Tag Archives: First Nations

Senate QP: Karina Gould brings the vague

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After the House of Commons voted down the NDP motion to condemn the government for abandoning their electoral reform promise, minister of democratic institutions Karina Gould headed down the hall to the Other Place to answer questions there. Senator Carignan led off, asking about her new mandate letter, and Gould answered in generalities. Carignan followed-up asking about her plans for reforming the Senate, and Gould mentioned the new appointment system put into her place by her predecessor, and that she was waiting to read the report of the Senate Modernisation committee and to work together.

Senator Frum asked about loopholes that allow foreign money to be used in elections by registered third parties, and Gould spoke circles around financing laws but didn’t give much in the way of an answer regarding a loophole. Frum pushed on the notion that there was a possibility of foreign funds getting into the system, and Gould said she would look into it but it wasn’t something she had really come across.

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QP: Disingenuous tax concerns

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Back from Washington, but only briefly before he heads off for Europe, Justin Trudeau was present for QP, but not all leaders were. Rona Ambrose led off, worried about the cancellation of tax credits hurting families. Trudeau responded by reminding her that they lowered taxes and were giving bigger child benefit cheques, tax free, to those who need it. Ambrose listed a bunch of taxes (of dubious veracity), and Trudeau reiterated his tax cuts to date. Ambrose raised the issue of a cancelled tax break for troops in Kuwait, to which listed the many sins of the past government when it came to the military. Ambrose reiterated the question, but Trudeau didn’t change his answer. Ambrose finished off demanding transparency for the true costs of the carbon tax — as though it were a federal thing — and Trudeau reminded her that it was revenue neutral federally. Jenny Kwan led off for the NDP, decrying the fact that Trudeau hasn’t condemned Trump’s racist policies. Trudeau didn’t take the bait, talking about jobs and trade, and when Hélène Laverdière tried again in French, Trudeau said that they need to be respectful in their disagreement, but the focus was on jobs and trade. Alexandre Boulerice worried that Trudeau made university students cynical over electoral reform, but Trudeau didn’t apologize, saying that he was acting responsibly and making voting easier. Nathan Cullen demanded an apology in English, and Trudeau reminded him of the other issues in the last election other than electoral reform.

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QP: Programming opposite Trudeau-Trump

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With Trudeau away at the White House, it was still surprisingly busy in the Commons with most of the desks filled, but not all of the leaders were present. Rona Ambrose led off with the case of Vincent Li, didn’t mention his schizophrenia, and worried about the government looking to end the bulk of mandatory minimum sentences. Jody Wilson-Raybould reminded her that the review boards determined when those found not criminally responsible were eligible for release and discharge when people were deemed not criminally responsible. Ambrose decried that Trudeau voted against Conservative legislation that would ensure that people like Li were locked up for life, but Wilson-Raybould didn’t take the bait, and spoke in generalities about the need for broader criminal justice reform. Ambrose then raised the issue of carbon taxes, claiming that they would lead to jobs flowing south, to which Scott Brison reminded her that while they have had positive job numbers, the global economy is sluggish and they were working to stimulate growth. Luc Berthold then rose for a pair of questions in French to demand that the government lower business taxes and cut carbon taxes. For his first question, François-Philippe Champagne reminded him of their focus on trade, and for his second, Brison repeated his previous response in French. Jenny Kwan led off for the NDP, demanding an end to the safe third country agreement, to which Ahmed Hussen told her that there was no evidence that the US travel ban was having an impact on the agreement. Hélène Laverdière pointed out the illegal border crossing happening, and Hussen repeated his point that the executive order had to do with resettled refugees, not claimants. Laverdière brought up the case of a Quebecker refused entry into the US, to which Dominic LeBlanc reminded her that the US has the sovereign power to decide who goes into their territory but people could bring up concerns with them. Jenny Kwan asked the same again in English, and got the same answer.

