Tag Archives: Conservative Leadership

Roundup: Civilian control – it’s a Thing!

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Over the past couple of weeks, as the government’s “interim” fighter acquisition plans were announced and the fallout has been filtering down since. I’ve seen a lot of fairly disturbing commentary around it, not just from some of the usual ass clowns on social media, but I’ve also seen it in the House of Commons. No less than Rona Ambrose told the Prime Minister that the government needs to get out of the way of military procurement decisions and let the military decide what it needs or wants.

Nope. So much nope.

In case Ambrose or anyone else has forgotten, in a liberal democracy we insist on civilian control of the military. That’s kind of a big thing, and as Stephen Saideman points out, it’s a central ingredient and necessary thing for democracy. And it’s not just this attitude creeping out in Canada, but we’re seeing it in spades in the United States right now as Donald Trump is looking to put former military members into cabinet who haven’t passed their designated “cooling off” period yet.

It’s also why I get annoyed by these stories about how the government’s plans and policies are characterised as “contradicting” the head of the Royal Canadian Airforce, for example. The problem with these kinds of headlines is that if you’ve at all paid attention to the Canadian Forces for the past number of years, you’ll see that they will always say that they have the resources at hand to do the job they’re asked to do. If the government says that 65 new planes are enough, well, then the RCAF will make sure that 65 planes are enough, no matter how much they might like or need more. Plenty of stories filtered out during the air mission in Iraq about how the RCAF was managing it despite their budget constraints, and it was a lot do to with cannibalising training budgets and so on to ensure that those missions that were being asked of them still flew, and they did it without public complaint. (Never mind that they were concerned about the declining readiness of the fleet at the time, but they still had a job to do that was being asked of them, so they made it work).

We need to remember that governments set policies, and they are held to account for the policies they set, but it’s not up to the military to tell us what that policy should be. We’ve had procurement problems in the past where the military were allowed to set their own parameters and went wild looking for the biggest and the best kit available, and boondoggles resulted. So yes, the government can set its own policies and align procurement to match it. That’s fine. And we can hold them to account for that policy on any number of metrics. But we should really refrain from that metric being “the military said the old policy was fine” because of course they were going to say that. It’s also not their job to be yet another cudgel for opposition parties to wield and then hide behind like they do with every other institution and officer of parliament. Civilian control matters. Let’s remember to treat it that way.

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Roundup: Giving the PMO too much credit

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Over the past day-and-a-half, everyone and their dog has had an opinion about just what Maryam Monsef was thinking when she stood up in Question Period and said that the electoral reform committee hadn’t done their job in bringing forward a recommendation and then tried to use the Gallagher Index equation as a way of ridiculing their work. And when she stood up in QP to apologise yesterday no less than five times, the opinions got more and more “sure” that everyone knew just what was going on.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/804730651652096000

And while I am always happy for a Thick of It reference where I can get it, I’ve seen a lot of tweets over the day that have basically posited that Monsef is this vacuous cipher for the PMO, and that she’s just reading the lines assigned to her, and it bothers me. Why? Because Monsef isn’t vacuous. Quite the opposite in fact, and while she may stick to her lines in QP and have all the sweetness of saccharine, she’s very deliberate in the way she responds (as she articulated to John Geddes here). So yes, she prepared for Thursday’s QP and had some lines prepared, including the one about the Gallagher Index, but she also knew that she was going to be bombarded with a bunch of ridiculous questions from the opposition parties who overread the conclusions of the report. Did she go too far? Yes, absolutely, and I think she recognised that. But she’s also been handed a really shit file to manage, and she’s got a tonne of work to do in stick-handling it.

Essentially, the Liberals made a foolish promise that they probably knew they couldn’t keep, but they also managed the expectations around it somewhat with promises for consultation that gives them an out. It was also just one item in a comprehensive reform package, most of the rest of which is well on the way of being implemented, but they went and oversold this one item and now they need to figure out how to break it without looking like they’re breaking it for self-interested reasons. And no, I don’t think they want to break it just because the current system worked out for them – rather, they realised that the alternatives are not actually better for our system in general. Part of how they can hope to break it is to show that the other parties are unreasonable and no consensus can be reached, and to a great extent, the electoral reform committee report demonstrated that, but Monsef went and overshot and her own party members got hit with friendly fire as a result. And now they need to keep up the charade a while longer, but this is something that they need to smother, but they can’t look like that’s their plan, and Monsef has a hell of a job trying to manage that.

Oh, and for everyone who asserts that this is just the PMO pulling the strings instead of the minister, I’m less convinced. I’ve had conversations with people who’ve worked in Queen’s Park who now work here, and their assessment is that this actually is government by cabinet – the centre is not stickhandling everything, and I’m not convinced that Monsef, as junior as she may be, is just a puppet like so many Harper ministers were. The evidence just isn’t there for me.

