Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

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it up and are running away from the fight (objectively not the case), and the NDP caterwauling that C-51 needs to be repealed full stop – that the Liberals do indeed seem to be taking this seriously.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.

https://twitter.com/stephaniecarvin/status/768814441865605120

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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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Roundup: Send in the narcissistic clowns

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It happened on Thursday, but I’m still fuming about it. Power & Politics interviewed a couple of would-be Senate candidates based solely on what I’m guessing is the sheer power of their narcissism, and not once was the actual Senate itself brought up for discussion. It was pretty much inevitable that this would happen – the moment the government announced that they would allow their advisory committee to allow self-applicants into the process, you were guaranteed to find a bunch of people who felt that somehow they had the right stuff to be a senator, and lo and behold, these people have been making themselves known, like the one guy from PEI who is going around and door knocking to get people to sign a petition about how swell he would be as a senator, never mind that a) it’s not how this works, and b) if he’s so keen about knocking on doors, maybe he should seek a party nomination to run to be an MP. Just maybe. Or the woman in Nova Scotia who thinks that just because she’s championed a couple of petitions to twin highways that she has the right stuff to be in the Senate. Never mind that neither of them have any particular policy expertise that they want to bring to the job. Never mind that both of these clowns are way too young to even be contemplating a position that is generally seen as a way that allows people who have excelled in their fields to contribute to public service as their careers are winding down. They feel that because they’re honest and have integrity (and really, who doesn’t think that they do), that makes them good material for the Senate. Okay, then.

What burns me the most, however, is the way that the media treats the narcissistic clowns and uses this as some kind of human interest story rather than to demonstrate that the Senate is actually pretty serious business. Not once were these wannabes asked what they think the Senate actually does, and how exactly they plan to contribute to a chamber that is full of subject-matter experts. None of them were asked if they know how the legislative process works, though they seemed to think that they had ample time for on-the-job training (and to a certain extent yes, that may be the case, but generally you would have some kind of other expertise going into this rather than you think you’ve got a good character). And by treating the Senate seriously in that you’re not asking people who think they should populate it about the chamber itself, it betrays the fact that We The Media seem to have learned nothing about it despite all the stories about it over the past two or three years, from the ClusterDuff fiasco to the solid debates that were had over the assisted dying bill. And that’s really sad, because you would have hoped that we would have learned something about how interesting and vital a place it is in our democratic process, but no, we remain fixated on spending scandals (for whose coverage and pearl-clutching was hugely out or proportion to what had actually taken place for most senators), and not on the actual work of the chamber, and we are all poorer for it.

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Roundup: “Hot lesbian” pinkwashing

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By now, you’ve probably heard about that ostensibly pro-oilsands ad that proclaimed that lesbians are hot, and it’s better to use oil from Canada, where they’re considered hot, than from Saudi Arabia, where they would be executed, and it being accompanied by an image taken from Orange is the New Black. And his apology and attempts to walk back from how particularly boneheaded the whole idea was to begin with. (Seriously, his sputtering about what he considers to be “hot” is both hilarious and sad at the same time). As well, the fact that he didn’t use two men to make the same point is entirely because he was conscious that the same message wouldn’t have the same effect on his target audience (because let’s face it, the idea of guys kissing isn’t as titillating to the general public as the idea of two women). What hasn’t been really explored in all of this, however, is this increasing tendency toward pinkwashing, particularly from the political right, as an excuse for xenophobia.

If you’re not familiar with the term pinkwashing, it’s generally used to show how some modicum of LGBT rights is a contrast to the death sentence that can be associated with homosexuality in certain parts of the world, usually as a way of deflecting attention from other problems. A famous example is the way that Israel uses Tel Aviv Pride to deflect criticism of their other human rights problems, and there was a tonne of pinkwashing done in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando as a pretext to condemning so-called Islamist terrorism (never mind that the same people spouting this pinkwashing ignore their own homophobic records. Who cares if we want to take away their civil rights – we don’t want to execute them, is generally how the argument goes, as though that’s really the choice that the LGBT community wants to be faced with). And this lesbian ad isn’t even the first time that this argument has been used – the Erza Levant brainchild Ethical Oil tried similar arguments a couple of years ago to little avail.

