The brief sitting of Parliament last week saw some committee shenanigans already underway, despite the new era of hope and optimism. Because of political considerations, as in not having enough members for official party status, the Bloc were denying unanimous consent to form new committees as they won’t have a voice on them. While they relented on the creation of the special joint committee on assisted dying – which they nevertheless still want a voice on even if they can’t vote – they continued to deny the formation of the Finance Committee, which means that it now can’t hold any pre-budget consultations. So while rules are the rules around who can sit on committees, and we were reminded when these tactics were going on that the Bloc themselves were adamant that they be followed to deny NDP and PC MPs seats on committees back in the nineties, times change apparently, and now they want to throw their weight around. As for the Liberals, they’ve already undermined their promise not to have parliamentary secretaries sit on committees by assigning the House Leader’s parliamentary secretary to the Procedure and House Affairs committee, but he insists that he won’t vote – just assist other members. That sounds suspiciously like the PMO still trying to bigfoot the committees, and exert undue influence on what should be independent operations that have a duty to hold government to account – something that becomes more difficult when you have a someone charged with assisting the government in the ranks. One hopes that they come to their senses and knock it off before things really get underway, but it is a disappointment that they are not living up to the spirit of that promise, if not the letter. (Also, Charlie Angus is lamenting the partisanship on committees? Has he looked in a mirror lately?)
Tag Archives: Conservative Leadership
Roundup: Preparing the leadership campaign
The Conservative national council, plus about twenty other individuals including MP Diane Finley, are nearly set to lay out their leadership campaign rules, including the date of the vote – likely sometime in 2017. I’m sure we’ll start seeing the campaigns start to rev up soon after that – Kellie Leitch and Jason Kenney out the door first, and over time, I’m sure a not-Jason-Kenney candidate will emerge for others to start coalescing around. People keep saying Lisa Raitt, but I haven’t seen any sign of her French improving, and that is going to be an important consideration with the party having improved its fortunes in Quebec in the last election. And then there’s Peter MacKay, who leads in the polling on the subject, but I’m not sure that he’s had enough time and distance from politics just yet, not to mention the fact that he really isn’t the Red Tory that most people seem to think he is (just because he very briefly led the Progressive Conservatives after winning the leadership on a promise that he immediately turned around and broke). I’m not unconvinced that there needs to be someone who was much more of an outsider, largely untainted by the Harper years, who will be the instrument of the party broadening its base more as part of the leadership process, and again, I really doubt that MacKay is that person. He is intimately tied with Harper for his joining with him in the creation of the party, and I fail to see how that would be any kind of asset in a leadership race where the party would need to show that it is moving on from those years, rather than simply moving to relive them.
Roundup: One week of excitement
This is the week that Parliament returns, and we’re already getting a hint of what it’s going to look like, with clues from Government House Leader Dominic LeBlanc as to the agenda. According to The Canadian Press, LeBlanc’s plans are for the Commons to sit for one week in order to move a motion on the tax changes the government plans to make (I’m guessing it’s a Ways and Means motion), and there will be a move to reconstitute the Procedure and House Affairs Committee, as well as Finance Committee, in order to get the ball rolling on procedural changes in the former, and pre-budget consultations in the latter, but leaving other committees to start up in the new year, and likely with more resources and staff in order to help make them more independent – all good things. While I remain sceptical about the proposed changes to make the Prime Minister only show up once a week in Question Period (as I outlined here), at least they are providing the framework for the discussions to happen before Parliament really gets into the thick of it. Thus far, there have been no decisions made about what’s happening with the Senate, which is starting to get a bit bothersome, particularly as it relates to either choosing a Speaker or a Leader of the Government in the Senate, and word has it that the Senate is likely to end up cancelling its Question Period altogether (which would be a tremendous shame considering that it’s a far better debate than what happens in the Commons). As for other items on the government’s democratic reform agenda, Léonid Sirota isn’t sure that some of them – like mandatory voting or limiting third-party spending outside of a writ period – will pass the constitutional muster.
