Tag Archives: First Nations

Roundup: More trouble in Rideau Hall

Posted on by

The news out of Rideau Hall is rarely good these days, and yesterday, it was about high levels of harassment and job dissatisfaction being reported by the staff there. I’m not entirely surprised by this, given that most of the established and long-time staff abandoned it shortly after Julie Payette was named governor general, because she and her hand-picked secretary (who had no government or Crown-related experience) essentially made everyone’s lives miserable. This after it was revealed that Payette still refuses to move into Rideau Hall because she’s unhappy with the lack of privacy there, while she has decided to decamp to the Citadelle in Québec City – her other official residence – for the summer. (On that note, it’s probably the most use the Citadelle has had continuously in quite a while). All of this makes one wonder if she wasn’t told when she was offered the position that it’s a very public role and that living in an official residence would come with issues like staff being in the building at all hours. It seems odd that she wouldn’t have known this going into the job (and possibly a sign that Justin Trudeau and his office did a terrible job in either selecting her or preparing her).

Meanwhile, I remain concerned that we’ve heard nothing from the PMO about how they’re planning to replace the lieutenant governor of Saskatchewan following his untimely death this week, because the provincial government will be paralyzed until that is filled. If we had a functioning vice-regal appointments commission, there would have been more names from a short-list on record that could be drawn from fairly easily for a replacement, but now it’s an opaque box, and if there is another Judy Foote-like appointment in the works, that could be yet another self-inflicted wound for this government.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Proving the SCC’s point

Posted on by

It was only a matter of time after Alberta premier Jason Kenney announced that he was reviving his province’s sham Senate “election” laws that the two so-called “elected” senators from the province started chiming in, and lo, Senator Tannas did just that on the Alberta Primetime politics show on Alberta’s CTV affiliates this week. During the hugely uncritical interview, Tannas proclaimed that getting an “endorsement” from the public gives him the right to speak up “more forcefully,” and that he and fellow “elected” Senator Black are “listened to differently” because they of their special status.

Let me remind you what the Supreme Court of Canada said when it comes to consultative elections – that it would give the Senate a popular mandate, which would change the constitutional architecture of the institution, and you can’t do that without a formal constitutional amendment. In other words, Tannas is proving the Supreme Court’s point – that his “election” (which was a sham, let’s be clear) confers upon him some kind of special authority, which is whole point. Now, Tannas did try to couch some of his criticisms for his nominally appointed colleagues from Alberta because he has to work with them, but amidst the myths about Bills C-48 and C-69 and the complete self-aggrandisement, there was virtually no pushback at Tannas about what the Supreme Court said, or the fact that the process that got him “elected” was a sham worthy of a People’s Republic.

There seems to be almost nobody pushing back against Kenney and his unconstitutional legislation and the sham that these “elections” really are. Why, here’s Don Braid with a lazy garbage take that lauds the farce that Kenney puts on because he’s swallowed the rhetoric about those bills whole, along with the fairytale nonsense about a “Triple E” senate and what it purports to do (never mind that the only thing it would do is create 105 new backbenchers with an overinflated sense of self). Repeat after me: Kenney is only doing this to invent a future grievance, while he lies about those two bills. It would be great if someone could be bothered to call him out on it.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Federal Government 2, Provinces 0

Posted on by

It was not a surprise that the Ontario Court of Appeal told Doug Ford to go pound sand with regard to its objections to the federal carbon price, which is exactly what they did in a 4-1 decision, affirming the Saskatchewan decision that the price is not a tax but a regulatory charge, and that it’s not unconstitutional. Ford, predictably, vowed to take this to the Supreme Court of Canada, and given that they agreed to hear the Saskatchewan case, it’s likely these two will be heard together, where you can pretty much bet that the majority of the judges there will tell Moe, Ford, and the likes, to similarly go pound sand. As for the dissenting judge on the Ontario panel, well, he has a pretty interesting history of his legal philosophy, and was unusually appointed directly to the Court of Appeal from his being a law professor.

