Tag Archives: Conservative Leadership

Roundup: Rebutting the reformers’ complaints

Posted on by

If it were possible for someone to write a column that was basically one long subtweet, then I’m pretty sure that it’s what Andrew Coyne did with his column on electoral reform, with me as his unspoken target – particularly as he parroted several of my arguments (that no one else seems to be making) without actually getting their substance correct. So here we go.

When proportional representation advocates complain that the allocation of seats among the parties in the legislature does not resemble their relative shares of the votes cast — with the especially unhappy effect of allowing a minority of the voters to rule over the majority — first past the post’s defenders reply: why should it? Members were elected in 338 separate riding elections, not in a single nationwide vote.

Yes, and that’s pointed out for a number of reasons – that the vote share figure that reformers cite as evidence is not actually real (hence its use as evidence is meaningless), and the fact that each MP is elected to a single seat in a separate election has a particular meaning that gives them individual agency rather than making them a thrall of a particular party. This is an important consideration in the electoral system because it gives a clear line for how MPs are empowered, which is what we keep insisting we want. It also demonstrates that if the complaint is that MPs aren’t empowered, it’s because it’s their own choice or ignorance – not the electoral system that is at fault.

When reformers point out the imbalance this creates between voters — in a given election it typically takes many more votes to elect a member from one party than another — first-past-the-posters look positively mystified: everyone gets one ballot. And when the former observe that under first past the post the votes cast for anyone but the leading candidate in a riding are “wasted,” in the sense that they do not contribute to electing anyone, the latter lose all patience. How could any of the votes have been wasted, they ask, if all were counted? The candidate who was elected may not have been everyone’s choice, but he still represents everyone.

Here Coyne adopts the same specious math that the Broadbent Institute was pushing over Twitter yesterday, which ignores how ridings actually work, and that elections are 338 separate events, and mashes the figures together and divides by 338, pretending that it’s a number with meaning when it’s not – just like the popular vote. It’s pretty much like bringing a unicorn to a logic exam. As well, he doesn’t make a compelling argument about why votes are “wasted” because it ignores the broader political ecosystem. It has little to do with the fact that the MP who won the seat represents everyone, but that the vote itself is but one small piece of political engagement. Casting a vote is not the end-all-be-all of political engagement. Rather, the system is built for people to be joining parties and engaging at a grassroots level to develop policy and for riding associations to act as interlocutors between the local community and the caucus, even when they don’t have a local MP in that party. As well, the percentage by which the MP won the seat is a figure that matters. If it’s by a slim margin, then those votes against are certainly not “wasted” – they have a meaning in the message that it sends to the MP about where his or her support lies. That matters.

To reformers’ complaints about how the system works, in other words, the answer commonly offered is: that’s how the system works. It is as if that were not just the system we have now, but the only system there is. And of course if you assume that then yes, reformers’ objections become literally incomprehensible. They might as well object to the weather. If only one member can be elected per riding, then obviously it’s silly to talk about wasted votes, or to complain that voters who supported another candidate are not represented. That’s life. Suck it up. The resulting parliament was not proportional? That’s not how our system works.

No, that’s not why one has to point out that it’s how the system works – one needs to point that out because you need to understand how the system works before you go about changing it, which usually means breaking things and making them worse. It has been proven that every time we tinker with our system, we make it worse, which leads us to want to tinker with it more, breaking it even further. Why? Because people don’t understand how the system works, so they assume that it’s broken, particularly if they get emotional that it doesn’t do what they think it should. This is the whole premise of my book – that we need to stop and understand how and why things work the way they do before we go about messing with the system some more because history has shown repeatedly that tinkering makes it worse. Ignorance is literally killing our democracy, and no matter how well intentioned its reformers tend to be, they almost always make it worse.

At any rate, it’s worth debating. Some might argue that single-member ridings give constituents a clearer sense of who to take their problems to, and who to hold to account. Others might reply that, with several members competing to represent them, constituents might get better service: if one didn’t answer your letter, another might.

From here, Coyne goes off about how maybe multi-member ridings would be better, possibly sprinkled in with single-member ones where they would be too large (hello, all of rural and remote Canada), which immediately brings up questions about how that could possibly be considered a more fair system. And while he touches ever so briefly on accountability, he gets the premise wrong – an MP’s job is not to “service” one’s constituents. It’s about holding the government to account. This, however, is lost on the reformers, whose fetishisation with fantastical notions about “representation” overshadow all other aspects of how the system works in its broader ecosystem. Yes, representation is a part of it, but it is not the totality, and yet that is what all of their reforms are geared toward with no regard for the bigger whole.

