Tag Archives: Canadian History

Roundup: The needed reforms to the Estimates

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Democratic reforms remain the topic of discussion on the Hill, following Dominc LeBlanc’s appearance at the Procedure and House Affairs committee on Thursday, and some of what he’s talking about is necessary – most importantly, reform to the Estimates process. The Liberals had promised during the election that they would reform the process so that the Estimates were a) readable, and b) resembled the Public Accounts, so that the latter could be used to check over the former. There is probably no greater reform that needs to happen than this, because it’s the job of MPs to hold government to account by means of controlling the public purse. The Estimates are how they plan to spend the money, and the Public Accounts are the accounting of how it was spent. When both are reported using different accounting methods, and with the Estimates currently being largely unreadable to the layperson, it makes that accountability nigh impossible to do. It’s no wonder that the process has largely devolved to voting them through at all stages with no actual discussion or scrutiny (as they did in December, only for the Senate to catch their mistakes when they ballsed it up in their haste). It’s also why MPs have been consistently fobbing off that homework to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the Auditor General, and increasingly the Senate, while ministerial visits to committee to discuss the Estimates for their departments are spent answering questions on issues of the day rather than the Estimates they were there to talk about. Add to that, there’s the “deemed” rule, whereby Estimates are deemed to be agreed to and passed after a certain date, so MPs couldn’t even hold them up if they wanted to. It’s so entirely broken, which is why the Liberal promise to fix this system is so damned important. Of course, with the good comes the bad – talk of eliminating Friday sittings, possibly with longer days on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to compensate (but what about the “family friendly” elimination of evening sittings so that MPs can have dinner with their families?), and assurances that they wouldn’t actually be getting Fridays off, but working in their constituencies. The problem there is that constituency work is not actually part of an MP’s job – the ombudsman role they play on behalf of their constituents’ interactions with the civil service has grown over the years until it’s metastasised into this beast now where there are stories that the immigration department won’t touch files until they are forwarded by the MP’s office (so far down the slippery slope to corruption it’s alarming), and MPs continue to spend their resources doing this work rather than their actual jobs of scrutinizing the Estimates or legislation. In other words, eliminating Friday sittings makes this problem worse, not better. LeBlanc also did agree that a proposal to ban applause in the Commons may be something else worth considering to help improve decorum, and I would agree that even more than the constant sanctimonious tut-tutting about heckling, applause and scripts are the bigger problems that should be tackled if we want to be serious about making changes to the way our MPs do business.

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Roundup: Liberal revisionism

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Of all of the hopeful and optimistic things that our new cabinet ministers have been talking about, one is already raising alarm bells, which is our new heritage minister, Mélanie Joly. Joly says that her ministry is one about symbols, and she is going to go about changing those symbols to ones of “progressiveness,” saying that those promoted by the previous government weren’t those shared by Canadians. That of course is total nonsense, but it all points to the kinds of revisionism that both parties engage in, even though everyone seemed to think that it was only the Conservatives who did it. While some of this is no doubt in reference to the Conservatives’ fascination – almost to the point of fetishism – with military history and those particularly martial symbols, we shouldn’t pretend that we don’t have these traditions in Canada. Previous Liberal governments indeed liked to do so, with a focus on peacekeeping that may not have reflected reality, or at least the modern reality where the global landscape has changed and those kinds of missions may no longer be feasible the way they once were. The other one that I’m particularly worried about is whether this means that Joly will engage in a purge of monarchical symbols that the Conservatives themselves restored after decades of Liberals trying to push them aside. One of the things that I cannot forgive either the Liberals or NDP for doing in the previous decade was the way in which they allowed the Conservative government to politicise the monarchy by pretending that it only mattered to Conservatives. When they would reintroduce a monarchical symbol, they would complain rather than acknowledge that yes, we are a constitutional monarchy and we should all embrace it and its symbols rather than allowing one party to associate itself with it to the exclusion of all others. Unlike some other Liberals, Trudeau doesn’t appear to be a republican in his sentiments, and has stated that he has no intention of trying to distance Canada from the Crown, but when Joly starts talking about revisionism based on an exclusionary conception of who is and isn’t Canadian (and in this vision, Conservatives apparently aren’t), I worry. Revisionism is going to happen, but it should be called out as much as it was called out under the Conservatives because it’s still distasteful, no matter whose agenda it’s carrying out.

