Tag Archives: Immigration

Roundup: Cullen pens a hot mess

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NDP MP Nathan Cullen penned an op-ed for National Newswatch over the weekend, and it’s a total hot mess. Hot. Mess. Where to begin, where to begin? Let’s start with the opening paragraph:

One of the recurring conversations I’ve had over the years, with folks of all political leanings, is the condition of our democracy and how our voting system doesn’t reflect their voices at the national level.

Demonstrably false, since what we vote for are who to fill individual seats. People who are elected to those seats are the reflection of the wishes of that riding. Ergo, our voting system actually is reflective of voices at the national level. The entire second paragraph is a gong show:

It’s not a new charge that the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system too often produces false majorities. Our current voting system is broken. Too many Canadians simply feel their vote does not count. Something is deeply wrong if our very voting system encourages people to tune out of our democratic process.

Nope, nope, nope, and nope. There is no such thing as a “false majority” because the popular vote is a logical fallacy. You can’t extend 338 separate and simultaneous elections, mash them together and come up with a figure when you don’t have the same number of parties running in all ridings, nor does it reflect the fact that we elect individual seats, not parties. The voting system is not broken – it accurately reflects that we elect individual seats in individual ridings. Canadians feel their vote doesn’t count because of sore loserism, and apparently votes only count when the person you voted for wins, which is childish and wrong. Our voting system does not encourage people to tune out of our democratic process – our appalling lack of civic literacy does. From there, Cullen goes on to defend his idea of a “proportional” Commons committee to consult on electoral reform, except it’s a) not proportional, b) it’s designed to play up his desire for proportional representation (if the committee can be proportional…) and c) it’s designed to game the process, while he professes new ways of doing things. From there, Cullen meanders into a defence of the NDP as “progressive opposition,” which sounds more defensive by the day as the Liberals continue to outflank the party on the left, and finally, the piece moves into a defence of Thomas Mulcair as party leader, with Cullen professing support – you know, to look like he’s not angling to replace him should Mulcair happen to fall well short of expectations at the upcoming leadership review vote. After all, the federal NDP have a culture of it being unseemly to not be in complete and total lockstep at all times when the cameras are on. So there you have it – a complete hot mess. What is that old journalistic expression? Get me rewrite.

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Roundup: De-Canadianizing the Crown

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A decision from the Quebec Superior Court came down yesterday which will have grave constitutional implications for Canada, yet few people actually know or understand it. The case challenged the royal succession law that the previous government passed as part of the series of reforms passed in all of the realms that share Queen Elizabeth II as their respective monarch, and by most reckonings, the Canadian law was a complete sham, simply assenting to UK legislation, in essence subordinating the Canadian Crown to a subset of the UK crown, despite the fact that they became separate entities after the Statute of Westminster in 1931. The Quebec Superior Court, however, sided with the Department of Justice, that the monarch was the same per the preamble of the constitution as opposed to a separate legal entity, and essentially reducing Canada back to a subordinate British colony, all because the Harper government didn’t want to go through the necessary steps of doing a proper constitutional amendment to change the Office of the Queen to match the aims of reform. So long, Queen of Canada. We hardly knew you.

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Roundup: Cauliflower concerns

