It was Elizabeth May’s turn to go before Peter Mansbridge last night, and as with all other leaders, she too got the basics of government formation wrong – but unlike the others, May just got it wrong in a different way. She insisted that if Harper got a minority government, the opposition parties should be able to call the Governor General to insist that they get a chance to form government before Harper. Nope, that’s not how it works, because the incumbent remains the Prime Minister until he or she resigns. That’s because the position can never be vacant. Ever. Her Majesty must always have a government in place, and it’s the GG’s job to ensure that happens. So really, no matter the result on election night, the leader whose party wins the most seats isn’t invited to form government – the incumbent is still the government until they choose to resign, which may or may not involve testing the confidence of the Chamber first. May also revealed that she has the GG’s number and will make that call herself, as though he is obligated to take it. Remember of course that May has also previously written the Queen about issues, and treated form letter responses as vindication. It’s part of her particular problem of over-reading her mandate – she’s hugely conflated her role as an MP with that of being in government in the past, and it’s a problem with how she interacts with the system. It’s also part of her curious insistence that somehow, a handful of Green MPs sitting in opposition and not in a coalition cabinet would magically make a minority parliament a less fractious place. How, exactly? Did none of the proponents of more minority governments learn any lessons from the three minority parliaments prior to 2011? Apparently not, because the magical thinking prevails.
Tag Archives: Infrastructure
Roundup: The Conservatives’ anti-refugee inertia
With opinion galvanizing around the Syrian refugee crisis, there are calls for the government to do more – even if the opposition parties’ targets remain a little on the weak side in the overall picture. Cities and provinces – in particular Quebec – are pledging to do more, but they are bound by the pace that the federal government sets. And above all, that is the real problem with Canada’s response. Chris Alexander has been subtly blaming the UNHCR for their slow and onerous process while trying to cast his government in a positive light for trying to change that, except they’re the ones who’ve made the system far more onerous in the first place. I’ve covered the refugee file for a number of years, most especially when I was writing for Xtra, and a consistent theme emerged was that every time the Conservatives changed the rules, they were making it harder for refugees to make it into the country. In a particular bid to try to keep out refugee groups that they didn’t want to deal with – Mexicans and Roma are two that immediately come to mind – they continually tinkered with the rules, going so far as to create a “designated country of origin” list to make it easier to reject and deport those groups, no matter that a high volume of them had legitimate claims. They shortened processing times on arrival to prejudice the system against them, particularly when it’s difficult to get documentation, and denied them avenues of appeal. And overseas, they’ve understaffed embassies and missions in areas with high refugee populations and outsourced refugee determination to the UNHCR, which doesn’t have the resources and capacity to do that. Here in Canada, they’ve shifted their focus to private sponsorship away from government sponsorship, and even when they try to assist private groups, they don’t give them the assistance that they really required, such as capacity building. And then there was the whole issue of cutting off healthcare for refugee claimants, which was also used as a means of disincentivising people from coming over. Add to this a focus on risk assessment and then prioritizing minority populations in places like Syria and Iraq, and suddenly it’s no wonder that they’re moving at a glacial pace when it comes to getting more refugees resettled in Canada. The lack of political will to tackle this refugee crisis has been long-standing and a long time in the making. There are plenty of things that they could do, as Joe Clark explained, such as putting people on the ground in the region, doing security checks there, relieving the UNCHR of all of the work of refugee status determination, and arranging transportation rather than offering them loans for it (because if there’s one thing that refugees need it’s to be nickel-and-dimed by the Canadian government). They have the capacity, but they’ve spent so long trying to choke off the flow of refugees that the law of inertia has taken hold, and they can’t turn the ship around. I don’t think enough people are calling them out on this fact.
