Tag Archives: G20

Roundup: Lighting a fire under the minister

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It’s been a year since the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Jordan, which set upper limits for trial delays, and so The Canadian Press had a couple of good pieces on it today, both looking at the fallout in terms of what needs to change in the justice system, as well as looking at the numbers of cases that have applied or been granted a stay of proceedings owing to delays that have been deemed unreasonable. I will note that while justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould says that the decision “lit a fire” under her, she’s been agonizingly slow in responding.

I write a lot for the Law Times, and I talk to a lot of players in the legal community, and there has been a sense of mystification as to what all of the delays are. The fact that it took her a year to start the process of reforming how judges are appointed was baffling, and that slowed down the process for making said appointments – especially as some of the committees advising on appointments still aren’t up and running, six months later. While more appointments are finally being made, it’s taken a long time and it’ll take even longer for those judges to be fully prepared and worked into the system.

There is the legislation that has been coming out in drips and drabs. For example, they made a big deal about a bill that would finally equalise the age of consent for gay sex, but then abandoned said bill to roll those provisions into a larger bill on doing away with “zombie laws” that have been struck down but remain on the books. How much time and energy was spent on that abandoned bill? We keep hearing about the big promised justice reforms promise – looking at the Criminal Code, sentencing, bail, the works, but we’re nearly two years in, and there’s still no sign of them. Yes, they’re big files, but this is nearly the halfway point in the mandate, and big, complicated files like that are going to take time to get through Parliament – especially in the more independent Senate where they will face pushback from law-and-order Conservatives who are looking to hold onto the “reforms” of the previous government.

And then there are the whispers about Wilson-Raybould’s office. There is a constant churn of staff, but not before great delays when it comes to actually filling positions, like the judicial affairs advisor – a pretty key role that took months and months to fill. And if these kinds of necessary staffing decisions are taking forever, what does that mean for the managerial skills of the minister? There are whispers in the legal community, and they’re not too flattering. So when Wilson-Raybould says that Jordan lit a fire under her, one shudders to think about the pace of progress had it not.

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Roundup: Rural nomination angst

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In yesterday’s Hill Times, a few would-be Liberal candidates in rural ridings are talking about how they want nominations to start sooner than later, citing the challenges of rural life when it comes to door-knocking – owing to the difficulties of travel in the winter, the best time for them to meet constituents is in the summer and autumn. Hence, they want the nomination process to be over before summer 2018, so that they have a long lead-time to do the campaigning in large rural ridings – something that is less of an issue in urban ridings.

As far as suggestions go, it’s not a terrible one. I think that parties should have a fairly long lead-up with a nominated candidate, particularly in unheld ridings, so that they can do the work of grassroots engagement and get people involved in the process. This also being said, in a riding that has an incumbent, you also don’t want to run the nomination too early because an open nomination is also a way to hold that incumbent to account by their grassroots members, so if you hold the nomination too early, you don’t get as much of their tenure to judge them by. I know that some Liberals are agitating to have their nominations protected, while Conservatives have a threshold system in place to protect their nominations (which I am less keen on because it can short-circuit accountability), but I also know that the Liberals haven’t made up their minds how they’re dealing with nominations for 2019, which boggles the mind. Of course, this is part of the fallout of their wholesale party constitution rewrite (which, I will remind you, centralised even more power in the leader’s office at the expense of the grassroots), so we’ll see how they decide to deal with this, and how much lip-service they pay to the grassroots while still keeping their newly acquired centralized power. Suffice to say, nominations remain the most important part of our democratic process, so watching a party flail about it is never a good thing.

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Roundup: The looming retirement of the Chief Justice

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Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin announced yesterday that she would be retiring on December 15th, a few months in advance of her mandatory retirement date, in order to give the government enough time to find a suitable replacement. Why that date is significant is because it will be at the end of the Court’s fall sitting, letting her use the next six months that she is able to clear off the files from her desk and work on any outstanding judgments rather than depart mid-sitting and the organizational chaos that would follow.

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The next steps are now an important consideration. The government will not only have to name a new Chief Justice, but a new judge from Western Canada (and likely BC given that’s where McLachlin was appointed from). And in order to keep gender balance on the court it will likely have to be a woman, and in accordance with this government’s push for diversity, it will likely be a person of colour, if not someone Indigenous (and let us not forget that said person must also be fluently bilingual, which is another self-imposed criteria that this government has made for itself). This may be easier to find in BC than it was in Atlantic Canada, mind you. And for Chief Justice? My money is on Justice Richard Wagner, whom I know many close the court have already tapped as being the successor if they had their druthers.

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Of course, we’ll see if this government can get an appointment process back up and running within the six months. Experience has shown us that they seem to have difficulty with that, especially as there are still some sixty or so federally appointed judicial vacancies still remaining around the country, and a few of the Judicial Advisory Committees charged with finding candidates for said vacancies still not fully appointed either, which is a problem. Of course, they may be able to largely reconstitute the committee that oversaw the nomination of Justice Rowe, with Kim Campbell again in charge of the process, but I guess we’ll see how long that takes.