So no, it’s not about whether other systems are possible – it’s about not making things worse because you don’t understand how things work now. That’s a very different thing entirely.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Obama and his populist rant

Posted on by

So, that speech by Barack Obama was quite something. Canada tends not to be a country of lofty rhetoric or grand and eloquent speechmaking, so it’s nice when we get to borrow it for a bit, but it is a bit of novelty. For all of his complementary rhetoric about Canadians and our progressivity, it was interesting to note the places where people in the Commons weren’t all unanimous with the applause (mentions of climate change and LGBT rights certainly didn’t endear the Conservatives), and he was very clever in the way he couched his criticism of Canada needing to do more to pull its weight with NATO, by timing it so that the applause had already started with is line about the great job that the Canadian Forces do when he finished the thought that the world wants them to do more. Clever that.

What was perhaps even more interesting and less rehearsed was the rant that Obama went off at the conclusion of the Three Amigos summit press conference, where he pushed back against the use of “populism” when it comes to the likes of Trump, Sanders, and the Brexit vote. While Obama was quick to paint Trump in particular with the terms of nativism and xenophobia, I’m not sure that he really addressed the core of the issue with the rise in populist sentiment that gets hijacked by those nativist and xenophobic elements. Why? Because he was quick to try and associate populism with only the positive benefits of helping the working classes to better themselves, and on the face of it, “populism” is about appealing to ordinary people. The problem is that it has a dangerous flipside about making that appeal in contravention to expert opinion and evidence, which is painted as elitist – something that Obama steered clear of. Meanwhile, populism has already overtaken the political discourse in Canada, when our one-time ideological parties on both the left and the right have abandoned their ideologies in favour of left and right-flavoured populism, eschewing that evidence or clear-eyed policy in favour of selling it to ordinary people, never mind that it would actually disproportionately benefit the wealthy (and yes, that applies equally to Conservative and NDP policy in Canada). When that ethos of casting off evidence and expert opinion reaches dangerous levels, you get the kinds of rhetoric you heard in the Brexit campaign, and with Trump and his supporters, but it’s on the same populist road. So you will forgive me if I don’t subscribe to Obama’s embrace of populism as solely a force for good. It has a dark side that needs to be acknowledged, lest it get as out of control as it clearly has been doing of late.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Specious arguments about political bullying

Posted on by

As someone who writes a lot about our democratic system (true fact – I have a book about it coming out in March), I read a lot of really dumb things that people try to assert in order to make a point. The Citizen had an op-ed yesterday that pretty much takes the cake for specious reasoning when it comes to asserting that our electoral system somehow turns everyone into petty bullies. That’s right – it postulates that First-Past-the-Post is responsible for The Elbowing that happened a couple of months ago. No, seriously. It’s such a moronic argument that I. Can’t. Even.

Here’s the thing – trying to blame the electoral system is a losing proposition because trying to prove the counterfactual amounts to pixie dust and unicorns. Electoral politics can get nasty because that’s the nature of competition, and even in systems that are supposedly built upon consensus models (such as the legislatures in the NWT and Nunavut), there is just as much bullying among MLAs that takes place as in the oppositional system we have here. There is all manner of fractious and nasty politics in countries that have proportional or ranked ballot systems because it’s almost like we’re all human beings or something. Add to that, trying to put the blame on the logically fallacious notion about “false majority” governments (which don’t exist because the popular vote is not a real thing – elections are not single events but rather 338 separate and simultaneous events that you can’t simply mash into a single statistic and expect it to be meaningful) doesn’t automatically turn the victors into bullies because it posits that either “true” majorities or minority governments would not be the same. That’s of course false, as large majorities can turn triumphalist and run roughshod over opposition parties just as much, and minority parliaments can be petty and nasty as parties clamp down in order to ensure that the government isn’t toppled, as our own recent memory shows. None of this has anything to do with First-Past-the-Post, and pretending that another system would force parties to work together forgets that it simply means shifting from one model of horse-trading and bargaining to another model, where there tends to be more extreme elements jockeying for power instead. So, to be quite frank, if this is supposed to be “kicking off” a discussion on electoral reform, it might as well be a tale that includes a vampire or two because it’s just as fantastic.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Duffy expenses redux

