Tag Archives: Environment

Roundup: Enter the new Whip

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Newly-appointed Chief Government Whip Steve MacKinnon had a conversation with CBC over the weekend, and there are a few interesting bits in there. For one, I didn’t actually realise that the term came from 18th-century hunting slang for “whipper-in, as the rider who keeps hounds from straying from the pack. So it’s not about any kind of literal or metaphorical whipping of MPs to vote a certain way, and now we’ve both learned something new today.

What I did know before is that there is more to the whip’s job than just ensuring MPs vote in certain ways, particularly if there’s a confidence vote upcoming. Rather, the whip and his or her office has a lot of work in juggling assignments – who is on what committee, who can stand in for that MP if they are away, and to an extent, who has House duty. And because the whip is largely the person in charge of MPs’ attendance (even if said attendance is not made public), I have it on very good authority that the Whip spends a lot of time listening to MPs as they unburden themselves, and talk about what is going on in their lives as to why they can’t attend a committee meeting or vote. The whip also becomes responsible for the staff in a riding office if that MP resigns or dies in office. And then comes the discipline part, which is different between each party. Some parties are very strict about it, some have unofficial ways of enforcing discipline – largely through in-group bullying – and some are fairly relaxed over the issue provided it’s not a matter of confidence.

The other thing I would add is that at the advent of the era of “Senate independence,” as Justin Trudeau and others would have you believe, the whip in the Senate was equivalent to in the House of Commons, and they instructed senators how to vote – or else. This was simply not true – the whip in the Senate was always rather illusory, and the Whip’s office was more about doing things like committee assignments, finding alternates for those who were absent, and assigning things like office space or parking to incoming senators who joined the caucus. They had little to no leverage of senators and their voting patterns because of institutional independence, and I heard a former Liberal senate leader once remark that on one occasion when the leader’s office on the Commons side called them up and said they’d really like it if senators could vote for a certain bill, that these senators turned around and voted the other way, just to prove a point around their independence. So there is a lot more to the role than people may expect from the outside, and best of luck to Steve MacKinnon as he takes on this new role.

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Roundup: A notice of appeal before a pause

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It’s not wholly unexpected that the federal government filed the notice of appeal on the Federal Court decision around the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal order around First Nations children. No sooner did all of the television news rush to get Cindy Blackstock on camera when another notice went out by the government – that they had reached an agreement to pause said litigation while they sit down with stakeholders in this court case, as well as with two other related class-action lawsuits, and hammer out a deal by December 1st.

There are a few thought around this. The first is that this should have been expected because the real crux of the issue if the Tribunal’s order rather than the compensation itself. The government has committed to spending the money – and there are billions of dollars at stake – but any tribunal that exceeds its statutory authority is something that any government, no matter the stripe, will want to challenge because they don’t want to set a precedent where the Tribunal continues to exceed its authority, and in this case, turns itself into some kind of roving commission of inquiry. (I wrote all about this issue previously here). The notice of appeal spells this out pretty clearly, and while one judge at the Federal Court may have disagreed, he’s certainly not the court of last instance (and frankly, I would rather hear from some of the judges on the Federal Court of Appeal when it comes to matters of administrative law – as with this Tribunal – than I would this particular judge). And while a number of self-righteous reporters demanded to know why the government couldn’t just pay the amount and sort out the issues later, I’m pretty sure that litigation doesn’t work that way.

My other thought is that it looks a lot like the notice of appeal was more out of a need for the government to keep their options open as the negotiations continue, particularly given that it was filed as late as it was, followed immediately by the press conference to explain what was taking place. Frankly I don’t buy the “they filed it at 4:30 on a Friday to bury it” because it wasn’t exactly buried when it dominated the politics shows and is the top story on every news site in the country. That’s not burying something, especially when they have a captive audience. This being said, I’m still don’t think that this government has communicated the issues very effectively (particularly the issue around the Tribunal exceeding its authority), and that’s compounded by the fact that the media writ-large has shown itself to be fairly incapable of writing a legal story with any nuance or complexity, and rely on both-sidesing it with a clear bias toward taking Blackstock’s word as the authority, and by conflating a number of different issues and completely blurring the timeline of the different orders from the Tribunal. This isn’t a black-and-white issue of taking kids to court – but you wouldn’t know it if you only paid attention to what gets reported.

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Roundup: Clear and concise, to counteract Poilievre

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Earlier this week, to accompany the release of their Monetary Policy Report, the Bank of Canada released a sixty-second clip over social media to explain their assessment of the state of the Canadian economy in plain language. And it was great.

This kind of communication is essential, especially now, for the Bank because of the level of noise and misinformation that is being promulgated, particularly by certain members of Parliament who have made it their mission to politicise the work of the Bank, as they spout facile talking points about the current state of inflation that have zero bearing on the actual causes. And if it’s not Pierre Poilievre, my reply column is full of chuckleheads who think they know better, and inflation truthers (which are the gods damned worst). So yes, this kind of clear, simple-to-digest communication is especially needed by the Bank, much like the Cases in Brief have become an essential form of communication from the Supreme Court of Canada. This is a great initiative from the Bank, and hopefully we’ll see more like it in the future.

