Tag Archives: F-35 Fighters

Roundup: The price of everything and the value of nothing

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We’re into that part of summer where the news is so thin that we’ve turned to cheap outrage to get to some headlines. Combing through expense reports, many a reporter is simply putting a big number up on a headline and clutching their pearls about it, never mind that there’s no context around those figures, and that in most cases they’re actually reasonable. And lo, we look small town cheap, like backwater rubes as we continue to insist that our politicians subsist on stale bread and shaving water lest they look like they’re too good for the rest of us.

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What is possibly worse is the fact that there is constant apology rather than defending any of the spending. Was the cost of Jane Philpott’s car service unreasonable? That’s debatable, and I’m dubious that the fact that the owner of the service was a campaign volunteer will gain much traction with the Ethics Commissioner. Catherine McKenna at least defended the use of a photographer at COP21 (and no, it’s not the media’s job to take photos that the government can later use for their own promotional need), but instead of media questioning the return that they got for them (Jen Gerson noted on Power & Politics that the quality of the photos she’d seen were questionable and the photographer hired had credentials that may not have been suitable for the task), we just get performed outrage at the dollar value.

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In this he’s exactly right – this is made worse by politicians essentially cannibalizing one another to score points rather than saying “Whoa there, let’s stop and think about this for a minute. Maybe these are reasonable expenses.” No. Instead it’s this game of tit-for-tat, Conservatives getting back at the Liberals for pointing out their own spending excesses when they were in government, and the NDP simply being sanctimonious and smug. The Globe and Mail’s editorial on the subject is right – we are spending too much time on the nickel-and-diming and the cheap theatre of performed outrage rather than on the actual scrutiny of government spending, and this may be related to the absolute dysfunction of the Estimates process in parliament (noting that parliamentarians themselves let it get this bad rather than push back on successive governments that caused this problem, and performing cheap outrage is easier). On the other hand, we’ve reached the point where we are living out that Oscar Wilde quote about a cynic being “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Reporters rushing to put up that headline number with no context attached have done the system a disservice. Insisting that everyone post receipts will only make things worse, and will only hasten the race to the bottom where MPs will be fighting for re-election on the backs of what brand of toilet paper they bought for the constituency office and whether it was on sale that week or not. We need to draw a line somewhere, before we both paralyze the discourse and make politics so unattractive to anyone who wants to serve the public that they won’t bother. We’re our own worst enemies, and we help nobody in feeding this populist noise.

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Roundup: “Hot lesbian” pinkwashing

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By now, you’ve probably heard about that ostensibly pro-oilsands ad that proclaimed that lesbians are hot, and it’s better to use oil from Canada, where they’re considered hot, than from Saudi Arabia, where they would be executed, and it being accompanied by an image taken from Orange is the New Black. And his apology and attempts to walk back from how particularly boneheaded the whole idea was to begin with. (Seriously, his sputtering about what he considers to be “hot” is both hilarious and sad at the same time). As well, the fact that he didn’t use two men to make the same point is entirely because he was conscious that the same message wouldn’t have the same effect on his target audience (because let’s face it, the idea of guys kissing isn’t as titillating to the general public as the idea of two women). What hasn’t been really explored in all of this, however, is this increasing tendency toward pinkwashing, particularly from the political right, as an excuse for xenophobia.

If you’re not familiar with the term pinkwashing, it’s generally used to show how some modicum of LGBT rights is a contrast to the death sentence that can be associated with homosexuality in certain parts of the world, usually as a way of deflecting attention from other problems. A famous example is the way that Israel uses Tel Aviv Pride to deflect criticism of their other human rights problems, and there was a tonne of pinkwashing done in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando as a pretext to condemning so-called Islamist terrorism (never mind that the same people spouting this pinkwashing ignore their own homophobic records. Who cares if we want to take away their civil rights – we don’t want to execute them, is generally how the argument goes, as though that’s really the choice that the LGBT community wants to be faced with). And this lesbian ad isn’t even the first time that this argument has been used – the Erza Levant brainchild Ethical Oil tried similar arguments a couple of years ago to little avail.