Meanwhile, here’s some analysis, with threads by Andrew Leach, plus Lindsay Tedds on the whole tax/regulatory charge difference.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1144686800348340226

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1144687790367674368

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/1144706969493749761

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/1144708330037874692

Meanwhile, the BC government’s lawyers were in Alberta court on Friday to argue for an injunction against the province’s blatantly unconstitutional “turn off the taps” legislation now that it’s been proclaimed, likening it to a loaded gun that they don’t want to go off accidentally. The hitch, of course, is the question of whether BC has standing to go to Alberta court over the case, so we’ll see what the judge decides there.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Solidifying the “new” Senate

Posted on by

Another day, another badly executed wrap-up article on the Senate, this time courtesy of the CBC, which again, has a badly misleading lede in which it claims that “Legislative changes that would have made it harder for a future prime minister to reverse Senate reforms have fallen through.” This is wrong – any changes to the Parliament of Canada Act that the government was contemplating would have had zero effect on the selection process for future senators. Why? Because that’s not governed by that Act, or indeed any piece of legislation – it’s part of the constitution, and clearly spelled out as a prerogative of the Governor-in-Council, meaning the prime minister and Cabinet will advise the Governor General as to who gets appointed. There is nothing that Trudeau could do to bind that advice legislatively – recall the Senate reform reference to the Supreme Court of Canada – that would require a constitutional amendment requiring seven provinces with fifty percent of the population to do.

What would changes to the Parliament of Canada Act regarding the Senate do? The actual proposals were to ensure that leaders of any parliamentary group in the Senate would get commensurate salary increases and resources to put them on par with the what is nominally the government and official opposition in the Senate, and the ISG has been pushing for this pretty hard, but they also were demanding to be part of consideration for vote bells, though I’m not sure why it would matter (particularly given that they have demonstrated time and again that they’re not reliable negotiating partners). But I also suspect that part of the reason why these changes didn’t get proposed was because there is some legal opinion that it would require some kind of buy-in from provinces to make this kind of change, so there was likely little time for the government to add this ball to all of the other ones they were juggling that late in the parliamentary calendar (despite the cries of the ISG). Of course, this hasn’t stopped the media from falsely framing these changes as affecting the selection process, as this has been cited by more than one reporter from more than one outlet, and it’s false.

The rest of the story is again more of the same voices opining on how great the “new” Senate is working, but we fortunately got a bit of pushback from Liberal Senator Lillian Dyck, who did point out that the lack of organisation among the Independents has held up bills and slowed down the process – and she’s right. But nobody wants to talk about that as they’re busy patting themselves on the back for “not being whipped.” There’s more to the Senate than that, and they need to get off this self-congratulation because things aren’t working as well as they like to claim.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The hand that feeds the Senate?

Posted on by

Over at The Canadian Press, Joan Bryden wrote a wrap-up piece about the near-defeat of a few government bills in the Senate during the final days of the parliamentary sitting, but some of the piece has been rankling me, in part because of how it frames the state of play. So if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to pick it apart just a little, because I think it’s important to understand these things.

The lede is very awkward “In the final hours of Justin Trudeau’s four-year experiment with a less-partisan Senate, Independent senators came within a whisker of biting the hand that feeds them.” It’s a nonsense sentence that doesn’t make any sense – Trudeau’s experiment with a “less-partisan Senate” isn’t over by any stretch of the imagination, and there were no final hours to it – saying that it was the final hours of the parliamentary sitting or even session (since the chances of a prorogation and Speech from the Throne before the writs are drawn up in September are infinitesimal), or even the 42ndParliament would make sense, but not as written. I’m also really bothered by the notion of the “biting the hand that feeds them.” By feeding them, is it supposed to imply the person who appointed them, because that’s not the same thing. Is it supposed to imply that their posts continue at the beneficence of Trudeau, and that he could be rid of them at any point? Because that’s clearly not the case in the slightest (particularly constitutionally), but the phrasing implies the latter instead of the former, which is why it’s weird and misleading in all kinds of ways.

The rest of the piece is the usually bit of sniping between the leader of the Independent Senators Group, the Conservative whip, and the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, wherein Harder and the ISG insist that everything is fine, this is exactly what the Senate should be, and the Conservatives cry that the Independent senators are just Liberals by another name. The wrench in here is that Senator André Pratt calls the Conservatives out for supporting a government bill that more Independents opposed because they didn’t really want to set up a precedent for the Senate voting down government bills because when they form power next, there could be a real problem for them (though one has to say that the bill in question, C-83, was of very dubious constitutionality as it had court rulings against it before it was even law). As we approach the election, we can expect more of this sniping going on, particularly once the Independents start trying to agitate for continued independent Senate appointments to be an election issue – which is essentially an endorsement for Trudeau – and it could start to get very uncomfortable for all involved really quickly.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A queen and her prime minister

Posted on by

It was Pride weekend in Toronto, and Justin Trudeau was in attendance once again this year, with several Cabinet ministers and his Toronto-area MPs. The only Conservative MP in attendance appears to have been Lisa Raitt, while Jagemeet Singh and Elizabeth May were also present.

