Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

Roundup: The cynicism of Kellie Leitch

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As it turns out, would-be Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch has opted not to recant her survey question on “screening” immigrants and refugees for anti-Canadian values, and has doubled down on it by insisting that there is a conversation to be had, and suggested that there was merit to the “barbaric cultural practices” tip line, but that it had simply been communicated poorly. Thus far, only Michael Chong has bothered to respond and refute the narrative that Leitch is putting forward.

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Objectively, Leitch’s concerns about keeping Canada safe are nonsense because all of our domestic terror incidents have been home-grown and self-radicalizing lone wolves. That she thinks there are unified “Canadian values” are also hugely problematic because there are plenty of Canadians who are intolerant of other religions and cultures (particularly of Muslims), sexual orientations (hell, two of her other putative leadership candidates are running on socially conservative platforms that are downright homophobic), violence and misogynistic behaviour is prevalent if not endemic in our own culture, and the embrace of personal and economic freedoms is a dubious metric, especially as her own government was perfectly willing to curtail personal freedoms in the name of national security. The myth of shared values is nothing new, however, but it is just that – a myth. Add to that the notion that these values are something that can be tested or screened. Is Leitch somehow proposing polygraphing all prospective immigrants or refugees on these issues? Or, as I was not even really joking yesterday, hiring a bunch of telepaths to find out if they’re hiding something. It’s not even that this is dog whistle politics, it’s that the country repudiated this kind of thinking in the last election in a pretty big way. Leitch trying to adopt the language of Donald Trump to try and bring together her party’s base is deeply cynical and Leitch should know better (presuming she has the EQ to realize it, which I suspect she doesn’t).

In other Conservative leadership news, anti-abortionists are ready to back Pierre Lemieux and Brad Trost, and probably Andrew Scheer if he winds up running again. Martin Patriquin in Maclean’s argued why these kinds of leadership candidates will continue to hurt the party’s brand.

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Roundup: Fear change of government!

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Another day, another round of completely objectionable things heard regarding electoral reform that need to be countered. Most egregious of all today was Elizabeth May’s musing about the nature of government under current and PR systems.

And then my head exploded.

It sounded for a moment there like May was advocating for a system of basically permanent governments that don’t change, and that basic accountability – i.e. “throwing the bums out” – was a bad thing. It boggles the mind that this would be considered a good thing. Is it a good thing that countries like Germany, Austria and Sweden have basically had one-party rule for decades, where coalition partners get shuffled and that’s that? That hardly sounds like a healthy democracy because longevity can certainly breed complacency and to a certain degree corruption. May also assumes that the “consensus building” of coalitions would somehow produce superior governance without looking at the effect it has on accountability (when everyone’s responsible, then no one’s responsible), or that the watered-down outcomes and lack of ability to govern effectively in many cases is really better than a system that allows for decisive action but also the ability to hold those who take action to account for those decisions. Seriously, though, this dislike of accountability mechanisms is very concerning. Also, this notion that the “right parties” will always be in power to get these mythical better outcomes.

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And then there’s Andrew Coyne, who again cherry-picks his railing against the arguments to keep the status quo with regards to the arguments about stable governments (as though other PR countries operate on a system of responsible government), or that our current system has been riddled with regional parties that we warn about in PR countries (ignoring that regional parties don’t last long in our system precisely because they can’t get power), and buying into Ed Broadbent’s ridiculous revisionist mythologizing about the NEP.

I’ll end on one good note, which was Samara’s call for better civic education. That should be what the government spends its time, energy and resources on rather than this ridiculous quest for a new electoral system, but it’s a start that people are calling out for it.

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Roundup: O’Toole a possibility

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I’ve generally shied away from talking about these stories about perceived support for leadership candidates, particularly in the Conservative pool, but this one about the potential for Erin O’Toole stuck in my mind after I read it. I will fully admit that my initial reaction was “Erin O’Toole? Really? Why?” But it wouldn’t let go, and I thought about it more, and about O’Toole’s particular political trajectory. To a certain extent, he’s always been one who has been seen as a kind of saviour figure for the party – elected in a by-election to replace Bev Oda after she resigned in disgrace, O’Toole entered as someone who was going to start setting a new tone for the seat and the party. His credentials as a veteran and a lawyer were seen as impeccable and the kind of MP that the party not only wanted but needed as it had taken on the label of being a nasty party, and here was someone who was affable and a nice guy, and was a breath of fresh air for so many. When he made it into cabinet after some time as a parliamentary secretary, it was again in the role of someone who was there to fix things, this time taking over the Veterans Affairs portfolio after Julian Fantino had managed to earn the enmity of pretty much the entire veteran community across the country. (Then again, being a duotronic android will probably do that when you’re in a job that requires a great deal of empathy). O’Toole came in and immediately started to turn things around – well, as much as is possible in a department with a sclerotic culture (and I’ve heard things from some of the Liberals currently on that file about the way that the department runs and it’s a bit shocking).