Meanwhile, Colby Cosh offers some more context for that whole Gallagher Index nonsense, while Paul Wells manages to better interpret Monsef’s reaction and the real reason why the committee failed, which has to do with the referendum question. Andrew Coyne mystifyingly tries to equate the issue with free trade, while again insisting that Monsef is just a cipher for the PM.

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Roundup: Taking out the caucus ballgag

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One of the cheapest attacks in Question Period on any given day is the rhetorical device where an opposition member laments that no member of the government benches from any given province will stand up to defend their province from whichever government programme they’re feeling aggrieved about. It’s one of those questions that seems largely directed to the backbenches, as if they were actually permitted to respond to questions (they can’t), but the questioner will always claim that it’s directed to members of cabinet from that province. And sometimes members of cabinet from that province will respond – witness Ralph Goodale taking Conservatives from Saskatchewan to school over carbon pricing denunciations, and yesterday, it was the NDP trying to needle Liberal MPs from BC over the approval of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline despite the fact that there was some vocal disagreement from Liberal MPs. And of course, in true partisan fashion, NDP MPs started tweeting out nonsense like this:

https://twitter.com/r_garrison/status/804054400926892033

But what’s throwing them for a loop is the fact that Trudeau is letting these MPs go public with their disappointment. There were no gag orders, they put out statements on their websites and Facebook pages, and they didn’t shy away from the press during caucus ins and outs yesterday, and even went on the political shows to express said disappointment. And it bears repeating that this is actually a shocking development because the PM is allowing members of his own party to have some public dissent rather than demand absolute lockstep agreement in public or so-so-solidarity on all things. *cough*NDP*cough* We haven’t seen this in Canadian politics in a long while. Usually when disagreements over regional issues get bad, we see things like Bill Casey leaving the Conservatives in protest (and eventually, a couple of election cycles later, crossing to the Liberals and getting re-elected under that banner). Rather, Trudeau is openly acknowledging the dissent and making moves to placate them in public and not behind the caucus room door. While one may criticise him for a great many things in the way that he has managed his caucus since becoming leader (including a great deal of centralization of power), I will give him points for the way this is being handled. I sincerely doubt that if this were happening under any other party that they would broker for any public dissent on the file.

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Roundup: Two yays and a nay

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The government announced its decisions on three pipelines yesterday – no to Northern Gateway (and a tanker ban on the north coast of BC was also reaffirmed), but yes to Kinder Morgan expansion and Line 3 to the United States. There are a lot of people not happy on either side – the Conservatives are upset that Northern Gateway also didn’t get approved, saying this was just a political decision, and the NDP and Greens (and the mayor of Vancouver) unhappy about the Kinder Morgan announcement, Elizabeth May going so far as to say that she’s willing to go to jail for protesting it.

None of this should be a surprise to anyone, as Trudeau has pretty much telegraphed these plans for weeks, if not months. And as for the critics, well, Robyn Urback makes the point that I do believe that Trudeau was going for:

In fact, Trudeau said as much yesterday in QP when he noted that they were sitting between a party demanding blanket approvals on everything, and another party opposed to approving anything, so that was where he preferred to be. He’s spending some political capital on this decision, including with some of his own caucus members who are not fans of the Kinder Morgan expansion, but he has some to spare, so we’ll see whether he’s picked up any support in the west, or lost any on the west coast when this all blows over.

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Roundup: And the Tony for outrage goes to…

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I really didn’t want to have to write about this, but it managed to suck up all of the oxygen in the news cycle this weekend, and I feel compelled to once again say something that I really didn’t want to, but lately this seems to be my lot in life. I’m talking about the whole Trudeau/Castro statement, and how very tiresome that pile-on soon became. Forgetting of course that nobody’s hand are clean in the game of international diplomacy, and for some reason nobody is allowed to speak ill of the dead unless it’s Fidel Castro, Trudeau’s comments weren’t sufficiently scolding enough of his legacy – never mind that he has a personal family connection there, and he has to be pragmatic about relations as he walks the line between needing new markets with American protectionism on the rise and economic liberalisation slowly happening in that country. And when pressed, Trudeau made no bones about the fact that Castro was a dictator while still explaining making the statement that he did. Nevertheless, I will hasten to add that Trudeau’s statement has nothing on the leftist paeans being sung to Castro that I’m finding all over my Facebook timeline, praising his stand against Imperialism and how the love of his people protected him from CIA assassins, and so on. (And these are from the same kinds of people who considered Stephen Harper a dictator, so seriously, chill out). And then there was the digging up of statements that Stephen Harper had made after the deaths of the likes of the King of Saudi Arabia (“desired peace”) and Hugo Chavez, and lo, no outright condemnations in either of those statements. Should Trudeau have said something more? Probably. But I do get that he’s trying to walk a very fine line.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, people took to social media to bombard us with endlessly with the instantly tiresome meme of #Trudeaueulogies, while the whole of the Conservative leadership race decided that they too needed to take to social media to perform some outrage for us, demanding that Trudeau not go to the funeral, and beating at their breasts, wailing and gnashing their teeth about how terrible it was that he didn’t mention the executions or the persecution of gays, and it was like every single one of them was vying for a Tony award. And then they all emailed party members trying to crassly try to fundraise on this issue. Honestly, it’s just so tiresome because it’s just so transparently performative.

