While Trudeau and a good number of ministers remained at the UN General Assembly, things carried on back in Ottawa. Rona Ambrose led off, reiterating her line from yesterday about our troops not being pawns on the political chessboard of getting a UN Security Council seat. Harjit Sajjan reminded her that nothing was decided about where they would be deployed and they were still gathering information, and then patted himself on the back for how transparent they were being about it all. Ambrose asked a pair of questions about why there was a sudden change of heart on an extradition treaty with China while they still have the dealt penalty, Sajjan said that they were pushing China on that issue. Ambrose then changed topics to the planned CPP increase, and Bill Morneau said that they still planned on keeping TFSAs and that the rate would increase with the Consumer Price Index, and then they went one more round in French. Thomas Mulcair concerned trolled about the Liberals still using Stephen Harper’s GHG targets, and Jim Carr said that they were planning to increase the targets as they went along. Mulcair went another round in French, and Carr reminded him of the pan-Canadian targets being negotiated. Hélène Laverdière asked if the government would repeal the ministerial directive that allows information obtained by torture to be used. Ralph Goodale didn’t make a firm commitment, only noted that they were giving the whole national security apparatus a thorough review and that legislation on a parliamentary oversight body was before the House. Laverdière then returned to the issue of the extradition treaty with China, but got much the same response from Sajjan that he gave before.
Tag Archives: China
Roundup: Chagger vs Bergen
The big news yesterday was Rona Ambrose shuffling up her shadow cabinet after the summer of leadership announcements, and naming Candice Bergen as the new Opposition House Leader in the place of Andrew Scheer. What is of particular interest is that you have two fairly inexperienced people in the role in both the government and the official opposition, which could make for some very interesting times going forward.
To refresh, the role of the House Leader is to basically determine the agenda of the Commons (deputy leaders fill this role in the Senate), when it comes to determining what items will be up for debate on what days, the scheduling of Supply Days for opposition parties, and basically doing the procedural management. Why the fact that two relatively inexperienced MPs will be doing this is interesting is because we’ll see what kinds of ways that they prioritise things. (Bergen does have experience as a parliamentary secretary and minister of state, but little in the way of procedural experience as far as I’ve been able to determine). What everyone will be paying attention to in particular, however is tone. The fact that for the first time in history, it’s two women in the role is going to have people waiting to see just how that affects tone (as Rosemary Barton gave as her item to watch in this week’s At Issue), because we have been fed a number of gender essentialist narratives that women do things differently and without as much of the partisan acrimony – not that I necessarily believe it, given that Bergen herself is a pretty die-hard partisan. The added spoke in this wheel is the NDP’s House Leader, Peter Julian, whom I have it on good authority is unreasonable to work with at the best of times. When the tension between the House Leaders boiled over into Motion 6 in the spring (and the subsequent The Elbowing that broke that camel’s back), I have little doubt that it had a lot to do with Dominic LeBlanc losing his patience with both Scheer and Julian (who totally insisted that they weren’t even being obstructionist, which I find a bit dubious). So will they be able to work together to push through what promises to be an extremely busy legislative agenda? Or will Bardish Chagger need to start resorting to procedural tactics to ensure that bills can get passed without endless Second Reading debates that the opposition refuses to let collapse so that they can get to committee (which was constant in the previous parliament when the NDP were official opposition). I’m not going to make any predictions, but it is something that I am very curious to watch as the era of “openness and cooperation” rolls along.
Roundup: Questioning Mulcair’s absence
The fate of Thomas Mulcair and whether he will continue to stay on as interim leader of his party are suddenly the topic of discussion, as whisperings from the party seems to be that his virtual absence over the summer – particularly from events like St. Jean Baptiste, Canada Day and Pride – is not conducive to staying on as interim leader, and that there is some sort of ultimatum that if he doesn’t start showing up, he’s out. It’s a bit funny that they’re talking that way because there’s not much that they can do to him at this point – he’s already on the way out, slowly but surely, but one has to wonder what they hope to accomplish – except to maybe jumpstart their moribund leadership campaign process. Peter Julian denies there are rumblings (as is expected), and Mulcair insists there’s no problem, but he’s just taking some time off for the first time in nine years, and while I would normally buy that excuse, the fact that he’s missed so many of the big things that MPs are expected to attend (particularly if they’re things, like Pride, that their party purports to stand for), it does make one wonder a little about how seriously they plan to take the job, especially after convincing the party to let him stay in an interim capacity for that long. (In case you’re wondering, the correct answer to all of this is that party caucuses should be doing the selecting, and we would avoid these drawn-out contests and lame-duck interim leadership intervals).
Where are Naomi Klein, Avi and Stephen Lewis in this hour of discontent? How did they spend their summer holiday? Asking for a friend.
