Tag Archives: Civic Literacy

Roundup: Not what parties are for

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As part of a longer piece (linked in the section below), the campaign director of the Liberal Party offered a loathsome sentence yesterday, and it’s just so completely disheartening.

No. The role of the party is not just to win elections and to fundraise. In fact, this kind of attitude is why the political system in Canada is in the state that it’s in. Parties are just seen as election vehicles rather than the grassroots organizations that deal with ground-up policy development, selection and nomination of candidates, or holding either their local representatives or the party itself to account. There is a whole structure that parties are supposed to play in the political ecosystem of being the interlocutors between ordinary people and the caucuses in the capital – it’s not just about mobilizing volunteers to make phone calls and knock on doors during a campaign. It’s not just about election machinery. It’s about the lifeblood of politics.

But this is where we are – our bastardized leadership selection process, twisted into a parody version of American presidential primaries, has centralized power, and hollowed out parties so that they are no longer performing the functions they were designed to do, and instead are merely vassals to the personality cults that have added brand recognition. It’s utterly debased how the system is supposed to work, and campaign guys like these help to fuel the demise.

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Roundup: The menace of ignorant premiers

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Occasionally a politician will say something so blindingly wrong and stupid that it makes me incandescent with rage, and yesterday the honour went to PEI’s new premier, Dennis King, who believes that because he’s in a hung parliament that he’s “not the government,” but that “we’re all the government.”

And then my head exploded.

King is the premier, which means he’s the government. And for him to try and abrogate his responsibilities in the face of questions from the opposition is a sickening lack of civic literacy and frankly spine. Trying to shame the opposition into “collaborative government” is frankly trying to avoid accountability. After all, when everyone is accountable, then no one is accountable, and that’s not how our system works. He’s the premier. He is responsible to the legislature for the decisions that the government makes, and while he’s trying to launder them through the opposition in the name of “collaboration,” that’s not how the system works. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hung parliament – that only means that he needs to work harder to secure the support of the opposition, not that they are in government with him. And yes, I’m enraged by this because he and everybody else should know better.

Alberta extremism

On another topic, this story out of Edmonton about extremist billboards calling for civil war against the rest of Canada, and promoting conspiracy theorism and outright lies about Justin Trudeau is extremely concerning because this is how illiberal populism happens. And Jason Kenney has a direct hand of responsibility in this, both by selling lies about the province’s situation and about what Trudeau is and is not doing, and by selling them snake oil in a bid to keep them angry because that’s how he gets votes. But as the anger won’t dissipate now that he’s in charge, he’s forced to try and keep the anger going in one way or another and hope that it doesn’t blow up in his face – hence why he’s inventing new grievances by things like his sham Senate “elections” – because unless he keeps trying to point that anger to new enemies, it will turn on him. I really don’t think he appreciates the monster he’s created, and these billboards are a warning sign that needs to be heeded.

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Roundup: PEI’s alarming adventures

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Yesterday, the lieutenant governor of PEI gave the nod to PC leader Dennis King to attempt to form a government, and the whole thing is going to make my head explode because dear sweet Rhea, mother of Zeus, nobody has a clue what they’re doing. Not one of them. It’s alarming. (Side note: While the media have been saying that there would be a PC minority government, or that King was premier-designate, none of that became fact until today, and media outlets not only jumped the gun, but were attempting to short-circuit the process, which is a very bad thing).

Where to begin? How about the fact that the lieutenant governor, Antoinette Perry, was giving a media statement about her decision? Because no, she absolutely should not. And King? He says that he’s thinking about naming members of other parties to Cabinet, before preparing his Speech from the Throne and first budget “in consultation” with said parties. Again, this is utter insanity. Unless you have a formal coalition, you can’t have members of other parties in Cabinet because of Cabinet solidarity. Otherwise, they would just be de facto floor-crossers, which again, if that’s what you want then just go ahead and poach them, but be honest about it. As for King saying that he hopes that by “consulting” on the Throne Speech and budget that the opposition won’t oppose them for the sake of opposing them, well, he seems to be missing the whole point of the opposition, particularly with the budget. The opposition’s job is to argue why the government doesn’t deserve Supply to carry out their programme – they are supposed to be making that case. Having all parties vote for it defeats the purpose of why we have an opposition.

