With parliament resuming this week, all attention is on whether or not Senator Mike Duffy will resume his duties. After all, there have been a few signs of activity in his office, with computers being updated and such, but there remains a question as to whether his health will allow it, but we’ll see. As for the question as to whether he will be getting any back pay for his time suspended without it, well, senior senators are not so keen. In fact, the phrase “no appetite” is continually used, and they are quick to point to the fact that the Senate’s internal discipline – which the suspension was part of – was based on the Deloitte audits and not criminal findings of guilt or innocence, thus his acquittal by the courts makes it largely an irrelevant issue as far as they’re concerned. I would also add that should Duffy decide to press the issue, well, there are a few well-placed senators who around this issue who are known to leak things to the media, and who will undoubtedly start doing so about any other skeletons in Duffy’s closet that they are aware of. Meanwhile, there remain questions back in PEI about whether Duffy remains qualified to represent the province, as there is still a level of distrust that he is actually a resident (and given that it sounds like he spent the bulk of his time on suspension in Ottawa, well, that doesn’t help matters much). Meanwhile, some Conservative senators are grousing a little bit that Senator Peter Harder isn’t really providing much in the way of answers during regular Senate QP (as opposed to ministerial versions thereof). I think they’re being a bit unfair, considering that he’s been on the job only a couple of weeks and hasn’t yet staffed up his office, nor really had a chance to get proper briefings from the Privy Council Office (because yes, he has been sworn into the Privy Council to take on this job, making him a quasi-minister) on the files that he is likely to be asked about, or had much in the way of a briefing binder prepared, but it does put him on notice that they do expect him to step up his game in the role of “government representative,” particularly when it comes to being the conduit for holding the government to account. These are things that are important, especially as there are no opposition voices in the Commons from Atlantic Canada or the GTA, making the Senate’s role in asking those questions all the more important.
Tag Archives: Census
Roundup: Caution on the veto
The particular bugaboos of electoral reform and the role of the Senate have been colliding increasingly in the past number of days, as there have been threats coming that certain Conservative senators have been threatening to use their majority to vote down any legislation on changes to the electoral system unless there’s a referendum first. And then this particular op-ed in the Citizen by a Université de Montréal law professor urging them to do just that makes me want to just take a moment to talk it all through. First, a few things to keep in mind – the senator who went to the media about this threat was Don Plett, who is, well, singular on some issues. He’s broken ranks before, and is willing to stick to his guns on others, but I wouldn’t ever quote him as the voice of the Conservatives in the Senate, even though he is now the caucus whip. The other thing to keep in mind is that the Senate of Canada, being probably the most powerful Upper Chamber in the democratic world, does indeed have the power of unlimited veto – there is no overriding it if the Senate decides that they want something to die. It’s a power that they very rarely use, particularly when it comes to government bills – it’s kind of like the nuclear deterrent for legislation. No, they’d rather make amendments and send it back, with few exceptions. The reason it’s treated with such caution is that they know they don’t have the democratic mandate to exercise these powers except in rare circumstances. In those rare circumstances, they will do it because it’s their job to have a check on a majority government, and be empowered to speak truth to power, which is why they are afforded the kind of institutional independence that they have. So with this in mind, I will hold up a big caution sign when it comes to encouraging them to overturn any theoretical bill on electoral reform. This all dredges up memories of the Free Trade Agreement, and when the Senate held up that bill from the Mulroney government until it could be put to the people, seeing as this deal was hugely contentious at the time, and it was believed that it was going to be selling out our sovereignty to the Americans. The election was fought on this issue, Mulroney won, and the bill passed, and lo and behold, the sky didn’t fall. But while there was merit in putting that question to the people, it was part of the chain of events that started to polarise the Senate, which prior to 1984, was said to have operated on a much less partisan basis. Tit-for-tat games ramped up the partisanship there, until things became so bad that Mulroney exercised the emergency powers of appealing to the Queen to appoint an additional eight senators in order to get the GST passed. The Senate is currently in a vulnerable spot, and while I wouldn’t ask them not to do their jobs because they are in a period of intense scrutiny and this would get blown completely out of proportion by an ignorant pundit class and MPs with agendas harmful to the independence of the Senate – but it would hurt them. That’s why this discussion needs to be approached extremely cautiously, and rash actions scrupulously avoided at all costs.