Suffice to say, while the mainstream media did jump all over these ridiculous lesbian ads, the criticisms tended to focus on the surface images of photogenic actresses and the fact that it ignores that there are still problems in this country where the GBLT community is concerned, the fact that there was no discussion about pinkwashing was disappointing, because this increasing tendency (particularly from the alt-right and Trump supporters) to use the queer community as some kind of shield to justify their xenophobia is tiresome and needs to be called out for what it is. These ads provided a good opportunity to do so, but that opportunity was largely squandered.

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Roundup: Another incoming mass appointment

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The government’s permanent Senate appointment board is set to get underway “within days” to get to work on filling the remaining 19 vacant Senate seats, but if you listen very carefully, you can hear my alarm going of that the way they appear to be planning to do this is a Very Bad Idea. Specifically, it certainly looks like the plan is to appoint all 19 in one fell swoop by the fall, and I cannot stress enough how much of a really, really bad thing this is. It’s like nobody learned any of the lessons from the glut of 18 panic appointments in 2008, and how badly that stressed the Senate in its ability to absorb that many new members at once, and the fact that it had a negative effect on their independence because it meant that the government at the time pretty much controlled them and exercised a heavy whip hand because there wasn’t time to let them integrate at their own pace. The seven appointments made this spring, without a government or caucus to guide them, put them on a steep learning curve and left them with little in the way of logistical support for setting up their offices, which isn’t exactly ideal either. That Peter Harder has now created for himself a new quasi-whip (ahem, styled “government liaison”) that has the capacity to help them with some logistics issues, barring the Independent Working Group being in a position to offer that support as well if they are in a position to do so, may wind up being one less stressor for the individual appointees, but that still doesn’t neglect the fact that mass appointments are bad for the system. Because of the nature of the Senate, it works best when individual vacancies are filled as they happen, and that those new senators gradually get up to speed, given the unique way that the chamber operates, and that really is a process that can take two or three years to get fully into it. But the government sitting on the appointment process as long as it has, in order to do these appointments in one fell swoop, is a problem, and it’s yet another problem of their own making, which is a consistent pattern when it comes to the Senate. It’s one thing I hope that does come out of this Federal Court challenge to Senate vacancies – that there is a declaration that sets a time limit for when vacancies must be filled, so that it cuts down on future mass appointments, on top of ensuring that those regions have their proper representation as they are guaranteed under the Constitution, because yes, these things do matter.

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Roundup: To give or not to give Sophie resources

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At his session-ender press conference, Trudeau highlighted three carefully chosen accomplishments, gave no additional clarity on the missing and murdered Indigenous women file, and didn’t commit to an open process for fighter procurement. All of that was par for the course, given that it was a lot of back-patting, but also a reminder that there is still a lot of work ahead, and he doesn’t want to look like he’s patting himself on the back too much. What I found more curious was in response to a question that he said that his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, should be able to have resources to carry out the duties that she has set about to undertake, but that he also doesn’t want to create a formal role for prime ministerial spouses going forward so that there is no obligation for the future. There is a certain amount of sense to this position, but it’s a very fine line to walk. Currently, she has one assistant and is given help from PMO staff on an ad hoc basis, as needed. Speculation with the staffing changes made to the household, particularly around nannies, has to do with creating space on the staff for an additional assistant for Grégoire Trudeau, but we have yet to see that materialise. None of it answers the specific existential question however on the role that prime ministerial spouses play. The reluctance to create an official position is a good instinct to have, especially because it bears reminding again and again that we are already a constitutional monarchy, and we have a royal family to take on these particular roles. In fact, the GG and his spouse also take on these kinds of feel-good roles in the absence of a more present royal family, which leaves very little room for a prime ministerial spouse to take it on. What they have to trade in – particularly Grégoire Trudeau – is a kind of celebrity status, especially as the previous few prime ministerial spouses haven’t had much in the way of a career of their own, and for Grégoire Trudeau, it has become her career to be a public speaker at events and for particular charity groups – and there’s nothing wrong with that. It nevertheless makes for a sticky situation with who pays for the help that such a career entails, particularly if it becomes an important optical consideration that she not be paid for the work (and if she were paid, even on a cost-recovery basis, one can already imagine people hissing “how dare she!” on accepting money from charities no matter that it’s the cost of doing business and standard practice). So we are between that proverbial rock and hard place. I don’t have a solution to offer either than to say that there is no winning, and it now becomes a way of finding the least unpalatable option, and that may wind up being what Trudeau is signalling – resources but the explicit rule that this is not formalising the role in any way. His reminding people that we have a royal family for these kinds of things wouldn’t hurt either so that we can stop this constant “First Lady” talk.