So with this in mind, it’s actually not surprising that O’Toole would be considered a fairly reasonable choice for the Conservative leadership. He has some cred and some experience (but not so much that he’s carrying the legacy of the whole of the Harper years on his back), and his French is reputedly decent (but not bilingual, though he has some time yet to get it up there). And he’s avoided some of the missteps that dog certain other leadership candidates like Kellie Leitch, and his story is probably more compelling as a narrative than some of the others, nor is he a more marginal figure (like Michael Chong, who put himself on his party’s fringe by being reasonable more often than not). So it’s possible. We’ll have to see if he does throw his hat in the ring, and whether someone like Peter MacKay does throw his hat into the ring (though it’s starting to feel less likely the longer he waits, not to mention that I have a hard time understanding why he would be the frontrunner considering his own history). But if this is going to be a race without any big stars, then O’Toole may have a surprising resilience.

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Roundup: A rapidly shrinking legacy

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

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

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Roundup: Reporting the terror threat

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The government released their 2016 Public Report on the Terrorist Threat to Canada yesterday, and there are a few items of note, particularly that there are more Canadians who are suspected of travelling abroad to engage in terrorist activities, more women are joining the cause, and more of them are returning to Canada after some time abroad, all of which needs to be monitored. The biggest threat remains those lone wolves who are “inspired” by terrorist ideology rather than being directed from abroad, because quite obviously it’s much harder to detect and monitor. Apparently it’s also news that Ralph Goodale is calling ISIS “Daesh” in the report, but some terror experts will note that this is just a bit of name-calling. On a related note, RCMP are talking about their roadblocks in the fight against terrorism, which is a lot about the difficulty in turning evidence gathered from partners like CSIS into something they can admit to the courts, which is apparently harder than it seems. I’m not really sure that I’ve got a lot to add on this one, just that despite the various howls from both the Conservatives and the NDP in how the Liberals have been handling the terror file – the Conservatives insisting that the Liberals have given it up and are running away from the fight (objectively not the case), and the NDP caterwauling that C-51 needs to be repealed full stop – that the Liberals do indeed seem to be taking this seriously. While experts have been praising them on their go-slow approach rather than legislating in haste, I think it’s also notable that they are making reports like these public in order to give a realistic picture of what is going on, rather than relying on hysteria in order to try and build public support that way. We’ll no doubt see a lot more from them in the next couple of months as the new national security committee of parliamentarians is set up, and consultations on the state of our anti-terror laws transition into legislation, but this was a good reminder that things are in the works. In the meantime, here are some more thoughts from a real expert on these kinds of things, Stephanie Carvin.

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Roundup: Online voting scare

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There was a story on Blacklock’s Reporter yesterday morning that used Access to Information documents to suppose that Elections Canada was moving ahead with electronic voting, despite the fact that the electoral reform committee hadn’t even made any recommendations around it. As it turns out, that’s not what they were up to, but it nevertheless touched off a discussion over Twitter about reasons why electronic voting is still a bad idea, and why never is still too soon to even start contemplating it.

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Roundup: Counter-radicalism and reality checks

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In the wake of the Aaron Driver near-miss last week, public safety minister Ralph Goodale is set to announce that the government is moving ahead with a counter-radicalization programme, but it looks like the details are still a little ways out. That said, Goodale has been pretty frank that our current counter-radicalisation programmes have little coherence and that’s what he aims to fix over the course of this year. And while we get the musings about what kind of leader Trudeau will be in the face of terrorism, we get his former foreign policy advisor Roland Paris reminding us of what he has done to date (which is not nothing, as his critics have stated). More importantly, however, we need to remind ourselves of the reality of the situation, and for that, I would turn your attention to Stephanie Carvin’s piece in this weekend’s Globe and Mail, which explains why counter-terrorism and counter-radicalism is not as easy as you might think, and provides a good reality check for the kinds of rhetoric out there, and why saying things like “connecting the dots” isn’t actually helpful to any kind of conversation around the subject.