Roundup: A muzzle or a distasteful incident
The neutrality of the civil service has been an issue lately, with the distasteful episode of the cheering (and booing) at Global Affairs last Friday on the one hand, and to a certain extent, the “un-muzzling” of scientists on the other. Michael Petrou explores the former issue here, while Paul Booth offers some advice for the “un-muzzled” here, noting that there is a balance to be struck between talking about one’s research while at the same time maintaining their role of civil servants where they are not supposed to be critical of the government of the day if they want to keep their jobs, because they have a role to play. At the heart of both is that they ultimately serve the Queen and not the government of the day, no matter how much their advice or carrying out of government policy is criticised. While ink has been spilled on the cheering as being proof that the Conservatives were right to be suspicious of “official Ottawa,” one has to note a few different thing, including simple demographics – polling data repeatedly shows, time and time again, that education levels will affect political preferences, with the Conservatives scoring best among those who only have high school diplomas, while those who have attained increasing levels of higher education increasingly support Liberals. The vast majority of the civil service is university-educated, so their sympathy with the Liberals should not be a surprise. Should they have cheered Trudeau? Probably not. I will note that for context, the one clip I saw of the cheering happened after Trudeau said that he would be taking their advice unlike the previous government, while the booing of that journalist’s questions were both to the fact that they crashed a private event, and that it was a question for which an answer had already been given earlier in the day. Not that this should excuse what happened, because they should have known better, and I know plenty of other civil servants who were also critical of what happened there. But on the other hand, we should also note that they are human, and that the Conservatives exacerbated any distrust of the civil service with excessive dickish behaviour (such as Diane Finley walking into a department she was taking over and telling the staff that they were all Liberals and that she would clean up the joint). We should hope that this kind of incident doesn’t happen again, and it may very well not. I’m also not sure how helpful it is to light our hair on fire about it either, but I could very well be wrong about that.
Roundup: Still no Senate decisions
Amidst all of the activity yesterday, one of the things we did learn was that the new Prime Minister has yet to decide what he plans to do with regards to the Senate. It did not go unnoticed on Wednesday that there was no Leader of the Government in the Senate named to cabinet, but as we found out, it’s because he simply hasn’t decided what he’s doing yet, and that’s the same with regards to the Speaker. It raises all kinds of questions about how things are going to be managed with regards to the Senate, and Government House Leader Dominic Leblanc has been named the person to be the liaison between the two chambers, as is fair. What concerns me, however, is that in all of the talk of making the Senate more independent, what isn’t being considered is how it will do its job in holding the government to account if there is nobody in the chamber for them to do so (not to mention that it really is a problem if there is no member of cabinet in the chamber to shepherd government bills through either, which the Conservatives have been fudging for the past year or so). Some senators have been musing about cancelling Senate Question Period altogether, or having it simply focus on asking questions of committee chairs, but that seems particularly short-sighted, considering that they tended to ask far better quality questions of the government as compared to the Commons. Yes, the last couple of government leaders were not exactly great at responding to questions, but neither were ministers down in the Commons, and that era is hopefully over. The loss of the accountability function would be a huge blow to our parliament as a whole, and I hope that the Liberal government is considering this problem. Meanwhile, John Pepall urges caution with appointing too many good-hearted experts to the Senate, as it may empower them to challenge the democratically elected government too often as is starting to happen over in the UK, with the Lords starting to push back against their own limits. Food for thought in that there are consequences even for well-intentioned acts.
Roundup: Moving on from Harper
So there we have it – the last hours of Harper’s time in government, and lo and behold, there were no last grasps for power, no refusals to resign, no attempts to make last-minute appointments, no craven behaviour of any kind. From all accounts, the exit has been gracious and orderly, but as befitting his time in office, he kept all of the big decisions behind closed doors because he didn’t want any clips of him resigning or visibly stepping down in any way. And hey, ten years later, we’re not a dictatorship, this isn’t a fascist state, there is no cult of personality that people are worshipping. We had free and fair elections, and instead of voter suppression (and conspiracy theorists insisting that they would try to stuff ballot boxes, or that the odd ballots that had ink blotches on them from the printing process), we had a dramatic upswing in voter turnout. All of those doomsayers and the hysterical who have been bombarding our Twitter feeds with the insistence that democracy was dead in Canada – all for naught. That Vapid Narcissist whose stunt as a Senate page was part of her somehow insisting that the previous election wasn’t free and fair either and that the results were somehow stolen or illegitimate and necessitating acts of civil disobedience – she’s been trying to take credit for the election result (and inexplicably, people are actually congratulating her) – but this has nothing to do with her. There was no evil Bond villain that needed to be vanquished. This was politics. Sure, it was nasty and dickish most of the time, but it was politics. Hopefully we can spend the next few years unclenching, but we all know that Trudeau Derangement Syndrome is as much of a thing as Harper Derangement Syndrome. Hopefully, however, the hyperbolic nonsense won’t be quite so awful and unhinged (but who are we kidding?).