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Roundup: Big tent divisions

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There was an interesting and perhaps somewhat revealing interview in The Hill Times yesterday where openly gay MP Rob Oliphant let it be known that despite the outward acceptance of LGBT issues in the Liberal Party, it is not a universally held opinion, and that there are still undercurrents of the “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude that still reside within some of its members. As an example, MP John McKay – a noted evangelical Christian – was quoted as saying that his feelings about same-sex marriage haven’t changed, even though he considers the issue settled. It’s that line between tolerance and acceptance, and Oliphant rather adroitly points out that the line is still there within his own caucus. It also seems to me to be a kind of oblique explanation for why the government wound up taking such a tough line on the assisted dying bill – to the point that they would rather see it go back to the Supreme Court of Canada in order to suffer a defeat and be “forced” to deal with the issue as it was originally laid out in the Carter decision rather than to go along with it on their own. There are other lines within the party where Trudeau has forced the issue with his candidates and caucus, such as abortion (McKay being an opponent, as was Lawrence MacAulay until Trudeau’s edict), and it would seem that the same line is being threaded with the assisted dying issue. The difference is that with this one, Trudeau did not force the issue with his caucus and insist that this is a Charter issue that they will be whipped on (never mind that the Carter decision very clearly stated that yes, this is a Charter issue and this is why the current law is not adequately ensuring access for these Canadians with grievous and irremediable suffering). And it did seem that it was originally going to be the case where this was going to be a whipped vote on Charter lines, but he backed away from that under some public pressure from the media. How much of that was from push-back from the caucus and the broader party membership remains to be seen, but it would seem that the attempt to create the broadest possible tent is forcing some uncomfortable compromises, and in this case, Trudeau made the calculation that this wasn’t a battle he was willing to fight within his own base, never mind that he had the Charter argument right there. Instead, we are left with an inadequate law that will be challenged again (and one hopes not at the expense of another suffering family), and the reminder that while the public face of the Liberal Party is one of progressivity, there remains a social conservative undercurrent of the party that the leader’s declarations haven’t entirely done away with.

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Roundup: Everyone’s an expert

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More amendments to C-14 in the Senate, and the very real threat from senators that they would rather veto a bad law (such as the bill as originally drafted) than let it pass and have to head back to the courts, is prompting everyone to consider themselves an expert on the Senate and how to reform it. After days of clutched pearls by pundits and the odd bit of praise (such as Martin Patriquin’s grudging admission that the Senate is a necessary evil), we’re also starting to get some pretty bizarre pieces out there, like one from iPolitics, where they got a mining company CEO to weigh in on reforming the chamber.

No, seriously.

Apparently, according to this “expert,” Trudeau has gotten it all wrong by creating a situation with “no enforceable rule,” and apparently we’ve never had a situation in the past 149 years where bills bounced back-and-forth between the chambers. Err, except that there have never been real levers by which a Prime Minister could control the chamber, only sentiment on the part of senators in his or her caucus, and we’ve had plenty of situations where bills went back-and-forth, including to having conferences between chambers (a situation which is unwieldy in the current configuration of the Senate). And while Trudeau has made mistakes, he is not to blame for the Senate’s actual constitutional powers, which are currently being demonstrated.

But wait – there’s more!™

Our CEO “expert” says that the solution is not Triple E (thankfully), but rather to reduce senators’ term limits to 12 years, to give provinces a veto on their nominees to represent them, and to ensure that a nomination panel ensures that “a new Senate is younger, more representative and better qualified for the work by credentials and life experience.”