— Michael Den Tandt (@mdentandt) September 7, 2016
In the midst of this is a “bring back Mulcair” campaign organised by some party members online, who think that the way he was treated in the Edmonton convention was “unfair and unethical.” Erm, really? That’s novel. He ran a disastrous, largely tone-deaf campaign, and was just as tone-deaf when it came to how to convince the membership that he should stay on the job as leader. He failed to do that, and he is paying the consequences. That’s politics. There is nothing “unfair” or “unethical” about that – he was defeated in a membership vote. How that’s unethical boggles the mind.
Roundup: Leitch keeps digging
So many hot takes on Kellie Leitch and her need to keep digging when it comes to her “Canadian values” test proposal. Leitch continued to insist that this is a topic worthy of discussion, and proposed yet more “Canadian values” to back up her claim, and this time, those values include “equality of opportunity, hard work, generosity, freedom and tolerance,” with a focus especially on the tolerance part. She also denies that this targets Muslims in any way and doesn’t think that characterisation is fair. So there’s that. Oh, and you can add Deepak Obhrai to the list of leadership candidates opposing Leitch’s position, and Maxime Bernier gave a somewhat muddled response that he believes there are Canadian values but you just can’t test for them.
Kellie Leitch has been offered a job as head of the Archeologists Association due to her love for digging. https://t.co/ZdgtwCjkCG
— Justin Ling (Has Left) (@Justin_Ling) September 6, 2016
In terms of pundit reaction, Michael Den Tandt seems to think that Leitch is going nativist for the sake of deepening her fundraising coffers, while Matt Gurney sees Leitch’s proposal as unworkable, but not really offensive per se. Susan Delacourt sees problems for Leitch from the perspective of a party that doesn’t seem to want to embrace a young female leader, though she may have tapped into an anti-immigrant sentiment within the ranks, while Madeline Ashby looks at the inherent contradictions in Leitch’s position. My own Loonie Politics column on Leitch’s campaign looks at the ways in which she and some of her fellow campaigners are picking and choosing which intolerances to run on, and her own tone-deafness about it (which, given today’s added comments, seem to really fit the bill).
.@supriyadwivedi on the idea of screening potential immigrants for 'anti-Canadian values' #cdnpoli #pnpcbc https://t.co/uZ6WFpIiT3
— Power & Politics (@PnPCBC) September 6, 2016
In other Conservative leadership news, Brad Trost thinks that he can unite the party around his economic ideas while still running as a social conservative, and Deepak Obhari has filed his papers and is officially in the race.
Roundup: Party fault lines
With social conservatives trying to stake out turf, along with Kellie Leitch’s “Canadian values” testing, Michael Chong’s Red Toryism and Maxime Bernier’s Freedom!-crying Libertarian-ish-ism, the question has been posed as to whether the Conservative leadership is opening up old schisms in the party. And the answer I would surmise is that probably, and it’s almost inevitable that it would. The party is a fairly big tent with some big divisions that got patched over by Stephen Harper in his quest to take down the Liberal party, and at the time, he was able to get enough disaffected factions together to do just that and keep them together while they achieved power, because power is its own reward. But now that they’re no longer in power, with Harper no longer at the helm, and the conditions that predicated his leadership have moved on, it’s not surprising in the slightest that these factions are now getting restive and trying to find different leadership camps to rally around. It’s not uncommon, and I have to wonder if there is anyone with enough personality and charisma to keep the factions together, given that there seems to be little appetite for another Harper (not that one could really be found among the current crop of leadership candidates). One could add that it should be a warning to Jason Kenney that the same conditions that allowed for the Conservative unification federally may not exist in Alberta given the history and challenges of the separate parties there. I would also note that given the diversity of views to be found in that big tent, this is likely not a discussion that we would be having if Canada were to adopt a Proportional Representation voting system. There, each faction would be more likely to splinter off into its own party in the hopes of forming an external coalition with more leverage for trying to achieve their goals rather than the internal coalitions that exist in big-tent brokerage parties currently, which moderate the excesses of the various factions in the hopes of achieving government. It’s one of those reasons why we need to be sceptical of those poll analyses that would show how the election might have gone under another system, given that it’s not likely that our parties would continue to exist in the same way under a different system.
Meanwhile, in case it was keeping you up at night, Kevin O’Leary continues to say he’s waiting to see who else is running before he announces if he’ll make a leadership bid of his own.
Roundup: The cynicism of Kellie Leitch
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.
https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/771831806165344257
https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/771848455086039040
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).
.@markusoff pic.twitter.com/P05XQzZOFy
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) September 1, 2016
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.
