Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

QP: Thanks for your pre-arranged meeting

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Tuesday, and it was the first regular QP not attended by the new prime minister. Rona Ambrose led off, reading her thanks for Trudeau taking her advice and meeting with Denis Coderre — you know, the meeting he had already had planned before QP yesterday. Ambrose suggested that if he wanted to create other jobs, the government could permit the extension of the Toronto Island Airport, which would hopefully help Bombardier sell more jets. Marc Garneau responded by saying they took an undertaking to respect Toronto’s waterfront plans. Ambrose then raised the spectre of ISIS, and conflated the AQIM attack in Burkina Faso with the other conflict. Stephane Dion insisted that Canada was part of the fight against ISIS. Ambrose then called ISIS the greatest threat to women and GLBT rights, to which Sajjan insisted that ISIS was a threat that he was taking seriously. Gérard Deltell then repeated Ambrose’s first question with the spin of other Quebec industry, and got a response from Jim Carr about the importance of resource development, and took a a second question on Deltell in the same vein. Thomas Mulcair was up next, and demanded that the government not appeal the Human Rights Tribunal decision on First Nations child welfare, to which Jody Raybould-Wilson assured him that they would reform the child welfare system, but did leave the door open for judicial review. Mulcair then turned to the issue of existing pipeline approval processes, to which Catherine McKenna spoke about rebuilding trust with stakeholders. Mulcair demanded that the assessments be redone, but McKenna’s answer didn’t waver. Mulcair thundered about broken promises before pivoting to his scripted question about EI eligibility, to which MaryAnn Mihychuk assured him that they were conducting a comprehensive review.

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Roundup: “Elected” senatorial whinging

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One of Alberta’s “senators in waiting” is grumbling about the current Senate appointment process, believing that the people of Alberta “have spoken” when they chose his name from a list to one day fill a Senate seat for that province. The problem, of course, is that the Supreme Court declared that whole process – which was a bit of a farce from its very inception – unconstitutional. If one wants Senate elections, they need a constitutional amendment with the seven-provinces-representing-fifty-percent-of-the-population amending formula. And don’t give me the “but it’s a non-binding election” line either, as Justice Cromwell very rightly pushed back during the Senate Reference hearings, “why not hold a consultative auction then? Is that any less valid?” The thing with the excuse for Senate elections as they have existed in this country so far is that they don’t actually provide any form of accountability is because they are for a non-renewable term. With an election, the re-election is where the accountability comes in. Anyone can get elected, no matter how terrible – we’ve seen untold number of examples of this in the past, and with the process that Alberta put into place, most of their Senate “elections” were just names on a ballot – most of the time, there was little advertising, there were no televised debates, and generally only one party participated as the Liberals boycotted the process and the NDP had no interest seeing as they want the Senate abolished anyway. At least when you have MPs who more or less accidentally get elected, you can judge them the next time around to see whether they did a good job or not (and we got a taste of this with the demise of many of those NDP MPs who got elected in the “Orange Wave” in 2011). Complicating the process in the Alberta conception of Senate “consultative elections” was the notion that they were based on provincial party nominations which don’t necessarily correspond to the federal parties that Senators caucus in (or at least used to until a couple of years ago), and what would one’s platform be anyway? It’s pretty hard to make legislative promises as a Senator, and promising transparency in spending is a sideshow compared to the actual legislative duties that they are expected to perform. And if memory serves, none of the “elected” Senators that Harper appointed have put forward any bills in the Senate either. One of them is also now concern trolling about the new “independent” senators as not being accountable to a party caucus, which makes one wonder why the big fuss about electing a Senator if one simply expects them to follow party lines despite the fact that the place was created with institutional independence for the very sake of pushing back against the government. Nevertheless, the Conservatives’ democratic reform critic has decried the new Senate appointments process as an “insult to Alberta” (erm, what part of unconstitutional don’t you understand?) and now we get these demands that the results of this sham election be considered regardless of the process or the Supreme Court’s judgment. The Senate was not designed to simply create 105 new backbenchers for the Commons. It would be nice if people stopped insisting as though that were the case, which is precisely what these “elections” have given us.

