Tag Archives: Canada Post

Roundup: A rapidly shrinking legacy

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A little less than a year after the last election, Stephen Harper announced yesterday that he was finally resigning his seat as an MP, and will be off to face future challenges under the banner of his own private consultation firm, Harper and Associates. Apparently he is looking forward to “building something new” and will have an international focus in his new endeavours, which I find a bit curious considering that this was someone who had never even left the country until he became Leader of the Opposition, and whose foreign policy during his time in government was a tad, well, ham-fisted. Oh, and he’ll be joining a speaker’s bureau and tour the world to give speeches, which again is against the grain of his time in office when he was known for not only speaking as little as possible, but also of scrubbing any bits of humanity from his speeches in order to make them as dull and forgettable as possible with no hint of personality in them. We’ll see if he plans to continue this in his new life. Meanwhile, here are some reactions from some of his former cabinet ministers, other notable Canadians, and five ways that Harper changed politics in Canada. Susan Delacourt writes about Harper’s legacy of being a lone wolf and keeping everyone at a distance.

If we’re going to talk legacy, then his longevity is one of the biggest points, but we’ll see how lasting any of his accomplishments are. His ability to reunite the Conservative party, such as it was (because let’s face it, this was not the Progressive Conservative party of John A. Macdonald, John Diefenbaker, Joe Clark or Kim Campbell) was an accomplishment, but we’ll see if it holds under new leadership or if we have a new voting system. After all, a proportional representation system would see the parts of the conservative coalition break-off out of the big tent into smaller factions that would see advantage in gaining outsized power from a new system, and you can bet that the social conservative elements would not have the patience to stick with a party that has ignored them if they can gain seats and leverage in another way. The vast majority of his policy agenda is well on the way to being rolled back under the new government, with the exception of the fiscal stranglehold that Harper put on the nation’s finances with his decision to cut the GST by two points. That is the only real policy area that the new government has shown no appetite to roll back, but if deficits persist, then raising the GST may be something they would consider (though the fact that some of the provinces have moved into that tax room – which was Harper’s plan all along, in order to see the federal government retreat further from their affairs). He has a legacy of some Supreme Court of Canada judgments that have put a lot of roadblocks on attempts to change the constitution by backdoor or “unofficial” means, so take that for what you will. But his other plan of obliterating the Liberals and turning Canada into a two-party state of Conservatives versus NDP – as he so nearly succeeded in doing in 2011 – has unravelled spectacularly, and saw not only the resurgence of the Liberal party, but a deep wounding of the NDP in the process. So what does this all add up to? I guess we’ll have to wait to see the history books, but it is a legacy that seems to have a shrinking quality less than a year after his time in office ended.

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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.

https://twitter.com/stephaniecarvin/status/768814441865605120

https://twitter.com/stephaniecarvin/status/768848309754564609

https://twitter.com/stephaniecarvin/status/768853486670708738

https://twitter.com/stephaniecarvin/status/768914845475278849

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Roundup: An important disavowal

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Oh, hey – the author of a study on ranked ballots that relied on survey data from the last election has admitted that it wasn’t really a good study because the behaviours of voters would be different using a different ballot system. Gosh, you think? This is the same study and survey data that people have been citing in the blind panic that “OMG it will be first-past-the-post on steroids so obviously the Liberals want it!” because somehow it would give the Liberals 205 seats, based on that singular poll about second choices in the last election. It ignores that the selling feature of a ranked ballot – other than ensuring that a winner will always have more than 50 percent of the vote (no matter that you need to keep redistributing votes until you reach it) is that it eliminates the need for strategic voting, and in Australia it has given the Green and other minor parties a few seats of their own in the House of Representatives, plus allowed their National Party to remain independent of the Liberal (read: conservative) Party. Considering that they have largely relied on coalitions in the last few parliaments has shown that it’s not just geared toward majoritarianism, the way that people have been freaking out about in Canada. That said, why this particular study was allowed to stand considering its obvious design flaw is a bit galling, and this walking back from the results should have come much sooner rather than this committee hearing after months and months of false and misleading media stories proclaiming that ranked ballots would exacerbate the “distortions” of the current system, which have poisoned the well when it comes to having a reasoned discussion on the various systems that are out there. (Note: Those distortions are not real but a result of misreading the results based on a logical fallacy. Also note that I am not actually a proponent of ranked ballots, merely of proper and informed debate on electoral reform, which we have not been getting).

