Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

Roundup: A tire fire of a debate

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Last night was the third and final leaders’ debate in the Ontario election, and it was…terrible. Painful to watch. And yet here we are. Doug Ford promised all kinds of increased spending, and promised not a single layoff, while he offered no specifics on any promise, and a false version of history of when he was at Toronto City Hall. Andrea Horwath promised some different spending than the Liberals, that she would end “hallway medicine,” while being overly generous on the hole in her party’s platform and the fact that she doesn’t stand for Hitler memes (while not having actually rebuked or dumped the candidate accused of posting one). Kathleen Wynne was sorry that people don’t like her personally, but isn’t sorry for her record, and she offered detailed policy in a format that didn’t let leaders fully answer questions and where Horwath in particular kept interrupting and aggressively talking over everyone else. In all, a demonstration that this whole election is absolutely terrible.

In reaction, Chris Selley remarks on Ford’s performance – that the only place he stood out was his promises around childcare (though he didn’t offer specifics, which are that his tax credit won’t amount to much for parents), while David Reevely noted Horwath’s aggressive challenges around Ford’s lack of platform or Wynne’s stance around collective bargaining, showing more fire than Wynne, who was building an intellectual case in a lawyerly tone for much of the debate, only really finding her own fire when she pushed back against accusations around the Hydro One sale.

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Roundup: Don’t be fooled by Friday’s childish meltdown

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You may have heard that there was a bit of a meltdown in the House of Commons yesterday. You may also have heard a bunch of suspect commentary about what it was about, and some particularly dubious ruminations about how noble it was that these opposition MPs were standing up for their rights to examine the Estimates and to ensure that all government spending was properly voted for, and so on. The problem is, is that those sentiments demonstrate that they’ve been taken in by the ruse that this is all related to.

So, to recap: Yesterday the parties were on notice that Government House Leader Bardish Chagger was going to move the motion to start late-night sittings in the House of Commons for the last four scheduled sitting weeks, in order to get bills through and off to the Senate. After all, it’s likely that the government wants to prorogue and have a new Throne Speech in the fall, and it’s better to get as many bills off the Order Paper before that happens. But just before Chagger is going to move that motion during Routine Proceedings yesterday, the NDP’s Daniel Blaikie conveniently stands up to raise a point of order and starts to demand that the Speaker allow them to delete Vote 40 from the Estimates. Vote 40 is related to the $7 billion fund that the government wants to use to get a move on budgetary matters that haven’t made it through proper Treasury Board review yet. The figures are all in the budget, laid out in a table, on how it will be spent. The opposition has decided that this is really a “slush fund” that can be spent on anything (the government is quite insistent that if they spent it on anything other than what’s in the table in the budget that it would constitute unauthorised spending, which is a significant thing). After Blaikie started a lengthy speech about it, the Speaker said he’s heard enough, that the matter is before committee and not the Commons, so it’s not in order. When he tried to move onto other business, Blaikie kept demanding he be heard. The Conservatives joined in. And thus began an eight-minute childish tantrum of shouting and desk banging that drowned out other business, and once that calmed down, endless cycles of points of order regarding whether or not they could hear the motion or the interpretation, and so on. There was no greater principle being expressed or upheld – it was a procedural filibuster. And we know this because they tried other tactics after that one failed, including points of personal privilege over the earlier meltdown, and a concurrence debate on a committee report (which, as Kady points out, is kind of fun to watch because almost no one has prepared speeches for them, so they’re forced to think on their feet, which they should be doing anyway, but whatever).

Procedural shenanigans I’m fine with. It’s a necessary part of Parliamentary democracy. I’m less fine with the infantile tantrum that they threw when they didn’t get their way. That’s the part that needs to be called out for what it was. And I especially resent the fact that you have a bunch of pundit who should know what a filibuster looks like after being on the Hill for so many yearswho were all “They have a legitimate point!” That legitimate point, as meritorious as it may be in a more existential conversation about reform of the Estimates process, was not what this was about, and to treat it as though it was is to fall for the game. I will additionally add that I am especially displeased with the commentary on the Power & Politicspower panel, where pundits who are not in Ottawa and who don’t cover this place got space to ruminate about how the Speaker was acting partisan because the government is on its heels a bit, of that this $7 fund was just like an omnibus bill that they swore they would never use, and nobody pushed back about how bogus this commentary was. (Paul Wells offered the actual take, bolstered by Aaron Wherry, for the record, but regardless). I will reiterate that procedure matters, and it would really help if people covering and commenting on this place understood that.