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The NDP put out a press release yesterday, which was essentially an object lesson in precisely what not to do when trying to make hay out of a political issue. The issue – rising food prices, and in particular, the rising cost of fruits and vegetables, and the lament that cauliflower is now a “luxury item.” Err, except that it’s not. And worse, that its “inexplicable” rise in price is entirely explicable – there’s a drought in California, and then there was a frost, which reduced the supply, and the increased demand lately (because it’s a trendy food right now) means that, thanks to the basic laws of supply and demand, the price spiked for a few weeks. And lo, it’s come back down again. And let us not forget that fresh fruits and vegetables in the winter is actually a luxury that our parents pretty much never had. They attempted to use the release to highlight inequality – Mulcair put out a release a couple of days previous, lamenting that Trudeau didn’t bring up inequality during his speech at Davos – but most of the claims in the cauliflower release were spurious. Transportation costs are not increasing – the crashing price of oil means that the cost of fuel is coming down by quite a lot. And the lament that the December rate of inflation was 1.6 percent? Um, target inflation is two percent, so unless they have another target in mind, that might be a policy they want to put out there. Rising food costs also have a lot to do with the lower dollar, and if memory serves, the NDP were lamenting that the dollar was too high (no doubt because they felt it was depressing the manufacturing sector, never mind that there are deeper structural issues than just the dollar alone), and that’s the thing about a low dollar – that it reduces your purchasing power, particularly if the fresh fruits and vegetables that don’t grow in this country in the winter have to be imported. To cap it off, the release offers no actual suggestions for what they’d like to see – only a vague statement that the upcoming budget is an opportunity to do something about inequality. So what, pray tell, is up for offer? Socialist wealth redistribution? The government is already raising taxes on the wealthiest one percent and offering more transfers to poorer families. So in totality, one has to ask if there as any adult supervision in putting out this hot mess of a press release, because the evidence before us makes that assertion unlikely in the extreme.

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Roundup: I Lost My Talk

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I Lost My Talk performanceIt’s been a while since I’ve done any arts reporting, but this is an exception. Last night I had the good fortune to attend the world premiere of I Lost My Talk, the new original composition commissioned by the family of former Prime Minister Joe Clark as a gift for his 75th birthday. The composition is based on the poem of the same name by Rita Joe, considered the “poet laureate of the Mi’kmaq” people, and it deals with a people losing their language and subsequently culture thanks to the legacy of residential schools. The evening was marked by a talk on Art and Reconciliation, led by Dr. Marie Wilson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, followed by the performance of the work itself. Presented along with other works about the endurance of the spirit – Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9 in E-flat Major, Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op.35, and John Williams’ theme from Schindler’s List, I Lost My Talk was the final performance of the evening. It was presented along with a video projection of a dance performance, also created to accompany the work. While one may not be sure how to turn a very tight poem of a few lines into an eighteen minute musical piece that is done without lyrics – lines of the poem recited intermittently through the piece – it was done perfectly. The composition itself was like an epic score to the poem, that was cinematic in scope and feel, the film and the choreography therein were wonderfully realized, and visually arresting. In total, it’s a powerful new work of Canadian composition that takes on the themes of reconciliation, bringing elements of the Indigenous conversation to more European art forms, and creates something powerful of them together. It was stated in the talk beforehand that reconciliation is not an Indigenous problem – it’s a Canadian one, where all of our society needs to participate. This work is part of that conversation, and reconciliation. One can think of no greater gift to a former Prime Minister like Joe Clark than the one that his family commissioned for him with I Lost My Talk. That the National Arts Centre is carrying on and extending the work with more First Nations artists creates a broader dialogue for the work, and the ongoing project or reconciliation.

Joe Clark – Art & Reconciliation Panel

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Roundup: Fledgling government delays

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Delays seem to be the word of the day for the fledgling government – delays in getting the refugees here (but that’s happening), delays in getting committees up and running (thanks in no small part to NDP and Bloc wrangling) – though they did finally name the assisted dying committee members today, and it looks like there are now delays in getting the new Independent appointments committee for naming new senators up and running. This means that those promised five new “independent” senators won’t likely be chosen before Parliament comes back, nor will the new government “representative” be chosen from one of those five as intended. That could start being a problem for the government as they start looking to outline their agenda and figure out what they’re going to start sending over to the Senate in terms of legislation. Mind you, it’s not too late for the government to do the right thing and appoint an existing senator to the post (because it makes absolutely no sense to put someone with no Senate experience into the role – it really doesn’t), and then figure out how to keep the relationship as arm’s length as possible while still letting parliament function as it should, with government and opposition sides that help keep debate and accountability going. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, can We The Media please stop this whole “The Senate has traditionally been a partisan dumping ground” line? It’s a gross exaggeration of the truth, and it neglects the fact that a lot of eminently qualified people who weren’t just party hacks were appointed. Yes, some of them chose to behave a bit unfortunately once appointed because they thought they had do (particularly true of the way that Harper’s poor appointment process corrupted a generation of senators), but on the whole? We had some pretty great appointments on both sides for a lot of years. Stephen Harper and his PMO upsetting the balance should not be held up as the norm of the chamber’s history any more than the small number of senators with questionable expenses should be treated as a reflection on the vast majority who didn’t. But by all means, keep repeating the received wisdom (and in some cases mendacious gossip) about the Chamber and its denizens. It’s really helping us live up to our role of educating the public as to what goes on in Parliament.

