Tag Archives: Conservative Leadership

Roundup: Trudeau plays hardball

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Yesterday was the day that Justin Trudeau decided to start playing hardball. Under the backdrop of the debate on ratification of the Paris Agreement on GHG emissions, he dropped the hammer on a minimum national carbon price, starting at $10 per tonne in 2018, rising to $50 per tonne by 2022, and provinces would keep the revenue with the intention that it be revenue neutral, so as not to ensure this is a federal “tax grab.” Any province that doesn’t comply will have the price imposed and the revenues returned to them. Stéphane Dion feels vindicated by this development, incidentally. Oh, and Trudeau probably isn’t going to meet with the premiers about their demands around the health transfer escalator either.

https://twitter.com/Geddes28/status/783000372730298370

Some of the provinces were immediately incensed. At the environment ministers’ meeting in Montreal, ministers from Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador walked out of the meeting, and true to his diva self, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall declared the “level of disrespect” to be “stunning” – never mind that Trudeau has been telegraphing this move ever since the Vancouver premier’s meeting. Alberta, incidentally, whose own plans surpass Trudeau’s, say that they won’t support it unless there’s a commitment for more pipelines, while Manitoba is non-committal for the moment. (Other provincial positions here).

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Brad Wall, for his part, is threatening to take the government to court over carbon pricing, but it’s not likely to get anywhere.

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In terms of analysis, economist Trevor Tombe reminds us why pricing carbon is the most effective market mechanism to deal with climate change, while John Ivison says that Trudeau may have outsmarted his opponents, and Andrew Coyne notes the one-sidedness of any federal-provincial negotiations.

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Roundup: Poisoning the expenses well

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With the story out yesterday morning about Rona Ambrose’s expenses claimed while staying in Stornoway, I think we’re starting to approach peak ridiculousness with the growing war over expenses, and accusations of poor judgment across the board. That the Conservatives have spent the past two days pushing a non-story about Dominic LeBlanc giving a speech at an event sponsored by a law firm with Irving connections, claiming poor judgment and a conflict of interest where clearly none actually exists (it’s not a fundraiser, no decisions are being made, it’s a speech, FFS), it’s desperation and grasping at straws.

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The bigger problem, however, is the corrosive effect this continues to have, fuelling not only the cheap, petty outrage that voters are being encouraged to feel anytime government spends money, but it is starting to burn the very real bridges for why we have expense regimes in the first place.

https://twitter.com/aaronwherry/status/781863718799941632

Like Rob Silver above, Wherry may be exhibiting his trademark sarcasm, he’s got a point – we are rapidly approaching the point where We The Media have stoked such public opposition to legitimate expense claims by clutching our pearls at seemingly large numbers presented without context while crying “Judgment!” and “Taxpayers’ money!” that people are developing the wrong impression. We had NDP MPs last parliament declaring that if we’re to have senators, then they should all work as volunteers, and lately I’ve had jackasses barking at me on the Twitter Machine saying that senior political staff should also be volunteers. We’re half-a-step away from people demanding it of MPs.

Which gets back to the whole point of expense regimes in the first place – so that it acts as an equaliser, so that you don’t have to be inordinately wealthy in the first place in order to participate in political life, be it as an MP or senator (or senior political staffer, apparently). Do we really think it’s for the best that we return to an era where only the wealthy can afford to participate in political life and let them dictate policy for us? Or where a lack of an expense regime would encourage actual graft (as opposed to this nonsense we’re currently getting the vapours over with moving expenses and whatnot) from politicians to help make themselves financially whole from the expense of doing their jobs? Seriously, we need to grow up and stop poisoning the well because we don’t want to go where this road leads. Only certain doom lies that way.