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Roundup: Border agent woes

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When the House of Commons returns on Tuesday, it’s a pretty safe bet to say that the news that the Canada Border Services Agency is shifting customs agents from the GTA to the Quebec border is going to be one of the main topics of conversation. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that it’ll come up in Question Period on the first day back. Why? Because amidst this news, a memo from Air Canada pilots claims that they may face delays of up to an hour, being kept on the tarmac because of this lack of agents. There are denials all around (and I’m a bit skeptical myself – I can see big lines in the airport, but I have a hard time seeing why they’d detain them on the tarmac), but the line is going to be that Trudeau is making you wait on the tarmac because he can’t enforce the law on the border.

It’s not exactly true, of course. Whether we see actual delays at airports remains to be seen, but the continued insistence that he can somehow snap his fingers and the border will somehow seal itself is this specious bit of political fiction that nobody wants to seem to own up to. I’ve written about this before – he can’t unilaterally declare the entire border to be an official port of entry, nor can he amend the Safe Third Country Agreement because that requires the buy-in of the Americans, and that’s not going to happen. If he suspends the agreement, like the NDP demands, that will cause a flood at border crossings of people who are jurisdiction shopping while making asylum claims, which was the whole reason the agreement was made in the first place. Direct engagement with the communities where the influx is coming from had success with the Haitian community and the government is looking to repeat it with Nigeria, where most of the new claimants are coming from (and no one has yet explained why that’s the case), but we’ll see when they can actually start engaging.

What this does illustrate is that the government still has a way to go in order to re-capitalize CBSA and ensure that they have enough border guards and customs agents. (They also need to fill vacancies in the Immigration and Refugee Board, and to give them additional resources, but that hasn’t been happening expeditiously either). And yes, this is something that Conservatives can share in the blame with as well, because they cut CBSA to the point where they were having to suspend a number of programmes like screening for drugs being exported, and they had to let go of most of their sniffer dogs because they no longer had the budget. Will this light a fire under the government to properly rebuild their capacity? We’ll see. They insist they’re re-investing but it may be of little use if the situation sounds as dire as it is right now with these rotations in and out of the border crossing.

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Roundup: Sending amendments back a second time

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There’s drama with the Senate, after they sent back the omnibus transport bill back to the Commons a second time, after the government rejected several of the nineteen amendments proposed. We haven’t seen this happen in twelve years, that last time being in 2006 when there was back-and-forth on Harper’s Accountability Act, when he had a minority in the Commons, and the Liberals had a majority in the Senate, giving them the necessary leverage. But while much of the focus is on whether or not there’s going to be a constitutional crisis over this (there’s not, and quit being such drama queens about it), there is actually some nuance here that should be explored a bit more.

There are a couple of reasons why the Senate eventually voted to insist on some of the amendments, and one of those had to do with the way it creates unfairness for the Maritimes when it comes to rail transportation rates, as there is a monopoly in the region. What’s very interesting about this is the fact that after PEI Senator Diane Griffin made her speech about the regional unfairness, all subsequent debate became spontaneous and unscripted – something we almost never see in either chamber. This is how Parliament should work, and based on that speech, some senators changed their votes, which shows that the process does work as it’s supposed to, from time to time. It also shows that the Senate is fulfilling its role when it comes to standing up for regions, as they are doing for the Maritimes in this case. (Griffin, incidentally, says she’ll likely back down if the Commons rejects the amendments a second time).

The other reason the Senate is sending these amendments back, however, is the fact that when the government rejected them, they didn’t offer an explanation as to why, and this is important (and I haven’t seen anyone reporting this fact). And this puts the onus on the government, because they owe senators that explanation as to why their sober second thought is being rejected. Just about a year ago, when the Senate sent back amendments to the budget implementation bill, the House rather snippily stated that such amendments would impede the privileges of the Commons – but never stated how they would do so. While the Senate passed the bill, they did send a message back to the Commons that yes, they do have the ability to amend budget bills thank you very much, but they did make sure to let Bardish Chagger know their displeasure the next time she appeared at Senate QP, where they wanted the explanation as to how the amendments would impact the Commons’ privileges (and she never did give them an answer). Trudeau keeps saying he respects the independence of the Senate, but he should demonstrate that respect by offering explanations and not treating the work of the Senate in such a dismissive manner.