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Roundup: Important praise for the status quo

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The electoral reform conversation has been going around, and proportional representation fans frequently take to my Twitter feed to harass me about the subject, and we usually end at the impasse where they refuse to deal with our system as it exists in order to comprehend its logic. Regardless, there are few voices out in the mainstream in favour of the status quo option, but I was pleased to see that the Ottawa Citizen’s editorial board wrote a defence of the status quo. While some of it needed a bit more work (particularly in how they went about describing how the current system can “skew” results – it really doesn’t if you read those results properly and don’t import the logical fallacies of popular vote figures), but the nub of their argument is the most important – that our current system is particularly valuable in that it lets the electorate throw the bums out on a regular basis. It’s often said that in Canada, we don’t elect governments – we defeat them. And every few years, we get tired of who is in power, and we punish them and elect someone new who will clean up the mess left behind (and really, most of those parties need the defeats to let them clean house, re-energise, and think about where they went wrong. Sometimes, it takes them a couple of elections to do just that). What the editorial didn’t address very specifically is that in many PR countries, there really isn’t this ability to throw the bums out. Instead, they tend to be dominated by a central party who remains in power for decades, while they simply shuffle up their coalition partners when they need something. This was certainly the case in Germany, and while we don’t know what a PR-landscape in Canada would look like, it is a distinct possibility as there would be more incentive for small and fringe parties who exist to start agitating for their own power and influence within a coalition (as that would be the likeliest way to form future governments in what looks to be a continued sense of minority parliaments). As more small parties grow, the larger ones will likely fracture as there will be less incentive for the interests that they contain would stick around when they could gain outsized influence as a smaller party vying for that coalition power. Add to that, if we adopt a PR system that employs party lists, that makes it even harder for problem MPs to be tossed aside, as their fortunes are in the hands of the party itself, not the electorate. While emotional arguments about perceived fairness and “wasted” votes tends to rule the day, accountability should be a feature that requires greater consideration. Most other systems can’t provide it the way ours can, and that remains one of the reasons why I remain with team status quo on our electoral system.

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Roundup: Political drinking

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The admission by new Liberal MP Seamus O’Regan that he’s seeking treatment for an “alcohol-free lifestyle” is one that has brought plaudits and expressions of support from across the political spectrum. This is, after all, the age where people are being more open about issues like addiction and mental health, in order to shake the stigma that still surrounds it. But as Laura Payton writes in Maclean’s, this does present a problem with the way that Ottawa works currently, where much of the socialising here revolves around cocktails. Social functions put on by lobby and industry groups are in that 5-7 hour, when MPs come out of votes or committee meetings and head to them for drinks, hors d’oeuvres and schmoozing. It’s pretty much the only bonding experiences that MPs have left, given that the shared experiences of dining together three nights a week before late sitting debates happened were killed off in the early nineties in an attempt to make the institution more “family friendly.” But really, what this misses is the fact that it’s a far less booze-intensive place than it used to be, and I’m not talking about the post-Confederation days when there used to be a pub in the basement of the original Centre Block. No, up until the early nineties, there was far more access to alcohol around the Parliamentary precinct, where there used to be beer machines everywhere (one of the last was in the Press Gallery’s Hot Room), where there used to be the Press Club where reporters and sometimes politicians would drink together at the end of the day, and when martini lunches were a Thing. And those late night debates were often lubricated by drinks with dinner, during an age where you couldn’t order by the glass in the Parliamentary Restaurant, but rather had to buy the whole bottle (which they would put your name on and keep behind the bar for you). So really, if anything, it’s probably the easiest it’s ever been for people who are abstaining to be around the environment. On the other hand, there has been a direct loss in the collegiality between MPs since the booze largely stopped flowing. Make of it what you will, but the relationship between politics and alcohol is an interesting and fairly interconnected one, which makes a story like O’Regan’s a particularly interesting one to consider in the broader context.

