Tag Archives: Elections Canada

Roundup: Aspirational job targets

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Stephen Harper’s election pledge du jour was a target of 1.3 million net new jobs by 2020, which sounds terribly impressive, but if you listen to the economists talk about it, there are a few caveats. Of course, we should note first that really, government’s don’t create jobs as such, but they can provide the environment that is conducive to investment and hiring. The question for Harper really is a) how many of these jobs would be created regardless of whatever you do, and b) what measures exactly are you proposing to create these jobs, considering that it’s becoming ever more clear that we’re moving into an era of really low growth. And no, just signing trade agreements isn’t enough, nor is just lowering taxes and calling it a day. The Conservatives asked Mike Moffatt and Kevin Milligan to check their figures, and both say that sure, it’s plausible – but it’s going to depend on strong global growth, immigration, and older workers staying in the workforce longer (as in not retiring). Mike Moffatt gives his analysis here, while Milligan (and others) have tweeted their comments.

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Roundup: F-35s flare up again

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Talk of the F-35 fighters dominated the discussion yesterday, with Harper going full-bore on trying to say that Trudeau was living on some other planet if he thought that pulling out of the F-35 programme wouldn’t “crater” the country’s aerospace industry, while Mulcair – a vocal critic of the F-35s for years – suddenly said they should stay in the competition process. Of course, it sounds increasingly like Harper is trying to indicate the F-35s are the government’s choice all along no matter the procurement process that they’re going through right now with great fanfare, while Mulcair sounds increasingly like Harper – something Trudeau probably doesn’t mind. As a reality check, there are no contracts to tear-up, because we haven’t signed or committed to anything. As well, there is no guarantee that Canada pulling out of the F-35s would damage our industry because those companies supplying parts for the aircraft were chosen for quality, and because we paid into the development process, but didn’t commit to buying the full craft itself. Not to mention, any other plane we would go with (say, the Super Hornets) would have the likelihood of as many if not more regional industrial benefits. (And while we’re on the subject of reality checks, the Liberals apparently really bungled their costing figures for the F-35s in their own backgrounders). As for how you can have an open competition but exclude the F-35s? I don’t think that’s rocket science – it seems pretty clear to me that you simply add the specification to the procurement process that it needs to have more than one engine. That would rule out the F-35 pretty effectively, no? Suffice to say, it’s a lot of sound and fury, and plenty of flashbacks to the last election where this was an issue. Paul Wells writes more about it, and how it positions the leaders.

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Roundup: Niqab politics taking over

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The politics of the niqab have slowly starting taking up a lot of oxygen on the election campaign, on a number of fronts. While people over the Twitter Machine tried to skew Harper’s “old stock Canadians” remark as some kind of racist or dog whistle politics (I’m not sure that interpretation makes sense given the context of what he was saying), the government has decided to crank their petulance around the attempted niqab ban up to eleven by declaring that they will ask the courts for a stay of the Federal Court of Appeal ruling on the niqab-at-citizenship-ceremonies case, essentially to deny the woman in question the right to vote. It’s going to be tough for them to convince the courts that there is some imminent danger if they allow her to take the oath before October 19th, much less convince the Supreme Court of Canada to hear the case (and they almost certainly won’t, seeing as this is a fairly open-and-shut case of administrative law, where the minister overreached is authority to implement the ban). But while this pettiness digs in, the panic over the niqab has already begun to spread, with the Bloc launching an attack ad to warn that the NDP will mean pipelines and niqabs in Quebec, while an NDP candidate has stated that while Thomas Mulcair reopens the constitution to try and abolish the Senate (never going to happen), that he deal with the menace of niqabs at the same time. No, seriously. He added that he’s sure the party supports him on that, and as of posting time, the party has not repudiated the statement (much as they did not really repudiate it when Alexandre Boulerice made similar statements about banning niqabs earlier). Justin Trudeau, for his part, said he wouldn’t try to appeal the ban to the Supreme Court. So there’s that. Meanwhile, Tabatha Southey takes on the government’s attempted niqab ban, with her usual acid wit.

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Roundup: Globe Debate debacle

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The big “economic debate” was last night, hosted by the Globe and Mail, and well, it wasn’t exactly edifying on any account. The moderator was also commenting, he rushed segments so the leaders were alternating between slow points and rushing through, and then there was the shouting and the non sequiturs. And what non sequiturs they were – I’m not sure what C-51 had to do with taxation, but Thomas Mulcair brought it up anyway. Truth be told, much of the “debate” was leaders trying to go down their talking point and catchphrase checklists. Alas. Kady O’Malley offers advice for future single-issue debates, while Drake Fenton gives an ode to the moderator’s bell/egg timer. Reaction from the Citizen’s pundit panel, Paul Wells, and Micheal Den Tandt.