But most importantly? This years RuPaul’s Drag Race runner-up from Toronto, the Queen of the North, Brooke Lynn Hytes was also in attendance, and got to meet her prime minister, as any good queen would.

https://twitter.com/AdamScotti/status/1142852635780927488

https://twitter.com/Bhytes1/status/1142870645673484294

Continue reading →

Roundup: Resurrecting sham “elections”

Posted on by

As part of his ongoing fit of pique against the federal government, Alberta premier Jason Kenney has decided to revive one spectacular bit of political bullshit theatre that some of us had hoped was now dead and buried – the sordid practice of Alberta’s “consultative elections” for senators. The whole notion is unconstitutional, and while the Supreme Court didn’t explicitly rule against the provinces setting up their own “elections” as part of the Senate reference, it was certainly implicitly in there, both in the notion that a consultative “election” creates an expectation of legitimacy, but the logic behind it was also completely blasted during the hearing, when Justice Thomas Cromwell asked if a consultative election is fine, why not a consultative auction? Not to mention that the entire election process in past elections has been little more than the electoral equivalent of a show trial – a sham that resembles electoral democracy but is simply designed to return only candidates from a certain party to then form an illegitimate demand that they be appointed. Kenney’s attempt to say that this gives them “accountability” is ludicrous on its face because they don’t face re-election, so there is no actual accountability that can be exercised. The whole farcical exercise has more in common with the sham elections held in communist countries than it does with the actual electoral practices in the rest of Canada, and the fact that Kenney is looking to resurrect this demented kabuki is just more of his campaign of snake oil and lies whose only point is to keep stoking the irrational anger of Albertans and hoping that it won’t blow up in his face. It inevitably will, however, and the whole country will pay the price for Kenney’s arrogance in believing he can manage the monster he created.

In other news of Kenney’s political bullshit theatre, his piece by Chris Turner dismantles the whole raison d’être of Kenney’s so-called “war room,” by pointing to the literal conspiracy theories that underpin the whole thing, and the mythology that Kenney is trying to spin around why capital has left Alberta’s energy sector. And it’s complete myth, but it gets repeated uncritically constantly, and it goes unchallenged by the media, and yet Kenney is creating this $30 million spin machine to further reinforce this mythology and conspiracy theorism, because again, it feeds the anger of his base, telling them that it’s not the fault of the world price of oil that their fortunes have changed, but rather that it’s the sinister forces of dark foreign money that is really behind it all. Without putting too fine of a point on it, this is the kind of thing that fuels the kinds of populist movements that breed fascists. But Kenney doesn’t care, because he thinks he can control it.

Meanwhile, Kenney has suddenly changed his story about the incident where he handed out earplugs during that debate in the Alberta legislature, and it’s gone from it being “light-hearted morale-boosting” to “one of my MLAs has tinnitus and was being shouted at,” which the video clearly didn’t show, and it’s just one more example of Kenney’s smile-and-lie show that he puts on for media interviews, and you can’t help but feel sorry for the interviewers because trying to disentangle his egregious lies is a Sisyphean task.

https://twitter.com/EmmaLGraney/status/1142194069902364680

Continue reading →

Roundup: Closing it all down for the summer (and the election)

Posted on by

The House of Commons rose yesterday, earlier than expected after news that Conservative MP Mark Warawa died of cancer. Business was truncated, all remaining bills passed swiftly, and a few tributes were made to Warawa before adjourning the House, ostensibly until September, but the writs would be drawn up for the election before then. There is a chance that Parliament will be called back in the summer to deal with the New NAFTA implementation bill, which was not passed, but apparently they’re waiting on the Americans before we go further.

Over on the Senate, side, a number of bills passed through swiftly, including the reforms to the Access to Information legislation, but the ones that caught the most attention were Bills C-48 and C-69, being the west coast oil tanker ban and the environmental assessment legislation. Immediately after those were passed, Alberta premier Jason Kenney thundered over Twitter about how he was going to challenge them in court – which you can expect the courts to tell him to go pound sand, just as they will with his challenge to the federal carbon price that will be imposed on his province come January. The Senate won’t be passing a number of private members’ bills, including some prominent ones like Rona Ambrose’s bill, but it was a bad bill anyway and deserved to die on the Order Paper. (The Liberals also promised to revive the bill in the next parliament, which…isn’t great, frankly, because it’s either unconstitutional in its original form, or largely symbolic in its amended form).

