Tag Archives: Immigration

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

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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.

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Roundup: TMX is go

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It wasn’t unexpected that the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion was given the green-light by the government, with assurances that there would be construction this season – but there are still details to come. More accommodations were made as part of their Indigenous consultations, and it sounds like there may be more details to be ironed out, particularly around one First Nation who is concerned about the pipeline traversing their aquifer. More than anything, however, Trudeau made it clear that any profits from this pipeline – which could be $500 million per year – would go toward clean energy projects. (It also needs to be said that Trudeau came and faced the media for this announcement – something Harper never did with Northern Gateway).

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None of this was good enough for Trudeau’s critics, however – Andrew Scheer made up a bunch of nonsense about how the government failed to get the project moving until now, Jagmeet Singh flailed about how this was contrary to climate goals, and Elizabeth May was in high dudgeon about how this made a mockery of all other climate actions (never mind the fact that oil would flow by rail without this pipeline, and this actually reduces emissions overall – crazy, but true). John Horgan promised to keep fighting the pipeline, while Jason Kenney promised to keep fighting every other environmental measure.

And then the hot takes – Aaron Wherry enumerates why this pipeline is the compromise that it is. Chantal Hébert doesn’t think that this approval will be the political problem that some think it will be. Jody Wilson-Raybould isn’t a fan of the approval, for what it’s worth. Don Braid waxes about how this entrenches the view of Alberta as a “resource bucket to pay for national dreams.” (Erm, isn’t that exactly what Kenney and company keep selling?)

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Roundup: A line-by-line review

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If the tweets of Cabinet ministers are to be believed, Cabinet is currently seized with doing a line-by-line review of the amended Bill C-69 that was sent back to them from the Senate earlier this week. By all accounts, the current form of the bill is a complete dog’s breakfast that includes a number if contradictory clauses, because the Chamber of Sober Second Thought didn’t bother to actually do the work of reconciling them because members of the environment and energy committee were keen to placate Jason Kenney and to credulously believe the oil and gas industry lobbyists who insisted that the bill’s original form, while not perfect, would somehow doom all future projects in this country. And you would think that actually getting a bill in reasonable condition back to the Commons would be kind of important to a body like the Senate, for whom this is their raison d’être as a legislative chamber who preoccupies itself with reviewing legislation, but no, they decided instead to sent it back to the Commons as is rather than to take the blame that Kenney and company will lay on them as he continues to lie about the bill and consider it a rallying cry for the implacable anger of Albertans that he sold a bunch of snake oil to during the last provincial election.

In the midst of this, you have senators like Conservative Senate Leader Larry Smith claiming that the Senate’s attempt to stop bills C-69 and C-48 are supposedly the last bastion of the provinces who are “under attack” by prime minister Justin Trudeau, which is hokum of the highest order. C-48 doesn’t landlock Alberta’s resources because the chances of a pipeline to the northern BC coast are virtually nonexistent given the Federal Court of Appeal decision on Northern Gateway’s failure, and the propaganda campaign against Bill C-69 is the completely divorced from reality, but hey – angry narratives to sustain. At the same time, Senator André Pratt is defending the Senate against accusations levelled from the likes of Andrew Coyne that they’re overreaching if they do kill C-48 (which they won’t), saying that they’re trying to do their job while being cognisant that they’re an appointed body. He’s not wrong, and it’s probably one of the better articulated pieces of late.

Meanwhile, the Conservative whip, Senator Don Plett, is denying that he’s stalling the UNDRIP bill, and he’s actually got procedure on his side for this one – the cancelled meeting would have been extraordinary, and there are reasons why the Senate doesn’t hold special committee meetings while the Chamber is sitting – which they are sitting later and later because they have so much business to get through because the Independent Senators can’t get their act together, and lo, we have the current Order Paper crisis that they are working their way through (though apparently not so urgently that they didn’t sit yesterday). Unfortunately, the media does love private members’ bills, and is focusing a lot of attention on them, no matter that most of them are actually bad bills that should probably die on the Order Paper (but people don’t like to hear that).

