Tag Archives: Ethics Commissioner

Roundup: Reporting the terror threat

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The government released their 2016 Public Report on the Terrorist Threat to Canada yesterday, and there are a few items of note, particularly that there are more Canadians who are suspected of travelling abroad to engage in terrorist activities, more women are joining the cause, and more of them are returning to Canada after some time abroad, all of which needs to be monitored. The biggest threat remains those lone wolves who are “inspired” by terrorist ideology rather than being directed from abroad, because quite obviously it’s much harder to detect and monitor. Apparently it’s also news that Ralph Goodale is calling ISIS “Daesh” in the report, but some terror experts will note that this is just a bit of name-calling. On a related note, RCMP are talking about their roadblocks in the fight against terrorism, which is a lot about the difficulty in turning evidence gathered from partners like CSIS into something they can admit to the courts, which is apparently harder than it seems. I’m not really sure that I’ve got a lot to add on this one, just that despite the various howls from both the Conservatives and the NDP in how the Liberals have been handling the terror file – the Conservatives insisting that the Liberals have given it up and are running away from the fight (objectively not the case), and the NDP caterwauling that C-51 needs to be repealed full stop – that the Liberals do indeed seem to be taking this seriously. While experts have been praising them on their go-slow approach rather than legislating in haste, I think it’s also notable that they are making reports like these public in order to give a realistic picture of what is going on, rather than relying on hysteria in order to try and build public support that way. We’ll no doubt see a lot more from them in the next couple of months as the new national security committee of parliamentarians is set up, and consultations on the state of our anti-terror laws transition into legislation, but this was a good reminder that things are in the works. In the meantime, here are some more thoughts from a real expert on these kinds of things, Stephanie Carvin.

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Roundup: No ideological obstruction

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There’s the Senate bat-signal again. Conservative Senate leader Claude Carignan says that his caucus won’t abuse their majority in the Senate to thwart Liberal legislation that comes forward, to which I say “Um, yeah. Of course.” Because wouldn’t you know it, Senators have a job to do, and they know it. Of course, I’ve never bought into the conspiracy theory that Conservative senators would be the puppets of Harper, trying to influence things beyond the political grave, or even the theory that they would be extra dickish just because they were Harper appointees. Then again, most people seem to forget that senators of any stripe suddenly get a lot more independent when the PM who appointed them is no longer in office, and they get really, really independent once leadership races kick off. So far we’re at the first of those two, and with the Conservatives as a whole allegedly experimenting with a less command-and-control style of leadership, we may see the yoke they unduly placed over their Senate caucus lifted. Mind you, we’re still waiting for a signal to see what Trudeau will do in terms of both the Speaker of the Senate and the Leader of the Government. Without a Leader, they might as well just cancel Senate Question Period, which would be a loss because it’s quite instructive for how QP in the Commons should be run. Some senators have floated the idea of just having Senate QP be about asking questions to committee chairs (which, incidentally, they already can do), but it’s not a good idea because those committee chairs aren’t going to have a lot to say about issues of the day, they won’t have access to briefing materials, and they aren’t conduits by which the government can be held to account, which is the whole point of QP – not asking details about committee work. But seriously – can we please stop worrying about fantastical hysteria about what the Senate is going to do? 99 percent of it is based on false assumptions and ignorance of the chamber, and it’s so, so tiresome. They have jobs to do. Let them.

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Roundup: More responsibility from failure

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The OPP report on the October 22nd shooting is out, and highlights a number of lapses that happened on that day, but among them all, it should probably be highlighted that a lot of the problem seems to be with the RCMP who are patrolling the exterior of the buildings on the Hill, and that they had a minute-and-a-half to do something about the shooter and didn’t. (Some of what people saw during the shooting is described here). Not that there weren’t problems inside, as some of the bullets that flew were from security personnel and not the shooter, including the one that lodged itself in to the door of the Railway Room, where the NDP were having their caucus meeting. It was also raised in the report that the RCMP were dealing with budget cuts, so it does raise the question as to whether their limited resources played a factor in what happened, be it in resourcing or equipment. It also raises a lot of questions moving forward because the government made a particularly top-down move to have the RCMP take over the oversight of all Hill security from its previous silos (remember that Commons and Senate security forces are separate because of privilege issues). If the RCMP couldn’t manage the situation outside of the buildings, how will they be any better overseeing and coordinating things inside? As well, it needs to be stressed that this new system, under RCMP management, has been imposed hastily and without enough discussion and consultation – the government put the motion under closure, and its implementation is in the omnibudget bill with not enough time for proper scrutiny, particularly as many of the questions about what it all means still haven’t been answered yet, like what the role for the Sergeant-at-Arms will be under this new regime. Speaker Scheer did acknowledge that parliamentarians are complaining, but he seems to think that everything will work out fine. How can we be sure of that if we’re rushing this through and not thinking clearly enough about it, or consulting enough with all of the stakeholders and taking this report into consideration, which hadn’t been completed when the motion was passed and the implementation put into the budget bill. Meanwhile, the fact that RCMP are now carrying submachine guns on the Hill has a lot of its denizens unsettled.