Term limits are a solution in search of a problem because they reduce institutional independence. The problem, identified in the Ontario factum to the Supreme Court reference, is that a senator nearing their term limit can start to curry favour with the government in hopes of a post-Senatorial appointment to a tribunal or diplomatic posting. By ensuring that their end date is age 75, it scuppers those plans and keeps Senators from sucking up. Provincial vetoes? Well, senators are not there to represent provincial governments. They are not even technically representing provinces, but rather regions, and their representation tends to be for minority communities, be they linguistic, ethnic or even religious, which was the express purpose for why the Senate was built in the way that it was. And demands for a younger Senate clash with the desire to get accomplished Canadians to serve in its ranks toward the end of their careers so that they can draw on their decades of experience, and if you look at some of the qualifications of our current senators, they are on the whole a very accomplished group indeed (some exceptions apply).

So rather than get some CEO to bloviate without any actual institutional knowledge or awareness, perhaps we should all brush up on our civic literacy and learn about the chamber as it currently exists before start weighing in on how to fix something that is not actually fundamentally broken.

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QP: Shifting focus to fighter jets

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After the big “family photo” on the steps of the building this morning, and a speech marking the 150th anniversary of the legislature of Canada meeting on Parliament Hill, we got into the business of the day. While Trudeau was on the Hill in the morning, he was on his way to Toronto and absent from QP today. Rona Ambrose led off, mini-lectern on neighbouring desk, and asked about measures to bring Yazidi girls to Canada as refugees. John McCallum noted that refugees are prioritised based on need as determined by the UN, and that he was proud of their record. Ambrose turned to the question of fighter jets, and wondered why they would get new jets if they didn’t use the ones we have to fight ISIS. Harjit Sajjan noted that that he had received a briefing on the mission in Iraq, but didn’t really answer. Ambrose listed off the sins of Liberal procurement past, and wondered how this time would be different. Sajjan retorted that the previous government cut $3 billion from the defence budget. Denis Lebel was concerned about pulling out of the the F-35 programme and how that would affect the aerospace industry in Montreal, and Sajjan noted that no decision had been made. When Lebel tried to press about the other allies who had adopted the F-35, Sajjan noted that they were not fully operational and they were taking the time to make the right choice. Thomas Mulcair led off for the NDP, asking about a statement that Senator Pratte made about the need to pass C-10 quickly. Marc Garneau said there was no deal, but this was about avoiding future litigation. Mulcair wanted assurances that there was no deal, and Garneau plainly stated there wasn’t one. Mulcair turned to tax havens by KPMG, and Diane Lebouthillier noted that there were investigations and court cases ongoing. Mulcair said that if it was in the courts it would be public, but pivoted to the Super Hornets and sole-sourcing. Sajjan repeated that no decision was made.

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Roundup: Six months later

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The Liberal government is now six months old, so everyone is checking in on the list of their promises kept and broken. This one list, compiled from the “Trudeau Meter,” however, is a bit nitpicky on some of those “broken” promises, calling them broken because there was no mention in this year’s budget when there are three more years of budgets left in the current mandate, and it’s pretty hard to expect everything to have happened in the first six months of a government, when there are a lot of moving pieces to keep track of. In other words, give them a little more time before you declare all of these promises broken. The deficit figures for this year continue to look better than anticipated as the Fiscal Monitor shows continued surpluses into the spring months (which the Conservatives will be insufferable about in QP next week, I can promise you), but that may be because CRA is apparently having a banner year in terms of collecting lapsed taxes, up to an extra $1 billion so far. So there’s that. The Conservatives, meanwhile, have the challenge of trying to stay united during this period of transition for their party, particularly as the leadership contest starts to intensify. As for the NDP, they’re now struggling to remain relevant six months later. So there’s that.