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Roundup: Erin Weir’s apostasy

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First thing Thursday morning, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh took to the microphone in the Foyer, caucus behind him, to announce that he had expelled Erin Weir from caucus following the conclusion of the investigation into harassment allegations. And to be clear, he wasn’t kicked out because of the conclusions, given that Weir agreed to anti-harassment training and conciliation with his accusers – rather, it was because he had the temerity to go to the media to respond to the leaked allegations made to him without getting the permission of the leader’s office. And then the other MPs told reporters that Weir “expelled himself” by doing so, because it meant there was no trust in that relationship. So…wow.

To be clear, we don’t have much in the way of details about the allegations that were sustained in the report, but we have Weir’s word for them, and the clues that Singh dropped. That the former senior staffer in Mulcair’s office leaked to the CBC forced Weir’s hand in responding (which he says he asked Singh’s office, and they never responded to him), and this was the basis of the policy dispute on the floor of the Saskatchewan NDP convention where that staffer threw her weight around, and then accused him of harassment. As for the three “sustained” incidents of sexual harassment, Singh said it was because Weir failed to read “non-verbal cues” but that when he was told his advances were unwarranted, he ceased. Weir says that he was told over the course of the investigation that it was essentially because he’s a “close talker” and failed to realize that it made some people uncomfortable, but he has no idea who his accusers were, and says that after the initial complaint about him that the party essentially put out a “call for proposals” from staff to see if there were any complaints, which does seem a bit suspicious. It also seems like there is a giant inflation in terms of what constitutes harassment and sexual harassment, particularly coming from an MP who is a bit socially awkward.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/992068538142605312

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Weir contends that he will sit as an independent for now, hoping that Singh will see reason, but given how the ranks have closed around him in a way they didn’t when David Christopherson got punished for breaking ranks on a vote suggests that Weir is now guilty of some form of apostasy, particularly that he had the temerity to defend himself in public when his accuser apparently leaked to the media to get ahead of the report when the leader’s office would have had him be humiliated publicly while he waited for permission to respond, which reinforces this notion that there can be cult-like behaviour in the party. Meanwhile, Don Martin suggests that the outcome of this mess suggests that this became a witch hunt, while John Ivison contends that this whole affair is not reflecting well on Singh, who continues to flounder as party leader. At Issue also took a look, and notes the rumours circulating that the party was looking for an excuse to boot Weir for whatever the reason.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau says they will not delay implementing legal cannabis, but that will still likely mean a September rollout, and that legalization is a “process.”
  • Scandal! The Trudeau family’s meals are prepared at 24 Sussex and then sent to Rideau Cottage by messenger! (Seriously? This is what we’re worrying about?)
  • The federal government will intervene in the BC Court of Appeal reference on pipelines. This is standard since their jurisdiction is up for question.
  • Bill Morneau says they’ll have a better handle on the costs to households from carbon pricing in September when all provinces have submitted their plans.
  • An audit shows that the programme to help veterans transition to civilian jobs was next to useless. The government has since switched to a different system.
  • Scott Brison isn’t looking to budge from his $7 billion fund in the Estimates to get programmes moving, while the real problem remains the sclerotic bureaucracy.
  • The government used their majority to reject nine of nineteen Senate amendments to the transport bill. Now we’ll watch senators huff and puff before passing it.
  • The Commons privacy committee is ordering Cambridge Analytica to preserve vital data in advance of investigation, given news of their bankruptcy proceedings.
  • The military is being accused of “brass bulge” as upper ranks are growing faster than the regular forces are.
  • In case you were curious, it turns out that part of why the parliamentary lawn is being dug up is because they have to replace the drainage pipes below it.
  • While the Supreme Court of Canada upheld his influence peddling conviction, Bruce Carson is likely to avoid jail time.
  • NDP MP Kennedy Stewart is considering a run for Vancouver mayor.
  • Here’s a good profile of Doug Ford, and what the experience of working with him on Toronto City Council was like.
  • The Canadian Press’ Baloney Meter™ tests the Conservative claim that they cut emissions without cutting taxes. (Ron Howard’s voice: “They didn’t.”)
  • Colby Cosh contends that our system worked in keeping outsider Kevin O’Leary away from political leadership (but that Doug Ford was a perfect storm).

Odds and ends:

A documentary crew is looking to film the Senate’s third reading speeches and vote on the bill to end whale and dolphin captivity.