Posted on by

Because it’s never over, the saga of Mike Duffy’s illegitimate expenses are back in the news as Senate Administration is demanding that he repay some $16,955 in expenses claimed improperly that were paid for using his third-party contract with Gerald Donohue. And, wouldn’t you know it, Duffy’s lawyer is raising a huge fuss saying that the judge in the trial already declared that these were okay – something senators dispute, saying that just because they were not deemed criminal it doesn’t mean that they were okay, particularly when these expenses were not allowable and that the third-party contract was used to go around the approval process. (Duffy’s lawyer, incidentally, is also hinting that they will demand back pay for the suspension, to the tune of $155,000). But this is where the particular nature of the Senate comes into play, which is that it’s a self-governing body that is protected by parliamentary privilege, and it needs to be in order to safeguard our democratic system. In governing its own affairs, it is allowed to enforce its own rules (which, it bears reminding, do and did exist no matter what Bayne tried to argue in trial). And it is also empowered to enforce its own discipline, which is what the suspensions were related to – not a determination of criminality or a reflection of it, but rather that Duffy (and Wallin and Brazeau) had brought disrepute onto the Chamber and an example needed to be made. Is it fair? Possibly not, but this is also politics. Bayne raised the straw man argument that the 29 other senators whose expenses were flagged by the Auditor General weren’t suspended, which is a ridiculous argument considering that a) Duffy was not part of that process at all; and b) they ensured that there was a resolution process that ended in repayment one way or the other, so nobody was seen to be escaping justice. I don’t think Bayne will find much truck in the courts if he wants to press the issue around Duffy’s suspension or the fact that they are demanding repayment for expenses that clearly were not allowed, but it seems that we may be subjected to more drama around this, possibly for years if they take the matter as far as the Supreme Court of Canada.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Bills left unpassed

Posted on by

While the House of Commons may have risen for the summer on Friday, they did so with an unusual number of bills waiting to pass third reading, not to mention the fact that Bill C-7 on RCMP unionization is heading back to them after the Senate amends it (and those amendments have passed at the committee stage and are awaiting third reading vote). What is most unusual to me is the fact that C-7 was another bill that was in response to a Supreme Court decision that also was granted an extension, and still managed to miss its deadline and remains un-passed. Now, the government is prepared to allow it go un-passed through the summer, despite the fact that while it was under consideration on the Commons side, they insisted they couldn’t make substantive amendments to the bill because of the deadline. That deadline has passed, and they are willing to now let it go through the summer, the sense of urgency suddenly evaporated? How? It makes no sense. And looking at the other bills that they haven’t passed yet, there are two that are both awaiting Third Reading and could have passed if they’d sat for an extra couple of days: C-2 on their vaunted income tax changes, and C-4 on undoing the Conservatives’ changes to labour rights. Why they’re letting these languish through the summer – particularly C-4, which keeps some pretty onerous regulations for labour unions on the books – is frankly mystifying.

I will say that the mood in the Commons was strangely exhausted by the time Friday rolled around, when they hadn’t even been doing late-night sittings up to this point in order to get things passed an off to the Senate (often with the expectation to get those bills passed as well before rising themselves). In fact, normally by this time, MPs are outright feral, and the tone in the Commons could generally be compared to jeering, hooting baboons. Mind you, we had The Elbowing and that associated drama a few weeks ago, and as someone remarked to me the other day (and if I could remember who you were when I had this conversation, I would credit you), they basically peaked too soon this year. And that very well could be. It still makes no sense that they would leave these two bills on the Order Paper waiting for final debate, or not waiting for C-7 to come back from the Senate. But then again, there have been a lot of questionable choices made this spring, so perhaps we should chalk it up to more of that.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Further conversations on constitutional conventions

Posted on by

In response to my blog post yesterday on the our unwritten portions of our constitution being just as important as the written parts, I had a lot of response over the Twitter Machine, many trying to argue that parties were not an integral part of the system, but historian Christopher Moore took the time out to chastise me for the use of the term “constitutional conventions” when it comes to Responsible Government. But the problem is that Moore is actually wrong in what he tried to argue. To wit:

Smith should look at Section 54 of the Constitution Act, 1982, which sets out in plain language that only the cabinet can make and propose the raising and spending of money. That is what defines the role of the cabinet of ministers. It budgets; it plans the getting and spending.  But then there is Section 53, which bluntly states that only the House of Commons can give approval to the cabinet’s proposals for getting and spending.

A few problems with this. First of all, he’s citing the Constitution Act, 1867 and not 1982, and looking at Section 54, there is no mention of cabinet at all:

It shall not be lawful for the House of Commons to adopt or pass any Vote, Resolution, Address, or Bill for the Appropriation of any Part of the Public Revenue, or of any Tax or Impost, to any Purpose that has not been first recommended to that House by Message of the Governor General in the Session in which such Vote, Resolution, Address, or Bill is proposed.