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Roundup: The new Senate hurdles

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Just how MPs should deal with an increasingly independent – and assertive – Senate is the question posed by former MP Bryon Wilfert and his firm partner Paul Hillier, and it’s a question that I’m really not sure that Justin Trudeau adequate considered when he embarked on this path to modernization. While they note that no longer having senators in caucus limits the closed-door opportunity to hear and debate government proposals, I will state that they overplay the concern about the ability to whip those votes. There has never been any formal power to whip senators’ votes, but they relied primarily on sentimentality or affiliation, and sometimes senators went along, and sometimes they very much didn’t. That’s one of the reasons why there remains a bit of a taint around the post-2008 Harper appointees, because most of them came in being told that they could be whipped, and they behaved as though they could – up until fracture points around the contentious bill C-377, and then they rebelled against their Senate leadership (and it’s not a coincidence that Marjory LeBreton resigned as Government Leader shortly thereafter). They also point to the very real problem that with so many new MPs, and with the Liberal senators no longer in caucus, the personal relationships between parliamentarians that would normally exist no longer do, and that does start to exacerbate the problem of driving legislation through the Senate.

Where I see their proposed solution as being problematic is the suggestion that committee chairs be the new agents to set the legislative pace and of trying to build consensus. Why I think this is a problem is that the point of committees is to hold the government to account, which is why ministers are so frequently called to appear before them. If the chair is acting as the agent of the government, rather than of the committee itself, it creates something of a conflict in their roles. As well, many of the committee chairs are from the Conservatives (not that the Senate Liberals are the same party as the government, but there is an assumption of greater sympathy despite the fact that the relationship has been pretty testy to date). Trying to co-opt those chairs into being government agents to drive consensus would seem to be antithetical to the purposes of having an opposition, and its accountability functions. It also puts those chairs in the awkward position of having stakeholder groups trying to court them in order to get their support in rounding up senators to support the bills – groups that would also want to come before committee to plead their cases when the bills get to said committees, which again presents a bit of a conflict. If anything, I do think this highlights the value of having caucuses for organisational purposes, and arranging these meetings – and yes, the Independent Senators Group could possibly host these same kinds of stakeholder discussions without trying to come to an internal consensus, allowing their members to make their own minds up (and to date, they have operated on a rule that anyone trying to get support does so outside of their meeting room). It will continue to take getting used to, but it will continue to take some serious thought about what roles we’re asking people to take on within the chamber in order to get bills passed.

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Roundup: Harder’s arrogant dismissal

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It is probably not without a certain amount of chutzpah that Senator Peter Harder went before the Senate’s modernisation committee yesterday, and not only lectured to them about what the Senate does, but offered his particular thoughts on how the institution should be reformed, and most of all, having the gall to suggest that there was nothing that could be learned from the House of Lords and their integration of crossbenchers. Harder, with his mere couple of months of experience, has taken it upon himself to declare that the Senate should comprise of the government representative (a creature which does not actually appear in convention, statute or logic) and independents who will loosely affiliate on an ad hoc basis – no government, no opposition, no parties, no partisanship.

Give. Me. A. Break.

This declared allergy to partisanship in the upper chamber has reached the point of being utterly ridiculous. Parties exist for a reason. No one is arguing that the current power structure in the Senate needs to be broken apart and for independents to be given more power and resources, but blowing up parties is not the way to go, nor is assiduously screening nominees for any past hint of partisanship because there is nothing inherently wrong with partisanship. If Harder thinks that 105 individuals can sufficiently organise themselves for debates without any kind of structure – that his office doesn’t impose anyway – is lunacy. And it does concern me that Harder is making a bit of a power grab, especially considering that his office is already poised to start offering staffing services for the incoming batch of senators, which is not only unseemly but once again looks to bigfoot the work that the Independent Senators Group has been doing to come up with a bottom-up approach to organising unaligned senators in a manner consistent with the operation of the Chamber while working to give them caucus-like powers for committee assignments and with any luck, research dollars and support. But this isn’t the first time that Harder has attempted to bigfoot this nascent group, and I think that’s a very real problem. His attitude towards the modernisation committee – and in particular his arrogant dismissal of the crossbencher model (which the Independent Senate Group has been looking toward) – is a worrying sign.

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne not only unhelpfully endorses the Segal-Kirby call for the Senate to limit its veto to a suspensive one (because hey, it’s not like we might need an option to stop a prime minister with a majority from passing really terrible legislation), but goes one step further and proposes that any bill in the Senate that has not been passed in six months is deemed to have passed, so that when they can’t procedurally speed through certain bills that get bottlenecked in committees (like any private member’s bill, many of which are objectively terrible), or when they demand more time and attention, they should just be passed anyway? Seriously? What a way to run a parliament.