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Roundup: Yes, governing is political

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Your best political read of the weekend was a Twitter essay from Philippe Lagassé, so I’ll leave you to it.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/569515068326457344

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Lagassé, who was part of the fighter jet replacement options analysis task force, reminded us then as reminds us now that we need to stop behaving like we should be in a technocracy, that there are political considerations and debates that need to be had, and that ministers decide things for which there is always a political calculation. This is not a bad thing, though we may disagree with the final decision. The great thing is that we can hold those who made the decisions to account – something you can’t really do in a technocracy, so can we please stop pretending that it’s the way our system is supposed to operate?

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Roundup: AG highlights and denials

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It was the Auditor General’s fall report yesterday, and as expected he gave a pretty damning indictment of the veterans mental health programme, citing that some 20 percent of veterans can wait over eight months for disability support. The government, naturally, found the one line in the report that made it sound like they were doing a good job overall and repeated it over and over again, as though that would make it true. Other gems included $15 million spent on a digital records storage system at Library and Archives, which was later scrapped with no documented rationale (the video clip is in response to my questions in the press conference), a lack of follow-up on the Nutrition North programme to ensure that the subsidies were being passed onto consumers, a lack of cooperation meaning RCMP aren’t getting data on Canadians who offend abroad, and there was a lack of adequate data to assess the auto bailouts from 2008. And then there was Julian Fantino (or likely the staffer monitoring his Twitter account, as I suspect his duotronic circuits can’t handle the feed) trying to get one over Mercedes Stephenson, who was having none of it.

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Roundup: Partisan government tweets

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The government continues their questionable communications strategies, as they are now asking federal departments to tweet favourable messages about the government’s new “family tax cut” programmes using hashtags like #StrongFamilies. You know, a slogan that Harper debuted at a party event back in the summer. And these tax measures? Not actually adopted by Parliament yet, so advertising about them is premature (not that it stopped them with the Canada Job Grant, and they’re doing TV ads already on the basis of these unapproved tax measures). Despite what Tony Clement will tell you about how this is important messaging from the government to let people know about their new programmes, it all smacks of partisan advertising – just like those terrible marijuana ads that use torqued and demonstrably false claims (like 400 percent stronger marijuana). Getting public servants to start bombarding social media with these kinds of partisan messages further degrades the neutrality of the civil service, and shows the government to be treating it as their own personal ad agency, which they should not be doing.

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Roundup: Sanctions as a badge of honour

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The Russian government has retaliated against sanctions imposed by Canada by instituting sanctions of their own against 13 Canadian officials, including the Clerk of the Privy Council, the deputy secretary to cabinet in the Privy Council, Speaker Scheer, Peter Van Loan, Senator Raynell Andreychuk, and MPs Dean Allison, Paul Dewar, Irwin Cotler, Ted Opitz, Chrystia Freeland and James Bezan, all of whom consider it a “badge of honour.” Notably absent were John Baird and Stephen Harper, which signals that there is still room for negotiation. Irwin Cotler wrote his response about how he was first banned from the Soviet Union in 1979, and that he was poisoned on his last trip to Moscow in 2006. Meanwhile, the G8 is essentially no more, as Russia has expelled after their invasion of Crimea. The G7 is now resurrected in its place.

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Roundup: Procurement and protectionism

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A couple of different reports on military procurement came out yesterday. One of them, from the Commons public accounts committee, which looked into the F-35 procurement reports by the Auditor General and PBO, completely watered down the findings so as to tone down the criticism of the government’s handling of the file. So, good job there in holding the executive to account, government backbenchers! Meanwhile, an independent panel report recommended that Canadian companies take the lead with building from scratch or taking the major role with follow-on support contracts for the various military procurements being undertaken, though Rona Ambrose noted during QP that the government was better suited to be a customer of Canadian industries than a subsidizer, so take that for what you will.

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Roundup: Blocking the Auditor General

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The House of Commons (as its own entity rather than its occupants) is taking the Auditor General to Federal Court to block an Access to Information request around his correspondence for his committee appearances. The House says this is about parliamentary privilege, and the AG says that privilege doesn’t extend to his office. Kady O’Malley delves further into this, but it does seem unlikely that the Courts could even weigh in on this, and there is also that wee little fact that Parliament is a court in and of itself. Both the PMO and the Liberals say that they’re willing to waive privilege in this case. It was later revealed that the NDP were the originators of said ATIP request, which just makes this all the more curious.

Iran has responded to our embassy closures, and calls it “unwise, uncivilised, and hostile.” Brian Stewart looks at some of the possible intelligence that may have prompted the pullout, and wonders if it wasn’t threats on Canadian soil that they were more concerned with. The ousted Iranian charé d’affairs insists that they did nothing wrong. Meanwhile, Thomas Mulcair seems to be distancing himself from some of Paul Dewar’s comments regarding the embassy closures.

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Roundup: Additional reporting powers requested

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Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson says that politicians are honest, but when the Act comes up for review she wants additional powers, especially when it comes to MPs reporting gifts.

What’s that? The government may be rigging sole-source contracts? You don’t say!

In light of Senator Fairbairn’s dementia and Rob Ford’s hospitalisation, we ask ourselves once again if we give Canadian politicians too much privacy, and where do we draw that line?

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