As is consistent in our constitution, there is no mention of a PM, or cabinet, because they are part of Responsible Government, which as I pointed out yesterday are part of the unwritten conventions that we inherited from the UK. As is consistent with the rest of the written constitution, only the Governor General is mentioned. And here’s the kicker: the unwritten constitutional convention is that under Responsible Government, the Crown – by way of the GG – acts on the advice of ministers, and for that to happen, ministers must hold the confidence of the Chamber. Ministers via the convention do all executive government in the Queen’s name. It’s not written because it’s a convention, per the preamble, as a constitution being similar in principle to that of the UK. Moore’s contention that it’s not a convention and that it’s embedded in the text does not hold. So while I’m happy to be corrected when I get it wrong (and it happens), this is not one of those times. Also, if you’re going to quote the constitution at me, then quote the constitution. And as for those people on the Twitter Machine insisting that Responsible Government can function without parties, well, it’s possible in a theoretical world with vampires and unicorns, but it will never happen in real life, so trying to disprove it to make a point is pretty much moot. The practice of parties developed for a reason. Maintaining confidence without them is a fool’s errand.

With many thanks to Philippe Lagassé for talking this issue through with me.

Continue reading →

Roundup: An affidavit in error?

Posted on by

Another interesting twist has emerged in the saga of the satellite offices, and the quixotic quest to have the Board of Internal Economy decision challenged in Federal Court. While the NDP crowed that the court accepting their “expert opinion” affidavit, it seems that the legal opinion given to the Board is that this is a Very Bad Thing that needs to be challenged, because allegedly this sets up some kind of terrible precedent. As well, because the acceptance of the affidavit was by a court official and not a judge – meaning probably a prothonotary – this is also somehow significant and material to the challenge. I’m certainly not an expert in civil procedure, and welcome the comments of those who are, but my own particular reading of this is that this is apparently something that should have been laughed out of court right off the start, rather than allowing a judge to actually get the affidavit, read it through, and then telling the NDP to go and drop on their collective heads in a scathing judgment because there is such a thing as parliamentary privilege and it’s an important concept that parliamentarians govern their own affairs. Which of course may explain why the NDP were so giddy as to alert the media that their affidavit was not laughed out of the room in the first place, even though I will remind you that having an affidavit accepted is a far cry from actual victory. Mind you, I do think that this is an issue of parliamentary privilege (for which I explained the reasons here), so perhaps the Commons’ legal advice is worth noting that it means that the affidavit should have been refused after all. But like I said, I’m not an expert in civil procedure, so I await responses from those in the know.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The problem with sponsoring bills

Posted on by

News that the “Government Representative” in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, has been asking unaligned senators to sponsor government bills as they arrive from the Commons has me feeling a bit uneasy, and I’m trying to figure out why. This meant a trip through the Senate Procedure in Practice, and I find my concerns only slightly mollified. I will admit that the government’s plan to move a government bill in the Senate – Bill S-2, which deals with motor vehicle recalls – also has me uneasy because while it is being sponsored under Harder’s name, the fact that Harder is not a cabinet minister remains a troubling procedural issue. Government bills should be introduced by cabinet ministers, whether that minister is the Leader of the Government in the Senate or another minister in the Senate (which happens on occasion), and Harder, while sworn into the Privy Council, is not a minister. That the Conservatives did this with Claude Carignan was not a particularly good precedent to create or follow, since Carignan was essentially a minister without being in cabinet for the only reason that Stephen Harper was having a fit of pique over the ClusterDuff Affair, Carignan also having been sworn into Privy Council and being given access to PCO resources to do his job. But while Carignan was at least a part of the government’s caucus, Peter Harder explicitly is not, which is why this decision to have him sponsor government legislation is troubling. I remain of the view that as much as Harder is trying to present himself as non-partisan and independent, you cannot be independent while also representing the government because it is an inherent conflict of interest. That he is being asked to perform the functions of a cabinet minister while still proclaiming himself to be independent is risible. It is a problem that Justin Trudeau’s particular…naivety around his Senate reform project cannot simply gloss over without eroding the fundamental tenets of our Westminster system. That he wants a more independent Senate is not a bad thing, and the appointment of a critical mass of unaligned senators is a laudable goal, but you cannot expect someone who is not a minister to do the functions of a minister and still call themselves independent. As for Harder asking unaligned senators to sponsor bills, it’s not quite as outré as having Harder sponsor government bills that are initiated in the Senate, but I am still uncomfortable as this is typically something done by a member of the government’s party, given that the sponsor’s job is to defend the bill and advocate for its passage. While I don’t buy that every new appointed unaligned senator is really a crypto-Liberal, as many a Conservative senators would have you believe, the fact that Harder is the one doing the asking is still uncomfortable. It would perhaps be better if he were to call for volunteers to sponsor bills on their way from the Commons and then perform a coordinating role rather than an assigning one, if only for the sake of optics. Harder calling up unaligned senators and asking them to act as sponsors looks too much like he is playing caucus management, and if he continues to insist that it’s not the way that the chamber is operating, then perhaps he needs to be more conscious of the optics of the way he is operating.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A curious silence