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Roundup: Scheer’s vague hand-wavey promises

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We’ve been through a week of particularly misleading rhetoric about the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report on the impact of a $50/tonne carbon tax on the Canadian economy, where the figures about the “damage” it would cause to our economy supposes that the money collected would be either lit on fire, or given in lump sums to individual families rather than recycled in provincial tax cuts or other measures. But confident that it reinforces their narrative, the Conservatives have been parading it around as “proof” that they are right to oppose carbon pricing. To that end, while doing the rounds on the Sunday political shows, Andrew Scheer said that his party’s climate plan – yet to be revealed, but he promises that’ll happen before the 2019 election – will both meet Paris Accord targets but won’t impose a carbon tax. That’s…special.

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Given previous Conservative positions on this, it’s likely that this will involve either magic, or some particularly onerous and costly regulations of industry that will simply internalize the costs (which get passed onto consumers) rather than having that cost be out in the open so that people can see it in front of them and make choices appropriates – you know, a market pricing mechanism that you would think a conservative party would favour over red tape and regulations. (This of course assumes that they are actually a conservative party instead of a right-flavoured populist party, which we know that they’ve become). They will claim that they had a record of carbon reduction while in office, but it had zero to do with their own politics, and everything to do with Ontario shuttering their coal-fired electricity plants and the economic downturn. Remember that their “coal-fired regulations” applied to new plants which hadn’t been built yet, and their sector-by-sector regulations were slow to roll out, and steadfastly strayed away from our biggest-emitting sectors, like the oil sands (which they still haven’t given any indication how they would mitigate their emissions without carbon pricing to drive innovation). I suspect we’re going to be looking at some hand-waving about future technology that will magically remove carbon from the atmosphere, but I leave myself room to be pleasantly surprised.

Meanwhile, on the subject of carbon pricing, here’s Andrew Leach to correct some of the performative outrage and bad economics that have been passed around in the past week.

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QP: Poilievre makes a scene

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A grey day in Ottawa, but today, most of the leaders were away. This left Candice Bergen to lead off, wondering how many organisations got job grants to protest energy projects. Jim Carr replied that they will get Trans Mountain built, preemptively called out the false equivalence between protesting energy projects and hiring students to distribute flyers with graphic images of aborted foetuses. Bergen insisted that the Liberals want to shut down the energy sector, and Carr dismissed the concerns. Bergen demanded Carr tell the prime minister that giving funding to these protesters is wrong, and Carr reminded her that the Harper government gave twice as much money to the same group. Alain Rayes took over in French to rail about the same issue, and Carr noted his recent trip to Fort McMurray to highlight the jobs in the energy sector. Rayes tried again, and in response, Carr regaled him with a tale about how they engaged in a better process of Indigenous consultation where the previous government failed. Guy Caron was up next for the NDP, demanding the government come clean that they rigged the Trans Mountain approval process, to which Carr reiterated that they engaged with Indigenous communities in unheard of consultations. Caron tried again in French, and Carr noted that all of the Access to Information documents are all online and he can look for himself as to the process. Anne Quach was up next, demanding pay equity legislation in advance of the G7, to which Patty Hajdu noted the items in the budget. Niki Ashton was first concern trolled about InCel followers, and demanded a gender-based violence strategy. Ralph Goodale said that they have put resources to tackling these issues, and that they met with G7 leaders to get that material off of the Internet.

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Roundup: Dumbing down the border debate

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The Conservatives were in full performative outrage mode yesterday, with a Supply Day motion to demand a plan by May 11thto stop the influx of irregular border crossers seeking asylum, and for the PM to admit that his “Welcome to Canada” tweet is the cause of the problem. It’s not going to work, but it’s indicative of the way in which they are dealing with complex issues and trying to boil them down in a way that is ultimately disingenuous, while using bogus arguments like how the backlogs in this system are slowing down legitimate immigrants and refugee claimants – the immigration stream is separate and is unlikely to be affected by this influx, and when you’re talking about “legitimate” refugees, there is a great deal of difference between resettling refugees in camps and processing the claims of those who arrive on our shores to claim asylum. Those claims, yes, are slowed down, but it’s more than just this influx that is that problem, and drawing this link is a long-time Conservative tactic of trying to play immigrants and refugees off of one another.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/988779198096519168

For example, Michelle Rempel has been demanding that the government simply declare the whole border with the US to be an official port of entry for the purposes of the Safe Third Country Agreement, in order for us to simply turn back anyone who crosses from the US. See! Simple! It’s not like we need American sign-off to do so (because it’s their border too), and it does nothing about what has been driving this influx in the first place, which is less Trudeau’s tweet than the tweets of one Donald Trump. And while the government deployed MPs with linguistic ties to communities that were crossing previously, such as Haitians and Guatemalans, the influx we’re seeing right now has to do with Nigerians who are getting tourist visas for the US, and then using those to cross into Canada. To that end, we learned yesterday that the government has been sending officials to Nigeria to try and engage on the ground there, while also working with the Americans to try and get action from them that their tourist visas are being abused, so we’ll see if that has any measurable effect.