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Roundup: Cauliflower concerns

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The NDP put out a press release yesterday, which was essentially an object lesson in precisely what not to do when trying to make hay out of a political issue. The issue – rising food prices, and in particular, the rising cost of fruits and vegetables, and the lament that cauliflower is now a “luxury item.” Err, except that it’s not. And worse, that its “inexplicable” rise in price is entirely explicable – there’s a drought in California, and then there was a frost, which reduced the supply, and the increased demand lately (because it’s a trendy food right now) means that, thanks to the basic laws of supply and demand, the price spiked for a few weeks. And lo, it’s come back down again. And let us not forget that fresh fruits and vegetables in the winter is actually a luxury that our parents pretty much never had. They attempted to use the release to highlight inequality – Mulcair put out a release a couple of days previous, lamenting that Trudeau didn’t bring up inequality during his speech at Davos – but most of the claims in the cauliflower release were spurious. Transportation costs are not increasing – the crashing price of oil means that the cost of fuel is coming down by quite a lot. And the lament that the December rate of inflation was 1.6 percent? Um, target inflation is two percent, so unless they have another target in mind, that might be a policy they want to put out there. Rising food costs also have a lot to do with the lower dollar, and if memory serves, the NDP were lamenting that the dollar was too high (no doubt because they felt it was depressing the manufacturing sector, never mind that there are deeper structural issues than just the dollar alone), and that’s the thing about a low dollar – that it reduces your purchasing power, particularly if the fresh fruits and vegetables that don’t grow in this country in the winter have to be imported. To cap it off, the release offers no actual suggestions for what they’d like to see – only a vague statement that the upcoming budget is an opportunity to do something about inequality. So what, pray tell, is up for offer? Socialist wealth redistribution? The government is already raising taxes on the wealthiest one percent and offering more transfers to poorer families. So in totality, one has to ask if there as any adult supervision in putting out this hot mess of a press release, because the evidence before us makes that assertion unlikely in the extreme.

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Roundup: Appointment board terms

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The Order in Council relating to the new Senate appointment board was made public yesterday, and some of the details were tweeted out (as below, with commentary). Of note for me when you read the terms was that this interim process for the first five appointments will be done by engaging with civil society groups of various distinctions. The permanent process going forward will be the one that invites people to nominate others (or themselves) as vacancies come open.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/690289470709563392

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/690289727677829121

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/690290163809959937

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Roundup: An appointment panel is named

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The government announced the composition of the permanent members of the Senate appointment advisory board, along with the ad hoc members of the three provincial members for the Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba seats that they plan to fill immediately. The federal members are headed by Huguette Labelle, a former senior civil servant and chancellor of Ottawa University, along with Indira Samarasekera, the former president of U of A who comes from a physical sciences background, and Daniel Jutras, a dean of law from McGill University. The provincial members have more varied backgrounds, including one Manitoba member who is a folk singer who also dabbles in pseudoscience around past lives, so oops there. They expect to make their first round of recommendations by the end of February – later than would have been hoped, but it’s only about three sitting weeks, so not too long to delay processes in the Senate, particularly as one of those first five appointments is to be the government’s new “coordinator” in the Senate (which remains a boneheaded suggestion if you ask me, considering that they will have no Senate experience whatsoever). And then come the complaints, mostly from the Conservatives (though the NDP did their share of tutting and shaking their heads about the “undemocratic” nature of the Senate). The problem with the complaints, largely coming out of Conservative Senate Leader Claude Carignan’s office, is that they’re grasping at straws – two of the academics were Trudeau Foundation scholars, so that obviously means they’re Liberals and can’t possibly be independent, right? No, seriously, that was Carignan’s argument. Also, that they were too elitist to pick “ordinary” Canadians to sit in the Senate, which actually isn’t their mandate. They are supposed to look for people with distinguished public service or who have some legislative experience. While I have my particular issues with the notion that the new Senators appointed through this process will all be independent (no, that’s not a guarantee, and nothing can stop them from joining whichever caucus they choose), there is this endemic chattering amongst Conservative senators that they’ll just all be Liberals by any other name, and as a result, they denounce the whole process. Never mind that the process by which some of those same senators got appointed was not particularly well run (the panic appointments of 2008 produced a number of senators of dubious merit), it makes their objections to this process to seem a bit precious. The other complaints – that because the appointment panel was not chosen by all-party consensus, that their deliberations are secret, that the short-lists are similarly kept secret, that the PM isn’t bound by the list – are all frankly out of step with the practice of Responsible Government and the constitution, and make no sense. Scott Reid’s complaint that it’s a process insulting to Albertans and their “elected” senators is also farcical considering the sham election process and the judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Senate reference case. And while there is plenty of things that could be criticised about the way this process is happening, the fact that the Conservatives are choosing the most ridiculous and specious arguments is a sign of that they’re not taking this seriously, which blunts the effectiveness of their role as official opposition.