Roundup: Barton vs Alexander
One of the great failings of our politics is the way that everything has devolved into talking points – and usually, they’re utterly moronic talking points that have little to do with the questions being posed to whichever MP is speaking, and sometimes those talking points are complete non sequiturs to the topic at hand. And it’s not just Conservative MPs who ape them either – the NDP are some of the worst at it, ever since the 2011 communications lockdown started, and there are fewer sights more painful than watching their young rookie MPs being sent into an interview armed only with two or three talking points and nothing more. And then there’s Chris Alexander – Oxford educated, former diplomat, and the most petulant communicator that the 41st parliament produced. With the topic of Syrian refugees top of mind, Alexander went on Power & Politics last night, and tried to spin, deflect, and otherwise obfuscate the topic at hand. And praise be, Rosemary Barton was having none of it, repeatedly calling Alexander on his evasions and when he tried to blame the show for not tackling the subject before then, well, she let him have it. And thank the gods, because it’s about time we see the hosts get tough with MPs rather than pussyfoot around them in the hopes that tough questions don’t offend them into boycotts. (BuzzFeed offers a recap here). I’ve argued before that Barton not only deserves to be the permanent host of the show once the election is over, but given her performance last night, I think she deserves a gods damned Canadian Screen Award.
P&P covered Syrian refugees 32x since 2011. Incl 5 debates & 1×1 intv w/ @calxandr. Many more intv requests denied. http://t.co/m1GPD9WGhd
— Leslie Stojsic (@LeslieStojsic) September 2, 2015
The full segment:
I’ll also say that the whole affair reminded me of this (faux) Jeremy Paxman interview from The Thick of It, and it fills me with hope that Barton is becoming Canada’s Paxman.
Roundup: The big infrastructure spend
It all being official that the Liberals are willing to run a small deficit in order to finance infrastructure spending in the hopes of boosting a stalled economy have turned the election into one with some real differences between parties, which incidentally seems to have also energised Harper’s performance at his own stops. The issue for the Liberals would seem to be now not only having to sell the idea of deficits – which they are attempting to do with the line of being the only party that’s being honest about the current state of the nation’s finances – but ensuring that the infrastructure spending they’re doing is going to be actually useful in the longer term. Sure, there is a big infrastructure deficit in this country for which this new funding is but a drop in the bucket, but if he wants to ensure that this is the kind of kick that will grow the economy, it should be in things that will have bigger impact – port infrastructure to get goods to market, ensuring that there is the kind of broadband access in places that need it to grow their business and attract investment, and so on. It shouldn’t be about short-term stimulus, lest the Liberals repeat the mistakes of the Conservatives in 2009-10. Not unsurprisingly, Toronto mayor John Tory and the president of the Canadian Federation of Municipalities both liked the announcement as it means more money for cities. Former PCO Clerk Kevin Lynch talks about the need for fiscal policy rather than just relying on monetary policy to try to grow the economy – and includes infrastructure spending as an example. Kevin Milligan examines the case for infrastructure spending at this time, and finds there is a plausible case for it.
Roundup: Constitutionally untenable declarations
One of those tangential sub-plots in the whole ClusterDuff affair reared its head in the testimony of Ben Perrin yesterday, which is the issue of the test of residency for a senator. Given that the issue had blown up during Perrin’s time in PMO, thanks to Stephen Harper’s panic appointments in 2008 where he named senators to provinces where those individuals did not currently reside but rather had originated from, they found themselves in trouble when a certain Senator Duffy was found to have been treating his long-time Ottawa home as a secondary residence that he could claim per diems with while his summer cottage in PEI was being treated as a primary residence, never mind that he rarely spent any time there, none of it in the winter. Perrin’s advice was to come up with several indicators, but that ultimately it would be up to the Senate to come up with those indicators for themselves. Stephen Harper disagreed, and said that as far as he was concerned, they were resident if they owned $4000 in real property in said province – a position Perrin found to be constitutionally and legally untenable. But the constitutionally untenable has become Harper’s stock in trade, particularly where the Senate is concerned, first with his unconstitutional reform bills, to his present policy of not making any appointments in defiance of his constitutional obligation to do so. (And no, Thomas Mulcair is no better with is own promise not to appoint any senators either). And we also know from the Duffy documents that Harper blocked an attempt by the Senate to strike a committee that would deal with the residency issue once and for all – because Harper wanted to protect those improper appointments he made. The rather sad thing is that if hadn’t made those appointments in haste, he could have ensured that they had their ducks in a row before they got appointed, to show that they had enough proof of residency to pass a smell test. He didn’t, constitution be damned – or at least be subverted on bogus “plain reading” arguments that don’t hold water the moment you think critically about them. And yet We The Media aren’t driving this point home to the voters, that the constitution does and should matter. (Aaron Wherry delves more into the residency issue here).