This isn’t to say that the current government isn’t blameless in all of this either. While they correctly point to the fact that the previous government made cuts to both the Immigration and Refugee Board and CBSA, which are reverberating to this day, they have had their own problems when it comes to not filling vacancies on the IRB because they changed the appointment process, and like virtually all of their appointment processes, the changes have slowed down the system to a crawl, and have touched off a slow-moving crisis within the whole of government and the courts. That’s on them 100 percent, and that is the problem that’s causing slowdowns with more than just refugee claimants, but also immigration appeals (and they are separate parts of the IRB, so again, it’s not just the influx of claimants causing problems for immigrants). But those aren’t the kinds of issues that the opposition is touching on with this issue, and it’s not the kind of simple solution that they’re trolling for, which is ultimately what’s harming the debate.

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Roundup: Peter Harder, hero of the Senate

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Oh, Senator Peter Harder. The Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative” did the media rounds yesterday to both promote his fifty-page position paper on his conception of the constitutional role of the Senate, and to kick at the Conservatives whom he claims are “sabotaging” his attempts to turn the Senate into a less partisan place. (I have a column reacting to the contents of the paper coming out later, so stay tuned for that). I’m constantly struck by Harder’s attempts to play the hero in this when he’s done virtually nothing to earn the title. Aside from putting out this paper in advance of the Modernization committee’s upcoming report, Harder has pretty much eschewed his actual duties of negotiating with the various caucuses in the Senate on legislative timelines (because negotiating and horse-trading is “partisan”), and he didn’t do his job in canvassing the votes for the marijuana bill, and even though it was in no danger of being defeated, he still got caught with his pants down and was a big drama queen about it. But instead of taking a modicum of personal responsibility for not doing his job, he instead blames the Conservatives for “sabotage” when they’re doing their job as opposition, when he would prefer that Senators never defeat bills (which would make his job even easier and put even less pressure on him to do his job). And yet nobody pushes back against his narratives in the media.

Senator McCoy meanwhile, makes a point that hasn’t been well aired in public yet, which is that Harder has been pushing for the Senate to return to the model of the Clerk being responsible for all of the Senate’s bureaucracy rather than the three-clerk model that they moved to post-Duffy scandal – a model which forces senators to take more responsibility for their actions rather than being able to blame their bureaucracy. Questions about the government’s control over that Clerk are certainly live ones, and it does undermine the notion that the Senate is supposed to be getting more independent. Apparently, that doesn’t extend to its internal operations. Curious indeed.

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Roundup: A curious appointment bottleneck

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There was an interesting revelation in the Hill Timesyesterday in that the government is sitting on more than 100 vetted Senate candidates while twelve seats remain vacant, and yet put out a call for yet more applications while the advisory committees are all empty, which would be the people who are supposed to vet all of those incoming applications. But that number amazes me – 100 names that are vetted and ready to go for those twelve vacancies, and the government isn’t moving on them, adding one or two names every couple of months at random intervals. And don’t get me wrong – I’m firmly opposed to mass appointments, but that also means that the Chamber should be in full operation and that vacancies should be filled as they happen, which are one or two at a time. Add to that the fact that because these are all being named as Independents, the kinds of mentoring that should happen isn’t, so at this point it almost doesn’t matter if we get all twelve in one fell swoop because the result would be the same either way.

The other thing that is very interesting is that in the interview with former appointment committee member Indira Samarasekera, she mentioned that they identified key skill areas that the Senate is in need of and that their names have reflected that, but these aren’t necessarily the people that Trudeau is naming in the long run. Which isn’t to say that Trudeau has simply been naming ideological Liberals and calling them Independents (despite what the Conservatives in the Senate are claiming), but it is hard to deny that there isn’t a similarity to most of the candidates in the fact that they tend to be activists from the social sciences as opposed to some of the business, foreign affairs, and trade experts that Samarasekera noted that they recommended. Despite this all, the piece provides an interesting window on just what seems to be the bottleneck in appointments that this government has a problem with making, and which continues to be a slow-moving crisis of their credibility.

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