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Roundup: Scaling back on tax promises

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With a boatload of spending promises but almost no details in how he plans to pay for the, Thomas Mulcair appears to be scaling back on how much of that shortfall he plans to make up by raising corporate income taxes because as he’s quickly learning, that’s not going to raise all that much money. He also likes to use the phrase “making different choices like cancelling income splitting,” but that’s also maybe a couple of billion, which isn’t going to pay for a whole lot. It also seems to me that by pushing back a number of promises, like the childcare spaces, to full implementation some eight years down the road, it seems to indicate a theory that economic growth is on the way, and soon there will be plenty to fill the coffers. That ignores the fact that a) the projected surpluses depend on continued austerity, which the NDP keep promising to reverse, and b) economists are starting to warn that this slow growth may be the new normal and not just a hangover from the last financial crisis. With no plans to create economic growth coming from any of the parties, it’s going to be uncomfortable trying to come up with promises for major spending plans while maintaining balanced budgets, like they also plan. (And yes, the Liberals still have their own costing figures to produce as well). What the corporate tax piece doesn’t mention are the NDP plans to tax stock options, which economist Kevin Milligan has questions about:

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/635570314882125824

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/635570827103047680

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/635571426313945088

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/635571982348644352

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/635581074584682497

On the campaign:

  • Stephen Harper announced yet another boutique tax credit, this time for membership dues of service organizations. Also, he’s not changing his limited questions policy.
  • Justin Trudeau sent a letter to Quebec premier Philippe Couillard outlining his desire to be a “true partner” of the provinces.
  • The Liberals are expected to announce a major policy around veterans’ benefits today.
  • Here’s a recap of last week on the campaign.

Good reads:

  • The Ontario government disputes Mulcair’s claim that they support his childcare policy because they don’t have enough information about how it will be funded.
  • Apparently we rank fairly low among OECD countries for public pensions.
  • Here’s a video comparison of the three parties’ childcare benefit promises.
  • Here’s a fact-check of Trudeau’s flexible work hours announcement (spoiler: It won’t amount to much).
  • Christopher Curtis offers a portrait of Trudeau on the campaign trail.
  • Aaron Wherry muses about the issues of control and how that erupted into the ClusterDuff mess.

Odds and ends:

As part of their announcement to protect BC salmon, the Conservatives used a picture of an Atlantic salmon. *slow clap*

Here’s a bit of Ottawa history related to our first general election.

Scott Feschuk gives us his take on the election to date.

Roundup: Dominion Day wrap-up

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For Dominion Day, none of the leaders said anything too egregious, even if the campaigning was in full swing.

https://twitter.com/thedukeofyork/status/616255907765309442

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Roundup: The galling abuse of the Information Commissioner

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The Information Commissioner is very unhappy about the government’s move to retroactively change the law to protect the RCMP for destroying gun registry records despite promises to her office that they wouldn’t in order to fulfil Access to Information requests. That the RCMP broke the law by destroying the information, and the government is protecting them by retroactively changing the law and putting that change in the middle of the omnibus budget bill, sets a very bad precedent, she warns, and she’s right. While the government wanted the long-gun registry data destroyed for political purposes, there was other information of value in the data that wound up being destroyed that had little to do with any future attempts at recreating a registry – something the Conservatives have long been afraid of, and are pressing for the hasty destruction of data to impede. And the way she characterises this is genuinely frightening – that they are backdating changes to the law to make something legal after a finding of wrongdoing. She uses the example of the Sponsorship Scandal – what if the Liberal government of the day retroactively changed the law so that the Auditor General was ousted from her jurisdiction after the fact. It’s unconscionable. What’s even more galling is the way that the prime minister is shrugging this off as just “fixing a loophole.” No, it’s not. It’s wilfully undermining the Commissioner and her ability to do her job, which this government has already made nearly impossible through starving her office budget and wanton disregard of their obligations under the Access to Information regime. All while they call themselves “open and transparent.” It’s grotesque, abusive, and in violation of their obligations as the government of the day. And if anything is any more upsetting about this situation, it’s that the opposition parties were too busy electioneering in QP instead of raising bloody hell about this issue – the Liberals not asking until nearly the end, and the NDP not raising it at all. Thanks for doing your jobs in holding this kind of unconscionable behaviour to account, MPs. Gold stars all around.

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Roundup: Friendly fire death

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With news of a death by friendly fire in Iraq, one can pretty much imagine how this is going to become the fodder of QP over the coming days – much of it likely to be condemnation about a mission where these special operations forces were never supposed to be near the front lines in the first place, and a government that will be urging patience for the outcome of the investigations into just what happened that night when our troops came under fire. To add insult, the Kurdish forces took to their local media to blame the Canadians for the incident, but there are already dissenting reports, saying that their version doesn’t fit with the facts on the ground, including the maxim that “special forces don’t freelance” – hence why the government will be urging calm until an investigation happens. Just don’t hold your breath when it comes to requests not to politicise this death, because we’ve already crossed that line.