And then there’s Green leader Peter Bevan-Baker, who may or may not actually be leader of the opposition, given that he’s talking about some kind of supply-and-confidence agreement with the government rather than being the opposition. And you can’t be both Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition while signing a supply and confidence agreement to prop up said government. It doesn’t work like that, because it blunts your ability to hold them to account because you need the threat of being able to remove confidence to do so. And it’s astounding that he doesn’t seem to get that basic constitutional role or function. I know that people somehow think that “cooperation” or “collaborative” governments should be the way things work, but they’re wrong, because that does away with accountability, which is at least as important. When everyone is accountable for decisions, then nobody is accountable, and that will be the death knell of our political system. It would be great if Bevan-Baker understood that simple bit of civic literacy.

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Roundup: A hung parliament in PEI

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The PEI election did not result in a Green Party majority, because shockingly, the polls were wrong. It did result in a hung parliament, which has never happened before in that province, and yet every single media outlet and then the prime minister himself declared that the progressive conservatives had won a minority. Err, except we don’t know the composition of the next government yet because the lieutenant governor hasn’t invited anyone to form government, and the seat distribution – 12 PC, 8 Green, 6 Liberal – is one where it’s not actually clear that the PCs will form government, as a Green-Liberal coalition remains more than possible. Which isn’t to say that it will happen, but there is a way in which government formation works in a Westminster system, and simply winning the most seats, even if you don’t win a majority, doesn’t mean that you get a chance to form government. It doesn’t work that way! And it would be really great if the media would stop creating this false sense that it works that way, because it doesn’t. And even if the PCs do form government, they will need one of the other parties to prop them up, and that will have a significant effect on the shape of that government. Pre-empting the lieutenant governor’s call simply invites confusion, which we should probably be avoiding.

Happily, the province’s electoral reform referendum also went down in defeat (and this is another place where the urban-rural split will likely be evident). Hopefully this means that the advocates will shut up about it because they keep losing. I know they won’t – they’re convinced that people just don’t understand or are too stupid to realise that PR is so good for them (it’s not), but you would hope that the constant defeats would be some kind of dissuasion.

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Roundup: Objections to the waiver

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At first it seemed like today was going to be the big day. Jody Wilson-Raybould had agreed to meet the justice committee to tell “her truth.” On his way into Cabinet, Justin Trudeau said he was “pleased” that she would be able to appear at committee. The committee agreed to give her the thirty minutes she requested off the top instead of the usual five or ten for an opening statement. Some MPs wanted to try and get the hearing moved from after QP to beforehand (never mind that it’s when all of the parties hold their caucus meetings) in order to be able to ask the PM any questions that might arise from the testimony. And then, surprising probably nobody who paid attention, Wilson-Raybould sent another letter to committee, expressing her “concerns” that the Order in Council that waived solicitor-client privilege wasn’t enough for her to tell the full story.

At this point, it’s starting to feel like a game – that Wilson-Raybould’s attempt to keep controlling the narrative is running out of runway, given that Michael Wernick called her out and Justin Trudeau went and waived solicitor-client privilege (unnecessarily, if you listen to some of the legal commentary out there), and now she’s trying to sow doubt that she’s still not completely free to speak, in order to keep up the narrative that she’s the victim or the hero, distracting from her poor record as justice minister. And it’s starting to feel like the more song and dance that she keeps putting up in order to keep from speaking, the less there is to what she has to say. But maybe I’m getting cynical after a decade on the Hill.

Meanwhile, former litigator Andrew Roman takes a deeper look into the portents of doom for SNC-Lavalin if they were subject to prosecution and even a ten-year ban from federal contracts, and finds them to be less dire than advertised, which makes any alleged wrongdoing by the government to protect them all the more baffling.

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Roundup: Dissent without disloyalty

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Yesterday on Power & Politics, we saw something that is far too rare in Canadian politics, but should be the norm. In response to the government signing on the US’ recent initiative at the UN to basically renew the “war on drugs,” Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith went on the show to publicly disagree with his party and the government that his party forms, and more to the point, we didn’t see anyone clutching their pearls about this, or higher-ups in the party make threats. Shocking, I know.