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Roundup: Not a hellscape, not a utopia

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

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Roundup: Corrosive myths about mandates

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It’s official – Theresa May is now the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom thanks to being selected by her party caucus, and thanks to her rival dropping out (after a spectacular media implosion) and she was left with no rival to take to the party membership. (See her first speech here). But that has already started the general nonsense about her being “unelected” or not having a “mandate,” all of which is complete and utter nonsense, as though anyone making those claims doesn’t understand how the Westminster system works – and yes, I’m looking at you, CBC, who used the term in your reporting on her being appointed by the Queen yesterday to the job.

One of the most incomprehensible piece on the subject so far was published in the Guardian, written by Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats, who seems to be utterly mystified with the way that governments are formed in our shared system of government, or the fact that we don’t elect prime ministers. (He also advocated a bunch of proportional representation nonsense, which didn’t help his arguments any either). Now, while it’s likely that the whole piece was simply his attempt at trolling for the government to call a general election (somehow bypassing the Fixed Term Parliaments Act as though it were no big deal), hoping to reverse their devastating losses from the previous election while running on a pro-Remain ticket, it’s nevertheless shocking just how civically illiterate the leader of a major political party is in print.

There was a great rebuttal to Farron’s nonsense by Robert Hazell, which offers some clarity on the way that Westminster parliaments work, but he makes the very salient point that all of this talk about needing a democratic mandate “has a corrosive effect on public understanding of our parliamentary system, and on legitimacy and trust in government.” And he’s absolutely right, which is why I am especially outraged that media outlets like the CBC are repeating this bilge rather than reporting on our shared system of government as it exists and how it’s supposed to work. Civic literacy should not be a high bar to clear when it comes to reporting on politics, and yet here we are.

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Roundup: Rebutting the reformers’ complaints

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If it were possible for someone to write a column that was basically one long subtweet, then I’m pretty sure that it’s what Andrew Coyne did with his column on electoral reform, with me as his unspoken target – particularly as he parroted several of my arguments (that no one else seems to be making) without actually getting their substance correct. So here we go.

When proportional representation advocates complain that the allocation of seats among the parties in the legislature does not resemble their relative shares of the votes cast — with the especially unhappy effect of allowing a minority of the voters to rule over the majority — first past the post’s defenders reply: why should it? Members were elected in 338 separate riding elections, not in a single nationwide vote.

Yes, and that’s pointed out for a number of reasons – that the vote share figure that reformers cite as evidence is not actually real (hence its use as evidence is meaningless), and the fact that each MP is elected to a single seat in a separate election has a particular meaning that gives them individual agency rather than making them a thrall of a particular party. This is an important consideration in the electoral system because it gives a clear line for how MPs are empowered, which is what we keep insisting we want. It also demonstrates that if the complaint is that MPs aren’t empowered, it’s because it’s their own choice or ignorance – not the electoral system that is at fault.

When reformers point out the imbalance this creates between voters — in a given election it typically takes many more votes to elect a member from one party than another — first-past-the-posters look positively mystified: everyone gets one ballot. And when the former observe that under first past the post the votes cast for anyone but the leading candidate in a riding are “wasted,” in the sense that they do not contribute to electing anyone, the latter lose all patience. How could any of the votes have been wasted, they ask, if all were counted? The candidate who was elected may not have been everyone’s choice, but he still represents everyone.

Here Coyne adopts the same specious math that the Broadbent Institute was pushing over Twitter yesterday, which ignores how ridings actually work, and that elections are 338 separate events, and mashes the figures together and divides by 338, pretending that it’s a number with meaning when it’s not – just like the popular vote. It’s pretty much like bringing a unicorn to a logic exam. As well, he doesn’t make a compelling argument about why votes are “wasted” because it ignores the broader political ecosystem. It has little to do with the fact that the MP who won the seat represents everyone, but that the vote itself is but one small piece of political engagement. Casting a vote is not the end-all-be-all of political engagement. Rather, the system is built for people to be joining parties and engaging at a grassroots level to develop policy and for riding associations to act as interlocutors between the local community and the caucus, even when they don’t have a local MP in that party. As well, the percentage by which the MP won the seat is a figure that matters. If it’s by a slim margin, then those votes against are certainly not “wasted” – they have a meaning in the message that it sends to the MP about where his or her support lies. That matters.