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Roundup: Non-binding unanimous support

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Supply day motions – also known as opposition day motions – can be tricky business, and unless the opposition party that moves it isn’t careful, they can wind up giving the government a free pass on supporting said motions without fear of consequence. Never mind that the point of supply day motions is to debate why the government should be denied supply (and hence confidence), these have largely turned into take-note debates on topics of the opposition’s choosing. These free pass motions happened with surprising regularity in the previous parliament, with the NDP frequently offering up mom-and-apple-pie motions that the Conservatives would obviously support the intent of, despite never having the intention to follow through with substantive action on, because hey, the motions are non-binding, and why not look like they support the idea of the motion? And lo and behold, the Conservatives offered up just such a motion around the Supreme Court of Canada, imploring the government to “respect the custom of regional representation” when making appointments to that court, “in particular, when replacing the retiring Justice Thomas Cromwell, who is Atlantic Canada’s representative on the Supreme Court.” While I will quibble with their use of “custom” as opposed to “constitutional convention” (which it really is at this point), this was one of those motions worded just loosely enough that the government could vote for it (and it did pass unanimously, as these kinds of motions often do), and should they go ahead and appoint a non-Atlantic justice to the court, they have room enough to turn around and give some kind of a nonsense excuse like “Oh, we felt that such-and-such diversity requirement was more needed at this point,” or “we felt that the Atlantic nominees were insufficiently bilingual,” or what have you. Or, as the talking points have been turning to, they will point to the number of Atlantic nominees on the short-list and said that they got equal opportunity and were not prejudiced against or some such, and make the merit argument. Suffice to say, there is more than enough wiggle room, and for a party that was so recently in government, the Conservative should have known better than to word a motion in a way that the government can support and later wiggle out of. This having been said, the government has been under enormous political pressure from the premiers regarding this Atlantic seat, so it is not inconceivable that this as a step in walking back from having the nominations being too open, but that remains to be seen.

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Roundup: Begin Royal Tour 2016!

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The Royal Tour has begun, which means we’re already being inundated with a bunch of ridiculous stories about “is it worth the price,” or treating the Canadian Royal Family as foreign curiosities when the Canadian Crown is a separate and distinct legal entity from the British Crown (well, unless you happen to follow the logic of the previous government, whose changes to the Royal Succession Act without going the constitutional amendment route put us on par with Tuvalu in terms of making our relationship with the Crown a subordinate one, but we’ll see if that survives the court challenges). Suffice to say, yes it’s entirely worth it because it’s a very small amount of money, and their touring for a week costs us less than it does for Obama to visit for an afternoon, they draw a lot of attention to a number of worthwhile causes that the Governor General never could, and hey, we’re a constitutional monarchy so it pays for us to act like one from time to time. And to all of those pundits who insist that it’s time that we “grow up” as a nation and “leave the Queen’s basement,” how’s that republic to the south of us doing when it comes to selecting a head of state? Yeah, I thought so.

Meanwhile, here are some photos from the arrival, along with a look at the symbolism of what Kate was wearing. The tour promises to focus on social issues like the environment, young families, and mental health issues. Sunday, they met with young mothers in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side battling addiction issues, before visiting the re-opened Coast Guard base at Kitsilano (which isn’t a dig at the previous government that closed the base at all). Later this week, they’ll visit the town of Bella Bella, which has managed to basically solve its suicide crisis.

https://twitter.com/adamscotti/status/779825920093728769

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Roundup: A few more partial concessions

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I’m about at the end of my patience with stories about moving expenses, just as news comes down that two more senior ministerial staffers have offered to partially reimburse their own expenses. This while we continue the smarmy remarks by the Conservatives who can’t decide if the perpetrators are cronies or millionaire BFFs, and the NDP perch on their sanctimony, and pundits across the nation clutch their pearls about how it doesn’t actually matter that all of these expenses were within the rules, that it’s all a matter of perception (which they incidentally are fuelling by the way in which these stories and columns are framed). Indeed, we have moralising columns mentioning entitlement, corruption, and how this puts things back on a “war footing.”

