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Roundup: Ginning up the Grewal resignation

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As the stories on Raj Grewal’s gambling debts and intended resignation continue to trickle through, a number of them have taken on a vaguely conspiratorial tone. A lot of facts that shouldn’t be out of the ordinary are treated as suspicious for absolutely no reason at all. For example, people keep wondering why he was reassigned from the finance committee in September “with no warning.” Gee, what else happened in September that would have affected committee memberships? Could it have been the fact that the parliamentary secretaries all got shuffled, so committee assignments need to be rejigged? Maybe? And whoa, he asked questions on catching money launderers to law officials and FINTRAC agents during a study on – wait for it – “Confronting Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing: Moving Canada Forward.” Such an amazing coincidence that is totally suspicious. And the latest “revelation” is that Senator Jean-Guy Dagenais says that a retired Mountie told him a year ago that he heard Raj Grewal was under investigation, and he therefore thinks PMO should have known then. Erm, except that neither the OPP nor the RCMP tell the PMO what they’re investigating because they operate at arm’s length, and more to the fact, Grewal was a backbench MP, which I cannot stress enough.

To that end, Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column looks at the issue of parties policing MPs’ off-hours, considering the Clement and Grewal situations, while Susan Delacourt cites those same two cases, and wonders if we need to do a better job of screening backbenchers. And I’m pretty dubious because backbenchers are not ministers. They don’t have access to secret materials (Clement, I remind you, is a former minister and thus a member of the Privy Council, and his activities on NSICOP are outside of the usual activities of a backbencher), nor are they public office holders. Their job is to hold government to account – they are not part of the government, and it doesn’t matter what committees they’re on. Treating them as the same thing is not only a gross overreach, but frankly it will give MPs a wrongheaded sense of their place in the system, which is already suffering because of civic illiteracy.

Are Grewal’s debts concerning? Yup. Is it a crisis that he was mentioned in passing as part of an investigation into other suspicious characters? Maybe, but we don’t know enough to say whether it is or not, and the baseless speculation and ginned up allegations aren’t helping. Should Trudeau and the PMO have been more candid from the start about the reasons Grewal was resigning? Probably, and given this government’s inability to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, their approach once again blew up in their faces. But treating this affair with clickbait headlines and spinning random facts out of context in order to make them seem sinister is bad reporting.

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QP: Grewal and false border numbers

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While Justin Trudeau was off to Argentina for the G20, Andrew Scheer was elsewhr, as was Guy Caron, more unusually. Mark Strahl led off, worrying about new revelations about investigations that Raj Grewal may have been swept up into, to which Bardish Chagger responded that last week he made them aware of his serious challenges and treatment, and they hoped he got the help he needed. Strahl didn’t believe her, but Chagger reiterated the response. Strahl got even more incredulous, but Chagger’s response varied only by saying the RCMP operates independently. Luc Berthold tried again in French, and got the same answer in French, and then they went yet another round of the same. Ruth Ellen Brosseau led for the NDP, demanding that the government take action. Patty Hajdu said that it was troubling, but this was a global decision affecting plants in the US and elsewhere, so they were going to help workers where they could. Brosseau then demanded the government not sign the New NAFTA until an oversight clause around milk classes was removed, to which Lawrence MacAulay deployed his well-worn points about defending Supply Management. Tracey Ramsey was worried that we didn’t know what was in the deal and demanded that it not be signed, to which Mélanie Joly stood up to assure her it was a good deal for Canada. Brian Masse, whose rant about the auto sector didn’t reach the question before he got cut off, and Hajdu recited some talking points about their support for the industry through the auto innovation fund.

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Roundup: Endorsing the Brexitshambles

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In case you haven’t been paying attention, Britain is currently in a state of utter omnishambles as they try to deal with Brexit. A potential deal that was reached resulted in Cabinet resignations, and some very real threats not only to Theresa May remaining as PM, but possibly toppling the government as a whole. It’s lunacy over there right now. Back here in Canada, Andrew Scheer has decided that this was the right time to reiterate his support for Brexit. Because “sovereignty.”