https://twitter.com/cfhorgan/status/802593401107611650

Meanwhile, John Geddes talks to a historian about the legacy of Pierre Trudeau and Castro with Canada-Cuba relations. Terry Glavin thinks that this proves that Trudeau is as vacuous as most people seem to think, while Charlie Gilles calls Trudeau’s statement “egregious whitewashing.”

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Roundup: Crying wolf on fundraising

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I’m starting to feel like a bit of history repeating again as I get cranky over yet more clutched pearls about so-called “cash for access” or “pay to play” fundraisers, which are nothing of the sort. Cabinet ministers are not soliciting stakeholders for tens of thousands of dollars of donations to meet fundraising targets. This is a government whose penchant for consultation means that there are multiple avenues of access for said stakeholders that they need not pony up to ministerial shakedowns in order to get meetings. And this latest allegation, that somehow “communist billionaires” from China got preferential access for $1500 (they didn’t pay as they can’t donate since they aren’t Canadian citizens) stretches credulity, and taking the cake is this hysteria about a donation made to the Trudeau Foundation. You know, a foundation that the Prime Minister is not a part of, and is a registered charity, which the PM sees no enrichment from in the slightest. That wealthy donors also contributed to the foundation, a statue of Trudeau’s father (again, where is the actual enrichment?) and to law school scholarship at McGill (Trudeau did not go to McGill law school) doesn’t have any particular relevance to him or government business, so even on the face of it, where is the conflict of interest? And don’t tell me that there’s a “perception” because if you actually look at the facts and not just go “Hmm, Justin Trudeau…Trudeau Foundation… Yup, sounds fishy to me,” then you’d realise that this is bunk. But no. Here we are, yet again, trying to make hay over activities that are reported, above board, and not actual conflicts of interest beyond people yelling “smell test!” and “appearance!” with no actual facts. And let me again remind you that the Chief Electoral Officer himself noted that our current donation levels are fine, and lowering them will mean money starts to move underground, which we do not want. And if you bring up the Ethics Commissioner calling these events “unsavoury,” let me also remind you that she wants all gifts to MPs registered at an extremely low threshold, meaning a massive amount of more compliance paperwork which MPs themselves have balked at, and the Lobbying Commissioner’s investigation is because people have brought this to her attention, and it doesn’t mean that she has found anything amiss. Honestly, stop lighting your hair on fire over innuendo. You’re currently crying wolf, and when any real impropriety happens, you risk it being shrugged off after any number of previous false alarms.

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Roundup: The pull of status quo

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The wailing and gnashing of teeth of the electoral reform crowd is about to get worse, as they will soon convince themselves that the government is out to kill their dreams of a new electoral system. Why? Because after the committee demanded that minister Maryam Monsef give them a report of the electoral reform consultations she’s received, she’s told them that those consultations are showing fairly strong support for the status quo, and that there is no consensus on what kind of electoral reform that people prefer. Add to that, there is apparently a strong preference for the local representation connection in their various values questions, which goes toward supporting the status quo argument. I’m fairly thrilled to hear about so much support for team status quo and hope that this bolsters the case to abandon this whole foolhardy process, but I fear we’re still a little ways away from that as of yet.

Meanwhile, our friends at Fair Vote Canada are baying at the moon that the new survey the government plans to open to Canadians is biased toward the status quo based on sample questions they found on the testing site. Except of course that those aren’t the actual final questions on the survey, and the questions were generated by the company for testing purposes rather than the government for their actual survey, so no dice (yet) on that particular conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, killing this whole electoral reform headache can’t come fast enough, nor can the justifications based on the “values” quizzes by the government. Then maybe we can focus on the real problems, like civic literacy and engagement, rather than trumpeting solutions in search of problems.