About the only salient bit of analysis that has been Robyn Urback’s (otherwise sarcastic) look at the Liberal damage control strategy pattern, which tends to be “ignore, defend, project, concede partial defeat.” And we did see elements of all of these, including the final two simultaneously as they not only had the partial concession of the repayments, but also the projection of looking at similar expenses within the Harper PMO, which they obviously spent Thursday night digging up from PCO records. And let’s be honest – as her first test, Bardish Chagger didn’t do much to help her cause when she would try to deflect with protestations that they were trying to help the middle class or building a strong team. (I will add that it may have been unfair for We The Media to castigate Trudeau for not giving the names of who the staffers were, given privacy considerations).

There was plenty of evidence or fact that Chagger could have used, from being more specific in pointing out the policies, or contextualising them as being a reflection of policies collectively negotiated with senior public servants (where changing policies could affect them), and most especially when the Conservatives were making cheap shots about the “personalised cash payments,” noting what those referred to precisely, which is not a payment in a brown envelope.

But no, we didn’t get that, and instead of having a discussion based on fact, we got pabulum, and it feeds into this ugly and petty narrative that We The Media love to perpetuate, where we must reflect a nation that is so cheap that we must be mean-spirited about it (and I deeply suspect is part of our collective tendency toward tall poppy syndrome). I defy you find a single person who wouldn’t claim moving expenses that they were legitimately entitled to. But instead, I’m getting people barking at me over the Twitter Machine that these staffers should be volunteers, and that it’s some kind of awful crime that they get reasonably well compensated for doing a damned difficult job that most people wouldn’t want to go anywhere near. This is the kind of nonsense that we shouldn’t be feeding, and yet we can’t help ourselves because cheap outrage is such a quick and easy high, but like most highs, it leaves us empty and worse off in the long run.

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Roundup: A questionable path forward

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Two former senators, Michael Kirby and Hugh Segal, got together to write a report on how they see a move to a more independent Senate should go, and offered a number of suggestions along the way. (They summarise the report in an op-ed here, as does Susan Delacourt in her column here). The highlights of the report are that they feel that the Parliament of Canada Act be amended so that the Senate is no longer dependent on recognized party lines to organise themselves, that they instead be organised into four regional caucuses (Newfoundland and Labrador apparently being lumped in with the Maritime region, and the territories being given a choice as to which region they want to sit with) that would form a “senior council” to decide things like committee selection. They also suggest changes to Senate Question Period, that the absolute veto be self-limited to a six-month suspensive veto, and that the minimum age of 30 be dropped as with the net worth qualification of $4000 (but not property, as it helps to determine residency requirement).

While I will no doubt discuss these recommendations in more depth elsewhere, I will first preface my comments by saying that the Senate Modernisation Committee will have their own report out in a few weeks, and we will likely get a better sense of how things are headed on the ground from there. As for these recommendations, while changes to the Parliament of Canada Act need to happen in order to break the party oligopoly now in place, I fail to see the value-added of regional caucuses. Current committee selection already looks at regional as well as gender balance, so creating a “council” to determine this seems frivolous, and the current seat allocation on committees will rebalance as more unaffiliated senators are appointed and start feeling comfortable enough to take on committee work. I’m not sure that enforcing regional lines is really what the Fathers of Confederation had in mind (as Segal and Kirby keep going back to) because I think it has the potential to create balkanization. Breaking the oligopoly and giving the unaligned senators more of a voice in organization and logistics can happen without needing to completely freeze out parties. The post-2008 excesses were not necessarily the fault of partisanship per se as it was an overly controlling PMO manipulating new senators, who didn’t know any better, to get their way. The suggested changes to Senate QP (like asking questions of committee chairs) make no sense as there is little accountability to be had from them, which is the point of QP. The change to a suspensive veto I am wary of because the point of the Senate is to be able to check the powers of a prime minister with a majority, and saying that the Lords in the UK has been like this since 1911 ignores the history or temperament of that chamber as it differs from our Senate. As for dropping the minimum age, if I had my druthers I would raise it a decade if not two, but if we can’t do that, then leave it as is. We have no need to appoint twentysomethings to be there until age 75. Sorry.