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Roundup: No, Chong’s bill won’t give us Australian leadership spills

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News of the leadership spill in Australia, ousting Tony Abbott as prime minister and ending the greatest political bromance of the Commonwealth countries (Harper and Abbott were quite the mutual admiration society), we were suddenly inundated with Twitter musings about whether that could happen in Canada, thanks to Michael Chong’s Reform Act which passed this summer. While Kady O’Malley offers the “in theory” answer, the in practice answer is that no, it couldn’t happen here, because Canada has a terrible system of leadership selection that purports to “democratise” the system with grassroots involvement, but instead created an unaccountable and presidentialised system of an overly powerful leader that has little fear of their caucus turning on them, because caucus didn’t select them. When it comes to removal, selection matters. A lot. Chong’s bill, perversely, makes an Australian situation less likely by raising the bar for leadership challenges to happen in the first place, and would instead give us situations like what happened in Manitoba where a sitting leader was challenged, and when it went to a leadership process where he still participated and won based on the grassroots support when his caucus was no longer behind him, well, it’s ugly and it’s down right unparliamentary given that a leader needs to have the confidence of his or her caucus, and when they don’t but stay in based on grassroots votes, the system breaks down. Paul Wells cautions that reforming a system usually replaces real or perceive problems with different problems, while Andrew Coyne points out that being able to dump a bad leader quickly is the lesser evil of being stuck with them.

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Roundup: The grasping of straws

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While we may be past the halfway mark in this campaign, we’re also well into the territory when things start getting a bit…surreal. Or utterly nonsensical. Take your pick. All of it done in the breathless hyperbolizing that parties do in order to try and make their rivals look bad. If you take a look at any Conservative press release, the sections comparing “Justin and Mulcair” are full of ridiculous non sequiturs that have little or nothing to do with the topic at hand. The Liberals are trotting out Jean Chrétien to say that Stephen Harper has “shamed” Canada (never mind that the rest of the world really doesn’t care). And the NDP have been taking the cake for some of their criticisms, which are starting to sound more like grasping at straws. They held a news conference with Charlie Angus to decry Justin Trudeau for “smearing” small businesses when he pointed out that wealthy people self-incorporate to pay lower taxes. And then Angus admitted that it’s a problem and they need to “tweak” the system, but still tried to insist Trudeau was smearing. Their line of attack about not being able to trust the Liberals not to make cuts is predicated on the 1990s, never mind the fact that the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is nowhere near what it was the. And now Thomas Mulcair is brushing off the concerns of the premiers for his plans, whether it’s Senate abolition (which most don’t support), or childcare (which the provinces are expected to pay 40 percent of), or even their balanced budget pledge, of which provincial transfers are an issue. But he’ll have a “mandate” he says. Never mind that he sounds like he’s already over-reading it when he hasn’t even been given one. Suffice to say, the talking points from all sides are getting ridiculous. And we still have a month to go.

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Roundup: First quarter results

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The Fiscal Monitor was released yesterday, and Stephen Harper was quick to don his Prime Minister hat to tout that it showed that the government posted a $5 billion surplus for the first quarter of the fiscal year. Better than expected, he proclaimed. On track to a balanced budget! Err, except maybe not. Much of that revenue had to do with the sale of those GM shares that they used to show that the budget was in balance, and it doesn’t fully take into account the plummeting oil prices or the GDP contraction that our economy has been facing. (We’ll find out on Tuesday if we saw a second quarter of negative growth, officially putting us into a technical recession). Not unsurprisingly, the Liberals called the surplus “phony,” and pointed out things like the GM shares as proof. Here’s Stephen Gordon to put the numbers into context:

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Roundup: The anti-intellectual warning shot