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Roundup: A new member of the Canadian Family

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Zunera Ishaq, the woman who challenged the niqab ban at citizenship ceremonies, took her oath yesterday with her face veiled, and the sky did not fall. And while Muslim immigrants question their faith in Canada, Ishaq is now free to cast her ballot to exercise her rights as a Canadian citizen.

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Roundup: The problem with paper candidates

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Yesterday, the quixotic Jean-François Party released a rare bilingual statement to decry the use of “paper candidates,” citing a case of a Green candidate from BC who had never visited the riding he or she is contesting in Quebec. If there was to be a cautionary tale around the use of paper candidates, it should have been with both the NDP in the 2011 federal election, and more recently in the Alberta provincial election. In both cases, paper candidates accidentally got elected in popular “waves” where it was clear that the voters of Quebec and Alberta were motivated to vote for the party for their particular reasons (affection for Layton in 2011, anger with the Progressive Conservatives in Alberta this year). In both cases, some less than stellar MPs/MLAs were accidentally elected – one of them, incidentally, joined the Jean-François Party. While Jean-François Party co-founder (and now party president and candidate) Jean-François Larose was one of those NDP MPs who was part of the sweep, then-fellow NDP MP Manon Perreault was an example of how a paper candidate turns out to be trouble. Over the course of the 41st parliament, Perreault was charged and convicted of criminal mischief when she falsely accused an assistant of theft, and was also later investigated by the RCMP for problems with travel claims expenses (though I’m not sure we heard the outcome of said investigation). Nevertheless, she was turfed from the NDP caucus during her trial, and after the writ dropped, she joined the Jean-François Party. So really, that the party is now coming out against paper candidates when their very existence is dependent on the victory of such candidates is curious. The problem, however, is that the parties have an incentive to create these candidates, and that incentive is that running full slates, regardless if those candidates have ever been to those ridings or not, allows them to claim the maximum spending cap. Hence, as especially in Quebec in 2011, ridings which barely had NDP riding associations all accepted the “nominations” of those paper candidates which included Ruth Ellen Brosseau and the McGill Four, because the NDP wanted their spending cap. So what to do about it? It’s a sticky situation because it would seem the answer is to remove the incentive of the spending cap, but how does one enforce that the candidates have actually been to the riding, or are actually campaigning? Do we really want Elections Canada to become an intrusive body to not only poke their heads into the party nomination process and to check up on those candidates in the ridings? It’s hard to say. I do think that paper candidates are an affront to our democratic system, but without turning Elections Canada into Big Brother, I’m at a loss as to a workable solution.

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Roundup: A potential TPP deal

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While signs that the election could become an ugly question of identity politics continue to circulate, the impending announcement of some resolution or other in the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks could swing the election narrative yet again. While an announcement was supposed to have been made yesterday, it was held over until morning today, and we’ll see what becomes of it. Back in Canada, Harper has been talking up the deal, while Thomas Mulcair has taken to using the TPP as his new wedge. While trying to change the channel from the niqab issue, and his own rapidly softening poll numbers, Mulcair has become the born-again protectionist, declaring that Harper has no mandate to negotiate the deal (despite the fact that there is both precedent and it would still require parliamentary approval for enabling legislation), loudly decrying the impact on dairy farmers and auto parts manufacturers. The curious thing, however, is that two months ago he declared himself an enthusiastic supporter of the potential deal. The Liberals, meanwhile, are saying that they are supportive of free trade but won’t make any comments one way or the other about the TPP until they have more details – for which the NDP are castigating them for not taking a stand. Remember how at the Maclean’s debate, Mulcair was making a big deal about not wanting to take a stand on certain pipeline projects until he had a better environmental assessment? Suddenly waiting for more details is irresponsible. It gives me a headache.

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