Roundup: Still no Senate decisions
Amidst all of the activity yesterday, one of the things we did learn was that the new Prime Minister has yet to decide what he plans to do with regards to the Senate. It did not go unnoticed on Wednesday that there was no Leader of the Government in the Senate named to cabinet, but as we found out, it’s because he simply hasn’t decided what he’s doing yet, and that’s the same with regards to the Speaker. It raises all kinds of questions about how things are going to be managed with regards to the Senate, and Government House Leader Dominic Leblanc has been named the person to be the liaison between the two chambers, as is fair. What concerns me, however, is that in all of the talk of making the Senate more independent, what isn’t being considered is how it will do its job in holding the government to account if there is nobody in the chamber for them to do so (not to mention that it really is a problem if there is no member of cabinet in the chamber to shepherd government bills through either, which the Conservatives have been fudging for the past year or so). Some senators have been musing about cancelling Senate Question Period altogether, or having it simply focus on asking questions of committee chairs, but that seems particularly short-sighted, considering that they tended to ask far better quality questions of the government as compared to the Commons. Yes, the last couple of government leaders were not exactly great at responding to questions, but neither were ministers down in the Commons, and that era is hopefully over. The loss of the accountability function would be a huge blow to our parliament as a whole, and I hope that the Liberal government is considering this problem. Meanwhile, John Pepall urges caution with appointing too many good-hearted experts to the Senate, as it may empower them to challenge the democratically elected government too often as is starting to happen over in the UK, with the Lords starting to push back against their own limits. Food for thought in that there are consequences even for well-intentioned acts.
Roundup: Moving on from Harper
So there we have it – the last hours of Harper’s time in government, and lo and behold, there were no last grasps for power, no refusals to resign, no attempts to make last-minute appointments, no craven behaviour of any kind. From all accounts, the exit has been gracious and orderly, but as befitting his time in office, he kept all of the big decisions behind closed doors because he didn’t want any clips of him resigning or visibly stepping down in any way. And hey, ten years later, we’re not a dictatorship, this isn’t a fascist state, there is no cult of personality that people are worshipping. We had free and fair elections, and instead of voter suppression (and conspiracy theorists insisting that they would try to stuff ballot boxes, or that the odd ballots that had ink blotches on them from the printing process), we had a dramatic upswing in voter turnout. All of those doomsayers and the hysterical who have been bombarding our Twitter feeds with the insistence that democracy was dead in Canada – all for naught. That Vapid Narcissist whose stunt as a Senate page was part of her somehow insisting that the previous election wasn’t free and fair either and that the results were somehow stolen or illegitimate and necessitating acts of civil disobedience – she’s been trying to take credit for the election result (and inexplicably, people are actually congratulating her) – but this has nothing to do with her. There was no evil Bond villain that needed to be vanquished. This was politics. Sure, it was nasty and dickish most of the time, but it was politics. Hopefully we can spend the next few years unclenching, but we all know that Trudeau Derangement Syndrome is as much of a thing as Harper Derangement Syndrome. Hopefully, however, the hyperbolic nonsense won’t be quite so awful and unhinged (but who are we kidding?).