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Roundup: The scourge of billionaires

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If you thought that the temptation to blame elites for everything was simply the crass tactics of Kellie Leitch – herself among the most elite of elites – then you’d be wrong. Yesterday Rona Ambrose decided to take a page from the very same playbook and rail in a speech open to media about how the Liberals were elites who were *gasp!* meeting with billionaires to talk about investment opportunities in Canada. OH NOES! The horror of it all! And not just billionaires – billionaires from Beijing and Dubai! Because it never hurts to get a bit of a protectionist/xenophobic twist to your moral panic. But then again, the Conservatives never could decide if they actually wanted to attract or shut down foreign investment, as they left rules deliberately vague so that they could indulge their protectionist, populist impulses when it suited their needs politically.

Part of what’s galling is the real lack of self-awareness that Ambrose is displaying in this kind of speech. While she’s trying to take a populist tack, her examples are all poor ones to prove her case about those darn elites being against ordinary working folks. Leaving aside that as MPs, they are the elites, the examples of things like cancelling the children’s fitness tax credit don’t even fit their rhetoric. Why? Because the Liberal not only replaced those myriad of tax credits with a broad-based income tax cut, but also with far more generous and untaxed child benefit payments, while those tax credits were non-refundable, meaning that they were generally inaccessible to low-income Canadians who needed them, but rather were far more beneficial to higher-income families who had the money to spend on the sports or arts or whatever to get the full benefit of said credits. In other words, trying to make a “regular families” argument in the “us versus the elites” narrative doesn’t stand up to logic or reality. The fact that they are willing to start indulging in this kind of rhetoric should be alarming, because the last thing we want to do is start trading in the politics of resentment like we’ve seen in the States. Only madness lies that way.

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Roundup: Pushing more policy to the courts

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There’s this terrible idea that keeps circling, and here it comes again, which is the idea that we should enshrine environmental rights in the constitution. David Suzuki is going around trying to make this happen once again, concerned that like the coming Trumpocalypse in the States, that one bad election in Canada and any progress we’ve made on environmental laws would be set back. And while this kind of thinking – insulating environmental laws in a more robust constitutional framework – sounds good on its face, its proponents need a good smack upside the head.

Why? Because this is a democracy, and what they are trying to do is take the environment out of the role of the government, and put it in the lap of the courts. No longer should the people decide on an important area like the environment, but instead, we’ll ensure that unelected judges with no accountability are the ones who are now determining policy. Add to that, I’m not sure that the courts have the competency to do be making these kinds of policy determinations, and yes, that is an issue that this proposal doesn’t seem to talk about. It’s disturbing that Suzuki and his ilk are trying to diminish the role of democracy in favour of a more technocratic approach to government, no matter how much importance one places on environmental policy. We have a system of government which is supposed to hold the government of the day to account, and usually it’s pretty successful. It held the Conservatives to account after they abused the public trust on things like the environment file, and were duly punished for it at the ballot box, and when you look at recent elections like that in the Yukon where the environment was apparently an issue, the party that was more reluctant to take action was punished for it. You don’t need to yet again turn everything over to the courts in order to take action – just mobilize enough popular support to the cause. It can and does happen, but to simply suggest that politics has failed and the courts should handle it is the kind of thinking that makes me really, really uncomfortable because of where it leads.

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Roundup: Pushing back against Leitch

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In the wake of Wednesday’s Conservative leadership “debate” – and I use the term loosely because there was no actual debate, just presentations sans Power Point – the wedge that Kellie Leitch has been nursing in her campaign became all the more stark. While Michael Chong may have been first out of the gate with his condemnation, Deepak Obhrai has used it to crank his campaign up a notch yesterday, with both an appeal for support in order to oppose Leitch specifically, and also told tales about messages he’s received from Leitch supporters telling him to leave the country.

At one point during the presentations on Wednesday, Leitch held up a book Points of Entry from sociologist Victor Satzewich to justify her screening proposals. The problem? That Satzewich’s conclusions in the book were the opposite of hers, that the system was working, that demanding more face-to-face interviews for all visa applications would make the system grind to a halt, and that while he went into the research sceptical, his research convinced him that things were better than he had initially surmised. So that’s kind of embarrassing for Leitch (or would be if she had any demonstrated capacity for shame, which I’m not convinced is the case).

Meanwhile Leitch, whose other Trumpian note has been to rail against “elites” – as though she were not the epitome of one – has been holding fundraisers in Toronto with Bay Street lawyers for $500 a pop. You know, more of those elites which she’s totally not one of. Also, if she’s so convinced that she’s going to be Prime Minister by 2019, isn’t this some kind of ethical conflict for her to be holding these kinds of cash-for-access fundraisers?

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