Tag Archives: Jason Kenney

Roundup: More documents, more drips

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Another day, another drip in the ongoing Double-Hyphen Affair fallout. This time, it was a letter from Jody Wilson-Raybould to the chair of the Commons justice committee saying that she plans to forward new evidence to him in the form of emails and text messages – evidence which will be translated, checked over by committee members, and then made public once that’s done. But she also stipulated it was the period within the waiver, so I’m sure this will lead to another round of accusations that she’s not being allowed to tell “her full truth,” and people will believe it. Justin Trudeau, for his part, insisted yet again that he gave her the ability to give a full airing of the issue, reiterated later in a town hall meeting in Thunder Bay, where he also talked about needing to do a better job in how he manages “those conversations” with people with strong ideas in the future. Trudeau also appointed a new caucus-PMO liaison, which may go a ways to soothing caucus tensions, given that there is a lot of grumbling that part of the problem has been that he hasn’t been listening to them and their concerns – but it’s just another staffer and not him personally, inside the caucus room, so we’ll see if it helps.

In related news, the past secretary general of the OECD wrote a piece in the Financial Post to explain the whole language around “national economic interest” that so many people (many reporters included) are getting hung up on. The intent of the phrase – and he was at the OECD at the time – was to prevent countries from using the excuse that bribery was necessary to protect their export markets – and it wasn’t about protecting jobs. And hey, he’s even got context about the state of international trade in 1995 when this was an issue. Imagine if we’d had some better reporting about this history weeks ago! (Also, here’s a thread from a former OECD public sector integrity official who also gives context to the rules and why a DPA was not only a valid tool, but so is seeking outside counsel on the suitability of offering one).

Meanwhile, Chantal Hébert is coming to the conclusion that if Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott keep stoking the controversy without adding new facts that their target is the prime minister. Philippe Lagassé gives a more complete recounting of the issue of parliamentary privilege and what Wilson-Raybould and Philpott can avail themselves of in this situation, and the broader moral obligation of the fact that the privilege exists to hold government to account without fear of consequence, and if they feel that there were constitutional violations in the Affair, they have the choice to avail themselves of the opportunity to speak.

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Roundup: Traps and tantrums

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Budget Day was a giant production, for a variety of reasons yesterday, starting with the long-awaited showdown at the Commons justice committee. Given that the Liberal members had released that letter the night before, we knew that they were going to wrap it all up – without a report, I might add – and on their way in this morning, they handed to the media a copy of the motion they were planning to move to start a new study on hate crimes (because this increasingly seems like what the Liberals want to fight the next election on). Well, this caused the opposition to storm out because that motion was supposed to be in camera (and we all know how much they’ve respected the notion that committee business be handled in camera of late), and then they came back and had their meeting, and the committee (read: Liberal majority) decided to end the study of the Double-Hyphen Affair.

This set the Conservatives off, and they warned that they would ensure that the budget was going to be delayed, mark their words, and they set up all manner of procedural trickery in which to do so. Except that the Liberals outplayed them, tabled the document just before 4 PM, right before the vote was being called that was intending to delay the budget speech, and then Bill Morneau marched out to the Foyer to start talking to all of the assembled media outlets and get his message out, while the opposition stayed in the Chamber to carry on their procedural shenanigans, to the point where they essentially held themselves hostage. When Morneau was able to give his speech, well over an hour later, the Conservatives did ensure that he was drowned out with noise so that he couldn’t be heard and that no clips were able to be captured for news media, but given how Morneau was doing the media rounds and Scheer wasn’t – indeed, after the fact, when he and his caucus marched out to the Foyer, they denounced the budget as a distraction from the Double-Hyphen Affair, and had nary a substantive comment on it. (Jagmeet Singh, incidentally, had the usual NDP talking points about how it wasn’t enough, but couldn’t really respond when pressed about specifics or implementation of their vision). So, take it for what you will, I’m not sure how well the Conservatives came across in the end yesterday, especially as Scheer walked right into Trudeau’s very obvious trap that about the Conservatives not wanting to talk about the economy.

Speaking of the budget, it was far more stimulus-heavy than I would have expected, but then again, targeting both seniors and millennials, and going some distance in doing more for skills training, though their housing affordability measures were weak sauce and will likely do nothing about the supply side of the issue (especially as they keep the focus on buying a home rather than simply having affordable housing writ large).