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Roundup: Peace bonds and terror suspects

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Everyone seems to want to talk about how the Aaron Driver terrorism incident went down and how it relates to the government’s plans to amend the old C-51 into something that better balances Charter rights, so here is some preliminary analysis from the expert, Craig Forcese, and more analysis that he did with Kent Roach for the Globe and the Post. And yes, the Liberals have reiterated that they plan to amend the legislation, while the NDP continue to demand its repeal (which may be difficult given how it interacts with pre-existing legislation). Meanwhile, here’s an interview with Driver’s father and a professor who studies radicalization – who noted that the isolation of the peace bond may have made that radicalization worse – and a reminder about the realities of terrorism like this in Canada versus Europe.

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Roundup: The wrong way to rein in the Senate

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Sometimes you read clueless columns, and sometimes the columns are so utterly clueless that you have to wonder how they ever got past an editor in the first place. The Globe and Mail featured one such yesterday morning from Campbell Clark, who asserted that it’s now Justin Trudeau’s fault that Mike Duffy is claiming expenses because cabinet ultimately has control over expenditures.

I. Can’t. Even.

The complete and rank civic illiteracy coming from a columnist in a national newspaper is galling, and looks a hell of a lot like he’s just making stuff up as he goes along. And no, I’m not chalking this up to a mid-August phoned-in column, because this isn’t the first time that he’s made this suggestion before, and it needs to stop. And it’s such an elementary part of civic literacy that Clark is apparently unable to grasp, which is that it’s the job of the legislature to hold the executive in check and not the other way around. In fact, it’s the job of the House of Commons to grant supply to the government for its operation and not the other way around. The Senate most especially exists to serve as a check on an executive that has a majority in the House of Commons. Neither the House of Commons nor the Senate are a government department – they don’t report to the Cabinet, nor does Cabinet control their expenditures because fundamentally they have institutional independence. Can you just imagine what would happen if Cabinet did control their purse strings? It would be nothing but a constant string of threats to cut of MPs’ or senators’ salaries or office budgets if they didn’t fall into line. That’s not how the system works, and Clark’s suggestion makes as much sense as giving cabinet the authority to go after judges’ salaries if they strike down that government’s laws. Add to that, Clark’s suggestion that the government should start clamping down on how much Senators can spend is so ludicrously boneheaded that it boggles the mind. You see, if MPs go after senators’ expenses, then senators will turn around and go after MPs’ expenses, and veto any budget until their independence is no longer being threatened. And why? For cheap optics? The Senate has a job to do, and democracy costs money. If Clark thinks that things work differently under our constitutional arrangement, then he is sadly mistaken, and he needs a remedial course in basic civics post haste because what he’s written is wholly and completely irresponsible. So no, it’s not Justin Trudeau’s government’s problem that Mike Duffy is claiming housing allowances, it’s Duffy’s problem (as we established yesterday). For anyone to claim otherwise doesn’t know or understand how our system operates.

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Roundup: The shameless Duff

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Senator Mike Duffy is back in the news again, once again claiming his housing allowance for his long-time residence in Ottawa, because of course he is. There are a couple of problems here, but the first one is the way in which the story is being reported.

“Hasn’t the Senate tightened its rules?” is usually the first plaintive wail that we hear, and yes, they did. They have put rules in place around what constitutes proof of a primary residence in the province that a senator represents, and those rules include things like driver’s licence, health card, CRA tax assessment – things that Duffy didn’t have when he was first appointed and yet started claiming his housing allowance for the residence he lived in for years already. Duffy has since acquired the necessary documentation to “prove” that his primary residence is PEI. It’s also problematic to start devising a formula for how many hours one has to spend in their primary and secondary residence because it is generally a qualitative and not a quantitative measure, complicated by the work that senators do, and in some cases, there are senators who can’t travel back to their primary residences because of health concerns and are essentially forced to spend more time in Ottawa than they would otherwise. They may yet assign some kind of hour or day measure, but my understanding is that there is not one at the moment.

The bigger problem here is not the rules or the Senate itself (and for the love of all the gods on Olympus, I wish that my journalistic colleagues would stop treating this issue as a problem of the institution than its actors), but rather that Duffy himself is completely and utterly without shame. If he had any shame or decency, he wouldn’t keep claiming for his Ottawa residence, because he would know that it’s what got the whole issue rolling in the first place. But no – he is entitled to his entitlements, and has taken the fact that he was not convicted of criminal fraud and breach of trust as validation rather than the fact that he was nevertheless condemned for his behaviour while recognizing that it didn’t quite meet the test of being criminal. And that’s why this is really a Mike Duffy problem and not a Senate problem. He never should have been appointed as a PEI senator, and yet here we are.

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