Posted on by

After a long weekend of seeing waaaay too much social media abuse hurled at Ruth Ellen Brosseau regarding The Elbowing, and both the Liberals and Conservatives coming to her defence, I am struck that no NDP MP has come forward to take any responsibility for the apocalyptic rhetoric they hurled at the Prime Minister on Brosseau’s behalf that she is now being blamed for, even though she didn’t actually say anything other than to acknowledge that yes, she was elbowed. Also, I remain bemused that people continue to muse about Justin Trudeau’s “anger management issues” and temper when it was Thomas Mulcair who exploded into a rage ball as it all happened, which forced MPs around to separate him physically from Trudeau. Also, amusingly, an Ontario newspaper took the Beaverton fake news article about the NDP showing up the day after The Elbowing in wheelchairs and neck braces as being true. So there’s that. Meanwhile, we’ve got a week for tempers to cool and to see if the House Leaders can come up with any kind of schedule regarding the remaining legislation that needs to be passed while ensuring the opposition feels they’ve had enough time to debate the assisted dying bill, while also noting that it looks like Parliament will sit extra late this year as the Senate contemplates those bills with likely amendments, and keeping in mind that President Obama is due to address a joint session of Parliament on June 29th – which is after the June 23rd date that the Commons was supposed to rise for the summer.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A short history of trans rights bills

Posted on by

The government is unveiling their promised trans rights bill today, and throughout the day, you’ll be reminded that other trans rights bills have been introduced in the House, and twice died in the Senate, and there will be a general sense of the NDP trying to anoint themselves in this glow of having been the fearless pioneers on this file. And it’s true – they did introduce previous trans rights bills, some of them more successful than others. But there is more to the story than is usually presented, and as someone who used to cover this file extensively (back in my Xtra! and the much lamented Outlooks days), it’s a little more complicated than is often presented. And yes, the NDP have largely introduced iterations of this bill but the sponsor, then-MP Bill Siksay, was too far down the Order of Precedence for it to be ever debated. During the 40th Parliament, however, he was high enough on the Order that the bill came up for debate, and narrowly passed the Commons. By the time it reached the Senate, however, it had mere days before the government was defeated. The Senate has no mechanisms by which to accelerate a private members’ bill, and the justice committee – where it would have been sent to – was jammed full of “tough on crime” bills and a private members’ bill never would have been able to come up for debate (as government bills always take priority). Nevertheless, the Senate was blamed for “ragging the puck” and it died when Parliament dissolved and an election was called. By this time, Siksay had announced that he was not going to run again, and Liberal MP Hedy Fry had said that she would re-introduce the bill in his stead if re-elected. She was, and fulfilled his promise. The NDP’s newly elected MP Randall Garrison was named the party’s new LGBT critic, and he was incensed that Fry had re-introduced the bill and decided to table his own version, but because you can’t have two identical bills on the Order Paper, he needed to come up with some creative drafting in order to differentiate the two bills. And then, by sheer fate, his name came up right before Fry’s on the Order of Precedence when the lottery was drawn, so he went ahead with his poorly drafted bill, while Fry’s version of the same bill was not put forward (and she went on to introduce a cyberbullying bill that was defeated). Not only did Garrison’s bill go ahead, but he decided to introduce amendments that would partially gut the bill and do things like put in definitions for “gender identity” into the text (something that would put it out of step with any other protected grounds in legislation). The resulting bill was a dog’s breakfast, and he managed to squeak it past the Commons, but he actually lost some Conservative support because it was such a hot mess. And when it reached the Senate, there were concerns. Conservative Senator Don Plett had some particular concerns and wanted to raise amendments, and while this whole “bathroom bill” nonsense began circulating, his amendments, while not great, were blown out of proportion by supporters of the bill as being far more odious than they were. And that bill eventually died on the Order Paper when Parliament dissolved, but while the NDP railed against the Senate as “killing” a bill that the Commons passed, they ignored the fact that it was objectively a bad bill and this was more of a mercy killing. And now, we have a government who has committed to making this one of their priorities, and they are, which we should applaud.

Update: The differences between Fry’s and Garrison’s bill weren’t as pronounced as I remember the debate being. Apologies to all involved, and thanks to Justin Ling for the correction. The amendments, however, were a dog’s breakfast.

Continue reading →