The civics refresher here is that all MPs are supposed to hold government to account, whether they’re in the opposition or in the government’s backbench. Holding the government to account is the very raison d’etre of Parliament, but you wouldn’t know it given how many government backbenchers think it’s their job to be cheerleaders, to give unquestioning support, and possibly to suck up in the hopes of a Cabinet posting or parliamentary secretary position. I also know that this isn’t quite as true behind the caucus room door, but we see very little dissent in public. We see even less dissent in other parties – the NDP enforce solidarity and uniformity in all positions, and have been known to punish MPs who step out of line, while we’ve seen the amount of tolerance that the Conservatives have for dissenting opinions with Maxime Bernier’s post-leadership experiences (though I will grant you, there is still some diversity of thought in there, but it’s rarely expressed publicly). And while I don’t praise Justin Trudeau for many things, I will say his openness to dissenting voices is unquestioningly a good thing in Parliament.

And this brings me back to Leona Alleslev’s defection to the Conservatives last week, and the statements she made about how she didn’t think she could openly criticize the government and not be perceived as disloyal. This is one of those statements of hers that I called bullshit on at the time, and I will call bullshit on it doubly today given this latest incident where Erskine-Smith broke ranks and nobody is calling him disloyal for it. He’s doing the job he’s supposed to do, and which not enough MPs take seriously (and this is also because the lack of proper civics education and training for MPs when they’re elected). I’d like to see him setting an example that others will hopefully follow.

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Roundup: Hung legislatures vs basic civics

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New Brunswick had an election on Monday night, and it resulted in a 22-21-3-3 hung legislature, and wouldn’t you just know it, there’s been some really awful reporting about it, because apparently people who report on politics in this country can’t be arsed to learn the basics of how Responsible Government works. Hence, we got reporters saying that people “don’t know who the premier is” – which is wrong, because it remains Brian Gallant as he hasn’t resigned – or that he would “get first crack to try and form a government” – he already has a government, but rather he will try to test the confidence of the Chamber – or another heinous offender was framing his meeting with the lieutenant governor as getting “permission” to test confidence, which is again wrong because the LG doesn’t grant permission. I’m also not crazy about framing the election as “inefficient votes” for the provincial Liberals because that implies that the popular vote is a real thing, when it’s a logical fallacy – it was not one election, but rather 49 separate elections that happened at the same time. This is basic civics, and yet our media is failing Canadians, so well done everyone.

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What makes this particular election result interesting is the fact that there are two “third-parties,” each with three seats – the Green Party, and an anti-bilingualism populist party – that will have to prop up either the incumbent Liberals or the PCs, who won one more seat (so far as we know – there are several recounts now underway). That means that the election of a Speaker will be crucial, and word has it that the government is making offers to PC winners to try and get one of them to take up the post. Of course, one particular quirk of New Brunswick is that, well, their Speakers tend to be fairly partisan. So that could make things doubly interesting for the way things will play out in the weeks and months to come.

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Meanwhile, Paul Wells accurately describes the dynamics of the post-election period and how the LG will discharge her role, which is not to give permission. Susan Delacourt tries to tease out the effect of populism on this election, but along the way grossly mischaracterises the LG as having “waded into” the results and giving Gallant “the right” to stay on as premier, when that’s not how it works, and it’s disappointing that these myths keep getting traction.

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Roundup: The problem with coalition speculation

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We’re only a few days into the Ontario election campaign, and we’re already hearing far too much of the c-word for my liking. And by c-word, I mean “coalition” (though I have no doubt that the other c-word is being uttered by trolls over social media). And it’s so utterly frustrating because most of the time, the talk isn’t accompanied by any particular understanding of how Westminster governments work so you get a ham-fisted attempt to force coalition talks into the early days of a campaign, during which the polls could easily swing (and have in the past). And yet here we are.

Paul Wells did a great service by calling out this kind of talk in Maclean’syesterday, reminding everyone – and especially We The Media – that this kind of talk, especially on the back of torqued headlines, doesn’t really help anyone. Why? Because, aside from the fact that it’s just pure speculation, and that it distracts from actual issues at play, it also forces leaders to start ruling out hypotheticals that aren’t in play but one day might be. He also makes the salient point that post-election, things are not on a level playing field – the incumbent government is still the government, regardless of how many seats they won, and it sets up interesting scenarios if the seat counts are close, as what happened in BC last year. And time and again, media commentators seem to utterly forget that fact, which becomes extremely frustrating as they give authoritative commentary about things that are in contradiction to the realities of how the Westminster system operates.