Roundup: The return of the Reform Act
Despite hopes that we might be rid of this nonsense, Michael Chong is back with a vengeance, plugging for parties to implement the Reform Act when their caucuses meet in the coming weeks, and hey, he’s not done spouting a bunch of complete bollocks about the new legislation! A reminder: The Reform Act is de facto useless, and de jure harmful to our system of government. I’ve outlined it all before here, here and here, so that soil is well tilled, but suffice to say, it’s not going to empower MPs like he says as MPs already have that power but simply don’t exercise it. It will, in fact, do the opposite. But then there’s some troubling statements he made on Power & Politics last night regarding his idea of the role of the Senate when it comes to leadership votes. Not only did his bill define the caucus as MPs only, but he stated that senators have no role in the selection of an interim leader because it was about (in this case) choosing the “leader of the opposition” which had nothing to do with the Senate, since MPs didn’t choose their leader. Nope – all wrong. It’s about choosing the interim party leader, not just leader in the Commons, and senators are just as much part of the party as MPs are. That makes a difference, particularly if the interim leader is going to be making organisational changes within the party structure which senators are every bit as entitled to have a say in as MPs. Also, because that leader will be able to choose who the Senate leader is going to be (well, for the Conservatives anyway – mileage may vary for future Liberal interim leadership votes), they have a vested interest in who will be chosen. Chong insisting otherwise is being disingenuous. So why is he making the big pitch – other than for the sake of his legislative legacy? Because I’m pretty sure that he’s building himself up for a permanent leadership bid as the “great reformer.” It’s too bad that his reforms are a sham that only serves to entrench what problems have grown in our system. But it’s all about looking like you’re changing things, right? It’s cynical, and sadly, a great many people (my journalistic colleagues included) will lap it right up.
RT @CBCPolitics: Chong urges MPs to 'reclaim their influence' as Reform Act takes effect https://t.co/VncbF1Vcq7 pic.twitter.com/U0YkVXUDmK
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) October 27, 2015
Roundup: About those Senators who approached Mulcair
Thomas Mulcair is telling people that he’s had senators approach him to say that they would be willing to work with him to pass a hypothetical NDP government’s legislation, but he won’t name names. While this may well be true, at least to a certain extent – we have been seeing numerous examples in the past couple of weeks of Mulcair exaggerating the truth – this should be unpacked a little bit. The first and most obvious thing is that we need to put aside the Harper Derangement Syndrome conspiracy theory that all of the Conservative senators are going to simply defeat any Liberal or NDP legislation that comes through because the fact that they were Harper appointees will apparently make them extra dickish, or something. Never mind that we’ve had plenty of parliaments where the party not in power held a majority in the Senate and lo and behold, things got passed with little difficulty. This will not change in the future. The second is that these Senators all know that they have a job to do, and that’s to scrutinize bills that come before them. Most of the time they pass. Occasionally they get amended and sent back. On very rare occasions, they get defeated, almost always because those bills are either fatally flawed, out of order, or unconstitutional and got passed on a whipped vote. And if the NDP holds up that climate change bill as an example of one the Senate killed, well, it’s because it was out of order and never should have been allowed to pass the Commons. That said, they are not rubber stamps, and won’t simply pass bills because the Commons did. It’s not their job, and if Mulcair has a problem with that, there’s a Supreme Court reference decision he should read. Third is that even if Senate Liberals formed a quasi-government caucus in the Senate should the NDP form government, it’s because the system needs to operate somehow. They are likely going to have to kluge together some kind of procedural workarounds to the fact that there won’t be an actual Leader of the Government in the Senate who can answer on behalf of the government, and if a hypothetical Prime Minister Mulcair doesn’t appoint a Senate Speaker, that is pretty much a constitutional nightmare waiting to happen. But Mulcair refuses to answer these fundamental procedural issues, while at the same time, he and his people continue to do nothing but hurl insults at the Chamber and its inhabitants while promising their abolition (which won’t happen, but they’re going to try anyway), while continuing to actively ignore the constitutional obligation to make appointments. So no, I’m not reassured by these senators who have allegedly approached him, because there’s more to it than just passing bills. We have a parliamentary architecture that he continues to ignore, and that should be worrying to anyone who cares about parliamentary democracy.