Suffice to say, while the mainstream media did jump all over these ridiculous lesbian ads, the criticisms tended to focus on the surface images of photogenic actresses and the fact that it ignores that there are still problems in this country where the GBLT community is concerned, the fact that there was no discussion about pinkwashing was disappointing, because this increasing tendency (particularly from the alt-right and Trump supporters) to use the queer community as some kind of shield to justify their xenophobia is tiresome and needs to be called out for what it is. These ads provided a good opportunity to do so, but that opportunity was largely squandered.

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Roundup: The lobbyist’s Senate speculation

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Courtesy of the Hill Times comes a hot mess of an article that speculates that the new independent Senate is going to have a much more active policy role upfront in the future, which…I’m not so sure about. The thesis of this former MP-turned-lobbyist is that the Trudeau gang knows exactly what they got into with their Senate reform plan (err, I’m really, really dubious about that based on what I’ve seen to date), and the loss of top-down Senate management means that Senators need to be brought into the legislative process from the conceptual stage rather than in their current role as revising and amending. Okay, so while his point that no government can take the Senate for granted anymore is true to a certain extent, most governments have paid a price when they did and found that the Senate wasn’t willing to put up with it. And it’s this particular passage that really makes my skin crawl:

Mr. Jordan said that with new dynamics in the Red Chamber, Senators could prove to be a useful ally of opposition parties and lobbyists, especially in majority governments when governing parties can pass any legislation they wish in the House of Commons. So, if an opposition party or a lobby group wants to stop the government from doing anything, their best bet would be to reach out to Senators.

“You could now go to the Senate and rally support,” Mr. Jordan said. “Make your case.”

It feels a little too much like Jordan, a lobbyist himself, is licking his chops at the prospect. It also undermines the role of the Senate as a kind of constitutional safeguard, who has the power of unlimited veto and of institutional independence to say no to a prime minister with a majority when there is no other option to stop an unconstitutional bill, not to become a partisan competition with the Commons. In fact, the Supreme Court reference stated explicitly that it was not the role of the Senate to be that competitor, and yet this is what Jordan both envisions and says that Trudeau must have known when he started making his push for a more independent upper chamber. (Again, I have my doubts). Turning the Senate into the tool of the opposition and lobbyist allies is antithetical to its nature and its purpose, and for him to start putting this kind of nonsense out there is not helpful, whether as a point of speculation or as a meditation on where senate reform is headed. And if anything, it proves that Trudeau didn’t know what can of worms he opened when he kicked his senators out of caucus, but here we are.

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Roundup: Patterns on the witness list

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The electoral reform committee returns next week, and so far I see a lot of proponents of proportional representation on the witness list, not that this surprises me in any way, as well as an academic proponent of a referendum on electoral reform – also not a surprise. So look forward to plenty of glowing recommendations about how electoral reform will solve all of our political ills.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for some background reading the Library of Parliament has some updated publications in store – one on the history and evolution of our electoral laws, and another that provides an overview of our current electoral system and those employed elsewhere. That one I found particularly lacking, especially in the language it used to describe the current First-Past-the-Post system, adopting wholesale the arguments about “disproportionate” seat counts (logical fallacy), the supposed advantages of “regional parties” or “regional strongholds” with no discussion of brokerage parties, and buying into the arguments about voter turnout without being critical about them (this is a broad problem across all western democracies no matter the electoral system). The rest was an overview of other electoral systems, examples of their use in other countries, the history of electoral reform initiatives in Canada, and some adjacent issues like mandatory voting, online voting (with zero mention about the concerns of the secrecy of the ballot), and lowering the voting age.

What was missing from this tepid report was any discussion on the impact of these electoral systems, such as government formation or accountability, which boggles my mind. It’s literally taking a piece of a complex ecosystem and treating it in isolation with no regard for how it will affect all other aspects of it, which is a huge part of the electoral reform discussion. What kind of government you get after you vote in that system is kind of a big deal. And even bigger deal is how you get rid of that government in a subsequent election, which is not easy to do in most systems other than FPTP because the tendency is for a big central party to just shuffle around their coalition partners, and that can be an even bigger headache, delivering policies that only a tiny fraction of the population voted for. You’d think this would be relevant to an examination of electoral reform proposals, but apparently not according to the analysts at the Library. You’ll excuse me if my faith in this government’s process has just sunk even lower.

(Hat tip to blog reader PierreB for pointing these reports out)

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