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Now, I sort of appreciate what Wherry is saying there, but the problem is that unless and until our media commentators bother to learn how the system operates, we will continue to trade in misinformation, that gets torqued for the sake of headlines, and it will exacerbate the situation and make it worse. Remember the prorogation crisis of 2008 that was precipitated by a potential coalition government willing to step in if they defeated the Harper government on a vote of non-confidence? And how the government’s talking heads were giving all kinds of nonsense answers about it being “anti-democratic,” or that they were going to “go over the head of the Governor General” and incite civil unrest if she let Stéphane Dion and Jack Layton form government? Don Newman was the only journalist who challenged these statements to their faces at the time, and, well, Don’s retired from the news business, and the rest of the pundit class hasn’t learned much since then, unfortunately, so I really am not confident that there would be pushback to wrong notions that will get promulgated if a coalition does become a reality in Ontario post-election. But as Wells pointed out, this kind of pointless speculation is the kind of empty calories and time-wasting that is irresistible to the media landscape. Meanwhile, I’ll be right here, head exploding.

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Roundup: No, committee studies shouldn’t guide government

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And lo, from Toronto’s den of hipsterdom, comes the plaintive wail that a government ignoring the work of committees is a betrayal of democracy. No, seriously – this is the complaint of VICE’s parliamentary columnist (who does not reside in Ottawa, or ever darken the halls of Parliament Hill, but whatever). Brown cites the centralization of power in the PMO and the growing power of branding as the forces that eclipse these poor committees, but it’s possibly the laziest gods damned complaint you can imagine.

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/971427684965371905

So, for Brown’s edification, here are a few points that he overlooked in his ignorance of how things actually work in Ottawa:

  1. The role of Commons committees is not to be driving government policy, as Brown seems to think. The role of Parliament is to hold government to account, and committees are the workhorses of doing that, particularly when it comes to scrutinizing legislation. Senate committees, it should be noted, do a much more robust job of looking at areas of concern and coming up with policy recommendations, but that’s because the Senate is Parliament’s built-in think-tank, and it operates on a less partisan basis than Commons committees, who often approach their committee work with the lens of validating their party’s pre-existing positions.
  2. Not all committees are created equal. He may cite the work of a few of the “high profile” committees, writing on “sexier” topics like pharmacare, but because those are higher-profile committees, you’re seeing more studies that are bound to attract attention but have little substance to offer. If he wants to get a better sense of really effective committees that do really good work, he should look at ones like Public Accounts, who do the real work that Parliament is supposed to be doing, which, again, is holding government to account.
  3. Committees coming up with reports that the government does not then follow is hardly a sign of PMO centralization – if he wants an example of that, it was how committees operated in the Harper era, where they were all branch plants of minsters’ offices, with parliamentary secretaries directing the government MPs to do their bidding, and having ministerial staffers providing direction throughout. Oh, and the minister would often direct the committee to study topics that were of convenience (while he or she went ahead and legislated before waiting for the committee report). The way committees are operating currently is a vastly different environment than it was just a few years ago. But he might know that if he was actually here and paid attention to these things.

You’ll excuse me if I have little time for facile analysis like this. Whinging about PMO centralization without looking at the complicity of MPs themselves in the problem is to miss the point. And to miss the whole point of Parliament in a column like this makes it clear that nobody should be paying attention to the musings of its author.

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Roundup: The cause, not the cure

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The particular turmoil of the Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership is difficult to turn away from, particularly given that right now it’s grappling with a fairly fundamental point about what is ailing our Westminster parliamentary system, which is the way in which we choose our leaders. Andrew Coyne lays it out really well in his latest column, which notes that another leadership contest won’t solve the party’s problems precisely because it’s the cause of those problems. And Chris Selley notes that with the inclusion of Doug Ford in this new race, that system of leadership selection is just as likely to result in a civil war within the party as it will do for anything else. (On a side note, Selley’s piece notes how Ford is attracting the evangelical endorsements in such an eerily Trump-like way).

Another point that Coyne gets to is this particular fetishization of the membership figures that Brown was able to attract to the party, but it ignores the fact that most of those who are signing up memberships have little connection to the party itself, and are little more than tools to be used by the leadership winner who sold them those memberships. And the point that I would add is that these memberships don’t actually strengthen the party because they’re being used to justify central control by the leadership rather than being a vehicle by which the riding associations are interlocutors between the grassroots and the caucus. These “rented” memberships are meaningless and do little to enhance the party, the way the chatter would otherwise suggest. If anything, they weaken the meaning of what the grassroots is supposed to represent. That’s why we need to get back to the proper working of a Westminster system, and restore caucus selection, so that we can reinvigorate the meaning of the grassroots.

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