While Scheer can bang on about how much control the UK gave up to the EU, and repeating falsehoods like the canard about the EU having regulations around the curvature of bananas, he both ignores that the EU has created a peace that has been unknown in Europe for centuries, and the fact that much of the Brexit campaign was fuelled by straight-up xenophobia. It’s this latter aspect that is particularly relevant because it’s part of a pattern we’re seeing with Conservatives, as John Geddes pointed out a couple of months ago – that they have this inability to orient themselves in a plausible way with the current nationalist populist trends in conservatism globally. Add to that, there is this naïve notion that they can somehow play with just enough extremism without it going into outright xenophobia or racism (and we’re especially seeing this playout with Maxime Bernier who blows the xenophobia tuba and then acts bewildered that white nationalists start showing up in his new party). But you can’t play with “just enough” extremism, because you can’t actually contain it. And when you wink about things enough times, you can’t act shocked and surprised when your adherents spell out what you were saying – like that post from a riding association Facebook account that posted Harjit Sajjan’s photo with the tagline “this is what happens when you have a Cabinet based on affirmative action.” They’ve only stated repeatedly that ministers in the Liberal cabinet are only there to fill quotas (whereas everyone in the Conservative Cabinet was there “on merit,”) but the moment someone puts Sajjan’s face next to that, well no, that’s totally not what they meant at all. Sure, Jan. And that’s why you can’t actually claim that Brexit is all about “sovereignty,” because it absolutely wasn’t. You can’t divorce the inflated sovereignty concern trolling from the xenophobia – it’s the same mentality as trying to assert that you can use “just enough” extremism for your political ends, but not go all the way.

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne remains boggled by Scheer’s continued endorsement of Brexit, and wonders if he’s trying to appropriate some of its populist nationalism (the aforementioned “just enough” extremism).

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Roundup: A policy reviewed and changed

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The government announced that their review of the transfer of inmates to Indigenous healing lodges is complete, and they made some changes to the policy to tighten the conditions. While they wouldn’t say directly, it was confirmed that Tori Stafford’s killer was reassigned from the healing lodge she had been transferred to back to an institution. Cue the self-congratulation from the Conservatives, who assert that the killer is back “behind bars.” But there are a few things we need to unpack here because some of this back-patting is disingenuous.

First of all, these healing lodges are still prisons. Said killer went from one medium-security facility to another medium-security facility. While Andrew Scheer kept insisting that she was moved to a “condo,” he is not only lying about what a healing lodge is, he is also misconstruing what conditions in women’s institutions in this country are like. There are no longer any of the kinds of cells and bars or high walls that you see on television – women’s institutions largely feature campus-like atmospheres, with apartment-like dwellings. Indeed, the facility she’s been transferred to post lodge is described as “a minimum security residential-style apartment unit and residential-style small group accommodation houses for minimum and medium-security inmates in an open campus design model.” So much for the crowing that she’s back behind bars.

There is also the self-congratulation in saying that they embarrassed the government into taking this action, and that this somehow disproves what the government said about not being able to act to transfer her. This is again disingenuous – when it came to light, the government ordered a review, and the policy writ-large was changed. They didn’t order an individual transfer, because that would be abusing their authority to do so. Now, there are some genuine questions as to how appropriate it is to change policies based on a single case, but insisting that they did what the Conservatives asked is not exactly true. Worse, however, is the unmitigated gall of the Conservatives demanding apologies and insisting that it was the Liberals who politicised the issue when they were the ones who decided to start reading the graphic details of Stafford’s murder into the record in the House of Commons. They’re still sore that they’ve been called ambulance chasers, which they insist is some kind of grievous insult, however their behaviour in the Commons around this issue was hardly decorous. An issue was raised, the policy was reviewed and changed, and the process worked. But trying to play victim over it is taking things a little too far.

https://twitter.com/journo_dale/status/1060641966776475648

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Senate QP: Looking tough and talking out the clock

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Following a lacklustre QP in the Other Place, the Minister of Looking Tough on Stuff, Bill Blair, headed for the Senate to take more questions related to his portfolio. Senator Larry Smith led off, asking about the financial pressure put on shelters in cities and provinces related accommodating irregular border crossers. Blair noted that he has been working with Ontario Minister Lisa MacLeod on the file, and noted that for the Toronto shelter system, the referred numbers are self-identified as refugees, which they arranged temporary housing for, and of the more than 400 that were referred to is now down to 35. Smith then laid out a number of facts related to irregular border crossers including the fact that the IRB wait time is around two years, and Blair gave a fairly broad statement about the increase in migration around the world, and that Canada saw similar spikes in irregular claimants in the past, and then veered off into talks about Conservative cuts to CBSB and the IRB that they have been forced to reinvest in, and from there went into the removals of failed claimants, before the temporary speaker cut him off for talking too long.

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