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The markets are crashing, the dollar continues to plummet and the price of oil seems to be in free-fall, but what is it that has the Canadian commentariat entranced – well, aside from the latest Duffy minutiae? The fact that Doug Ford may be contemplating the federal Conservative leadership if Stephen Harper fails to win the upcoming election. It kind of makes me want to weep. “Oh, it’ll be hilarious!” the Twitter Machine keeps relaying, but no, it wouldn’t. It would be heartbreaking for what it means to democracy. As we saw with the Rob Ford years in Toronto, and as we’re seeing play out with the Donald Trump primary race in the States, what more rational people see as hilarious and unbelievable is being embraced by a share of the electorate who are disengaged and who believe that all politicians are liars, so they would rather someone who stands up there and “tells it like it is,” never mind that what they’re telling them is completely divorced from reality and also generally false. We are already dealing with an overload of anti-intellectualism in the Canadian discourse (and no, not just from the right-leaning populists – you should see the abuse heaped on the economists who dared to debunk the NDP’s minimum wage proposal earlier in the week). Do we need it compounded on the federal scene by such an individual? While people may treat it like a joke, it’s a legitimate threat. Remember that Rob Ford got elected mayor because the very people who dismiss the Ford brothers can’t seem to grasp that they do strike a chord with voters, and I can’t think of anything more terrifying for the future of federal politics.

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Roundup: The PMO’s invisible levers in the Senate

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One of the big things that emerged from the Duffy trial yesterday was a raft of new emails released from Nigel Wright, along with Wright’s testimony. While none of it was particularly damning to the prime minister, a number of pundits and journalists were baying over the Twitterverse and elsewhere that “this proves that the PMO is controlling the Senate! Where’s the independence?” and so on, I’m going to get everyone to take a deep breath and calm down. Yes, the PMO has been playing the Senate leadership – not the Senate itself – like its own private pawn. I’m not going to dispute that fact. But I am going to offer some context. First of all, Stephen Harper broke the Senate with his petulant refusal to make appointments from 2006 to 2008, and then made mass appointments, which damaged the chamber. (Refresher read here). He had a Senate leader who did his bidding without question, which is a problem. Because said Senate leader had so many newbie senators under her wing who did her bidding without question, it set up a power dynamic that allowed the PMO to exercise power levers that don’t actually exist. Wright complained about this lack of levers at times in his correspondence, and we also know that the Senate staff, including committee clerks, were pushing back against this PMO control, even to the point of threatening legal action. (And to that point, this BuzzFeed headline is wrong – they weren’t “rogue staffers,” they were Senate staffers instead of political ones). This makes it a problem of actors instead of institutions. As it is designed, the Senate is already a bastion of institutional independence – appointed Senators have absolutely nothing preventing them from speaking truth to power, because they are protected right up to a retirement age of 75, which in turn protects them from needing to curry favour with the PM to get a post-Senate appointment to a board or tribunal. The system is designed to ensure that they can be fully independent – the problem is that the current crop of Conservative senators has chosen not to be, whether it’s out of ignorance of their role, sentimentality for the prime minister who appointed them, or the fact that they sincerely believe he knows what’s best, so they’ll do what he asks. I can’t think of any way to tinker with the system to prevent that. As a rule, senators get better with age, and when a party leadership changes, they tend to get really independent in a hurry, but until that point, this remains a problem of political actors instead of institutions.

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Roundup: Crossing the line with a golf shirt

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The official date of the new child benefit cheques going out saw the Conservative government at its most ham-handed yesterday, starting with a “leaked” letter to caucus about just how historic this event was as the “single biggest one-time direct payment in Canadian history.” Funny, it seems to me that an actual conservative government would rather just lower taxes across the board rather than bribe people with their own money, but oh, wait – this is a right-flavoured populist government and not a real Conservative one. As ministers and MPs went around the country to tout the benefit, and social media sites were bombarded with blaring ads, some of which were branded as “Christmas in July,” Pierre Poilievre was the most egregious of all, hosting a press event in Halifax that was arranged by his department, and yet featured him wearing a Conservative-branded golf shirt, as though this were a partisan event, or that it was somehow the Conservatives doling out this largesse rather than the Government of Canada. It was utterly crass, and yet the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner decreed that no, it wasn’t actually in contravention of the rules, though one cannot deny that it was in poor taste and poor judgement. Mind you, this bit of vote-buying is going to blow a big hole in the government’s budget, given that growth projections are down and we are pretty much certainly back into a deficit position (not that the budget was actually balanced – simply papered over by raiding the contingency reserve and the EI fund). But then again, the NDP have declared that the child benefit would remain under their plan on top of their plans to have this universal childcare programme (well, years down the road at a great cost to the provinces) and the Liberals planning to revamp the whole system that will also cost at least an extra couple of billion more than this programme does. Watching this play out in the election while each touts fiscal responsibility will be an interesting exercise.

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