At the end of the first week of the Duffy trial, the Crown regained some of the ground that it was appearing to lose – it wasn’t just that the rules were loose, or that there was no definition around residency, but there was an expectation that senators behave honourably, and thanks to the actions of the likes of Duffy, Wallin, and others, that expectation is now being buried under new legalistic guidelines. There was also pushback to the notion that because the Prime Minister appointed Duffy a Senator from PEI, his residency was assumed to be genuine – there are limits, and as I’ve discussed on this blog previously, not only did the PMO not ensure that their ducks were in a row on that front before Duffy was appointed (as previous governments who took appointments seriously and didn’t make them in a panic had done), but they almost practically encouraged the alleged abuses of Duffy and Wallin in particular by that very act of not ensuring residence upon appointment. Duffy himself kept trying to get reassurance as to the residency issue – as his own diaries show – but apparently only enough to ensure that he didn’t need to make the effort of actually ensuring that he was properly moved to the Island as his principle residence. What should be addressed – but isn’t in the trial because it is beyond the ambit – is the fact that when the Queen or GG makes the appointment on the basis of the PM’s advice, it is assume that the advice is sound because of Responsible Government. In the case of Duffy, we can be reasonably assured that the advice was likely not sound – that Duffy was not qualified to be a senator from PEI, or Wallin a Senator from Saskatchewan. What that also means is that under Responsible Government, we get to hold that government to account, and there is an election coming up. Perhaps we need to remind people of that fact. Maclean’s also has commissioned comic strips of the week’s events, while Scott Reid gives us his take on the Duffy Diaries, and the defence to date.
Tag Archives: Canadian Forces
Roundup: The trial begins
The day has finally arrived, and the Mike Duffy trial can begin – and let me say, if you were sick of hearing about it before it began, well, the wall-to-wall coverage is going to be insufferable, especially over the next two weeks until the Commons resumes its sitting, and we’ll get a budget. And you’ll forgive me if I’m not one of the people who is expecting this to be a litany of fireworks and bombshells that will damage the PMO. If anything, I would presume that the judge would take a dim view of any attempt to make this a trial of Stephen Harper’s government rather than of Duffy’s culpability in his own affairs. After all, he signed off on all of those expenses, and he bears responsibility for everything, up to and including accepting that cheque from Nigel Wright. The rest – trying to pry open the inner workings of the PMO, as much as Duffy’s lawyer may try to bring this up to portray Duffy as the victim or a pawn in these machinations, I doubt will hold much water. In fact, even the most recent “shocking” revelation has nothing to do with the PMO, but rather with Duffy’s own hand in things. So no, I really don’t think this is going to be cause for Harper to sweat or lay awake at night – one doubts that Duffy has too much dirt left that can damage him at this point. (Incidentally, the Maclean’s Duffy trial page is pretty sweet, particularly the Scott Feschuk humour pieces.)
ICYMI, back in September I profiled Duffy's lawyer, Donald Bayne, for @CanLawMag. http://t.co/5vbbFs4cTn
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) April 7, 2015
Roundup: Exeunt Glover and Paradis
Another two are down, and one wonders how many more are still contemplating the plunge. It was announced on Friday that both Shelly Glover and Christian Paradis, middling cabinet ministers such as they are, weren’t going to run again. Glover indicated she was going to return to her policing career, while Paradis cited “personal reasons.” Both, as it happens, have had a number of brushes with the Ethics Commissioner, and it does make one wonder if that really was a common denominator in their rather abrupt decisions – that all of the attention being paid to the Duffy trial is forcing some of the players with in Conservative Party headquarters to try and scrub away as many of the potentially embarrassing messes as they can before the election happens, so that it can’t be used against them in the race to be purer than pure. The late date of these announcements is also a bit of a puzzle, given the ultimatums that Harper had previously given, so that he had an election-ready cabinet in place, and we saw a number of ministers make their departures then. Baird later dropped out entirely, but Glover and Paradis plan to finish out their terms, and thus the question remains as to whether or not their announcements mean yet another mini-shuffle, with just eight sitting weeks left? It also makes one wonder if there are any other ministers considering their futures now, and wondering if the time isn’t right to get out while the going is good – or if they are seeing writing on the wall, and would rather leave on their own terms rather than face defeat in what could be a brutal slog of an election. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
QP: Easter season Friday-on-a-Thursday
With it being an early end to the week in advance of Easter long weekend and a two-week constituency break, QP was held at the usual Friday time slot of 11 am. And while it was on a Friday schedule, there was better than usual Friday attendance, including one major leader — Thomas Mulcair. Mulcair led off by reading a rambling question about balancing the budget on the backs of the middle class. Andres Saxton responded by reading some talking points about the family tax cuts, and warned that the opposition would take them away. Mulcair made some digs about Senator Nancy Ruth, to which Candice Bergen responded with some non sequitur talking points about those same family tax cuts. Mulcair then read some concerns about the Future Shop job losses, and Pierre Poilievre got a turn about those same talking points. Charlie Angus then got up to ask an out of bounds question about Senate travel — which earned him a warning from the Speaker after the fact, to which Paul Calandra reminded the House about their satellite office spending, and then they had another go around of the same. Marc Garneau led off for the Liberals, demanding infrastructure spending, to which Poilievre gave the same response. Scott Brison took another go of it in English, and Candice Bergen got another turn to deliver the approved lines. Brison then noted the amount of government advertising dollars that could go toward creating summer jobs, but Pierre Poilievre delivered a tired “forty million dollars” line before returning to the family tax cut talking points.