Roundup: Stampede politics
It’s Stampede time in Calgary, and all of the party leaders are headed out there to play the part. Curiously, all of them will be there at the same time rather than spacing their presence out a bit as they have in previous years, and both Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau are putting in appearances in the Stampede Parade. Speaking as a former Calgarian, Stampede is a peculiar kind of phenomenon – long-time Calgarians will try to flee the city for it because it’s so much insanity (much of it alcohol-induced. It’s no secret that post-Stampede you see a spike in sexually transmitted infections, and a baby boom nine months later). But because Calgary is one of those cities with a large in-migration population, it becomes this exercise in conformity, where people will shell out hundreds of dollars in order to get the right wardrobe to participate, and subject themselves to awful country music in order to fit in and show that they’re really Calgarians. It makes for a very interesting political contrast as well – last weekend you most of the party leaders in the Toronto Pride Parade, which is all about diversity and difference (and congratulations to the Conservatives for finally opting to participate this year); this weekend they’re at Stampede, which is about looking the part in order to fit in. Both are seen as necessary stops in order to show themselves off to those different political bases. That each leader gets judged on how well they can dress for Stampede is also an interesting exercise (and a far less forgiving one than the suits that they normally wear). It shows how strange the Canadian political landscape can be, and the summer barbecue circuit – particularly during an election campaign.
Roundup: The Reform Act makes everything worse
On a vote of 38 to 14, with four abstentions, Michael Chong’s Reform Act passed third reading in the Senate last night, despite a couple of late attempts at amendments that were designed to essentially kill the bill. MPs who bullied senators into passing the bill – Chong included, never mind that he wants them to kill a different bill he doesn’t agree with – were jubilant over social media, but they all seem oblivious to the fact that they’ve just undermined their own stated goals in passing this bill. I’ve written on the subject numerous times – here, here, here, here and here, and long story short is that it won’t actually remove the power of the leader to veto nominations because it doesn’t stop the leader from just giving his chief-of-staff that power, and instead of giving caucus the power to remove a problematic leader, it insulates that leader by creating a high enough bar that any MP who grows enough of a spine to go public will face a media that demands the names of the twenty percent of other rebellious MPs, and any opposition will crumble. Oh, and our current broken system of unaccountable presidentialised leadership selections are now being codified into legislation because we really want to make sure that we really break our system of Westminster democracy well and truly while patting ourselves on the back for “modest reforms.” It’s not reform, and I can guarantee that we will live to regret it, like we have every other “reform” attempt that has inevitably made our system worse off. Congratulations, 41st Parliament – you’ve done an ace job in making things worse. Slow clap.
QP: Like a greatest hits package
All of the leaders were present today, for probably the last time in the 41st parliament. And hey, government computer systems were under a cyberattack as it went off, so that was exciting. Thomas Mulcair led off, asking about General Lawson’s comments on “biological wiring” as it relates to sexual harassment in the military and what the government would do about it. Harper denounced the comments and noted that Lawson apologised immediately and that they would implement the recommendations of Justice Deschamps. Mulcair asked again in English, demanding a personal commitment by the PM to changing the culture of the military, but Harper repeated his response but cautioned Mulcair against slurs against all members of the military. Mulcair then changed topics to the RCMP deletion of those gun registry records and wondered about the PMO role in encouraging them to do so. Harper insisted that they acted under the law. Mulcair then brought up the Senate audit, and wondered about the residency of Senator Carolyn Stewart Olsen (who was not named in said audit). Harper, a bit testy, brought up the NDP satellite offices. Mulcair turned to another senator’s mileage claims, to which Harper said that they were inventing things and reminded them of the satellite offices again. Justin Trudeau was up next, returning to the issue of sexual harassment in the military, and wondered why the PM would not immediately dismiss the Chief of Defence Staff for comments that he himself condemned. Harper returned to his previous response, following a dig at Trudeau. A second round in French got the same response again, and for his final question, Trudeau touted his plans for a revised Supreme Court appointment process, and rhetorically asked why the PM doesn’t commit to appointing bilingual judges. Harper insisted that the institution was already bilingual, and not every member was required to be.
