Tag Archives: Ethics

Roundup: Danielle Smith’s problematic tales

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The Danielle Smith/Wildrose drama continued yesterday, as details about her decision to defect to the ruling Progressive Conservatives started spilling out, and Smith herself started giving interviews. Interviews that, well, didn’t offer a whole lot of clarity to the issues at hand. The shift in tone from when two of her former MLAs crossed the floor just weeks ago, the statements about the party culture of the PCs, about leadership changes not being the answer – all blown out of the water as Smith equivocated about all of it. There were some tantalizing hints, however, in some of what she said, talking about how the party was already self-destructing, as the grassroots membership voted against policies that would have moved them into the social mainstream rather than keeping them squarely as a protest movement of cranks and what Heather Mallick dubs “angry pyjamas.” As a leader who was increasingly disconnected from her party, she had choices of her own to make. Then comes in revelations about talks with the centrist Alberta Party to merge – in Smith’s estimation to help get an urban base for a rural protest party – and that Preston Manning had a hand in convincing the other Wildrose MLAs to cross the floor. It’s incredible to read, but I still find myself unmoved by this notion that it’s a kind of “reunification,” and that it’s all about the conservative movement as a whole. The problem with that is that it’s hard to consider the PC party as conservatives to a great extent because they’re more populists than anything, and that’s what allows them to remain as amorphous as they are and keep reshaping themselves to allow the One Party State™ to continue carrying on. That it merely absorbs the more strident fiscal conservatism of the Wildrose members is merely a sign of the times. By that same token, the federal Conservatives are also more populists than they are conservatives, if you judge by their fiscal policies, so it’s hard for me to swallow this narrative around the merger. It’s also hard to see how nine MLAs would cross out of the sake of careerism, but again, I go back to Smith’s comment about the party in a state of self-destruction. I’m sure more stories will continue to tumble out, but it’s a lot to try to wrap your head around. Kathleen Petty offers some thoughts, while Jen Gerson pitches for the leadership of the merged party – in 2042.

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Roundup: Frosty relations

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Jennifer Ditchburn remarks on the frosty state of relations between the Liberals and the NDP on the Hill these days, with each side accusing the other of playing dirty politics around the harassment allegations, and from what I’ve heard behind the scenes, even dirtier politics were being attempted but got blunted along the way. The NDP have tended to always have a particular loathing for Liberals, and recent events seem to have made everything worse. That said, I’ve also noticed a certain intensification of enmity toward the Liberals from both the Conservatives and the NDP in venues like Question Period of late. While Harper will respond to NDP questions by chiding them about something or being simply dismissive, with the Liberals he throws out accusations and dredges up irrelevant history. The NDP have increasingly tried to tie the Liberals into questions that are supposed to be directed toward the government, or to invent credit for the good things the Liberals are doing. It’s almost as if both see where the real threat to their fortunes lies.

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Roundup: Misplaced corruption claims

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I find myself troubled by this study that shows that a third of Canadians think that politicians routinely accept bribes, because I can’t think of a claim that could be further from the truth, but it’s also something that I think that We The Media need to have a long, hard think about as well. On the face of it, Canada does pretty well when it comes to running clean governments – what corruption there is, is pretty small change, and spending scandals tend to be isolated and low-key. The Sponsorship Scandal was pennies, really, in the grand scheme of things, but it’s been made out to have been a giant kleptocratic conspiracy by both political opponents of the Liberals, and some media talking heads for dramatic effect. Senators padding their expenses? Again, small change and most of it was caught by Senate administration before it hit the media. So where is this perception coming from? I think the preponderance of American scandals is rubbing off on our own politicians a lot, where they don’t have campaign spending limits or limits on corporate donations. So when people here think that the oil and gas lobby has bought off our politicians, I ask “How, exactly?” $1100 doesn’t really buy you a whole lot. And perhaps We The Media need to do a better job of putting scandal into context so that we don’t create this perception that our government is conducting graft at the kind of Third World levels that they’re made out to be. There is a line between accountability and hyperbole, and it’s disappointing to see how often it gets completely ignored.

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Roundup: The Tabulator gong show

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Over in the New Brunswick election last night, their new Tabulator machines which were supposed to deliver election results faster all pretty much fried and turned into a big gong show, with missing ballots and unreadable results, while the company who was contracted out to run the machines didn’t answer calls. With no results being trustworthy, parties began demanding manual recounts, and with a virtual tie result, the final results likely won’t be clear in the morning. And so, let this once again be a lesson that paper ballots should always be used with manual counts because that’s the only tried and true way with actual accountability.

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Roundup: An emergency debate, such as it was

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The Commons had their “emergency debate” on the situation in Iraq last night, using debate loosely, of course. After all, “debate” these days tends to largely mean reading monotonous speeches into the record that were all pre-written and don’t actually debate what has already been said. The NDP hammered away at demanding a vote on deployment, never mind that military deployment is a Crown prerogative and thus not subject to a vote, and in fact, shouldn’t be because it launders the prerogative and the accountability. But if Mulcair wants to give Harper political cover so that he can, in the future, say that the Commons decided on the matter and that they are culpable when things go wrong because there was a vote, well, it makes it kind of awkward for the opposition, no? It’s part of Responsible Government – the Commons has given the government the authority to govern, and if they don’t like it, then they can withdraw confidence. Voting to “make decisions” is not actually their role – accountability is. The NDP were also childishly mocking the Liberals for largely not being there for the debate – except that they only got two speaking slots the whole night, which they used near the beginning, and as we’ve established that it’s not a real debate, it does seem fairly pointless to have a bunch of people there to simply endure repetitive prepared speeches – and make no mistake, they are repetitive – with no real ability to respond or add to what’s been said. But this is the state of our parliament these days.