With that in mind:

  • The deficit will grow this year before shrinking again, but there is no path back to balance in the immediate future. (Debt-to-GDP continues to decline).
  • Here are the highlights for five key demographics.
  • Here are 23 key measures in the budget.
  • There was the start of Pharmacare, beginning with the Canadian Drug Agency to facilitate bulk buying – next steps coming with the Hoskins report.
  • Municipalities got a chunk of new funding (with shots taken at premiers who are holding up infrastructure agreements).
  • There are more funds earmarked for Indigenous services, not only with water but also child and family services.
  • The budget also outlines a plan to start targeting stock options for taxation as another way of soaking the wealthy.
  • There is a plan to start taxing cannabis products by the potency of their THC.
  • The budget has money to help veterans transition to civilian life, but doesn’t seem to have anything to deal with the disability backlog.
  • There was a big commitment on rural broadband, but implementation details remain fuzzy.
  • Here are ten things that may slip under the radar.
  • Here’s a fact-check of Morneau’s speech (but the sources could have been better selected).

In budget hot takes, Chris Selley calls it the budget of a government that is no longer selling utopia – just buying votes, whereas Alan Freeman simply calls it a “do no harm” budget. John Geddes details the spending surprises in the document, while Andrew Coyne grouses about the how there seems to be more concern over the quantity of spending over the quality of it, given there is nothing in the budget about things like productivity. Heather Scoffield takes note of the Liberals’ attempt to frame the budget as a response to anxieties – economic or otherwise – that Canadians are feeling. Kevin Carmichael cautions that there budget leaves very little wiggle room for economic downturns, given how sluggish growth already is. Paul Wells notes the sprinkling of spending throughout the document, and the big bomb for political journalists in there. There are also worthwhile threads from economist Kevin Milligan here and here.

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Roundup: Trudeau begins his Big Reset

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Yesterday very much looked like the start of Justin Trudeau’s attempted Big Reset after the weeks of damage that the Double-Hyphen Affair has done to his reputation, starting with the appointment of Joyce Murray to Cabinet as the new Treasury Board president. Murray has been the parliamentary secretary for Treasury Board during the entire life of this government, has been pushing for a “greening of government” initiative within the department, and has a history of being someone who has gone offside with the rest of caucus on several occasions, thus her appointment could be seen as sending signals that Trudeau is open to disagreement. Following this was the announced retirement of Michael Wernick as Clerk of the Privy Council, citing that he couldn’t carry on in the role if he was no longer trusted by opposition parties on issues like his role around sounding the alarm regarding election interference. This doesn’t mean culpability for the Double-Hyphen Affair, but it is nevertheless part of the accountability process (and accountability, like democracy, is a process). Wernick will be replaced by Ian Shugart, who is currently the deputy minister of foreign affairs. (I’m also not convinced that this is the last of the staffing changes, and we may yet see more cleaning house in the PMO as a demonstration of doing something).

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Minutes later, during Question Period, Trudeau announced that former justice minister Anne McLellan was named as a special advisor to the prime minister to examine aspects of what happened in the Affair, particularly as it relates to the dual roles of Justice Minister and Attorney General, and whether it’s time to separate the two. (She also backed out of a fundraiser for the Liberal Judy Lamarsh fund – which aims to help more women run for office – after taking on the new role). And then, after QP, Trudeau gave a rousing speech about condemning hatred and calling out white supremacy, and made some pointed digs at Andrew Scheer and Maxime Bernier for their winking and nudging of white nationalists without condemning their messages. All of this is working to change the narrative – things are being put into place to fix what happened, the speech sets Trudeau on a different rhetorical tone than Scheer – and sets out a huge contrast between the two, especially after Scheer’s insipid speech that followed – so we’ll see if the Liberals can capitalise on this, but the fact that Trudeau explicitly said in the speech that this was exactly the time for politics could be the signal that he wants to fight an election on this issue.

But that may be harder to do, given that the Liberal members of the justice committee put out a letter saying that they weren’t inclined to call Jody Wilson-Raybould back to testify further, stating that they’d heard enough and wanted to get on with the report, and let the other processes carry on. I will say that at least they put out a letter with reasoning in it – they simply could have gone in camera today and emerged saying they were going to focus on writing the report, and saying nothing more. You know, like the Conservatives frequently did when they were in power. It doesn’t look good for the Liberals, and feeds the Conservative narrative that they’re hiding something, but they may simply be trying to move on as quickly as possible. (Of course, there is no smoking gun here, and it’s a matter of determining credibility and finding the line of where pressure is deemed “inappropriate,” so that makes for a harder sell to keep this going as long as possible).

The Senate, meanwhile, is debating the motion to start their own study on the issue, but we’ll see how that goes. I’m not sure that the Conservatives in the Senate will get the Independents onside, as their performance during the inaugural televised Senate Question Period had the ISG leader tweeting right away that it was all about partisan posturing, but stranger things have happened.

