Tag Archives: First Nations

Roundup: The call is coming from inside the caucus room

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The hits just keep coming for Andrew Scheer, as one of his MPs came out vocally against his leadership yesterday. In the wake of the fairly low-key announcement of his Shadow Cabinet, it was quickly noticed that Ed Fast was not on said list, and Fast himself said that he was asked to be part of it and he declined, saying that Scheer should be surrounded by people loyal to his leadership, while Fast has concerns about it. Up until this moment, Scheer’s loyalists were dismissing those vocally and publicly calling for Scheer to step down as being Toronto elites and sore losers that go back to leadership rivals. Fast’s public denouncement puts a lie to this narrative.

Let’s face it – public dissent in caucus is rare because we have virtually eliminated all of the incentives for it. Our bastardized leadership selection process has leaders claiming a “democratic legitimacy” that they use to intimidate MPs into not challenging them, because it goes against the “will of the grassroots” (and to hell with that MP’s voters, apparently). We gave party leaders the power to sign off on nomination forms with the purest of intentions and it quickly got perverted into a tool of blackmail and iron-fisted discipline. Pretty much the only time MPs will speak out is if they have nothing to lose, and Fast is in that position – he could retire tomorrow and be all the better for it. And it’s when the dissent goes public that leaders really need to worry because that means that it’s happening by those inside the caucus room who aren’t saying anything out loud. Provincially, we’ve seen instances of it taking only one or two MLAs coming out publicly for leaders to see the writing on the wall and resign. The caucus may be bigger in Ottawa, but the sentiment is increasingly out in the open – that can’t be sustainable.

Scheer later went to the annual UCP convention in Calgary, where he was predictably given a fairly warm welcome– but he shouldn’t rest on this applause because he doesn’t need to win Alberta – he already has their votes, and they’re not enough to carry the country, no matter how much they increase their vote share. He needs seats in Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada, and he is having a hard time cracking those areas, in particular because of his social conservatism and the UCP convention isn’t going to be the place to go to get honest feedback about that problem. It’s a bubble, and a trap that becomes too easy to feel that there is nothing wrong if he stays in it too long.

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Roundup: Frivolous lawsuits that help no one

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Because climate lawsuits on behalf of youths are apparently all the rage, another one has been launched, this time against the Ford government in Ontario, because of their cancellation of the cap-and-trade system and their challenging of the federal carbon price. I can barely even.

So, to recap: Lawsuits are about getting individual remedies, and these actions are not designed to do so. They are using “novel” Charter arguments, which are an abuse of process. It’s also trying to use the courts to impose public policy solutions, which is not the job of the courts. That’s not their function, and trying to use the courts because you lost at politics is not how things work. And further to that point, the courts are already overburdened, and these kind of frivolous suits – and that’s exactly what they are – waste everyone’s time and court resources, and I would fully expect the courts to impose costs on those who brought forward these complaints that waste everyone’s time.

I spent an afternoon on the Twitter machine of being accused of not taking climate action seriously because I made these points about this lawsuit, which is not the case at all. My point – as exemplified by the (very good) lawyer who joined in the fight over Twitter, is that this is a political problem, not a legal one. You don’t use a saw to hammer a nail, which is what this lawsuit is attempting to do. The courts are not the place for this because they can’t force a government to come up with a climate change plan that meets the expectations of scientists – that’s not how life works, and it’s not how democracy works. And sure, young people are frustrated with the slow action so far, but democracy depends on people organising, and that means doing the hard work of getting involved in riding associations, changing party policy though conventions, and agitating internally to do something. And it means organising. I can’t stress this enough – organise, organise, organise. Protest votes won’t get you anywhere – and let’s face it, that’s what Green votes are. That’s how you make change in politics, and the sooner that young people realise this – and you can join parties as young as sixteen and start volunteering and voting on nominations and resolutions – the more you will be effecting meaningful change. (Want to learn more about how that works? Read my book).

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Roundup: More knives for Scheer

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Even more knives have come out for Andrew Scheer – on a couple of different flanks. From the social conservatives, Scheer didn’t defend their interests strongly enough in the election and now they want him gone. This in the face of more moderate conservatives looking for him to join the twenty-first century on issues like support for LGBT rights. And then, on Power & Politics, Kory Teneycke – one-time director of communications to Stephen Harper and maestro behind Sun TV – said that Scheer should resign and if he wants his job back, to run for it again in a full-blown leadership contest. What was even more interesting in those comments was his contention that a leadership review is not enough because those are easily enough manipulated by those loyal to the current leader – and he’s right.