Roundup: An imaginary crisis
The summer hearings of the electoral reform committee have ended, and now they move to cross-country hearings before they begin their deliberations. The optimistic among them think they can achieve consensus. The remarkably optimistic insist that it’s going to be some form of proportional representation. And the Conservatives say that any consensus would be contingent upon a referendum, while some Liberals say that if they can get consensus there would be no need for one. So, with any luck, that means it’ll all go down in flames. That said, there was still more eye-rolling testimony yesterday that should be commented upon.
There’s this existential drama going on where a Liberal MP on the committee noted that they’re not in a crisis situation, so is this the best time to have the debate, and Elizabeth May, true to form, prompts a witness to say that we should change the system now before there’s a crisis. But what crisis are we talking about?
Fox agrees it is far better to reform our unfair voting system now than in a crisis. @foxgw #ERRE #GPC
— Elizabeth May (@ElizabethMay) September 1, 2016
This I can’t figure out. We’ve had 149 years post-Confederation of free and fair elections, and reasonably good governance, and do I keep needing to remind everyone that the system isn’t broken? Because it’s not. And people who tend to talk “crisis” have been the ones from whom that crisis is that the party they favour didn’t win. “Oh, but Stephen Harper!” the exclaim. To which I remind them that he wasn’t a Bond villain. Yes, he bent the rules of Parliament to their breaking point, but that had absolutely nothing to do with our electoral system and everything to do with all of the other tinkering that we’ve done to our system in the name of making things “more democratic,” like changing the way we select leaders. Harper had a “democratic mandate” from his party members, the cachet of having united the party, and an immense amount of goodwill among the party members for that. But he was also unchallenged by his own party members for his going too far and his excesses because the party members let him, in large part because of civic illiteracy on their part in not knowing they had agency enough to push back, and their accountability measures having been weakened by successive generations of ways in which people tinkered with the system. This whole electoral reform exercise is just tinkering with the system on a more massive scale, and I have zero confidence that things will end up better because (to quote Colby Cosh), it’s a contrived moral panic over a solution in search of a problem. There is no crisis. There will not be a crisis, and it will certainly not be over the perceived legitimacy of a so-called “false majority” (which doesn’t exist because it’s a sore loser term to try to make a Thing out of a logical fallacy). The crisis is one of civic literacy – not the electoral system. Attempts to cast it as such are disingenuous in the extreme.
Roundup: Fear change of government!
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.
The statistical significance of the link is proven. Beyond that, one can surmise that policy lurches of FPTP are costly.@AaronWherry
— Elizabeth May (@ElizabethMay) August 31, 2016
By policy lurches, I am referring to "throw the bums out" voting. Unlike in #PR where more consensus is found.@AaronWherry @sultanofsnooze
— Elizabeth May (@ElizabethMay) August 31, 2016
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.
https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/771181766413398020
https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/771182236003512324
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.
just three responses for now. First, Reform no longer exists, because they wanted power. They needed to broaden.
— Peter Loewen (@PeejLoewen) September 1, 2016
second, the most dominant party of all time is probably the Swedish social dems. Coalitions have allowed them to stay
— Peter Loewen (@PeejLoewen) September 1, 2016
third, it's not so simple to look to other countries for counterfactuals. If you want to chose one, choose NZ.
— Peter Loewen (@PeejLoewen) September 1, 2016
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.
Roundup: O’Toole a possibility
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.
Roundup: Revisionist history mythologizing
The electoral reform committee was back yesterday and the “star” witness was former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, currently heading the institute that bears his name. If you’ve been out of the loop, Broadbent is an unabashed supporter of Proportional Representation, and figures that Mixed-Member Proportional is the cat’s pyjamas, and proceeded to regale the committee with any number of ludicrous statements about both the current system and the purported wonders of MMP, and then delivered this particular gem: that MMP would have spared the west the National Energy Programme in the 1980s.
I. Can’t. Even.
https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/770351319471325185
The amount of mythologizing around the NEP in this country borders on psychosis. There was a time not so long ago that people also caterwauled that a Triple-E senate would also have prevented the NEP, with no actual proof that would be the case if you actually stopped to think about what would be involved in creating such an institution (particularly the imposition of party discipline because if you think you would be electing 105 independent senators, you’re even more delusional than the premise of the question belies). Most of these mythologies around the NEP forget that there was a history involved with global energy crises, broad support in the rest of the country, and that it was a global recession that happened around the same time that was largely responsible for the economic collapse that ensued as opposed to the NEP itself, but the two became conflated in the minds of most people. It didn’t happen in a vacuum or because Pierre Elliot Trudeau simply rubbed his hands and tried to come up with a diabolical plan to screw the West. For Broadbent to suddenly claim that a PR system would have ensured more regional voices at the table and common sense would have prevailed is simply revisionist history combined with the kind of unicorn logic that his preferred voting system would have been responsible only for the good things in history and never the bad. It’s egregious bullshit and needs to be called out as such.