On a related note, former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge says that the current governor is on the right track with the economic recovery and where inflation is going, so if you needed an additional vote of confidence that they know what they’re doing, there you have it.

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Roundup: Taking his sweet-ass time to meet caucus

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The Liberals are starting to get restless – members of caucus are feeling put out that they haven’t actually had a formal caucus meeting yet post-election, and many of them are champing at the bit to have a closed-door drag out session about what went wrong in the election, and why their own leadership seemed unprepared for it when they called the blood thing in the first place. And telling the Hill Times that they want to know why the party leadership is taking their “sweet-ass time” to call this meeting was the icing on this particular cake.

I’m having a hard time fathoming why it’s taking Trudeau and company so long to get their collective acts together post-election. They made a whole song and dance about how urgently they needed to act while on the campaign trail, only for them to turn around and take said sweet-ass time in both finalising the Cabinet shuffle (and no, the recounts do not account for how long the delay is) as well as their decision to further delay summoning Parliament – and even his planned international travel does not excuse this. They could have had Cabinet sworn in before the Governor General went on her state visit to Germany, and could have summoned Parliament this week, in advance of Trudeau’s planned travel. That would have given them actual time to get committees up and running, and legislation in the system – particularly around the changes to the pandemic benefits – as soon as possible, as opposed to the current trajectory of a three-week sitting that will accomplish very little before they head back to their ridings for the Christmas break.

Additionally, not having a proper caucus meeting by now has reached the point of disrespecting their own MPs. They have things they want to say after the campaign trail, and they should be able to say it – that’s how this system works. It’s a very bad signal that they are being kept away from the leadership like this, because even aside from it betraying all of Trudeau’s talking points about being open and accountable within his own party, that kind of thing will start to fester if it’s not taken seriously. I’m not sure that’s a situation Trudeau wants to go out on in his final tour-de-force as leader.

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Roundup: A desperate Kenney paints yet another false picture

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In the wake of the final report of the Committee on Un-Albertan Activities, Jason Kenney and his band of flying monkeys have been spending their time putting out blatantly false readings of what was in the nothingburger of a report. And more to the point, we’ve had a number of columnists from a certain newspaper chain write more of the kind of propaganda that Kenney has been spinning. To wit:

Of course, Kenney doesn’t have much left going for him. He’s had his bullshit referendum (final results coming Tuesday), his bogus Senate “election,” his inquisition has ended, his “Fair Deal Panel” has reported its load of nonsense, and Kenney’s own numbers, meanwhile, are in the dumps and if an election were held in Alberta right now, the NDP would win by a significant margin of seats. So, of course Kenney is going to retreat to his usual tactic of lying about things to make himself look like the hero in this. But man, it’s getting hard to take any of this seriously, even though we have to because he has a legion of followers who believe all of it and he’s riled them up and made them angry about all kinds of manufactured grievances. Hard to see how any of this will end in a way that won’t be bad for everyone.

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Roundup: A surplus thanks to federal funds

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Something jumped out at me yesterday while doomscrolling, which was New Brunswick crowing that they have a bigger-than-expected surplus thanks to all of the additional federal dollars that were sent to the province because of the pandemic. And it stuck in my craw a bit – provinces have been crying poor when it comes to healthcare dollars and around doing things like improving long-term care, and then they turn around and pat themselves on the back for running surpluses as a result of federal dollars. It doesn’t quite add up.

The fact that certain provinces have been using federal pandemic dollars to pad their bottom lines is a problem for Confederation, particularly as these very same provinces are demanding that the federal government turn over even higher healthcare transfers, and justifying it with historically inaccurate talking points about the original share of healthcare spending without also recognizing the other agreements made in the late 1970s. The current federal government is certainly willing to spend the money, but they have also learned that they don’t want to get burned by it like previous governments have. Recall that when the health transfer escalator was at an unsustainable six percent per year, provincial healthcare spending growth was in the low two-percent range, meaning those additional dollars were spent on other things that did not improve the healthcare system. Similarly, when Stephen Harper tried to buy peace with Quebec and sign a huge cheque to correct a fictional “fiscal imbalance,” the provincial government turned around and cut taxes, which wasn’t the intent of said funding, and yet it happened.

It’s with this in mind that Trudeau has promised that there will be strings attached to future health transfers, and he laid out what many of those strings will be in the campaign, whether it’s hiring targets for doctors and nurses, or minimum salaries for long-term care workers. And yes, premiers will bellyache about it, and the opposition parties will take up those cries in the House of Commons, but we have seen repeatedly over this pandemic that the provinces will demand money and then not spend the money they do get. Time for some accountability for dollars – because it’s all coming from the same taxpayer in the end, regardless of which level of government is trying to make their bottom line look better.