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Roundup: Yes, governing is political

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Your best political read of the weekend was a Twitter essay from Philippe Lagassé, so I’ll leave you to it.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/569515068326457344

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/569515450780020736

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/569515909972434945

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/569516334192701440

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/569516761273532418

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/569517336677507073

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/569517603938369536

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/569517862274142209

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/569518893456171008

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/569530939325296641

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/569531442990088193

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/569532019685908480

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/569532280991055872

Lagassé, who was part of the fighter jet replacement options analysis task force, reminded us then as reminds us now that we need to stop behaving like we should be in a technocracy, that there are political considerations and debates that need to be had, and that ministers decide things for which there is always a political calculation. This is not a bad thing, though we may disagree with the final decision. The great thing is that we can hold those who made the decisions to account – something you can’t really do in a technocracy, so can we please stop pretending that it’s the way our system is supposed to operate?

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Roundup: The problem with SIRC

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Of the many hats that Bob Rae has worn over his long and storied careers in Canadian politics, one of them was as a member of the Security and Intelligence Review Committee for a period of five years. Remember, this is the body that the government claims is providing oversight to CSIS, and that they’re “robust,” “doing a good job,” and “are the envy of the world.” No, seriously – they have said all of those things. Rae, meanwhile, notes that SIRC has limited resources for the size of the job they have, but more than that, they haven’t been paid attention to by the government itself. In other words, no matter what their reports say, and how scathing they are, the government’s response is pretty much to pat them on the head, say thanks, and ignore them. Issues like the limited mandate and compartmentalisation of what they’re supposed to be reviewing makes their jobs almost impossible to get a proper picture. The Privacy Commissioner has pointed out that the silos make their own job difficult to do because they can’t see what’s going on either. And then there are security agencies like CBSA – which gained a lost of powers post-9/11 – who have no independent oversight at all. But hey, any oversight is just “needless red tape” – also a phrase this government has used – and would somehow detract from trying to fight terrorists. All of this just adds to the fact that giving CSIS new powers without any additional oversight sounds like a more alarming proposition all the time.

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Roundup: Hedging the messages

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Justin Trudeau continued his tour of southwestern Ontario over the past couple of days, meeting with local mayors and touring a Ford plant, and so on. But while he was talking about moving away from traditional manufacturing while in London, his stop in Windsor spoke about the need to support the auto sector as a pillar to diversify around, which seems to me to be a fairly big hedge since much of the problem with the auto sector is that it pretty much requires the government to keep feeding the beast with ever larger cash subsidies lest those manufacturers relocate elsewhere, which they generally end up doing anyway, while not enough is being done to transition those communities away from the expectation that they’ll get a decent paying job at the auto plant with a pension and benefits. Also, he needs to stop saying that the government put all of their eggs in the oil basket, because it’s like four percent of GDP, so it’s just not true. Another curious statement Trudeau made was that carbon pricing should be up to the provinces, which seems like a fairly fraught proposition because one can rather easily imagine the headaches that having a patchwork of pricing schemes around the country will create – carbon tax in one province, a technology levy in another, and cap-and-trade in yet another, while the federal government tries to book the overall reductions with no real commonality between them.

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Roundup: Voting attendance matters (Part II)

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Following up on their report about MPs being absent from votes, the Ottawa Citizen tries to delve into the issue of just what happens to MPs who don’t show up. Usually, as these things go, the whips handle it and do so quietly. And if MPs don’t like what the whips have to tell them, then they have the option of walking – as it seems that Sana Hassainia did from the NDP. And as the numbers bear out, independent MPs with little incentive from party whips to show up, may just as well not. And that’s fine, really – if their constituents look at their voting records and see a whole lot of blanks, well, then they have a pretty good idea about what their MPs take to be a priority. What gets me is that the piece quotes the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation as saying that hey, MPs have plenty of jobs, and sometimes they’re more important than just standing up and sitting down. Except no – that’s one of the most important parts of being an MP, standing up for what they believe in, and being seen to do so, and being on the record for doing so. Voting is how things are decided in a democracy like ours, so when the people we send to make those decisions don’t bother to show up, well, it kinds of defeats the purpose. Despite the fantasy notions that people have about all the varied things an MP’s job is supposed to entail, it pretty much breaks down to holding the government to account, and the mechanism by which that happens is votes. It’s not rocket science. Making excuses for why MPs aren’t doing that job by voting – or having a good reason for why they’re not there to do so – doesn’t help the health of our system.

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