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For more reaction, here’s Emmett Macfarlane on As It Happens and in the Ottawa Citizen, and Carissima Mathen on Power Play.

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QP: Carbon taxes and foreign takeovers

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On a sweltering day in Ottawa, things carried on as usual in the House of Commons. Andrew Scheer led off, railing about carbon taxes killing the manufacturing sector, never mind that in his Ontario example, it was a provincial carbon price. Justin Trudeau hit back with jibes that it was good to see that most of the aconservaties believed in the Paris Accords and that carbon pricing was good for the market. Scheer groused that they would meet the targets without a carbon price, before moving onto the Norsat sale and lack of a comprehensive security screening. Trudeau reminded him that they took the advice of national security agencies. Scheer took a second kick, needling that Trudeau admired Chinese dictatorship too much to care about national security, and Trudeau lashed back that partisan jibes like that were unworthy of this place. Denis Lebel was up next, demanding a non-partisan process to appoint parliamentary watchdogs, and Trudeau noted their new appointments and rattled off some of the diversity of the new reports. Lebel tried again in English, and got the same answer. Thomas Mulcair was up next, asking if the Der Spiegel article was true that the government was backing away from climate goals at the G20. Trudeau insisted that they have been climate leaders and pointed to examples. Mulcair pressed, and Trudeau was unequivocal that he did not say what was in the article. Mulcair then turned to the issue of court cases involving First Nations children and dialled up the sanctimony to 11, and Trudeau noted the memorandum of understanding he signed with the AFN this morning about moving forward on steps. Mulcair demanded that the NDP bill on UNDRIP be adopted, but Trudeau insisted they were moving forward in consultation (never mind that said bill is almost certainly of dubious constitutionality).

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Roundup: Party fault lines

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With social conservatives trying to stake out turf, along with Kellie Leitch’s “Canadian values” testing, Michael Chong’s Red Toryism and Maxime Bernier’s Freedom!-crying Libertarian-ish-ism, the question has been posed as to whether the Conservative leadership is opening up old schisms in the party. And the answer I would surmise is that probably, and it’s almost inevitable that it would. The party is a fairly big tent with some big divisions that got patched over by Stephen Harper in his quest to take down the Liberal party, and at the time, he was able to get enough disaffected factions together to do just that and keep them together while they achieved power, because power is its own reward. But now that they’re no longer in power, with Harper no longer at the helm, and the conditions that predicated his leadership have moved on, it’s not surprising in the slightest that these factions are now getting restive and trying to find different leadership camps to rally around. It’s not uncommon, and I have to wonder if there is anyone with enough personality and charisma to keep the factions together, given that there seems to be little appetite for another Harper (not that one could really be found among the current crop of leadership candidates). One could add that it should be a warning to Jason Kenney that the same conditions that allowed for the Conservative unification federally may not exist in Alberta given the history and challenges of the separate parties there. I would also note that given the diversity of views to be found in that big tent, this is likely not a discussion that we would be having if Canada were to adopt a Proportional Representation voting system. There, each faction would be more likely to splinter off into its own party in the hopes of forming an external coalition with more leverage for trying to achieve their goals rather than the internal coalitions that exist in big-tent brokerage parties currently, which moderate the excesses of the various factions in the hopes of achieving government. It’s one of those reasons why we need to be sceptical of those poll analyses that would show how the election might have gone under another system, given that it’s not likely that our parties would continue to exist in the same way under a different system.

Meanwhile, in case it was keeping you up at night, Kevin O’Leary continues to say he’s waiting to see who else is running before he announces if he’ll make a leadership bid of his own.

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Roundup: Ignoring accountability, again

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Samara Canada, the country’s civic engagement organisation, put out a report over the weekend about electoral reform and what the various kinds of systems looked like. And it’s a decent enough report on its own, but what struck me was the fact that yet again, we get a report on electoral systems that ignores the biggest single point of discussion with any electoral system – accountability. While I tweeted this concern, the report author responded thusly:

While the fact that two systems have a correlation between MPs and ridings, it doesn’t spell out the fact there are accountability mechanism, particularly around both nomination processes and in being able to punish an MP at the ballot box if necessary. Why this needs to be spelled out is because with Proportional Representation systems that have lists, the ability for voters to determine who is on that list is a big issue. Is it a slate? Then do you not vote for the slate for one or two bad names on that list? Is it an open list? How does that complicate the ballot process, particularly if you want to punish a bad MP? There is mention paid in the report to parties who want to put more women and visible minorities on their lists as a selling feature, but nothing about where those lists become problems when it comes to holding that party to account, or those MPs when it comes to re-election.

Similarly, one party government does not tell us anything about how we hold a government to account at election time, nor does it spell out the problems with holding governments to account when they are part of a coalition. The ability to punish a government at the ballot box is a feature of our current system, and this needs to be stated as such. Conversely, the fact that in many countries that use PR systems and have coalition governments, central parties can stay in power for decades by simply shuffling their coalition partners around periodically. This is not holding them to account, nor is it actually healthy for democracy if parties stay in power in perpetuity. They actually need to be out of power from time to time in order to refresh themselves, but this is not mentioned anywhere.