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Roundup: Amendments and dysfunction

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There is some movement on legislation in the Senate, with the amended fisheries bill heading back to the Commons, as is Bill C-69 on environmental assessments. This bill was passed on division (meaning no standing vote) and will let the government reject all of those amendments made at committee that were essentially written by oil and gas lobbyists, which nobody had the intestinal fortitude to want to actually debate, preferring the tactic championed by the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, to let someone else do the heavy lifting. That way the government can defeat the bulk of those amendments in the Commons on a whipped vote, and then Harder can say “the elected Chamber has spoken” while patting himself on the back for the amendments that did pass – likely only the ones the government itself proposed.

The bigger drama is being reserved for C-48, the tanker ban bill, as the whole Senate voted to overturn the committee report that recommended it not go forward, which was pretty much how I expected it to go. Given the torqued, partisan report that emerged, the talk about the committee being dysfunctional are ringing pretty true, but I’m not going to blame the Conservatives for that because the Independents aren’t stepping up. The likely next steps for this bill are for amendments to be debated at third reading, the bulk of which are likely to be defeated, and then the Conservatives will play procedural games with the debate so that Harder is forced to invoke time allocation on a final vote for it, because the Conservatives have set up that situation for him.

Meanwhile, there has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about the UNDRIP bill, particularly that the Senate didn’t vote to give the Aboriginal People’s committee permission to meet while the Chamber was sitting in order to discuss it – which isn’t actually a sinister plot. The Senate is set up so that the Chamber meets for only a few hours in the day and that committees don’t meet then, which also has major logistical considerations – they don’t have enough staff or interpreters to cover both, unlike the House of Commons. And to illustrate that, this thread by Chris Reed explains some of the procedural considerations of what happened. But also remember that in the midst of the Senate’s Order Paper crisis, nobody wants to take any responsibility and are content to blame the Conservatives for being “partisan.” They’re not the problem here.

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QP: Fiction about carbon taxes

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While the prime minster was on his way back to Ottawa (for a stopover before heading to London and then Normandy), Andrew Scheer was elsewhere, and Jagmeet Singh was the only major leader present. That left it up to Pierre Poilievre to lead off, and he spun a bunch of fiction about carbon prices impoverishing Canadians. Bill Morneau said that just because Poilievre says things, it doesn’t make it true, and he listed their Middle Class™ tax cuts and Canada Child Benefit as leaving Canadians better off. Poilievre whinged about the cancellation of boutique tax credits, and he raised the spectre of higher taxes because of the deficit — which is fiscally illiterate — and Morneau noted that they cancelled boutique tax credits because they only benefitted the wealthy. Poilievre again insisted there would be “massive tax increases,” and Morneau reiterated that the typical family of four was $2000 better off now than under the Conservatives. Gérard Deltell took over in French, and he worried about deficits,  and Morneau offered some pabulum on investing in Canadians. Deltell raised the canard that Morneau didn’t run deficits on Bay Street, and Morneau quoted the declining debt-to-GDP ratio. Jagmeet Singh was up next for the NDP, and in French, he worried about corporate tax rates, to which Morneau reminded him of the new tax brackets they put in for the wealthy. Singh tried again in English, and Morneau reminded him that the corporate rate is competitive with the US, and that they put in rules for transparency for offshore holdings as well as taxing the wealthy. Singh railed about the rich not paying their fair share, and Navdeep Bains listed off accomplishments under this government including a million new jobs. Singh tried again in French, and this time Jean-Yves Duclos listed the benefits of the government investing in the Middle Class™.

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QP: Claiming a piece of the report

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Shortly after the final report on the MMIW Inquiry was delivered, the prime minister got on a plane for Vancouver, leaving QP behind. Andrew Scheer led off, and raising the MMIW Inquiry report, wanted more action on human trafficking. Seamus O’Regan stood up and recited their thanks for the report and stated that they would work on a national action plan in response. Scheer the switched to French to lament attacks on the free press, per their Supply Day motion, and wanted the government to stop stacking the deck. Pablo Rodriguez stated that the Conservatives devoted a full day toward attacking journalists, and that the government would support them. Scheer turned to English to whinge about Unifor being on the advisory panel, and Rodriguez stated that they needed to hear from employers and employees in the sector. Alain Rayes took over to ask again in French, and Rodriguez repeated response, and then they went a second round of other same. Jagmeet Singh was up next for the NDP, and he returned to the MMIW Inquiry report, and tried to make it about him by asking the prime minister to join him in responding to it in a list of areas. O’Regan reiterated his previous response with an added list of steps they have already started taking, and when Singh asked again in French, O’Regan read the French version of his script. Singh then turned to a demand that the government adopt his climate change plan, and Jonathan Wilkinson read that the NDP’s plan simply adopted most of what the government said doing already. Singh tried again in English, deploying the “New Deal” terminology, and got the same response from Wilkinson.