The problem, of course, is that so long as we continue to insist on running our leadership contests in this bastardized model, leaders will continue to claim democratic legitimacy to marginalize their caucus, ignore the grassroots, and not face any meaningful accountability, so it’s hard to see how the outcome of such a contest could be any different in the broader scheme of things. There are deep problems that need to be addressed in our parties, but nobody wants to actually say so.

Meanwhile, not only has Scheer fired his chief of staff and his director of communications, but Hamish Marshall, his campaign manager, has come to the end of his contract and it doesn’t sound like he’s interested in renewing it anytime soon. It remains to be seen if this kind of house-cleaning is enough bloodletting for the caucus that remains frustrated by their election loss, but it may not be given the knives that have been out for Scheer in a number of different directions.

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Roundup: Tribunal orders and judicial review

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This week, the Federal Court will hear the case of the federal government’s judicial review of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal’s compensation order for First Nations children who were apprehended and removed from their homes by child and family services. The reporting on this is going to be emotional, and as you can see from both the CBC and Canadian Press reports previewing the hearings (which will be webcast for the first time), the focus of who they’re speaking to are Indigenous people – fair enough – but almost zero time in either report is spent on the actual legal arguments, which are significant. Only the CBC report included the line that “Ottawa has argued in court filings that the tribunal order was an overreach and that the original case was about systemic discrimination, which required a systemic fix, not individual compensation, which is the purview of class action law.”

This is a pretty significant thing, because one of the arguments is that the Tribunal, in making the kind of order that it did, was exceeding its statutory authority to do so. That’s a pretty big deal, and why the government would be looking for a judicial review – to ensure that the Tribunal isn’t allowed to overreach, and doesn’t create a precedent for future instances of overreach. It may seem like petty details, but it’s a pretty significant issue when you look at how the administrative tribunal system in this country is set up, and the role that it plays in the broader justice system. The fact that this is being ignored by the mainstream press isn’t surprising, because administrative law isn’t sexy (even though it’s one of the most contentious issues that our Supreme Court is grappling with at this very moment), but we shouldn’t dismiss it.

The government – and prime minister Justin Trudeau in particular – has stated that there will be compensation, and they are already working on a settlement for the class action lawsuit in question, which may include boarder compensation so as not to have to separate compensation streams for the same apprehensions. And they should absolutely be held to account to that promise that they made – but the Tribunal order cannot and should not be the end all and be all, and we need to recognize that, and ensure that some of the broader context is being discussed.

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Roundup: Middle Class™ is a state of mind

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I don’t really want to engage in a pile-on, but the fact that the new Minister of Middle Class™ Prosperity® was doing the media rounds and imploding on trying to offer a definition of just what is Middle Class™ was not a good start to her ministerial career – not to mention an indictment of the comms geniuses in the PMO who sent her out there unprepared. You would think that actually having a working definition of what is “middle class” would be an important thing to equip a minister with when you give her the portfolio – particularly when you wrap up an otherwise sober role of Associate Minister of Finance with this ridiculous title. And there are a couple of very serious points to make here – if you can’t actually define what “middle class” means, then you have no actual way of measuring your success in dealing with the perceived issues of income disparity – which this government has been using Middle Class™ as a code for without trying to sound like they’re engaging in class warfare. But as a branding exercise, when you rely on the fact that everyone thinks they’re “middle class” or about to be – particularly people who are well over what is actually middle class in this country – it’s one of those things that tends to flatter people, but becomes meaningless – essentially that Middle Class™ is a state of mind. Mona Fortier did, over the course of the day, transition from “it involves your kids being in hockey” to “there’s no one definition” because of regional variations and disparities, but it was a bit of a trial by fire, and hopefully a lesson that she – and the comms geniuses in PMO – will take to heart.

All of this talk of being Middle Class™ does bring me back to this scene from the early noughties UK sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme, where being Middle Class was a Thing.

Meanwhile, Chris Selley makes the very salient point that this government has moved the needle on poverty in this country, but the problems we’re facing aren’t with the Middle Class™, and perhaps they should put a focus on those areas instead.