While I appreciate that the author had limited space to work in, accountability is a concept that needs to be stated explicitly and discussed in open terms rather than in vague mentions like he did here. As with the whole electoral reform committee process we’ve seen, so much attention is paid to fetishizing the ballot without actually ever mentioning accountability that it’s only having half the discussion. Accountability matters. Being able to punish at the ballot box is just as important – if not more so – than electing someone. Being able to throw the bums out is one of the biggest single features of our current system, and yet that gets mentioned almost nowhere over the course of these discussions. It’s ridiculous and wrong, and we need to talk about it openly and frankly if we’re to have a true and proper discussion about what’s at stake.

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Roundup: Return of the airplane pressers

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After very little media time at the G20 in Turkey, Prime Minister Trudeau held a press conference on the flight to the Philippines yesterday, taking every question, and generally being far more open than Harper ever was on an international trip. There were a number of messages – first, that while the plan remains to withdraw the CF-18s from combat in Iraq and Syria, we would be stepping up training on the ground beyond the 69 special operations trainers there currently, and the what that training might look like is still being determined. Second, he spoke about his forthcoming bilateral meeting with President Obama while at the APEC summit, and that there was a lot of climate discussion at the G20 that will continue right through to the Paris summit, with Canada looking to get on board with more robust discussions and pushing more recalcitrant countries to step up. Finally, when it comes to Syrian refugees, yet more assurances that security is not being compromised as part of the push to get the promised 25,000 here before the end of the year. As for that APEC summit, Stéphane Dion and Chrystia Freeland were there in advance of Trudeau talking trade and in particular the TPP, since that looks to be one of the dominant themes on the agenda there.

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Roundup: Refugee hysteria

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The question of Syrian refugees in the aftermath of the Paris attacks has reached ridiculous proportions, as a number of American state governors declared that they were going to let ISIS win and terrorize them, by insisting that they didn’t want any Syrian refugees in their states. Because it’s the refugees that have been responsible for mass shootings in the States, right? Closer to home, Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall decided he was going to be the one to try and crank up the concern trolling over refugees to eleven, saying that he wants the whole thing suspended because he thinks that security screening is being compromised in order to reach the “quota” and “deadline,” despite there being zero evidence to that effect, and the fact that in order for people to be registered refugees under the UNHCR, most of these kinds of background checks will already have been completed. Unfortunately, Wall is also cynically pandering to populist sentiment that has been stoked by the hysteria of what happened in Paris, in defiance of logic and fact. What is fortunate, however, is that pretty much every other province has disavowed this kind of nonsense and is ready to push ahead, with Quebec and Ontario ready to accept some 16,000 refugees, Rachel Notley being okay with the accelerated timeline, Greg Selinger saying that Manitobans are excited to welcome newcomers, and Christy Clark recognizing the urgency to bring refugees over. So it looks like Wall is the outlier on this one, but that’s not exactly a surprise, considering that critical thinking hasn’t been his strongest suit on a number of other files *cough*Senate reform*cough*.

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Roundup: Concern trolling on bombers and refugees

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In the wake of Friday’s attacks in Paris, and Trudeau’s trip to the G20 in Turkey, we seem to have been inundated with a whole lot of calls to carry on the bombing mission in Iraq and Syria, coupled with all manner of concern trolling from Conservative MPs and others to slow down on the refugee pledges for “security screening,” never mind that there have yet to be any verifiable links between the attackers and any actual refugees from the region. (Most of what we’ve heard has been about homegrown attackers, along with a couple of passports of dubious authenticity). Michael Petrou makes the case that keeping up the fight against ISIS with the bombing mission is evidence-based policy (plus has a video of Syrian refugees in France here), while Terry Milewski gives a look at what the mission has accomplished to date, and notes Canada’s participation in some recent victories in the region. Wesley Wark says that the aftermath of Paris shows that Canada needs to up its intelligence game. After sparring with Jason Kenney over the Twitter Machine, Paul Wells lays the smackdown on Conservatives doing backseat ministering without actually looking critically at their own policy – which is still being enacted in the region – while they second-guess what the voters decided pretty clearly on October 19th. (And it’s an amazing piece that you really must read).

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Roundup: A hedge on refugees?

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It looks like the new Liberal government may be walking back a little on their first election promise, around the 25,000 Syrian refugees. Initially the promise was 25,000 government-assisted refugees with additional privately sponsored refugees on top of that figure. Yesterday, it sounded like the 25,000 will be a combination of the two based on comments by the minister, but Trudeau seemed to contradict that in his press conference while the minister’s spokesperson was hedging somewhere around the fact that there may be some privately sponsored among the 25,000 this year with more to come in 2016, but I’m not sure that the privately sponsored numbers will be that significant in the short timeframe that it would be too much of a difference for that 25,000 target. Meanwhile, it sounds like plans are being developed to fly a thousand Syrian refugees per day out of Aman, Jordan, while temporary lodgings are currently being worked out. No doubt we’ll hear more details in the coming days.

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