Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

Roundup: Campaign autopsies in full swing

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Not that we’ve had a day to catch our breaths (more or less), the campaign post-mortems are beginning, especially from the Conservative camp. Things are starting to leak out, such as this gem from the Conservative camp, which tells about their considering and ultimately rejecting the Hail Marry pass of having Harper say that he wouldn’t run after this campaign. It also tells of the Conservatives trying to offer advice to the faltering NDP campaign about how to attack the Liberals, lest the Liberals win out over both of them, and lo and behold, they did. Ron Liepert – a former provincial cabinet minister who turned federal to take out Rob Anders at the nomination race – talks about a campaign where the central party wasn’t respecting the local candidates or listening to their concerns on the ground. Andrew Coyne writes that the party defeated itself with a “deep, unrelenting, almost poisonous cynicism.” Not surprisingly, Conservatives like Michelle Rempel are questioning the tone of the campaign. As for the NDP, they are starting their own process, but some, like now-former MP Craig Scott, are less gracious in defeat.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/657050622504472576

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/657050927812075520

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Roundup: Boil-water promises need a grain of salt

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Some First Nations issues have finally been getting some play in the past couple of days in the election, after the early reiterations of positions by the parties with regards to things like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the issue of missing and murdered Aboriginal women. While Trudeau and Mulcair in recent days made repeated promises around closing funding gaps with First Nations, particularly around education, Trudeau this week made a pledge around the boil-water advisories on some 93 First Nations reserves, and said that he wants those eliminated within five years (though that number could be larger as the federal list doesn’t include BC). The question that Kady O’Malley asked, quite reasonably, is how big of a hole that puts in Trudeau’s other spending promises around infrastructure spending, as previous estimates have pegged water and wastewater systems needed on 571 First Nations around $1.2 billion. What could be more concerning to Trudeau and company is this conversation that Maclean’s had with an expert in this particular field, who said that dealing with this problem in five years is unrealistic given that the reasons for the advisories on so many communities is varied and that there can’t be a simple top-down fix for the issue. It is a complex problem that involves more than one level of government, and while the promise may be laudable, it may be necessary to temper expectations (albeit, as openly and transparently as possible) while still pushing ahead on the file, fixing as many as possible in five years but noting that eliminating the problem may take longer.

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Roundup: The problem with paper candidates

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Yesterday, the quixotic Jean-François Party released a rare bilingual statement to decry the use of “paper candidates,” citing a case of a Green candidate from BC who had never visited the riding he or she is contesting in Quebec. If there was to be a cautionary tale around the use of paper candidates, it should have been with both the NDP in the 2011 federal election, and more recently in the Alberta provincial election. In both cases, paper candidates accidentally got elected in popular “waves” where it was clear that the voters of Quebec and Alberta were motivated to vote for the party for their particular reasons (affection for Layton in 2011, anger with the Progressive Conservatives in Alberta this year). In both cases, some less than stellar MPs/MLAs were accidentally elected – one of them, incidentally, joined the Jean-François Party. While Jean-François Party co-founder (and now party president and candidate) Jean-François Larose was one of those NDP MPs who was part of the sweep, then-fellow NDP MP Manon Perreault was an example of how a paper candidate turns out to be trouble. Over the course of the 41st parliament, Perreault was charged and convicted of criminal mischief when she falsely accused an assistant of theft, and was also later investigated by the RCMP for problems with travel claims expenses (though I’m not sure we heard the outcome of said investigation). Nevertheless, she was turfed from the NDP caucus during her trial, and after the writ dropped, she joined the Jean-François Party. So really, that the party is now coming out against paper candidates when their very existence is dependent on the victory of such candidates is curious. The problem, however, is that the parties have an incentive to create these candidates, and that incentive is that running full slates, regardless if those candidates have ever been to those ridings or not, allows them to claim the maximum spending cap. Hence, as especially in Quebec in 2011, ridings which barely had NDP riding associations all accepted the “nominations” of those paper candidates which included Ruth Ellen Brosseau and the McGill Four, because the NDP wanted their spending cap. So what to do about it? It’s a sticky situation because it would seem the answer is to remove the incentive of the spending cap, but how does one enforce that the candidates have actually been to the riding, or are actually campaigning? Do we really want Elections Canada to become an intrusive body to not only poke their heads into the party nomination process and to check up on those candidates in the ridings? It’s hard to say. I do think that paper candidates are an affront to our democratic system, but without turning Elections Canada into Big Brother, I’m at a loss as to a workable solution.