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Roundup: Airfare obsessions

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Oh, the things we obsess over in this country – like the Prime Minister’s air travel. Perpetual source of media copy, as are the strange figures that get attached to it. As previously mentioned, Justin Trudeau and family went on vacation to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts-Nevis, and apparently rented a villa there (which they paid for out of pocket), and got a bit of tabloid attention, because why not? Also, apparently there was a bit of diplomacy as he met with the country’s prime minister and foreign minister, but that’s beside the point. The point is that while Trudeau has promised to reimburse the public purse for the equivalent of economy fares for the trip, the media continues to bring forward the dollar figure of $10,000 per flying hour to operate the Challenger jets, which the PM is obligated to take for security reasons. The problem with using that $10,000/flying hour figure is that it never places it in the context of it being a military aircraft, and it’s not just sitting around waiting to shuttle the PM around – they’re in use for other operations, and even when they’re not, they still get flown empty because those military pilots need to keep up flying hours aboard them. It’s a Thing, but nobody ever mentions it. Instead, when the PM wants to go somewhere on personal business, we drag up the $10,000/flying hours figure because we want a bit of cheap outrage, and if there’s anything that Canadian media loves, it’s cheap outrage. It is a little curious that Trudeau is reimbursing at the economy fare rate, but I guess we’ll see what that rate looks like once it’s repaid. While Paul Martin made it the practice to repay double the going business-class rate, Stephen Harper would occasionally reimburse it at what was alleged to be the lowest possible economy fare, though most of the time when reporters tried to find equivalent flights for what Harper repaid, well, it couldn’t be done. I would say that if anything, repaying less than the economy fare is almost more insulting than not repaying anything and saying “I’m Prime Minister, I can’t fly commercial, so deal with it” because it almost looks like you’re showing contempt than respecting the taxpayer (which is the born-again motto of the Conservative Party post-election). So really, we should suck it up (provided that the trips aren’t egregious) but I see little chance of that happening anytime soon.

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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: Caution on the veto

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The particular bugaboos of electoral reform and the role of the Senate have been colliding increasingly in the past number of days, as there have been threats coming that certain Conservative senators have been threatening to use their majority to vote down any legislation on changes to the electoral system unless there’s a referendum first. And then this particular op-ed in the Citizen by a Université de Montréal law professor urging them to do just that makes me want to just take a moment to talk it all through. First, a few things to keep in mind – the senator who went to the media about this threat was Don Plett, who is, well, singular on some issues. He’s broken ranks before, and is willing to stick to his guns on others, but I wouldn’t ever quote him as the voice of the Conservatives in the Senate, even though he is now the caucus whip. The other thing to keep in mind is that the Senate of Canada, being probably the most powerful Upper Chamber in the democratic world, does indeed have the power of unlimited veto – there is no overriding it if the Senate decides that they want something to die. It’s a power that they very rarely use, particularly when it comes to government bills – it’s kind of like the nuclear deterrent for legislation. No, they’d rather make amendments and send it back, with few exceptions. The reason it’s treated with such caution is that they know they don’t have the democratic mandate to exercise these powers except in rare circumstances. In those rare circumstances, they will do it because it’s their job to have a check on a majority government, and be empowered to speak truth to power, which is why they are afforded the kind of institutional independence that they have. So with this in mind, I will hold up a big caution sign when it comes to encouraging them to overturn any theoretical bill on electoral reform. This all dredges up memories of the Free Trade Agreement, and when the Senate held up that bill from the Mulroney government until it could be put to the people, seeing as this deal was hugely contentious at the time, and it was believed that it was going to be selling out our sovereignty to the Americans. The election was fought on this issue, Mulroney won, and the bill passed, and lo and behold, the sky didn’t fall. But while there was merit in putting that question to the people, it was part of the chain of events that started to polarise the Senate, which prior to 1984, was said to have operated on a much less partisan basis. Tit-for-tat games ramped up the partisanship there, until things became so bad that Mulroney exercised the emergency powers of appealing to the Queen to appoint an additional eight senators in order to get the GST passed. The Senate is currently in a vulnerable spot, and while I wouldn’t ask them not to do their jobs because they are in a period of intense scrutiny and this would get blown completely out of proportion by an ignorant pundit class and MPs with agendas harmful to the independence of the Senate – but it would hurt them. That’s why this discussion needs to be approached extremely cautiously, and rash actions scrupulously avoided at all costs.