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Roundup: Counting down to Kenney’s referendum

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Alberta is a little over two weeks away from Jason Kenney’s bullshit “referendum” on equalisation, which won’t actually accomplish anything, but will send his rhetoric into overdrive. (This is also when he will be holding his equally bullshit “Senate nomination election,” which is also blatantly unconstitutional, but that is a rant for another day, and I’ve filed numerous columns on the topic already). This referendum will do nothing about equalisation – it won’t do anything about amending the constitution, and if he thinks he’ll bring the federal government to the table to renegotiate the terms of equalisation, Justin Trudeau will once again remind Kenney that he was sitting at the Cabinet table when Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty imposed the current formula. It’s a waste of time and money, all in the service of Kenney trying to continue to drum up anger at Ottawa as a way to distract the province from his own record of failure.

Meanwhile, here is Andrew Leach with a few thoughts:

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Roundup: Yet another in a string of unforced errors

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It is easy to imagine the thought process that Justin Trudeau engaged in about Truth and Reconciliation Day – that he didn’t want it to be about him. That he wanted it to be a day for Indigenous people to speak their truths, and for Canadians to listen. That he didn’t need to be front-and-centre, being the emoter-in-chief as he so often is. So best to attend the ceremony on the night before, and then get out of the way.

And yet, somehow, he managed to make it all about him once more, thanks to yet another unforced error, compounding his record of unforced errors. And while he said that he spent the day on the phone listening to survivors, he also got on a plane to Tofino, BC, to spend time with family post-election. And that dominated the news, and the political talk shows, because he couldn’t have waited one more day so it wouldn’t look like crass opportunism and like he was taking the day as a holiday as people were insisting that we not do. It should have been blindingly obvious, but this is a prime minister who has so many blind spots that begin and end with him thinking that so long as his intentions are good that it won’t matter in the end. And once again, because of this blind spot, he has made it all about him, and took the focus away from the importance of the day (though one could also note that reporters and TV hosts making the huge deal about it, and harping on it rather than noting it and moving on should also have known better).

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Roundup: Calling for a return to in-person sittings

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Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet held a press conference yesterday, where he called for Parliament to be recalled as quickly as possible, and for it to resume in-person with vaccinated MPs, ending the “hybrid” sittings that we were saddled with in the previous session. For once, I actually agree with Blanchet – we are at the point with vaccinations and public health measures that there really is not any excuse for MPs not to be attending in person (wearing masks indoors as often as possible), because we cannot continue as we were before dissolution.

For those of you who weren’t following along, the hybrid sittings were direct contributors to the toxicity of the previous session, as MPs didn’t have to look one another in the eye while they behaved in the ways that they did or levelled the accusations at one another that they did, and the limitations of those sittings, particularly at committee, exacerbated the procedural warfare and filibusters that parties engaged in. Additionally, there can be no moral justification for continuing the hybrid sittings given the human toll it takes on the interpreters, who were suffering acoustic injuries at an increased rate because MPs refused to use their equipment properly, or behave reasonably online in ways that wouldn’t disrupt or injure those interpreters. Some parties – particularly the NDP, but you can bet that the Liberals will chine in as well – will want to keep some aspects of hybrid sittings around, but I want to caution that this should be resisted as much as possible – we don’t want to incentivise these to continue, because it will erode parliament the longer it carries on.

Meanwhile, I do fear that there will be Conservative MPs who continue to refuse either vaccination or to disclose their vaccination status (as a craven way of keeping their own anti-vaxx voters on-side) who will complain that they should be allowed to either attend the House of Commons without proof of vaccination, or to be allowed to carry on in a hybrid means without it. Even more to the point, I fear that at least one of them will turn this into a point of personal privilege, that their rights to speak in the Chamber are being infringed upon, and this will become a privilege fight (which would be doomed as the vaccinated majority eventually votes them down). Nevertheless, a return to in-person sittings needs to happen as soon as possible, and if some MPs refuse then so be it – and they can lose their salaries for absenteeism while they’re at it.

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Roundup: Return of the two Michaels

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Friday was very much an exercise in life coming at one fast, as Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with American authorities, and hours later, the extradition order she was under was dropped and she was free to return to China. A few hours after that, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were on their way back to Canada, the fig leaf that their arrests were not hostage diplomacy in retaliation for Meng’s arrest completely gone, and they arrived on Canadian soil in the early hours of Saturday morning, with prime minister Justin Trudeau and foreign affairs minister Marc Garneau greeting them on the tarmac in Calgary. Spavor debarked there, Kovrig then continued onto Toronto, where he was met by his estranged wife and his sister.

With all of this in mind, there are questions as to where our relationship with China goes next. Garneau says that they are “eyes wide open,” and that they are now following a four-fold approach to China: “coexist,” “compete,” “co-operate,” and “challenge” – which seems to be a more articulate policy direction than the “tough but smart” that Garneau’s predecessor, François-Philippe Champagne stated several months ago. This certainly came up during the election, but the Liberals didn’t articulate much of a foreign policy in their platform, and we got very little in the way of debate on the subject. It is not insignificant, however, that Canada did lead a group of Western allies in a pact against the use of hostage diplomacy, whether practice by China or others (and there are others), so it’s not like the government sat on their hands the whole time either. It will also be exceedingly difficult to disentangle our trade from China – particularly in our agricultural sector – so it will be very interesting to see what this process looks like going forward over the next couple of years.

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