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Roundup: Mild consequences for an outburst

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It took several days, and the announcement happened fairly late on a Saturday night, but Andrew Scheer decided to strip Michael Cooper of his committee duty – but not deputy critic portfolio – after his committee outburst last week, when he lashed out at a Muslim witness who suggested that conservative commentary was in part responsible for radicalizing some white supremacists, including the shooter of the Quebec City mosque. Cooper’s outburst, you will recall, was to attack the witness and quote from the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto, not only naming him (as the New Zealand government has been reluctant to do) and reading part of that manifesto into the record, so that it will forever be part of the archives of the Parliament of Canada. Scheer said that he was satisfied with Cooper’s apology (which was tepid at best), and that he considered the matter closed now that he removed Cooper from the committee. Funnily enough, Cooper described it as “agreeing” with Scheer that he shouldn’t sit on that committee, which doesn’t sound like it was that punitive (and I’m not sure that removing someone from duties is really that punitive. Putting him on permanent Friday House duty would be more punitive than giving Cooper less work to do).

The witness at the receiving end of Cooper’s outburst, Faisal Khan Suri, says Scheer’s response is not good enough, and says that Cooper should be booted from the caucus. And to that end, Scheer made his big point about showing people the door if they don’t believe in equality (and Cooper reading from a white supremacist manifesto would seem to be a line that was crossed), but well, the matter is “closed.” Not that the Liberals will let them forget it, but this is politics these days.

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Roundup: Incoming amendments

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There are a tonne of amendments coming out in committees in the Senate, and there are likely going to be some fairly major developments and debates on these in the coming days – particularly once the House of Commons starts debating (and ultimately rejecting) a number of them. One of the more unexpected ones for me were the fairly major amendments to the solitary confinement bill. I was fully expecting the committee to recommend the bill not proceed because the courts had already found the bill unconstitutional and the committee was on the road to deeming it unsalvageable. Apparently, they’re going to make amendments instead, so we’ll see where this goes, because they have at least two court decisions on their side already.

The legal and constitutional affairs committee has also amended the Criminal Code revamp bill to ensure that there are tougher sentences for those who perpetrate domestic violence against Indigenous women. The problem? Well, most of those perpetrators are Indigenous men, and there is already a problem with over-incarceration, so this is going to be a tough needle to thread (but we’ll see how they attempt to do so.

Meanwhile, it looks like that major revamp of C-69 – the environmental assessment bill – was left intact at report stage on a vote on division, which means that they didn’t hold a standing vote, but were simply acknowledging that the vote was not unanimous. It’s a bit…suspect that they chose to go this route, considering how many of these amendments essentially gut the bill (and were indeed written by oil and gas company lobbyists, which totally isn’t problematic at all). But what is ultimately happening here is that these senators – and Senator Peter Harder in particular – are going to send this to the House of Commons so that they can reject them, and then send it back to the Senate where they will ultimately pass it after some minor theatrics, because of the will of the elected house, and so on. It’s not exactly the bravest route, and for the opposition in the Senate, it forces Trudeau to wear the decision more directly. There may yet be senators who will try to move amendments or delete some at third reading, but given Harder’s stance, I think the strong impetus will be for them to get the Commons to make the defeats so as to protect their own backsides from the wrath of Jason Kenney and others.

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Roundup: A few straw men and some rhetoric about immigration

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Andrew Scheer gave another one of his “economic vision” speeches yesterday, this time on the subject of immigration policy. And while it was all “yay economic immigrants,” there were still a few questionable pronouncements throughout. It should be pointed out that off the top, he made a big deal about how they don’t want racists or xenophobes in the party (in apparently contradiction to the succour they gave avowed racists when they thought they could use them to paint the Liberals as the “real” intolerant party), and invoked his belief that we’re all God’s children so nobody is inferior regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation, and if they didn’t like that, the door was that way. So there’s that.

