Tag Archives: Honours

Roundup: The fount of Canadian honours

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A particular thread that I forgot to talk about last week was about the new GG, and one of the important things that the office does, which is to be the conduit by which the country’s honours system works. It’s a pretty important function of the office which has been encroached upon my MPs and in particular the Prime Minister in recent years, and yes, that is a problem.

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The Queen is the fount of honours in Canada, but politicians have been trying to get in on the game. Stephen Harper created a “teaching award,” and Trudeau has been talking about creating some kind of medal on his own as well, while there have been partisan spats about the Thérèse Casgraine award, or the John Diefenbaker award, and whichever party in power “forgetting” to award it, and on it goes. But part of leaving those kinds of decisions up to Rideau Hall is that it keeps the awards from taking on a partisan taint. With the Prime Minister’s Awards for Teaching Excellence, there was a lot of difficulty getting nominees under Harper because many people didn’t want to be associated with him, which is a fair point – the award should be politics-neutral, but associating it with the head of government as opposed to the Queen means not only that there’s a whiff of partisanship, but that the PM would use the awards as a bit of reflected glory. That’s generally something we try to avoid in our system, which is also why we ensure that it’s not the prime minister’s face on postage stamps or first in line in our embassies, but rather the Queen. It’s why the civil service swears their oaths to the Crown and not the government of the day as well – because we keep them above the partisanship of the day, and it keeps them from developing cults of personality (as much as is possible, but the age of celebrity politics is certainly challenging this notion). Suffice to say, we should be aware that the duties of honours rests with the Crown and with the GG for a reason, and we should frown on more attempts by politicians to horn in on them.

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Roundup: Dominion Day wrap-up

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For Dominion Day, none of the leaders said anything too egregious, even if the campaigning was in full swing.

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Roundup: Nolin’s passing a blow to the Senate

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The passing of Senate Speaker Pierre-Claude Nolin leaves the institution in a pretty vulnerable place. In light of the Duffy/Wallin/Brazeau affairs, Nolin was on a mission to bring some internal reform to the Chamber, both in terms of financial controls and the like, but also with ensuring that senators themselves were better educated as to their own roles. When Nolin was first named Speaker, he invited reporters to the Chamber for a Q&A, and before he took questions, he gave us a little talk, brandishing a copy of the Supreme Court reference decision on Senate reform, and made note of some key passages about the roles of a Senator. His message to his fellow senators was pretty frank – here are some things that you’re not doing, and we need to improve on that. Long-time readers of mine will know the root of some of these problems – not just a few poor appointments by the current Prime Minister, but the fact that appointments happened in large numbers. The Chamber works best absorbing one or two new members at a time, and they can find their feet and generally get on with feeling out their sense of institutional independence. When a fifth of the chamber is brought in all at once, they are more pliant and susceptible to control from the top, which is what happened. Nolin, always an independent thinker and someone not afraid to go against the current government, whose caucus he was a member of, wanted more of that from his fellow senators, and he probably would have done a lot to get them to a better place, institutionally speaking, if he’d had more time. Now, I’m not sure who will be able to take his place. The Speaker Pro Tempore (equivalent of the Deputy Speaker in the Commons) is not exactly an independent thinker, and is part of a cabal of players around the Senate Leader’s office, who in turn are supine to the PMO for a variety of reasons. That group is not going to continue Nolin’s work of trying to make the chamber a more independent place. We’ll have to see who the PM will ultimately choose, but Nolin has set a high bar that will be difficult to match. Elsewhere, here are some highlights of Nolin’s career. On Power Play, Mercedes Stephenson spoke to the man who appointed Nolin, Brian Mulroney (and a correction to Stephenson – Nolin was not elected to the Speaker position, as it’s a prime ministerial appointment. The praise for him was unanimous, however).