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Roundup: Munk debate a success

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The Munk Debate on foreign policy was actually really well done – probably the best and most substantive debate we’ve had so far during this election, with a good format, good moderation, and bilingualism that more or less worked out (though there could have been a bit more effort into the French). (Kady’s liveblog here). We also started to see a bit more of a change in the leaders. Harper was more or less his usual self, and in foreign policy, well, he’s got ten years of experience, but he also has a record to defence. Trudeau stepped up his game in this debate, and was the most confident and self-assured he’s been of any debate. The improvement was marked, and given the low expectations going in, where people figured that foreign policy was his weakest area (especially as it’s where most of his notable gaffes going into the election were), but those fears were largely put to rest. As for Mulcair, people expecting a statesmanlike performance were largely dashed as he tended to more personal attacks and swipes, while avoiding a number of answers – possibly because his party’s foreign policy platform is the thinnest of the three. Trudeau also defended his father’s record from attacks by Mulcair, and seemed to have a few of his best moments doing so, and it did get notice over the Twitter Machine. (It was also, he noted the fifteenth anniversary of his father’s death, so that certainly did weigh on his mind at the time). Here is some debate reaction from Michael Den Tandt, the Ottawa Citizen’s panel, and over Twitter, Bob Rae (who was subject of another of Mulcair’s swipes on stage). Oh, and audience polls seem to indicate that Trudeau was the big winner. Make of that what you will.

https://twitter.com/carbonexplorer/status/648663698819694592

https://twitter.com/kateheartfield/status/648657546933325824

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Roundup: Let the equivocation begin

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With three weeks left in the race, we’ve started seeing Thomas Mulcair start equivocating – or clarifying in any case – some of the policy planks he’s been running on. In many of those cases, it’s starting to make his promises look far less impressive. Take childcare – he is now talking about sitting down with provinces and using some of their existing spaces toward his “one million spaces” goal. One example was with Ontario, and the two years of full-day kindergarten offered in this province, so how does that get counted into with is childcare pledge, and the funding questions that go along with it? Add to that, with some 900,000 spaces already in existence across the country, does that mean that his plan will simply be to add another 100,000 spaces over the next eight years and make sure that they simply cap the fees at $15/day? Or is it still supposed to be a million new spaces? With his cap-and-trade announcement, he says that provinces can opt-out so long as they meet or exceed the federal objectives. But does that not then become essentially the Liberal position, where the provinces take the lead while the federal government establishes the targets? And didn’t he denounce that very notion? Mulcair has even started back-pedalling a little on his criticism of “useless” senators, saying it was only the institution he was denouncing (which, I’m sorry, is absolutely not what he said at the time). As crunch time approaches I’ll be interested to see how much more “clarifying” happens between the different parties, and how much of that clarifying goes against what they were saying the whole time.

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Roundup: Ignoring legal advice

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Looking through the government documents made available to the public during the court challenge on the government’s niqab ban during citizenship ceremonies, a pattern emerges quickly – that the department knew this was a non-starter, and they tried to offer alternatives for accommodation. Jason Kenney, the minister at the time, would have none of it, and pressed ahead anyway. And lo and behold, he used an instrument to implement a ban that was out of order. The Federal Court has said so, and the Federal Court of Appeal upheld it in a ruling from the bench, and this didn’t even touch the Charter arguments. But it shouldn’t be a surprise given the frequency at which this government’s legal and constitutional positions keep getting struck down by the courts, whether it’s with certain mandatory minimum sentences, or the Senate reference. People wonder what kind of legal advice they’re being given, and as this particular case clearly demonstrates in the documents, they’re being told that their positions don’t hold water – and yet they push ahead anyway. As we saw in the Duffy trial that the government created their own legal advisor position within the PMO, never mind that they have the Department of Justice who should be providing them with legal advice. The plain reading of what this means of course is that they didn’t like what Justice had to tell them, so they found a workaround to give them legal advice they found was more palatable. It all seems like such a waste of time, energy and taxpayer’s money – this from a party who insisted that they were going to put an end to waste in government.

https://twitter.com/michaelplaxton/status/646638431653765120

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Roundup: F-35s flare up again

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Talk of the F-35 fighters dominated the discussion yesterday, with Harper going full-bore on trying to say that Trudeau was living on some other planet if he thought that pulling out of the F-35 programme wouldn’t “crater” the country’s aerospace industry, while Mulcair – a vocal critic of the F-35s for years – suddenly said they should stay in the competition process. Of course, it sounds increasingly like Harper is trying to indicate the F-35s are the government’s choice all along no matter the procurement process that they’re going through right now with great fanfare, while Mulcair sounds increasingly like Harper – something Trudeau probably doesn’t mind. As a reality check, there are no contracts to tear-up, because we haven’t signed or committed to anything. As well, there is no guarantee that Canada pulling out of the F-35s would damage our industry because those companies supplying parts for the aircraft were chosen for quality, and because we paid into the development process, but didn’t commit to buying the full craft itself. Not to mention, any other plane we would go with (say, the Super Hornets) would have the likelihood of as many if not more regional industrial benefits. (And while we’re on the subject of reality checks, the Liberals apparently really bungled their costing figures for the F-35s in their own backgrounders). As for how you can have an open competition but exclude the F-35s? I don’t think that’s rocket science – it seems pretty clear to me that you simply add the specification to the procurement process that it needs to have more than one engine. That would rule out the F-35 pretty effectively, no? Suffice to say, it’s a lot of sound and fury, and plenty of flashbacks to the last election where this was an issue. Paul Wells writes more about it, and how it positions the leaders.