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Roundup: Brace for blanket coverage

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Today is the big day, and it’ll be wall-to-wall coverage of Justin Trudeau’s big meeting with Donald Trump, and we won’t be able to talk about anything else I’m sure. So here we go. At Trudeau’s meeting with Donald Trump he will apparently be seeking assurances on pre-clearance issues, while they will also be having a working lunch where the topic will be women executives. No, really. And the tone now is apparently going to be business instead of “love-in” (though I’m not sure anybody has had a love-in with Trump).

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The Conservatives are “pausing their hostility” with Trudeau in advance of the meeting, apparently showing solidarity in advance of it (though you wouldn’t have known it from QP last week). Here we have some advice from a former Canadian ambassador to Washington, while Anne Kingston wonders which version of Trudeau will be at the meeting. Marc Garneau, who chairs the Canada-US cabinet committee, says that today’s visit won’t focus on our countries’ differences. And Tristin Hopper offers some slightly tongue-in-cheek advice for the meeting.

And then there’s the historical context. Here’s a look at how previous PMs have dealt with unpopular presidents, and the lessons taken from Trump’s meetings with Theresa May and Shinzo Abe. Maclean’s has a photo reminder of meetings going back to the seventies.

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Roundup: The spectre of a Leitch Party

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A rather remarkable exchange happened during Trudeau’s visit to Nunavut when he was pressed about his electoral reform promise. Trudeau responded to his questioner “Do you think Kellie Leitch should have her own party?” and laid out a realistic case where parties like that can hold enough seats to affect the balance of power in a parliament. His questioner was taken aback and “respectfully disagreed,” which isn’t surprising because the narrative we are always given when it comes to proportional representation is that it will give us nice left-wing coalition governments forever, which is certainly not the case, and we need to challenge that particular narrative more often, and to point to what’s happening in Europe right now. And to be honest, I’m glad that Trudeau is being a bit more forceful on this point about the potential rise of extreme parties and that such a system would be bad for Canada. Big tent parties have done a lot for this country, and have moderated a lot of regional tensions within them.

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Of course, Trudeau bringing up Leitch in such a manner could have unintended consequences of its own.

In a not unrelated note, Michelle Rempel was at an immigration conference in Montreal, and she noted her frustrations in bashing her head against her own party as much as she was with the Liberals that she is critiquing. And she made some very salient points in here about how we can’t pretend that we’re immune to populist rhetoric in this country, because we have a history of it bubbling up (hello 1993 election) and the sentiments still exist here where you have groups of disenfranchised people looking to blame Others. And this brings us back to why changing our electoral system to give incentives to these elements to form their own parties and try to win seats that they can use to leverage power is a very real and present danger. Add to that, there are concerns from experts in the field that the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the States is bubbling up here and fuelling a rise of racism in this country because it’s being seen as more socially acceptable.

So do we change our system to incentivise these voices to better organise and try to win themselves political leverage? Or do we do we maintain institutions and practices that have been successful in dispersing these elements because they know that there is no pathway to victory by pursuing it? It seems to me that it’s a fairly simple answer.

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Roundup: A petulant motion

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The degradation of Supply Day – otherwise known as “opposition day” – motions continues apace as the NDP have chosen to be completely petulant about their day today, using their motion to get the House to say that the government misled them on their promise to end First-past-the-Post and call on the government to apologise. It’s petty and cheap, and it’s going to be no fun for the Liberals on House duty to have to eat some of their own words on the need for electoral reform, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that this is not what an opposition day motion is supposed ot be doing.

As a quick refresher, the purpose of Supply Days is for the opposition to demonstrate why the government should be denied supply – meaning the money that they want to spend to run the government. In other words, the day is to be spent arguing about why the government shouldn’t be spending money they’re asking taxpayers for. It’s part of the job of the House of Commons in holding the government to account by controlling the purse strings, which government can only spend with their approval. But that’s not how it works anymore. Now, it’s any topic under the sun.