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Roundup: A quasi-exit for May

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The other, non-Senate big news on Parliament Hill yesterday was Elizabeth May’s decision to step down as Green Party leader – sort of. She said that she would stay on as the “parliamentary leader,” but give up the mantle of big-P Party leader, and that one of her appointed deputy leaders, Jo-Ann Roberts, would be interim leader until the party could have a leadership convention – next October. May fully intends to stay on as an MP and run again as an MP (and said that she would not run for Speaker this time, but would pursue it in the next Parliament).

This particular kind of leadership dynamic is part of what ails Canadian democracy right now – this notion that there should be year-long leadership races, and that someone who doesn’t have a seat in Parliament should be leading the party in any capacity. The fact that the leader is not selected by caucus alone is one of the biggest problems with our system – it has allowed leaders to centralize power and when they get into power, that centralization rests in the PMO. And with May stepping back, and new MPs Jenica Atwin and Paul Manly also eschewing running for the role, they will again be a party where their leader is outside of Parliament, and who may or may not run for a seat anytime a byelection comes around, and they will face some of the challenges that Jagmeet Singh became all too familiar with.

There needs to be a rebalancing of leadership roles in our system, and we need to keep the party leader’s focus back on parliament, with the rest of the leadership better handled by the Party president. But what the Greens are doing now is just perpetuating what is horribly wrong with our system.

Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt remarks on how May left on her own terms, while Paul Wells sees the end of May’s leadership as a chance for her party to overhaul its message and its organizational abilities.

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Roundup: A new breakaway Senate caucus

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Expect some drama in the Senate coming up, as a group of Senators plan to break away from their existing caucuses – a couple of Conservatives, but most of them currently sitting in the Independent Senators Group – in order to form a new caucus that will concern itself with regional representation (and I have had independent confirmation of the reporting in this story). It’s expected that the formal application will be made this morning, and then the work of organizing starts, and because there are some ten to twelve senators in this group, they will have sufficient numbers for an official caucus under the current Senate rules (and will have even more right to salaries once the Parliament of Canada Act changes that Justin Trudeau promised will go through).

While I will be writing more about this later in the day, the names on the list aren’t too much of a surprise because they haven’t necessarily been playing well with the current ISG leadership, and many have bristled with some of the heavy-handed strictures in the ISG about party membership and so on. I have definite questions about how they plan to put more focus on regional issues as part of this group, and I’ll be making some calls over the day to get some more answers, but it’s going to be a very interesting next few weeks, and Justin Trudeau come to rue the day that he kicked his senators out of his caucus in order to avoid any audit revelations and pretend it was high-minded principle.

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Roundup: Performative or procedurally correct?

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The NDP held their first post-election caucus meeting yesterday, saying goodbye to departing MPs and welcoming their rookies and returning MPs, and when they met the press afterward, Jagmeet Singh announced that he is going to press for pharmacare and for the government to abandon their application for judicial review the Human Rights Tribunal compensation for First Nations youth. But there are problems with both – on the former, he is proposing the party’s first private members’ bill be taken up with the matter, and on the latter, the substantive problems with the Tribunal likely exceeding its statutory authority to make that kind of compensation order is kind of a big deal and as a lawyer, you would think he might have an appreciation for bad jurisprudence while still pushing for the government to go ahead with the compensation that they said they would honour. But you know, performative outrage.

Which brings me back to the notion of pharmacare legislation. The whole promise is built on both bad practice and bad procedure. Remember that when it comes to private members’ bills, they are allocated by lottery, meaning that it’s random as to who gets what slot, and Singh is not proposing as leader to take away the slot of the first NDP MP whose name comes up so that he can dictate what bill will be presented. That’s not only heavy-handed, but it actively removes the independence of that MP (which the NDP is used to doing while pretending they don’t, but let’s call a spade a spade). So much for any of the issues that MP cares about – the leader demanded their spot. The second and more important aspect is that private members’ bills can’t initiate government spending, and pharmacare is provincial jurisdiction, meaning that it’s depending on negotiating with premiers. The bill, essentially, is out of order, unless it becomes an exercise in demanding a national strategy, which the NDP love to do, but one of their MPs went on TV last night to say that they intend to use it to lay out the framework they want to implement. I can pretty much guarantee you that it means the bill will be dead on arrival, and that the committee that decides on what private members’ business is voteable will decide that it’s not. (The sponsor who was forced to give up their spot for this bill will then demand that the Commons vote to override the committee, and when they don’t, the NDP will wail and gnash their teeth that the Liberals don’t care about Pharmacare, which is a script so predictable it might as well be a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie).