This means that all that’s left is a royal assent ceremony, which will happen this afternoon, and it’ll be the first time that they’re going to attempt a ceremony with the two chambers in separate buildings. It’s been suggested previously that the Usher of the Black Rod will take a limousine to West Block to knock on the Commons’ door to deliver the message that Her Excellency requests their presence in the Senate, at which point the Speaker and a token few MPs will head over – possibly in limos or little parliamentary busses – to the Senate for the ceremony. We’ll see how it all unfolds.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A real climate sham

Posted on by

Andrew Scheer unveiled his long-awaited environmental plan yesterday, citing that it was a “real plan” because it was longer than the other parties’…but that was about it. After he listed a bunch of lies about the current Liberal plan, Scheer kept saying that carbon pricing didn’t do anything, which is both factually incorrect (as proven by peer-reviewed work), but it also completely ignores that the current plan hasn’t had a chance to sufficiently bend the curve. By removing carbon pricing from the market and instead forcing companies who exceed their emissions to caps, it is actually even less of a market-based plan than the Liberals’ plan, and there are no specifics in how any of it would work. Promising technological solutions without price signals to spur their development is just like counting on magic to lower emissions. It’s also like Scheer’s complete lie that this plan won’t cost Canadians – it will cost them, but those costs will be passed onto them and hidden, whereas the carbon price is transparent so that people can make better choices. Scheer also claims that his plan would have the best chance of meeting the Paris targets – without actually having targets, or articulating how they would be achieved. It’s replete with a bunch of boutique tax credits that are inefficient, and is generally a bunch of language that does very little. How he claims this is a “real plan” is somewhat of a farce.

And then there’s the global component, where Scheer says that Canada should be lowering global emissions by exporting “cleaner” Canadian energy like LNG – err, except that would grow Canadian emissions, and yet he wants us to get credits for those exports. And he says that China should use Canadian carbon capture and storage technology – except it’s hugely expensive, and is not really feasible unless you’re pricing carbon (not to mention that if the storage is not done properly, it can simply all be for naught). And Canada still has some of the highest per-capita emissions, which Scheer conveniently ignores in his arguments.

Amidst this, Scheer’s apologists are saying “it’s good that they’re admitting that climate change is real!” or “Look at how far the Conservatives have come since 2008!” Except that’s all spin. They can say they believe in climate change, but they also say that Canada’s contribution is so small that we shouldn’t do anything about it. Scheer and others tried to burnish themselves with the environmental reputations of previous conservative governments, except the old Conservative party is dead, and the current one is engaging in some egregious political necrophilia to cover for their own weakness. That those apologists could say these things with a straight face on television is astounding.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1141470545130729473

Continue reading →

QP: One last “PMQ”

Posted on by

It promised to be the last big show of the 42nd Parliament, with all of the leaders present for one last time. Andrew Scheer led off in French, worrying about the start date for the Trans Mountain expansion, studiously ignoring the Federal court of Appeal decision that revoked the permit. Justin Trudeau reminded him that Stephen Harper didn’t get any pipelines to new markets, while he ensured they got proper buy-in from Indigenous communities. Scheer switched to English to repeat his disingenuous lines, and Trudeau repeated that the only way to build energy projects was to work in partner with Indigenous people. Scheer got increasingly breathy as he accused the government of trying to phase out the energy sector, to which Trudeau replied that the Conservatives won’t take yes for an answer, and that they were succeeding in what the Alberta energy sector had asked for. Scheer shouted about all the things he would do to build pipelines and said the prime minister couldn’t get things done, and Trudeau calmly replied that the Conservatives still don’t understand why they failed the economy for ten years. Scheer rose one last time to assure Trudeau that a “real plan for the environment” would come at five o’clock, before he switched to some scattershot condemnation about the Liberals protecting corporate interests, and Trudeau listed off all the things that Scheer didn’t get about the environment. Jagmeet Singh was up next, and in French, he demanded the government spend on green projects instead of pipelines, and Trudeau took up a script to list off all of the measures they have taken to help the environment. Singh, in English, declared that the TMX would generate no profits — which is news to everyone — and he decried the government not protecting the environment. Trudeau picked up the English version of the script to list the measures that they have taken. Singh flailed around about measures for the environment, and Trudeau reiterated his previous response without a script, before he put it back to Singh that there were Indigenous communities supported the project. Singh switched to French to worry about the project some more, and Trudeau raised the fact that the pipeline was more responsible than moving oil by rail.

Continue reading →