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Roundup: Four new workers!

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It’s a special kind of desperation for a good news story when the government holds a press conference to announce four new jobs being filled. Specifically, four jobs on the Irving shipyard refurbishment in Halifax, which will be filled by Aboriginals. I’m still not sure the point of the announcement other than Peter MacKay saying “Look, we’re being diverse!” only they’re not even government positions (though they are getting a lot of government money). Sure, it’s nice that Irving has an Aboriginal employment strategy as part of its contracting procedures, but this was worthy of a government press conference? Sorry, but the news cycle isn’t that slow.

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Roundup: Clarity for First Nations titles

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The Supreme Court has given a unanimous ruling granting a title claim to the Tsilhqot’in First Nation in BC, over a large area of land in the south central part of the province, ending a 25-year court battle over forestry claims and a 150-year dispute between that First Nation and the Crown. Because most of BC’s First Nations don’t have treaties yet with the government, this ruling impacts them in particular, and will make sure that the government has a greater role to play in fulfilling its consultative duties to First Nations as more resource and pipeline projects come up. The ruling also declares that provincial governments have regulatory authority over land obtained by First Nations people through court cases or land claim negotiations. While the ruling has been said to give clarity to negotiations, it also raises the possibility that some First Nations will abandon their negotiations with the government in favour of turning to the courts to establish title or land claims, which should be a red flag seeing as treaty negotiation is a Crown prerogative, and we should be careful about delegating it to the courts. Terry Glavin gives the backstory to the whole dispute dating back to 1864 here.

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Roundup: Sweeping, questionable changes

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The House and Senate have both risen for the summer, but as they did, Jason Kenney and Chris Alexander unveiled their massive overhaul of the Temporary Foreign Workers Programme. It proposes to try and make the programme harder to use, with ever-diminishing caps on the number of workers (who were a fraction of one percent of the total workforce in the country, incidentally) with the aim of getting more unemployed Canadians, as well as Aboriginals, new immigrants and people with disabilities into these low-wage jobs. But Kenney seemed tone deaf to some of the massive labour challenges in Alberta, to demographic issues, to incentivising labour mobility, to the problems of aging populations in rural regions that are depopulating, but most especially to the attitude change that needs to happen if they think that university graduates will think that low-wage jobs in the food service industry or even higher-wage jobs in processing jobs like meat packing are going to be the answer to their labour shortages. The NDP condemned the changes without actually reading them, and all of their objections were addressed, not that it mattered. The Liberals made some pretty salient comments about the implausible changes to inspections and the giant loophole going unaddressed through the youth labour exchange programme. The restaurant and small business associations are really unhappy with the changes, which hamstring their ability to find workers in tough markets. John Geddes starts picking out the flaws in Kenney’s case, including demographics and the notion that it’s likely that non-Canadians made for cheaper and more reliable hires. Andrew Coyne says that the changes are simply bad policy, which punishes the service sector where a government goes out of its way to prevent a manufacturing job from offshoring. Coyne notes that if Canadians don’t want to take these jobs, then they shouldn’t be artificially shoehorned into them, but rather to spend their efforts creating value elsewhere in the economy while those who do want those jobs should be made to be Canadians by using the TFW programme as a pathway to citizenship.

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Roundup: Peter MacKay’s “special bonds”

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Peter MacKay ignited yet another firestorm by making comments to the Ontario Bar Association that there isn’t enough diversity in federal and federally-appointed courts because not enough women are applying since they have a special bond with children. No, seriously. And when called out on it, MacKay insisted that his comments were “misconstrued,” and then went on say law schools need to do better – never mind that female enrolment is already outpacing males. And no, there was nothing in his explanation about visible minorities, just women. Naturally, this turned into a parade of accusations about the regressive social attitudes during Question Period, laced with all of aggravating qualifications from all sides, MacKay included, about being parents. MacKay also gave a litany of appointment figures, all of them out of context, like how there was only one woman out of the thirteen appointments made last week. There was some great fact-checking over Twitter which pointed out just how ridiculous or outright wrong MacKay’s justifications are.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/479732973470638080

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/479739582615785472

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Roundup: Pushing back out of the gate

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The new privacy commissioner, Daniel Therrien, went before the Commons justice committee yesterday to talk about the “cyberbullying” bill, and the moment that Therrien did his job and pushed back against the bill – pointing out the overreach into lawful access provisions, the lowered test for getting warrants, the lack of oversight mechanisms, and that the bill should be split so that the more technical aspects of those lawful access provisions could get more detailed study, the government lashed back, turning against him immediately with the bizarre accusation that he hasn’t been a police officer. Apparently because police demand more powers, the government feels that they need to fall all over themselves to provide them, no questions asked – despite the fact that we have a history of showing that when authorities are given new powers without adequate oversight that they tend to be abused (for entirely well-meaning reasons, no doubt). Also of concern is that information could be requested not only by peace officers, but also by “public officers,” which includes elected officials, certain airline pilots and fisheries officers. No, seriously. Peter MacKay, meanwhile, brings up the child porn defence for these new measures, despite the fact that he hasn’t provided an excuse for why they wouldn’t need a warrant to get this kind of information. As well, NDP MP Randall Garrison tried to put in an amendment to the bill to see that transgendered people are protected from hate – you know, like cyberbullying – and the government shot it down for no real logical reason. Well done, everyone.

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