Roundup: Closure and privilege
It was wholly depressing the way in which the whole matter was rushed through. After the imposition of closure – not time allocation but actual closure – the government rammed through their motion to put all Hill security under the auspices of the RCMP without any safeguards to protect parliamentary privilege. After all, the RCMP reports to the government, and Parliament is there to hold government to account and therefore has privileges to protect that – the ability to have their own security being a part of that. Liberal MP Mauril Bélanger tried to amend the government’s motion to make it explicit that the Speakers of both chambers were the ultimate authorities, and the government said good idea – and then voted against it. And so it got pushed through, privilege be damned, with minimal debate and no committee study or expert testimony. The Senate, however, is putting up more of a fight, and the Liberals in that chamber have raised the privilege issue, and the Speaker there thinks there is merit to their concerns, and has suspended debate until he can rule on it. And this Speaker, incidentally, is far more aware of the issues of privilege and the role of Parliament and the Senate than his Commons counterpart seems to be, and he could very well rule the proposal out of order. One hopes so, and once again it seems that our hopes rest on the Senate doing its job, because the Commons isn’t doing theirs.
I don't know about you all, but I'm actually not willing to predict how Senator Nolin will rule. Senate speakers are tricky.
— kady o'malley (@kady) February 17, 2015
QP: Arthur Porter, come on down!
A blustery winter day in Ottawa, and there were a few sour faces among the official opposition ranks following the Board of Internal Economy directive the previous evening. All of the leaders were in the Chamber, and Thomas Mulcair led off, asking about more layoffs in Toronto. Stephen Harper said that it has to do with particular decisions of particular companies, but their Economic Action Plan™ has created more jobs than were lost. Mulcair insisted those new jobs were part time and precarious, then listed more retail layoffs. Harper retorted the NDP position was simply to raise taxes. Mulcair then moved to the issue of CSIS, and whether the thirty year-old SIRC has the tools to oversee the agency today. Harper insisted that the system was robust and had safeguards, but the solution was not to go after the police but the terrorists. “Arthur Porter, come on down,” Mulcair quipped and noted SIRC’s report saying that CSIS had misled them just last year. Harper said that the example shows that the system works. Mulcair gave a line about freedom and safety going hand-in-hand, and saying that Harper has been decisive about it. Harper insisted that the bill already enhances oversight. (Really? Where?) Justin Trudeau was up next, demanding income splitting be cut in favour of more investment in infrastructure. Harper insisted that they were already running the largest, longest infrastructure programme in history and that he recently announced more funding — and that the Liberals want to raise taxes. Trudeau pointed out the massive difference difference in funding over the last two years and that an April budget meant municipalities would miss construction season. Harper repeated his insistence that they were already spending record amounts and accused Trudeau of being bad at math. Trudeau repeated the question in French, and got much the same answer in French, with an added promise for a balanced budget and targeted tax breaks.
QP: Let’s keep repeating quotes!
With John Baird’s big resignation speech out of the way, and all of the leaders present in the Chamber, it had the makings of a more exciting day. Thomas Mulcair led off, asking about the job losses at Target and wondered where the budget was — odd, considering that Target’s closure has absolutely nothing to do with the government. Harper insisted that he put out a number of economic measures, and read a quote from the CFIB that called the NDP’s measures “dumb and anti-small business.” Mulcair read a competing quote where the head of the CFIB praised an NDP proposal, then asked the same question again. Harper, in turn, doubled down on his answer. Muclair read the same quote yet again, then gave an anecdote about being in a Legion Hall in Sudbury before demanding to see the budget again, giving Harper yet another option to repeat the “dumb and anti-small business quote.” Mulcair railed about all of the eggs being in the “extractive basket” — not remotely true mathematically — and Harper bashed on the NDP being high tax. Mulcair gave a convoluted question about corporations sitting on dead money before demanding help for the middle class and a budget. Harper listed off a number of actions he announced. Justin Trudeau was up next, and decried the problems of the middle class and wondered why the government was giving tax breaks to those who didn’t need them. Harper praised the help they were giving families including a tax cut. Trudeau noted the cuts to infrastructure investments, and said the government’s priorities were wrong when they wanted to help the wealthiest 15 percent of Canadians. Harper reiterated how great his policies were for families. Trudeau then changed topics and wondered about a statement that Peter MacKay once upon a time about the need for parliamentary oversight of national security. Harper insisted that SIRC was robust and functioned well.