To reformers’ complaints about how the system works, in other words, the answer commonly offered is: that’s how the system works. It is as if that were not just the system we have now, but the only system there is. And of course if you assume that then yes, reformers’ objections become literally incomprehensible. They might as well object to the weather. If only one member can be elected per riding, then obviously it’s silly to talk about wasted votes, or to complain that voters who supported another candidate are not represented. That’s life. Suck it up. The resulting parliament was not proportional? That’s not how our system works.

No, that’s not why one has to point out that it’s how the system works – one needs to point that out because you need to understand how the system works before you go about changing it, which usually means breaking things and making them worse. It has been proven that every time we tinker with our system, we make it worse, which leads us to want to tinker with it more, breaking it even further. Why? Because people don’t understand how the system works, so they assume that it’s broken, particularly if they get emotional that it doesn’t do what they think it should. This is the whole premise of my book – that we need to stop and understand how and why things work the way they do before we go about messing with the system some more because history has shown repeatedly that tinkering makes it worse. Ignorance is literally killing our democracy, and no matter how well intentioned its reformers tend to be, they almost always make it worse.

At any rate, it’s worth debating. Some might argue that single-member ridings give constituents a clearer sense of who to take their problems to, and who to hold to account. Others might reply that, with several members competing to represent them, constituents might get better service: if one didn’t answer your letter, another might.

From here, Coyne goes off about how maybe multi-member ridings would be better, possibly sprinkled in with single-member ones where they would be too large (hello, all of rural and remote Canada), which immediately brings up questions about how that could possibly be considered a more fair system. And while he touches ever so briefly on accountability, he gets the premise wrong – an MP’s job is not to “service” one’s constituents. It’s about holding the government to account. This, however, is lost on the reformers, whose fetishisation with fantastical notions about “representation” overshadow all other aspects of how the system works in its broader ecosystem. Yes, representation is a part of it, but it is not the totality, and yet that is what all of their reforms are geared toward with no regard for the bigger whole.

So no, it’s not about whether other systems are possible – it’s about not making things worse because you don’t understand how things work now. That’s a very different thing entirely.

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Roundup: Perverting the Westminster system

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Amidst the various detritus floating out there of post-Brexit thinkpieces, one could blink and miss a pair of posts the Andrew Potter made yesterday, but let me state that it would be a mistake to do so. The first post was a response to another trolling post from someone else who stated that a Brexit vote would never have happened in the American system because of all of its various checks and balances. Potter, however, doesn’t rise to the bait in quite the way you would think, and instead looks at the ways in which Responsible Government in the UK has gone wrong of late, which led to this situation. Things like the referendum itself not being a usual parliamentary instrument, or the fixed-parliaments legislation, and the ways in which party leadership contests have done away with the usual accountability mechanisms on the leaders that are being elected rather than selected. In other words, it’s the perversions of the Westminster system that have caused the problems at hand, not the system itself that is to blame as the original trolling post would otherwise indicate. And for those of you who’ve been following my writing for a while, this is a recurring theme with me too (which you’ll see expounded upon in my book when it’s released next year) – that it’s the constant attempts to tinker with the system that wind up being the problem because we’ve been forgetting how the system is actually supposed to operate. If we left the system alone and used it the way it’s intended, we wouldn’t have these kinds of problems creeping in, forcing people to demand yet more tinkering reforms.

The second post from Potter is a continuation from an aside in the first piece, but it’s worth a read nevertheless because it’s a quick look at ways in which the changes that America needs to its system go beyond simple electoral reform, but rather a change to a Westminster-style parliamentary system rather than its current morass that more resembles a pre-Responsible Government reflection of the “balanced constitution” model that the UK was experimenting with at the time. One imagines that it would mean turning their president into a more figurehead role than also having him or her be the head of government as well as head of state as the office is now (this is the part that Potter glosses over), but the rest of the points stand – that a confidence-based system instead of term limits would allow its heads of government to burn out in a third term rather than create independent power bases that are then used for dynastic purposes (witness both the Bush and Clinton dynasties), that problems with things like Supreme Court appointments would rectify themselves, and that it would force reforms to their party system that would largely prevent the kind of outsider demagogue problem that we saw in the current election cycle with Trump and Sanders. It’s certainly thought provoking, and a timely defence of our parliamentary institutions as they are supposed to function.