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Roundup: A “third party” option

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Six senators have taken the first steps to forming their own quasi-caucus with the Upper Chamber, as a means of trying to better sort out how to deal with life as independent senators. The list includes former Conservatives, Liberals and Independent Progressive Conservative Elaine McCoy, and they are calling themselves a “working group” as opposed to a caucus or party. Their aim is to get “third party” status that will allow them to better control their own destiny. Currently, party whips in the Senate control not only committee assignment duties, but also office allocations, parking spaces, trips for inter-parliamentary delegations, and all of those other administrative details that independents currently don’t have access to. Rather than turn over those kinds of details to Senate administration, they are looking to come up with a means to start controlling it themselves, which is important because it protects their privilege as Senators, which is important in how they govern themselves and are responsible for their own affairs. This is a very important consideration, and as the Chamber continues its process of forced evolution and change with the advent of decreasing partisanship and a greater number of independents on the way, because it has the potential to find a way through some of those process hurdles that are currently tripping them up. We’ll see how many other independent senators join this working group – after all, official party status in the Senate requires five members, which they have for the moment but at least one of their number is soon to hit the mandatory retirement age, and it would be incumbent upon them to keep their membership numbers up in order to carry on carrying on with their own affairs. This will hopefully help have systems in place for when the new senators start arriving, some of whom may opt to stay independent (others of course free to join a caucus if they wish), and allow these senators to assign one of their own as a kind of “whip” to deal with the administrative duties, and hopefully get more resources for their offices when it comes to things like research dollars. Overall, though, it will hopefully give them some organisational clout so that they are better able to answer stand up to the current oligarchy of the party structure in the Senate. Elsewhere, Senator Patterson has tabled a bill to amend the constitution and remove the property requirements for Senate eligibility (which I previous wrote about their relative harmlessness).

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Roundup: Coming up with a new organizational model

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There’s the Senate bat-signal, and there are a couple of articles out there about how the Senate organizes itself that need to be discussed. Global has an exclusive piece about how the Senate agreed to change its organisational funding model in light of their new post-government caucus reality, but *gasp!* it’s all closed-door negotiations about your taxpayer dollars! Oh, I’m sorry, did I yawn there? Senate caucus funding used to be allocated along government and opposition lines, but with there being no governing party in the Senate any longer, Senate Liberals were at risk of losing their operational funding, and yes, this is an issue because it costs money to run things and the Senate is an integral part of our democratic system. The compromise that they came up with, allocating funds on a proportional basis of seats, is actually pretty novel. Yes, it’s more money than they got before, but remember that the Senate Liberals can no longer draw from the caucus resources of their Commons counterparts either, particularly for things like research dollars, so not giving them some kind of additional resources would be punishing them again for Trudeau’s unilateral decision to kick them out of caucus. Let’s not forget that democracy costs money, and one of the most egregious forms of cheap outrage journalism is pretending that a parliamentary body can be run for pennies when it absolutely cannot, particularly if we want them to do the heavy lifting of parliament, as they are increasingly doing. Meanwhile, there is some consternation that the government won’t be appointing a whip when they appoint their “government representative” in lieu of a Leader of the Government in the Senate, but mostly because there has been a defined role in terms of the government whip for doing some of those organisational tasks like allocating offices and parking spaces, not to mention organising committee assignments when there are only so many spaces to go around and lots of senators want on some committees and fewer on others. After all, the whip’s job is more than just telling people how to vote – that role has been far less prevalent in the Senate, and well before Trudeau’s edict, Liberal Senators were not being given instruction by their Commons counterparts and exercised a great deal of independence. (As for the Conservatives, we saw in the Duffy trial that Nigel Wright was trying to encourage Harper to exercise levers of power that didn’t actually exist within the Senate, to the institution’s detriment, and while many Conservative senators don’t see anything wrong with the way they’ve been doing things, well, they haven’t known any differently and that’s part of the problem). Of course, with no government caucus, there is less of a need for that role, but what I suspect is going to end up happening is that the Senate’s internal bureaucracy is going to wind up taking on more responsibilities to deal with this lack of the traditional structures and growing number of independent senators. Again, there are organisational duties that need to be performed, and it would behove the institution to figure out who’s going to do them.

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