Roundup: New Senate appointment process isn’t rocket science
Apparently what is going on in the Senate is proving a little too confusing for some of the nation’s more obtuse pundits, so here’s a few points of explanation. John Ibbitson penned a column expressing optimism about the proposed new system of Senate appointments, and yet threw in a number of bizarre concerns that made me wonder. For one, it’s hard to see how they would all come “from Bay Street” when there is a set number of regional seats apportioned. His notion that they should come from “Main Street and the street” is also fairly mystifying because the Senate should be a place for eminent, accomplished Canadians. The House of Commons is for just that – the common people. The Senate has served best when it is a place where people who have achieved excellence can find a new way to contribute to public life in a way that they would not otherwise because they would not think to seek elected office – people like Romeo Dallaire or Kelvin Ogilvie. Ibbitson is also astoundingly obtuse when he calls Senate Liberals “Independents,” and figures that all new senators under this system would also be Independents, when neither statement is correct. Senate Liberals are still Liberals – they just don’t sit in caucus with the Liberals in the Commons so as to give them greater independence, and nowhere was it said that any senator chosen by an arm’s length process had to be an Independent when they could simply choose which caucus to sit in of their own accord. There is nothing wrong with that because there is nothing wrong with parties or with partisanship. Yes, the kind of hyper-partisan tribalism we’ve seen in recent years is a problem, but that’s a function of message control and discipline rather than the actual role and function of partisanship, and the two parties who relied heavily on message control and discipline were dealt blows in the last election, giving pause to those who believe in that kind of system. The Senate has generally always been a less partisan place because they’re not scoring points for re-election, which is half the point. None of this is rocket science, but you wouldn’t know it judging from some of the commentary we’re seeing.
Roundup: Warning about possible Senate frustration
There’s the Senate bat-signal, so here we go again. On Evan Solomon’s radio show, Liberal Senator David Smith suggested that if Trudeau does not appoint a Government Leader in the Senate that it will create frustration in the Chamber if they have no means by which to hold the government to account, and that they could – if it got that far – start to stall or even vote against the government’s legislation as a protest. Mind you, as these things do, the headlines hype it up, but it does point to problems that I outlined in my National Post piece earlier this week. And because I know that some people have suggested it, no, just calling ministers before committee is not enough as it robs the daily exercise of accountability that is Senate Question Period of meaning (as Smith suggested), and those appearances might happen every couple of months. The existing protocol is for the Government Leader to have access to the same briefing books as the Prime Minister. If senators are to do their job of sober second thought and accountability, they need access to information on a timely basis, and the government leader, if he or she can’t provide that answer immediately, takes it under advisement and gets a written response as soon as possible. They have a job to do and they need information to do it. The threats over the past couple of weeks, as overhyped as they have been, have awakened Andrew Coyne’s concern trolling over the Senate’s veto powers, because he apparently doesn’t believe they should have enough power to push back against a majority government when necessary, and would rather the courts do it years down the road. Meanwhile, Senate Speaker Housakos has said that he plans to propose the creation of an arm’s length spending oversight body to give guidance to the Internal Economy Committee, but we have no details on this yet. I would once again caution that we need to ensure that the Senate remains self-governing for the sake of parliamentary supremacy (argued here). I would still like to see Senator McCoy’s proposal for a Senate audit committee comprised of three senators, an auditor and a former judge as the best solution, but I guess we’ll wait to see what Housakos’ proposition is.
Roundup: Another reboot report
Yesterday saw the release of yet another expert report bemoaning all of our democratic woes, and proposed a handful of would-be solutions – or would be, if they actually bothered to correctly diagnose the problems they bemoaned. This time, it was the Public Policy Forum, and they have a pretty eminent list of people who compiled the piece. The problem was, while enumerating their grievances with our parliamentary system, they didn’t look at causes, and hence plan to treat symptoms rather than causes. “Restore cabinet governance” you say? Great! But no look at why the centralisation got more pronounced and how to fix the underlying reasons why. While their solutions regarding the public service and ministerial staffers are all well and good, their discussions around the committee system in the Commons stuck in my craw a bit. According to the report, we have too many committees, which is absurd considering that some of the busier committees don’t have the time to actually study a lot of bills with a reasonable number of witnesses getting reasonable turns to answer questions. So give them more work? Hmm. They want the whole Commons to vote on committee chairs instead of the committees themselves, like with the Speaker, but neglect to mention that this has bred its own particular set of problems in the UK, where this is the norm, where those chairs are becoming problematic personalities who have become somewhat untouchable when they start breaking rules. Their particular suggestions that committees not be bound by the parliamentary calendar is also a bit specious considering that they already have the power to meet when Parliament isn’t sitting, but those MPs tend to see the value in being in their constituencies during said periods when the House isn’t sitting. Give them more resources and staff? Certainly – they could do that tomorrow if they wanted, but it’s not because there are too many committees to do it adequately. And despite all of these suggestions, not one of them touches the underlying problem that the vast majority of MPs get elected without knowing what exactly their job is or how to do it, and what their responsibilities are once they get a committee assignment. But does this report once talk about better educating and equipping MPs themselves? Nope. So while it’s a valiant effort, perhaps they need to actually look at the forest for the trees.