https://twitter.com/davidakin/status/611239298713698305
QP: Gross mischaracterizations and repetition
The second-last Monday QP of the 41st parliament, and it looked like it was going to be a bit of a sleeper. Thomas Mulcair showed up on a Monday, which was unusual, and possibly because he’ll be at Jacques Parizeau’s funeral tomorrow. None of the other leaders were here either, however, so it was going to be pretty weak sauce. Mulcair led off by grossly mischaracterizing the AG revelation on Senate Speaker’s spending, saying that Speaker Housakos has a “spending problem.” Paul Calandra said that the Speaker had answer the question for itself. Mulcair demanded to know if the PMO was orchestrating the response to the recent Senate scandal, to which Calandra responded that the Senate invited the AG in and would answer for themselves. Mulcair asked again in French, got the same answer also in French, and then he moved onto the G7 communique on climate change. Colin Carrie got to respond to this one, reading that the G7 came up with a strong and unanimous statement on climate change. Mulcair demanded action on climate change,and got another talking point about our “clear” record. David McGuinty led off for the Liberals, asking in French about contradictory statements the government has made about infrastructure spending at the G7. Denis Lebel insisted that the facts were wrong, and that they were making record investments. Adam Vaughan blasted the government for their false assurances at the Federation of Canadian Munipalities meeting, to which Lebel insisted that the former Liberal government didn’t live up to promises. Vaughan hammered on the government and their messaging, to which Joe Oliver got up to insist that money would be available when projects needed them.
It's a good thing that Mulcair is protected by privilege, because that characterization of Speaker Housakos was likely libelous. #QP
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) June 8, 2015
Roundup: Getting ahead of the story
As we inch toward the full release of the Auditor General’s report, more material is leaking out, while some senators are trying to get ahead of the story and highlighting what they see as problems with the audits. Conservative Senator Janis Johnson, for example, was flagged for a couple of flights, and she even provided ample documentation to show that it was parliamentary business, however the auditor made a value judgement – he “felt” the trips were personal, never mind that the personal aspects to said trips (also perfectly allowed and not billed to the Senate) were booked after the work trips had been arranged, and yes, documentation supports it. That the auditor insisted that the problem was that she didn’t use the Outlook calendar is an exceedingly bizarre criteria for finding the expenses questionable, despite other supporting documentation. Given the legitimate dispute over the audit report that he has expressed publicly, and that of Speaker Housakos, it’s no doubt that we’ll start to get a better taste of what could be a very problematic audit from the auditor’s side. Meanwhile, we’re starting to get more boneheaded commentary from the pundit class again, wondering why the government just can’t stop funding the Senate – as though it wasn’t a completely separate house of Parliament with institutional independence and not answer able to the government. Why not cut off funding to the Supreme Court as well? Oh, right – we have a thing called the Constitution. Other hosts are stoking this hysteria over what they are trying to claim is a conflict of interest between the Senate leadership and the establishment of the arbitration process with Justice Ian Binnie, but when you look at the facts, it’s just not supportable, as Senator Cowan amply pointed out on The House over the weekend. When it’s pointed out that Duffy and company didn’t get this kind of a process, Cowan said point blank that he didn’t agree with that process at the time and that two wrongs don’t make a right. Elsewhere, Thomas Mulcair vowed he would consult with the premiers to try to abolish the Senate if he should be elected, to which I say good luck with that. You think the Atlantic provinces will give up that representation, or that Quebec wouldn’t have a laundry list of other demands? Keep dreaming.
https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/607713842966073344