https://twitter.com/BradWButt/status/1189643457444417536

What the NDP could do instead is use their first Supply Day to debate a motion on Pharmacare, which would then have a vote and let them scream and moan if the Liberals don’t adopt it for the reason that they’ve already committed to the implementation plan in the Hopkins report (which the NDP decry as not being fast enough), but at least that would be procedurally sound. But their apologists have been telling me on Twitter that all private members’ bills are theatre and only exist to make a point (untrue), or that they could simply get a minister to agree to it in order to spend the funds (never going to happen), but hey, it’s a minority parliament so the NDP can pretend to dictate terms as though they actually had bargaining given the seat maths. It’s too bad that they can’t be both performative and procedurally correct.

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Roundup: Finding that Alberta voice

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The questions about how prime minister Justin Trudeau will get Alberta and Saskatchewan voices into his reshuffled Cabinet continue to swirl about, and we’re already hearing some fairly crazy theories being bandied about – particularly that Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi is going to be tapped for Cabinet, either as an appointee to Cabinet who is not a parliamentarian, or as a Senator. Oh, but there aren’t any vacancies? Well, there is always the emergency provision in the Constitution that the Queen can appoint four or eight additional senators in order to break a deadlock, as Brian Mulroney did to pass the GST. Would this count as a deadlock? Probably not, and the Queen may privately warn Trudeau that this would likely be construed as an abuse of those powers for his political convenience.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1187454644315983872

Naming senators to Cabinet is actually routine – in fact, the Leader of the Government in the Senate is supposed to be a Cabinet minister, and while Stephen Harper ended the practice in a fit of pique over the ClusterDuff Affair, needing to give himself more distance from the Senate; Justin Trudeau carried over the practice in his bid to make the Senate more “independent” while appointing Senator Peter Harder to the sham position of “government representative,” while Harder maintains the half-pregnant façade that he is both independent and represents the Cabinet to the Senate and vice-versa (which is bonkers). There should be no issue with Trudeau appointing one of the existing Alberta senators to Cabinet (more from David Moscrop here), or appointing someone to the existing vacancy in Saskatchewan (and Ralph Goodale has already said he has no interest in it).

As for the notion of appointing someone who is not a parliamentarian, the convention is generally that they will seek a seat at the earliest opportunity – usually a by-election to a relatively safe seat. Jean Chrétien did this with Stéphane Dion and Pierre Pettigrew, so there is recent enough precedent. The hitch is that there are no seats in Alberta or Saskatchewan that they could run someone in during a by-election, and the closest would be a promise to appoint someone to the Senate seat from Alberta that is due to become vacant in 2021 (lamenting that it will be the mandatory retirement of Senator Elaine McCoy). It’s not very politically saleable, however. Nevertheless, Trudeau has options, but some of them involve swallowing his pride. (I have a column on this coming out later today).

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1187536180017061889

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1187547076470755328

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Roundup: Last minute obfuscation

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As this interminable, awful election draws to a close, leaders were busy making their final pitches to voters, starting with Justin Trudeau in Niagara, and then to Hamilton, where he had a media availability, and he mostly talked around questions being posed to him around things like that interview from Stephen Guilbeault where he said that more pipelines were unlikely to be built (I mean, has anyone actually looked at the economic data?), or what he might do in a minority situation (which really is the right thing to do, because all of this baseless speculation without seeing the seat math is pretty dumb). Trudeau then went to Brantford, Milton, Winnipeg, and ended off with a late-night rally in Calgary, so he can at least say he visited. There, he made a pitch for progressives to consolidate around him as an anti-Kenney vote.

Andrew Scheer held his media availability in North York, where he consistently refused to say whether the stories about his party hiring a certain Cult of the Insider figure to try and discredit the Maxime Bernier Fan Club, before he simply repeated misinformation. He then headed for Don Valley North, Brampton, Scarborough, and finished off with a rally in Richmond Hill where the crowd started chanting “lock him up” about Trudeau. Scheer tried to get them to say “Vote him out” instead, but honestly? This Dollarama-knockoff LARPing of American politics is so tiresome.

Jagmeet Singh largely stuck to the Vancouver area, and he too prevaricated on yet more questions about post-election situations including whether he’d trigger an early election rather than work with the Conservatives.

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