Tag Archives: Gilles Duceppe

Roundup: Threats from the Senate

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There are a couple of issues arising out of the Senate right now, both of which deserve a bit of exploration. The first is over the selection of the party’s interim leader – the party president has indicated that the Commons caucus would make the selection (per the provisions in Michael Chong’s lamentable Reform Act). Senator David Wells says that no, the party constitution says that an interim leader would be chosen by the Parliamentary caucus, which would include senators. Why is this important? Because right now, the party has no East Coast MPs, nor any from the GTA or Montreal, whereas they have Senators from those regions who can provide some of that input. (In fact, it’s yet another reason for why the Senate is valuable – for years, it used to mean that the only Albertans in the Liberal caucus were from the Senate, until of course Trudeau’s Great Expulsion). And as Wells points out, this is an issue in the party’s own constitution, which makes the party president’s position that much more untenable. The other issue is certain Conservative senators trying to flex their muscles and saying that they’re under no obligation to pass Liberal legislation, much as in 2006, Liberal senators were giving the Conservatives a hard time with some of their bills. This whole thing is problematic for a number of reasons. First of all, this is likely someone talking out of their ass (and I have my suspicions as to who it is). With Harper no longer leader, and no longer PM, any leverage that he had with the Senate has pretty much evaporated. Newer senators no longer have someone to feel beholden to, and there is no longer the emotional blackmail of “You want to support the PM, don’t you?” Those non-existent levers of power that the PMO was trying to exercise (per Nigel Wright’s complaints) no longer have anything to back them up when it comes to threat or reward. And then there’s the matter of 2006 that these oh-so-brave “senior senators” are referencing, particularly the Accountability Act. The problem was that it was a bad bill that had all kinds of problems and loopholes, but they didn’t get fixed on the Commons side? Why? Because the Liberals of that era were so cowed by their election loss that they left the fight up to the Senate rather than take the blowback themselves, while Pat Martin was the Conservatives’ accomplice, giddily rubber-stamping the whole affair in order to punish the Liberals some more. So the Liberals in the Senate did the battling for the needed amendments, most of which they actually got. I’m going to be optimistic and say that the legislation coming from this crop of Liberals is likely to be of higher calibre because they’re not opposed to listening to civil service advice for kneejerk reasons. On top of it all, there has to be enough shreds of self-awareness in the Conservative senate caucus to know that if they start playing games, they’ll damage themselves and the Chamber’s reputation as Trudeau tries to rehabilitate it, and everyone will lose as a result. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t take these threats too seriously.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/657348537873735682

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Roundup: Tolerating Ray Novak’s deception

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If there was one exchange on the campaign trail yesterday that speaks volumes for the way the current government is operating, particularly the lying about who knew about the cheque as opposed to Duffy himself repaying, it was between Hannah Thibedeau and Stephen Harper while in Hay River, and it goes thus: “You just mentioned in that answer a vast majority of staff believed that, but there were staff and very high profile staff that knew otherwise. For a few days, you have been evading that question about the deception done by many of your senior staff in the Duffy case including Mr. Ray Novak – he’s your current chief of staff, and he was told about Mr. Wright’s cheque in emails directly with Mr. Wright. So why have you tolerated Mr. Novak’s lying and even promoted him to current chief of staff who’s travelling with you right now?” Harper, predictably, rejected the premise of the question and insisted that only Wright and Duffy were responsible and they were being held accountable, which is clearly not the case. This was the party that rode into government on the white horse of accountability. It’s funny how that horse is nowhere to be seen these days.

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Roundup: At long last, the audit

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And after an agonizing period of leaks that did probably the maximum damage possible, the Auditor General’s report was finally released yesterday, and it was, well, honestly not that much of a bombshell or all that damning once you calm down from the breathless hysteria and cheap outrage over taxpayer’s money and start putting everything into context. Yes, there were some questionable expenses, and you’d pretty much find that in any organization (most especially elected ones). Sure, he made some comments about the fact that they sometimes charged for meals when there should have been one provided (but this is where things start to get nitpicky) or said that some were careless about cell phone roaming charges (which seems to be a pretty common irritant about any consumer judging from the number of news pieces about it). Senator Colin Kenny, one of the files the AG flagged for further investigation, refutes some of the claims (and this is one of the two that the AG noted he wanted further investigation on because of contradictory evidence). The five current and former Manitoba senators named in the audit refuted their claims to the CBC. The AG did make a big deal about the institution being self-policing without seeming to have any awareness about parliamentary supremacy or self-governance being an important consideration for the practice of Responsible Government – you know, something that is kind of a Big Deal. The Citizen has a Q&A with Ferguson, who says an audit of the House of Commons would likely be prohibitively expensive (but I still say that every MP who sanctimoniously denounces the Senate over this should have his or her own books subjected to the same audit). Liberal Senator Hervieux-Payette did manage to get through a motion to have the Senate rules committee investigate the leaks of the report, seeing as it undermined the presumption of innocence and having a fair defence for those senators named. I would be extremely curious to know who was leaking, so that it would give one a clue about what their endgame was.

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