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Roundup: Unrest without modernization

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Oh, look – it’s the Senate bat-signal, shining one last time for me this year. Here we go: Senators Greene and Massicotte, who have been trying to organise some internal reforms to the Chamber, are warning that if modernisations don’t happen within the caucuses that they may see more defections from frustrated Senators, and swelling the ranks of Independents – particularly relevant with more senators on the way chosen by this new process (though nothing says that all of these new senators will sit as Independents, or that they won’t opt to sit in one of the two existing caucuses). Many of the reforms that the two are proposing are pretty modest – electing chairs and vice-chairs of standing committees, replacing Question Period with “Issues Period,” electing caucus officers, televising Senate proceedings; larger communications budgets to promote the Senate and its work (particularly committee reports); and electing the Speaker. Some of these are already in the works, like televising/webcasting procedures, which will happen in a year or two, once they get the technology sorted. Similarly, work to reform Senate Communications has been ongoing, and will continue, and I’m sure no one will argue that more money would help. Some of them – electing caucus officers – already happens in the Senate Liberal caucus, and sounds like is starting to happen in the Conservative ranks. The issue of committee membership is a topic that is currently being debated, and no doubt work will be undertaken on this in the Senate Rules committee, where it will start getting hammered out because the growing number of Independents does make this a priority issue for them. Some of the ideas, however, are more problematic, such as electing the Senate Speaker. Why? Because the Senate Speaker is actually the titular Head of Parliament; it makes sense for this to be a government appointee as a result, and because of this titular position, it comes with diplomatic and protocol responsibilities. Having the Senate elect their own that could be in opposition to the government of the day would be a serious problem, which few people seem to be grasping. As for “Issues Period,” I find it to be the weakest suggestion, particularly as asking questions of committee chairs a) is already possible, and b) doesn’t happen often because there’s not a lot to ask of them. As I explained in my piece in the National Post last week, Senate Question Period is about holding government to account, and with there being no Conservative Atlantic Canadian MPs in the Commons, it gives those Atlantic senators an opportunity to play that role. Or rather, it would if they had someone to hold account. In the absence of that, the Senate loses out on one of its functions, which will become a problem, and it’s something that “Issues Period” won’t solve.

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Roundup: Different approaches to transparency

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The government announced yesterday that they would be halting compliance measures related to the First Nations Financial Transparency Act, and would restore the funds frozen to those 38 bands that had not reported yet. It was a move that First Nations applauded, while Conservatives and other small-c conservative types decried as making things less accountable. We also found out that the previous government was considering putting those non-compliant bands under third party management, which sounds fairly drastic. It’s not that First Nations are against being accountable – for the most part, they have indicated that they want to be, but that the previous government’s legislation was ham-fisted and in some cases unfair because it forced the reporting of revenue streams that didn’t come from taxpayers. In fact, they have long raised the notion of the creation of a First Nations Auditor General, but the Conservatives were never in favour of it. And to be sure, there are bands that do require a closer eye because in some First Nations, there are problems with nepotism and corruption, and it does need exposure. The question becomes what tools are best able to accomplish the goal that aren’t paternalistic or steeped in racist assumptions. It’s something that the current government is looking to engage with, and we’ll see where their consultations take them, but this will no doubt be part of their move to transform their relationship with Indigenous Canadians.

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