As for the policies, they were not only deficient when it comes to detail, but there was some of his usual problems of straw man arguments and hollow promises. For example, he repeated his usual argument that privately sponsored refugees do better than government-sponsored ones, but nobody is disputing that, and nobody is arguing against private sponsorship, but there is a place for government sponsorship which has to do with the most vulnerable who need more timely relocation and who may not have private sponsorship lined up. And yet, it’s part of his dichotomy about private groups being better than government. He also vowed to stop irregular border crossings, and good luck with that, because it’s always going to happen, and unless he can also stop Donald Trump from threatening immigrants and refugees in his own country, it’s not going to stem the flow coming into Canada irregularly – it’ll just push them to more dangerous crossings. He also didn’t stop the usual rhetoric that pits immigrants against asylum seekers that this kind of vow just exacerbates, so that’s not exactly turning over a new leaf. He also promised that economic migrants would get their credentials recognised in Canada faster, but good luck with that because credentials recognition is a provincial responsibility, and the federal government has precious few levers there, and successive federal governments have tried to deal with this situation in the past and not had much success, ensuring that his promise is empty. But what was perhaps most frustrating was his talk about intake levels – and while he took a dig at Maxime Bernier for calling on them to be reduced, he also said that the level should change every year based on “Canada’s best interests,” which is a giant loophole for that same kind of talk about reducing levels for bogus reasons.

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Meanwhile, the IRB says they need more funding if they’re going to tackle the asylum claimant backlog (which again, they inherited from the Conservative government) rather than just stabilize growth, which is what they’re projecting currently – but the real kicker here is that they’re still relying on faxes and paper copies rather than emails or electronic files, because they can’t share information effectively with CBSA, which should boggle the mind. And this problem was identified a decade ago (as was pointed out by Liberal MP Alexandra Mendès at Public Accounts), and it’s still a problem. I’ve talked to immigration and refugee lawyers who say that it’s a huge frustration for them that until recently, they couldn’t even schedule hearings by email. The IRB say they’re seized with the issue, but cripes, this should be embarrassing.

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Roundup: Mark Norman and the culture of leaks

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As the Conservatives try to keep the Mark Norman affair in the news – currently demanding committee hearings with a laundry list of witnesses, as though that had any chance of happening this close to an election when Parliament is seized with trying to get as many bills through the process as they can – there are a couple of new bits of information that I have a hard time fitting into the established factual matrix. The one that the CBC published yesterday was that it was revealed that Norman was authorized by the Harper Cabinet to communicate with Davie Shipyard – because they were using Norman to doing an end-run around the then-Chief of Defence Staff, who was opposed to the lease and refit of the supply ship. I’m not sure entirely how this would be the piece of information to exonerate him, given that he’s alleged to have leaked the news of the pause on the process to a lobbyist and a reporter as a way of pressuring the government to restarting it (which they did in short order). You also have to wonder why Peter MacKay would have sat on this bit of information for all of these months only to pull it out now rather than defend Norman in public with it. None of it makes any actual sense, but that’s where we are.

In light of the case, the National Post has a piece about the use of leaks in Ottawa, and the currency around them – how governments use them to manipulate journalists, how bureaucrats use them to even scores, and very occasionally they’re used to hold people to account. The question the piece asks is why, in a city of leaks, Norman was being made an example of, but I’m not sure it’s a question we’ll get an answer to anytime soon. While it’s a good overview, I keep going back to The Thick of It, and the discussion around leaks during the Goolding Inquiry, when Malcolm Tucker described leaks as essential to release the pressure going on in government, lest things get dark if they didn’t. And I do think there’s an element of that, but given the exercise we just went through during the Double-Hyphen Affair, and the competing leaks and denials, I find myself wondering if We The Media need to exercise a bit more self-reflection in our use of them, rather than simply allowing ourselves to be manipulated because we think it’ll be good for our careers. (Or maybe I’m just being naïve).

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