Roundup: The return of the Reform Act
Despite hopes that we might be rid of this nonsense, Michael Chong is back with a vengeance, plugging for parties to implement the Reform Act when their caucuses meet in the coming weeks, and hey, he’s not done spouting a bunch of complete bollocks about the new legislation! A reminder: The Reform Act is de facto useless, and de jure harmful to our system of government. I’ve outlined it all before here, here and here, so that soil is well tilled, but suffice to say, it’s not going to empower MPs like he says as MPs already have that power but simply don’t exercise it. It will, in fact, do the opposite. But then there’s some troubling statements he made on Power & Politics last night regarding his idea of the role of the Senate when it comes to leadership votes. Not only did his bill define the caucus as MPs only, but he stated that senators have no role in the selection of an interim leader because it was about (in this case) choosing the “leader of the opposition” which had nothing to do with the Senate, since MPs didn’t choose their leader. Nope – all wrong. It’s about choosing the interim party leader, not just leader in the Commons, and senators are just as much part of the party as MPs are. That makes a difference, particularly if the interim leader is going to be making organisational changes within the party structure which senators are every bit as entitled to have a say in as MPs. Also, because that leader will be able to choose who the Senate leader is going to be (well, for the Conservatives anyway – mileage may vary for future Liberal interim leadership votes), they have a vested interest in who will be chosen. Chong insisting otherwise is being disingenuous. So why is he making the big pitch – other than for the sake of his legislative legacy? Because I’m pretty sure that he’s building himself up for a permanent leadership bid as the “great reformer.” It’s too bad that his reforms are a sham that only serves to entrench what problems have grown in our system. But it’s all about looking like you’re changing things, right? It’s cynical, and sadly, a great many people (my journalistic colleagues included) will lap it right up.
RT @CBCPolitics: Chong urges MPs to 'reclaim their influence' as Reform Act takes effect https://t.co/VncbF1Vcq7 pic.twitter.com/U0YkVXUDmK
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) October 27, 2015
Roundup: Artificial anti-terror drama
With the Senate back in the news, it’s like my own personal bat-signal, so let’s delve into it, shall we? First up is a piece about some Conservative senators talking about changes to national security legislation (formerly C-51, which we need to stop referring to it as, since it’s passed and with dissolution the number scheme slate is wiped clean). Despite the ominous headline that warns that they could “disrupt” the plan to change the anti-terror act, there is very little indication in the story that they intend to do just that. They say they’ll study the changes, and they’re not opposed to creating a parliamentary oversight body, so where is the actual plans for disruption? Oh dear. It seems that we may have torqued a headline for the same of drama. I mean, they could disrupt any bill, but they don’t. Try again. Meanwhile, Senate leader Claude Carignan is trying to get assurances that Conservative senators will be able to vote on the interim leader, seeing as that’s in the party’s constitution, particularly because they are now all that is left to represent certain regions of the country – like the Atlantic provinces, or Toronto and Montreal. They will also have a particular heft to their representation, with 47 senators to a current 99 MPs. So that’ll be interesting. (Also, are we really down to four non-Harper appointed Conservatives already? Time flies). Senator Runciman talks about party renewal including proposing that they have their own Kingston Conference to lay the groundwork for their return to power, much as the Liberals have done in times past. Historian Christopher Moore thinks the party should return to caucus selection for permanent leader rather than an expensive and lengthy membership-driven process (which I would agree with), but somehow I doubt the party will buy it.