Roundup: Camembert and clutched pearls
In the media feeding frenzy yesterday morning, appetites whetted by unconfirmed reports by CTV that some 40 senators got additional letters from the Auditor General looking for further clarifications on expenses audited, one particular senator got swarmed while waiting at an elevator. Senator Nancy Ruth, who is a character who shoots from the hip and a pretty deadpan sense of humour, expressed her concerns about the Auditor General not understanding the role that a senator plays – in her case, as a feminist activist who brings a gender analysis lens to the work she does in the Upper Chamber – and then noted that the auditors were getting really picky to the point of being weird, like asking why her assistant expensed a breakfast when she should have eaten on the plane on her flight from Toronto to Ottawa. Nancy Ruth, deadpan, said that airplane food was awful, with “ice cold camembert and broken crackers.” But immediately We The Media clutched our pearls that she made such a quip. Camembert? That sounds awfully fancy! Why, normal Canadians would only eat blocks of Kraft cheese, thank you very much. And suddenly it became held up as a symbol of the Senate’s problems, and its members’ “entitlements.” There is this terrible strain of petty cheapness in our media – we’re aghast that things cost money (look at the renovations to Parliament Hill, much of which had been allowed to deteriorate because of the optics of spending money), and if someone puts up a dollar figure without context, it’s all the more fodder. If someone makes a legitimate expense, well, “ordinary Canadians” don’t get these expenses (err, except they do), so we try and shame them for claiming things that are within the rules. The moral panic around taxpayer dollars can be terribly provincial because it tends to be so very petty, this enviousness that some people are rewarded for doing long and difficult work – and make no mistake, the life of a senator is far less glamorous than people like to make it seem, particularly if you have a gruelling travel schedule to a lonely city like Ottawa and back. And it is a lot of work, both on Senate files and the kinds of projects that Senators take on because they have a position and a platform by which to champion them. But rather than acknowledge it, we begrudge it and we try to make everyone resent it too. Is it any wonder there is such cynicism about politics in this country? We stoke it at every opportunity. Maybe the problem is us, and our inability to roll with a quip or a joke, too busy clutching at our pearls instead.
https://twitter.com/jordanowens/status/583346556625154048
https://twitter.com/jandrewpotter/status/583450918303232000
QP: What about Future Shop?
Monday in the Commons, and as is now usual, none of the major leaders were present. It’s not like holding the government to account is important or anything. That left Nycole Turmel to lead off, haltingly reading a question about the closures of Future Shop stores, and government inaction on job creation. Joe Oliver was actually present for the first time in weeks, but simply delivered a talking point on the the fragile global economy and their low-tax plan. Turmel asked again in French, and got much the same answer. Turmel then turned to the issue of Jason Kenney’s false statements about precision-guided munitions. Kenney stood up and insisted that the U.S. and Canada are the only countries with these capabilities. Jack Harris asked again in English, and Kenney insisted that the Chief of Defence Staff confirmed his statement, which…is not necessarily the case. For his final question, Harris asked about Canadian jets possibly coming under fire in Syria, to which Kenney said that he was told that the Syrians didn’t have radar coverage in that region. Marc Garneau was up for the Liberals, and asked about downgraded economic forecasts. Joe Oliver responded with a quip about high Liberal taxes. Ralph Goodale then asked for more investment in municipal infrastructure, to which Joe Oliver insisted that the Liberals wanted to weaken the oil economy. Huh? Another round offered no further clarity.