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Roundup: The Privacy Commissioner finally has his say

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Bill C-51 is now getting its review in the Senate, hearing from someone that the Commons didn’t – the Privacy Commissioner. What they got was an earful – there are some big problems with the information sharing provisions in the bill that would allow large amounts of personal information to be collected and shared between departments with little justification, and that his office would be swamped with work because of it. He’s also calling for oversight – like everyone else – and for the ability for different watchdogs to communicate with one another and coordinate their investigations in order to get a better picture of what these organisations are doing as they work together but their oversight remains siloed. Those other oversight bodies – SIRC and the CSE Commissioner – had much the same concerns when it comes to the ability to work together, and just keeping pace with the increasing scope and scale of operations. But will any of this have an effect? Maybe, as there are some Conservative senators who are concerned about these kinds of things and who may push back. But the government may bully through, and said senators may decide that this isn’t the hill they want to die on (which does happen), and they’ll let it go through. Suffice to say, the issue has not gone away.

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Roundup: Getting what we ask for

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From across the pond comes a very interesting op-ed for your consideration, about the kind of insult and scorn that we heap on the political class. In taking a look at the example of the deputy prime minister and Liberal Democrat leader David Clegg, currently one of the most hated men in UK politics, it looks at how everyday cynicism about politics has obscured the reasons why people get into it in the first place, and the kinds of impacts that they can have by doing the work that they do, no matter that they’re currently not popular with the people. The title of the piece also speaks volumes – “If you believe that politicians are useless, you’ll wind up with useless politicians.” It’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy that we are reaping in spades here in Canada as we get MPs who are increasingly disengaged from their own jobs, and who are becoming little more than ciphers for their party leaders because we, the electorate, aren’t demanding of them to do their jobs. Instead, we have bizarre expectations of them to not be politicians, and what we’re getting in return is, well, an abrogation of parliamentary oversight and boosterism for central leaders’ offices that are increasingly run by junior functionaries whose chief virtue is loyalty and not experience. We, the electorate, should start rethinking our priorities before things get too far down the dark path we’ve started down.

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Roundup: Stampede speeches

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As part of his visit to Calgary, Justin Trudeau spoke about getting his candidates nominated by the fall, so that they have a full year to start taking on the Conservatives as part of a team effort – something else he says that he wants to emphasise, rather than the Conservatives being all about the Prime Minister. That Trudeau has been making so much effort in Alberta is a contrast to Liberal leaders past, where Alberta has tended to be a flyover province rather than one where they would do much engagement under the advice that there was no way that they could win seats there anyway.

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Roundup: Momentum or not after the by-elections

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I hope that everyone has enjoyed their Dominion Day celebrations. The Liberals and Conservatives certainly have, after their by-election wins, the Liberals not only holding Scarborough–Agincourt and winning Trinity–Spadina, but they made impressive gains in Fort McMurray–Athabasca. Their voter share went up in pretty much every one of the ridings, which probably says something. In fact, the Conservatives took less than 50 percent of the vote in Fort McMurray, which is actually a fairly significant thing, and perhaps not all that surprising given how upset they are with the changes made to the Temporary Foreign Workers Programme, which has a significant impact on their local economies, not to mention the myriad of ways in which the Harper government has ballsed up the Keystone XL file, and made it harder for the Americans to come to an agreement on it. As well, the Green Party scored more votes in Macleod than the NDP, which must also give them some pause as they keep insisting that they are making headway into Alberta. Kady O’Malley notes the increase in Liberal voter share, and the stumbling NDP momentum leading into 2015. Aaron Wherry muses about the meaning of the victories for Trudeau, and whether it really is disaster for Mulcair and that it probably wasn’t the NDP’s Outremont, as many Liberals were trying to suggest. Of course, with the really low voter turnouts (getting the turnout nerd crowd to declare that we need mandatory voting now), Pundit’s Guide looks at that factor, and how these contests may play out in 2015 after redistribution, which could be important once Fort McMurray–Athabasca gets broken up.

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