The Conservatives have been engaging in their own shenanigans with supply days, arguing one this week that was supposed to be about getting the government to agree not to tax health and dental benefits, but because they wanted it to be defeated, they got cute with the wording so as to proclaim that Canadians were too burdened with taxes and so on, knowing the government wouldn’t support it. And when they defeated it, they took to Twitter and QP to decry the government not ruling out taxing these benefits despite the fact that they had stated clearly that they would not. But hey, why not play silly buggers with parliament’s time?

Even worse than motions designed to get the government to vote it down by using cute language are the “mom and apple pie” motions designed to get the government to support them in the hopes of embarrassing them into taking action on a file, and as happened so often during the Conservative years, the government would support the motion, pat themselves on the back, and then do nothing while the NDP howled about it to little effect. It was a government that had no shame, but it was a too-cute-by-half motion to start with.

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Like Philippe Lagassé says, less theatrics, more accountability. And that’s exactly what we’re not seeing in any of these motions, when it’s the fundamental job of every MP in the Commons.

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QP: The Bombardier dichotomy

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For caucus day, the benches were mostly full, and we would see if the fire was back. Rona Ambrose led off, wondering about why the government was going ahead with a loan to Bombardier when they said it wasn’t necessary. Trudeau said that they had been discussion to see how they could help the industry with jobs and R&D, and to boost their global competitiveness. Ambrose wonders how it looked to other industries when they bailed out one business but not others hurt in the country. Trudeau noted the jobs he was creating through pipeline approvals in other parts of the country. Ambrose wanted to know how many jobs the loan to Bombardier would create, but Trudeau stuck to generalities. When Ambrose made a bald assertion about the loan, but without a question posed, Trudeau didn’t get up to offer a response. For her final question, Ambrose railed about the loan, and Trudeau kept up his happy, clappy talking points about high quality manufacturing jobs in the aerospace sector. Thomas Mulcair was up next, asking about refugee claimants crossing into Manitoba, and Trudeau noted his concern for the issue. Mulcair noted a Canadian Muslim family stopped and questioned at the US border, and wondered why Trudeau wasn’t standing up to defend them. Trudeau noted the 400,000 Canadians who cross the border every day and that a number of his ministers were engaged on the file, including defending their rights. Mulcair demanded to know what day he decided to kill electoral reform, and Trudeau noted that it was his signature on the mandate letter, not the minister’s. For his final question, Mulcair demanded an apology for misleading Canadians, and Trudeau parried with noting about other ways in which they were working to improve our democracy.

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Roundup: A painful lesson in committee cooperation

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News broke yesterday morning that rogue Liberal backbencher Nate Erskine-Smith had been reassigned from the public safety committee by the party whip, and immediately everyone was all “uh oh, this is totally because he spoke out against his party.” Yes, Erskine-Smith has been making all kinds of waves, talking about his disagreement with the approval of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, advocating for the decriminalisation of all illegal drugs to treat them as a public health as opposed to a criminal law issue, and most recently, prostrating himself before his electorate to decry his government’s decision to abandon electoral reform (and using the curious tactic of using language that both undermines his government’s legitimacy and advocates for a system that undermines the very agency he has as an MP to stand apart from his party, but whatever).

Of course, it also appears that none of those commenters from the peanut gallery actually bothered to read the story about why Erskine-Smith was yanked from the committee, and it had little to do with his outspokenness than the fact that he was overly naïve as a newbie MP if trying to make parliament a nicer place. In this case, he wanted to operate by consensus on the committee and tried to get the other parties onside for amending the bill on establishing a national security committee of parliamentarians. The problem was that in the process, he was manipulated by Tony Clement into deleting some of his government’s own provisions because, you know, consensus and working together! So yeah, painful lesson, and maybe he’ll learn to be a little less trusting the next time. I get that you want parliament to be a nicer place and politics to be done better, but if you’re not careful, your opponents will (metaphorically) shiv you because they have their own goals, and they don’t necessarily want to buy into your platform. And let’s not forget that the competition of ideas is part of what keeps our system vital and accountable.