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Roundup: About those Senators who approached Mulcair

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Thomas Mulcair is telling people that he’s had senators approach him to say that they would be willing to work with him to pass a hypothetical NDP government’s legislation, but he won’t name names. While this may well be true, at least to a certain extent – we have been seeing numerous examples in the past couple of weeks of Mulcair exaggerating the truth – this should be unpacked a little bit. The first and most obvious thing is that we need to put aside the Harper Derangement Syndrome conspiracy theory that all of the Conservative senators are going to simply defeat any Liberal or NDP legislation that comes through because the fact that they were Harper appointees will apparently make them extra dickish, or something. Never mind that we’ve had plenty of parliaments where the party not in power held a majority in the Senate and lo and behold, things got passed with little difficulty. This will not change in the future. The second is that these Senators all know that they have a job to do, and that’s to scrutinize bills that come before them. Most of the time they pass. Occasionally they get amended and sent back. On very rare occasions, they get defeated, almost always because those bills are either fatally flawed, out of order, or unconstitutional and got passed on a whipped vote. And if the NDP holds up that climate change bill as an example of one the Senate killed, well, it’s because it was out of order and never should have been allowed to pass the Commons. That said, they are not rubber stamps, and won’t simply pass bills because the Commons did. It’s not their job, and if Mulcair has a problem with that, there’s a Supreme Court reference decision he should read. Third is that even if Senate Liberals formed a quasi-government caucus in the Senate should the NDP form government, it’s because the system needs to operate somehow. They are likely going to have to kluge together some kind of procedural workarounds to the fact that there won’t be an actual Leader of the Government in the Senate who can answer on behalf of the government, and if a hypothetical Prime Minister Mulcair doesn’t appoint a Senate Speaker, that is pretty much a constitutional nightmare waiting to happen. But Mulcair refuses to answer these fundamental procedural issues, while at the same time, he and his people continue to do nothing but hurl insults at the Chamber and its inhabitants while promising their abolition (which won’t happen, but they’re going to try anyway), while continuing to actively ignore the constitutional obligation to make appointments. So no, I’m not reassured by these senators who have allegedly approached him, because there’s more to it than just passing bills. We have a parliamentary architecture that he continues to ignore, and that should be worrying to anyone who cares about parliamentary democracy.

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Roundup: The dream of tax simplification

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With the big economic debate coming up tomorrow, it’s with no small bit of amusement that noted economist Jack Mintz dropped a bomb in the middle of the election, and blowing open the pledges of most of the parties. In particular, Mintz says that the corporate tax rate should be lowered so as to keep those companies from shifting the burden in the form or lower wages or higher prices; raising the small business tax rate because it’s largely used by the wealthy to pay lower taxes; and eliminate a suite of investment tax credits to make the whole system simpler and fairer. In other words, doing pretty much the opposite of what the NDP has promised, and to a degree what the Conservatives have promised with their small business tax rate promises and more boutique tax credits than anyone knows what to do with. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find an economist who thinks that boutique tax credits are a good idea – particularly as Harper promised yet another bunch, this time for single and widowed seniors, and as Kevin Milligan explained, it’s pretty useless considering that a) it’s non-refundable and a lot of those seniors already don’t pay taxes, and b) we have a number of other income supports for seniors. (Also, I think this means that Harper is officially trolling singletons and childless couples, who are now the great pariahs of tax credits). The consensus would be that it’s better to eliminate the boutique tax credits and simply lower the overall tax rate – but how would parties be seen as rewarding “deserving” Canadians of those tax credits. (Again, it would seem that singletons and childless couples are not deserving.) Harper claimed that his boutique tax credits haven’t made tax forms too complicated. That sound you hear is every accountant in the country laughing, because it’s simply not true. We need major tax reform in this country, overhauling the system from top to bottom. (Same with the Criminal Code, incidentally). Too bad nobody is going to campaign on that.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/643841869735006208

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/643842726228680704

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Roundup: No, Chong’s bill won’t give us Australian leadership spills

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News of the leadership spill in Australia, ousting Tony Abbott as prime minister and ending the greatest political bromance of the Commonwealth countries (Harper and Abbott were quite the mutual admiration society), we were suddenly inundated with Twitter musings about whether that could happen in Canada, thanks to Michael Chong’s Reform Act which passed this summer. While Kady O’Malley offers the “in theory” answer, the in practice answer is that no, it couldn’t happen here, because Canada has a terrible system of leadership selection that purports to “democratise” the system with grassroots involvement, but instead created an unaccountable and presidentialised system of an overly powerful leader that has little fear of their caucus turning on them, because caucus didn’t select them. When it comes to removal, selection matters. A lot. Chong’s bill, perversely, makes an Australian situation less likely by raising the bar for leadership challenges to happen in the first place, and would instead give us situations like what happened in Manitoba where a sitting leader was challenged, and when it went to a leadership process where he still participated and won based on the grassroots support when his caucus was no longer behind him, well, it’s ugly and it’s down right unparliamentary given that a leader needs to have the confidence of his or her caucus, and when they don’t but stay in based on grassroots votes, the system breaks down. Paul Wells cautions that reforming a system usually replaces real or perceive problems with different problems, while Andrew Coyne points out that being able to dump a bad leader quickly is the lesser evil of being stuck with them.

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