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Roundup: Bernier’s Bay Street catnip

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Maxime Bernier gave a speech at the Economic Club of Toronto yesterday that was largely catnip for the audience there, saying that he wants to eliminate the capital gains tax, reducing corporate income taxes to 10 percent, making the accelerated capital cost allowance (ACCA) permanent, and eliminating corporate subsidies. While economics can point to the thinking behind some of Bernier’s plans (like below), others will point to the flaws in it, such as the ability to disguise salary as stock options that would no longer be taxed as capital gains, or the longer-term problems with the ACCA (like a new building being worthless for tax reasons in two years). It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Bernier’s ideas are largely slogans without a deep analysis of the real-world implications of them – kind of like how his plan to eliminate interprovincial trade barriers is just a gift to litigators rather than doing the hard political lifting necessary on such a file. Bernier has this kind of libertarian fanboy sense about him, that all of the problems can be solved by brandishing a copy of the constitution and shouting “freedom” will be all that’s necessary to kick-start a sluggish global economy, and that this will all be politically saleable to large swaths of the economy that have come to depend on government support in one way or another. And while yes, Bernier is indeed trying to bring some ideas to the table in this leadership contest while some of his competitors are trying to force the debate onto grounds of “values” and stoking national security fears, but it does remain true that it’s not really the point of leadership hopefuls to try and bring policy to the table that will change the direction of the party – that should be coming from the grassroots membership in a bottom-up and not a top-down process. But just remember – freedom! It’ll solve everything!

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Roundup: Precious conformity

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Conservative MP Garnett Genuis penned an analysis piece for Policy Options that tried to explain why MPs vote in lockstep, and it’s just so precious you can barely stand it. Genuis dismisses the talk of heavy-handed PMO and whips offices, and after some lengthy discussion, concludes that it’s the human nature of conformity that’s at play. His mode of analysis was the voting record on C-14, the highly contentious medical assistance in dying bill.

It’s not that Genuis doesn’t have some good – if somewhat infuriating points – in the piece, talking about how MPs are so busy with their constituency work that they just don’t have the time to sit down and study the legislation that they were elected to be considering. That one nearly made me blow a gasket, considering that constituency work isn’t actually part of an MP’s job description and its growing importance has come at the expense of their actual jobs of holding government to account. That Genuis uses it as an excuse for having MPs let the “experts” in their leaders’ offices tell them how to vote is utterly galling. I can see why they would use this excuse, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good one or one that we should let them get away with (but then again, almost nobody knows what an MP’s actual job description is, least of all the MPs themselves, and yes, that is a Very Big Problem. His better points, however, included that sometimes it’s good for local nominations to see that an MP will be willing to break ranks from time to time, but it’s a mixed bag when they also need to be seen to have a united front with the party. It is a tension that he doesn’t delve deeply enough into.

But so much of his thinking is flawed, in part because he relies on the data of votes on a single contentious bill rather than a broader sample, which would produce a more thoughtful discussion, and also because he ignores the other incentives for why MPs will vote in lock-step. For some parties, like the NDP, the need for solidarity in all things means a much more conformist voting pattern in all things, and there is an internal culture of bullying to keep MPs in line so as not to be unseemly with dissent. With government backbenchers, there is the hope that toeing the line enough will earn you a post in cabinet or as a parliamentary secretary, because the ratio of cabinet-to-backbench seats is still too low in Canada to encourage a culture of more independent backbenchers in safer seats willing to do their job of holding government to account. There is also the pressure – which We The Media shamefully perpetuate – that you don’t want to be seen as breaking ranks lest it reflect poorly on the leader (though this seems to be a bit less so under Trudeau who has been vocal about encouraging more free votes). There is no discussion about the blackmail of a leader that can withhold their signature from an MP’s nomination papers during the next election (or whatever the mechanism is post-Reform Act, because there is no actual clarity in law there any longer). So yes, while there is a human tendency to conformity, it is informed by a whole lot of other factors that Genuis ignores, and that taints his analysis to a pretty fatal degree.

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