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Roundup: Happy Dominion Day!

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Happy Dominion Day! In lieu of the usual rant, today I leave you with a few items for your perusal: a look at ten animals that helped shaped Canada, a look back at the creation of the flag, 40 famous Canadians giving their memories of childhood summers, and Maclean’s has 111 stories from Canadians. Now go enjoy the day, to the sounds of my July 1st theme song.

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QP: Sharper responses to repetitive questions

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The vast majority of MPs fresh from a convention, you would have thought that the leaders would be there to join them, but no, Elizabeth May was the only party leader present in the Commons for QP on a sweltering day in the Nation’s Capital. Denis Lebel led off, demanding a referendum on electoral reform to ensure that there was proper support. Mark Holland responded, inviting members of the opposition for their input on what kind of a system they would like to see. Lebel repeated the question in English, and Holland brought up the Fair Elections Act. Lebel asked again, and Holland broadened his response to say that it wasn’t just about electoral reform, but about things like mandatory voting or electronic voting. Andrew Scheer was up next, and demanded that the government withdraw the motion to create the electoral reform committee. Holland reiterated the points that people believe that the status quo isn’t good enough. Scheer closed it off with a series of lame hashtag jokes, but Holland praised the dynamic conversation that was about to happen. Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet led off for the NDP, and wanted C-14 referred to the Supreme Court. Jody Wilson-Raybould insisted that they needed to pass the bill before the Supreme Court deadline. The question was repeated in French, and Wilson-Raybould stated that the bill is the best public policy framework going forward. Murray Rankin took over, and pleaded for the government to work with them to get the bill right. Wilson-Raybould’s answer didn’t change, and on a repeated supplemental, Jane Philpott insisted that they need the legislation in place to protect physicians and pharmacists.

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Roundup: Jumping the satellite offices gun

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The NDP are signalling that they have received a hopeful sign in their attempt to take their battle over their satellite offices to the Federal Court, because an affidavit from a university professor that argues in favour of their position was accepted as evidence by the court. If I may be so bold, championing this as a hopeful sign is jumping the gun. Sure, they haven’t had their case summarily dismissed just yet, but that’s hardly a good sign. It could be that the judge wants to hear more arguments before writing his or her reasons as to why this case should never be brought before the courts because of parliamentary privilege, and while there is some academic opinion out there that this doesn’t qualify, I have a hard time seeing why not. It is a fundamental tenet of our democratic system that parliament be self-governing, which means that it does not submit itself to an external body for oversight, and that the courts do not interfere with Parliament and its operations, just as Parliament does not interfere with the courts as they do their job. The mechanism by which the House of Commons governs its affairs is the Board of Internal Economy. They may choose at some future point to come up with a new internal mechanism, but for the time being, that’s it. Normally it operates by consensus, but in this case, the NDP feel that they are being treated unfairly because the other parties at the table insisted that they broke the rules, and to justify their refusal to play by those rules, the NDP have cried “partisan” and “kangaroo court” rather than admit that they were in the wrong when they used parliamentary resources to open up those satellite offices (the very nature of which are dubious to begin with, because they are an extension of the centralization of power and communications within the leader’s office, which is problematic for the rights of individual MPs). By turning to the courts, the NDP are repudiating the supremacy of parliament in determining its own affairs, and that’s a problem. But then again, they are consistent in this repudiation, from demanding that the Board of Internal Economy be dismantled and replaced by a new bureaucracy to oversee MPs activities and expenses, and that senators be placed under some other external authority (in advance of abolition, of course). The problem with trying to replace parliamentary self-governance with a technocratic bureaucracy is that it undermines the fundamental nature of our democratic system. If we can’t expect the people we elect to be able to manage their own affairs, then why are we bothering to elect them in the first place? We might as well just hand power back to the Queen, tell her that the past 170-odd years of Responsible Government didn’t really work out, but thank you very much, and be done with it. Asking the courts to interfere with Parliament’s self-governing ability is a similar admission, rather than taking responsibility for their actions. It’s petulant and does long-term damage to our very democratic system. I quite look forward to a sound denunciation of their position by the Federal Court.

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