Roundup: $3 billion or else
Rarely does a day go by that the government doesn’t like to rub the Liberals’ noses in their past on defence spending, and that line “decade of darkness” is uttered. Never mind, of course, that it was Paul Martin that started the major recapitalisation of the Forces – no, the Conservatives like to take ownership of it. The problem is that all the money they poured into the Forces was almost immediately clawed back as their own spending restraints kicked in, most of the capital projects have been for naught thanks to botched procurement process after botched procurement process, and now, they’re facing the real killer – inflation. While sure, they may have poured in a high dollar amount of money at one point, those funds are being eaten away at by inflation as it goes unspent on said aforementioned capital projects, and it buys fewer and fewer ships and planes than it might have when it was supposed to go forward. Now, the Parliamentary Budget Officer is warning that the current spending is unsustainable, and unless the government can pour at least another $3 billion every year into the Forces, that they’re going to have to start cutting capabilities within three years. It must be pretty sobering, but even when these kinds of figures have been presented in the past, the government’s response is always “DECADE OF DARKNESS! MOST MONEY INTO THE FORCES EVER!” without those figures ever really bearing out. But hey, so long as they look like the only party to care about the armed forces, right?
Roundup: Some questionable justifications
Yesterday, Jason Kenney went on a charm offensive to lay out the legal position on extending our bombing raids into Syria, most notably saying that we have authority under Article 51 of the UN Charter, with Iraq asking us to help them defend their borders while the Syrian government is unwilling or unable to. It’s pretty thin ice under international law, but if the Americans are doing it, apparently that’s good enough for this government. More dubious was Kenney saying that we’re acting in the “spirit of” Responsibility to Protect, to which Trudeau later made the point that one of the tenets of R2P is that you don’t make the situation worse, which could be the outcome if our bombing ISIS in Syria ends up solidifying Assad/ And what about Syrian air defences? Do we not need to coordinate with them so as to not get shot down? Kenney says there’s no ground radar in that part of the country, and that ISIS doesn’t have weapons capable enough of taking down our fighter jets. Kenney also made the claim that only the smart bombs that Canada and the US posses in the alliance are capable of doing the job, but experts are disputing that fact, pointing out that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates also have the capability. In other words, this sounds like Kenney embellishing the truth again, which puts the veracity of his other statements into question as well. As for Harper, he started joking that we didn’t have to worry about ISIS’ lawyers taking us to court, when the bigger concern is actually other world leaders. You know, like Putin, for whom we are accusing of breaking international law for annexing the Crimea. Oh, wait a twisted little world it is.
Roundup: Cases and questions on Iraq
Stephen Harper gave his big speech about extending the Iraq mission into Syria yesterday morning, and not unsurprisingly, the opposition parties were not in favour of the motion, though they have slightly different reasons for it. The NDP, not surprisingly, reject the whole mission outright and went so far as to basically call Harper an ally of Bashar al-Assad, while the Liberals focused on principles they laid out not being met, and their past objections about the mission not being suitable for Canadian non-combat capabilities. There was also the difference of the NDP promising to pull our forces out right away if they form government, whereas the Liberals said that they wouldn’t because we’ve made commitments to our allies and they would ensure that we at least see those through. As for the legal justification, the Conservatives offered a couple of different ones during the day, which doesn’t help with the clarity. Here’s the statement Elizabeth May would have said if she hadn’t been denied permission to speak by the jackasses in the backbenches. Paul Wells parses the speeches a little more, and pays particular attention to Trudeau and his attempt to stay consistent. Michael Petrou gives some perspective sauce as someone who’s been in the region an on the front lines. Stephen Saideman has questions and comments about the motion, and David Pugliese tries to answer a few of the basic questions people may have. Philippe Lagassé examines the motion from the lens of a political convention (still likely designed to launder the decision) as opposed to an attempt to build a constitutional one.
Conservatives reflexively deny consent to let @ElizabethMay speak, but when front bench says yes, it's too late. #HoC #cdnpoli
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) March 24, 2015
QP: On bombing Syria
About four hours after Harper addressed the Commons about extending the Iraq mission, everyone gatherer again, all leaders present and full benches behind them. Thomas Mulcair led off, asking about the October statements that bombing in Syria would only happen with the permission of that government, and asked what changed. Harper responded that ISIS was taking refuge in Syria, and that we were following the lead of our allies in bombing across that border. Mulcair asked about the change in statements on painting targets, but Harper insisted that the government would act about the threat of ISIS. Muclair asked about how many new soldiers would be added, to which Harper insisted that those would not change. Mulcair asked for an exit strategy, and Harper responded by being “clear” about the threat that ISIS poses to Canada and the world. Mulcair wondered how Harper could still claim it wasn’t a combat mission, and Harper responded by wondering how the NDP could not support the mission. Justin Trudeau was up next, asking about the planning horizon for the combat role. Harper responded that the motion was for up to twelve months, and that they would continue to evaluate the situation. Trudeau wondered if our Special Forces would be operating in Syria, to which Harper assured him that the motion was only for them to continue training in Northern Iraq. Trudeau then wondered how Canada would communicate with the Assad regime to ensure that our fighters would not be targeted by Syrian air defences. Harper insisted that our allies were already doing it.