Of course, the fact that the whip could take this step has the usual suspects up in arms about how too much power is in the hands of the leader (by way of the whip), and the standard calls about reforming committees were trotted out. The Liberal Party’s promises on committee reform – more resources, electing chairs by secret ballot, and ensuring parliamentary secretaries are no longer voting members – were pretty much accomplished, but Conservative leadership candidate Michael Chong has his own reform ideas (try to look surprised), but reading them over, I have doubts. In particular, his plan to take away the power to assign MPs to committees and replacing it with a secret ballot process is dubious, in particular because a) I can’t imagine trying to count those ballots, b) it won’t solve the problems of MPs all trying to get onto the “sexier” committees while leaving some of the less exciting ones to be scrounging for members, c) critics – which the leader assigns – are on those committees, so for a party like the NDP, the secret balloting process would be useless, and d) this is a typical Chong suggestion of a solution in search of a problem. MPs like to bitch and moan about being assigned to committees they don’t like, but rarely actually ask for committee assignments, nor do they seem to have an appreciation that sometimes the party has to spread out their talent to places where it’s needed as opposed to where MPs want to go.

I’m also not keen on Chong’s plan to merge five committees to bring down the total number because there’s no actual need. We have 338 MPs and we don’t have a super-sized cabinet with a bloated parliamentary secretary brigade to match it, and in the previous parliament, they already reduced committees from 12 to 10 members apiece. There are enough MPs to go around, and merging the mandates of committees overloads them rather than letting them undertake studies of their own accord, which they should be doing. There’s no real crisis of overloading MPs with work right now (which was not always the case), so this particular suggestion seems gratuitous.

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Senate QP: Indigenous issues on the floor

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It was actually the second Senate ministerial QP of 2017, but I wound up missing last week’s for the McCallum/Dion farewell speeches. Alas. This week it was Carolyn Bennett’s turn to face the upper chamber and be held to account. Senator Beth Marshall started off, asking about only 12 percent of First Nations infrastructure funds being allocated. Bennett said that the regions can now approve up to $50 million without needing to get approval from the centre, but that 100 percent of the funding would be allocated and on its way out the door by the end of March. Marshall asked whether the projects would be posted on the department website so that there is some accountability, and Bennett indicated that it would be in a bit of a roundabout way, talking about the importance of water projects that would soon be announced.

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QP: No responsible path forward

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After the prime minister spent his morning hearing from youth about their issues (and, interesting enough, electoral reform was not brought up), he was in QP, ready for the grand inquest of the nation. Rona Ambrose led off, bringing up the Globe and Mail investigation on “unfounded” sexual assault complaints in the country, and about ensuring that the RCMP have sufficient training to deal with it. Trudeau said that they were working to address gender-based violence and sexual assault and making changes at the institutional level. Ambrose changed topics to fears that jobs would end sent south for lower taxes and slashed regulations, to which Trudeau pointed out their record of tax cuts and enhanced child benefits. Ambrose pressed the topic on trade issues, and Trudeau pointed out how many American jobs depended on trade with Canada. Denis Lebel went for another round in French, got the same answer, and for his last question, Lebel worried about softwood lumber. Trudeau noted that he has talked about it with the Americans constantly, and that they remain engaged on the topic. Nathan Cullen led off for the NDP, wailing about proportional representation. Trudeau reminded him that there was no consensus and no responsible path forward. Cullen railed about broken promises, and Trudeau pointed about other progress on the democracy file before reiterating that there was no consensus. Alexander Boulerice picked up to give the angry denunciations in French, and Trudeau hit back by talking about working in the best interests of the country. He then tried to insinuate that the PM was lying and got cautioned by the Speaker for it, not that Trudeau’s response changed.

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