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Roundup: Procedural warfare denied (for now)

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If the Conservatives were hoping for procedural tactics to try and delay the budget speech on Tuesday, well, they were outplayed by the government, who used their ability to control the timing of those Estimates votes to Wednesday instead of Monday. If you recall, the plan was for the Conservatives to force line-by-line votes on the Supplementary Estimates, so that they could delay the budget speech, which I will also remind you is a tactically stupid move, and doesn’t prove any point. And yet here we are. This having been said, I fully expect them to try some kind of dilatory tactics including a privilege motion of some variety on Tuesday in order to move the budget speech, because they’ve tried it before in the past, but once again, we’re a long way from the times that people who were good at this kind of thing were in charge.

Meanwhile, you can expect the next two days to be replete with bleating admonishing that the Liberals are going to try to use a “shock and awe” budget to drown out the Double-Hyphen Affair, as though the past five weeks of breathless reporting will evaporate in a single night. Come on.

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Roundup: The Philpott extraction

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Because the government’s handling of the Double-Hyphen Affair (as I am now dubbing it) needed another bombshell, it came in the form of Treasury Board president Jane Philpott resigning, citing that she had lost confidence in the government over its handling of the Affair, and because she could no longer abide by the principles of Cabinet solidarity throughout it. It’s a rare resignation on principle, and one that causes no end of damage to Trudeau (and more importantly for his electoral chances, his brand). To lose of his most capable ministers is far harder to try and pretend is just a disagreement over semantics than he could with just Jody Wilson-Raybould off-side.

Trudeau, of course, shrugged it off at his event that evening, still showing no contrition, but he did deploy some lines about “encouraging disagreement and debate,” and that there was “important debate” about how the ministry conducts themselves, which could signal that more heads are about to roll. Maybe. But the Liberals continue to hurt themselves, as parliamentary secretary Steve MacKinnon went on the evening politics shows and made the tactical error of saying that SNC-Lavalin was entitled to a deferred prosecution agreement, because otherwise they were at a disadvantage to international competitors who were able to get such agreements form their own governments. The use of “entitled” set off everyone’s alarm bells, and one imagines he’ll be cringing about it for the next few weeks if this whole Affair carries on much longer.

For context, there have only been two – maybe three, depending – resignations on principle in recent history. Here’s a recap of Philpott’s time in politics.

In punditry, and of course there was no shortage of hot takes, Robert Hiltz wonders how much longer this whole Affair can keep going on, particularly if Trudeau keeps on his current path. Matt Gurney wishes the Liberals luck in spinning the departure (indeed, Trudeau basically shrugged it off), while Jen Gerson says that Trudeau’s handling of this Affair has turned it into an existential crisis for his government. Paul Wells takes it a step further, pairing this with the shenanigans going on in Queen’s Park with the firing of the deputy OPP commissioner, and wonders if the culture of respect for the rule of law is being eroded in this country, sacrificed at the altar of political expediency. (This after Wells also accused Trudeau of essentially being a phony, not governing in the way he presents himself to the world). Chantal Hébert ponders whether Trudeau is capable of raising his game after the past three weeks. Susan Delacourt points out that the way this has played out is so different from previous departures that it leaves Trudeau without any kind of guidebook, and makes the added observation that women are changing politics – but not in the way that Trudeau expected.

In advance of this all, however, Andrew Coyne penned another one of his missives about this Affair, decrying that the system hasn’t worked because it was up to one woman to keep the system intact. Philippe Lagassé pushes back against this particular depiction, and I’m Team Phil on this one.

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Roundup: No inquiry (for now)

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Another day, and a few more incremental pieces to add to the SNC-Lavalin/Wilson-Raybould Affair. There were reports that Justin Trudeau met with Jody Wilson-Raybould about the company two weeks after the Public Prosecution Service declined to offer them a deferred prosecution agreement (but we have no details). Wilson-Raybould attended caucus, and Trudeau apologized to her for not forcefully condemning the remarks about her, or the political cartoons that portrayed her bound and gagged. (We also heard that when it came to Wilson-Raybould addressing Cabinet on Tuesday, she apparently waited outside for two hours while some ministers argued that she be allowed to be heard. So that’s curious – and pretty unprecedented). Later in the day, the Liberals voted down the NDP’s Supply Day motion to call for an independent inquiry on the whole affair – the party line being that they don’t think it’s necessary at this time with the Ethics Commissioner and justice committee processes in place – but two Liberals did break ranks to vote for it. It should be no surprise that it was Nathaniel Erskine-Smith and Wayne Long (but could We The Media quit framing these kinds of things as “cracks in party unity” or nonsense like that? That’s why parties develop iron fists). After the vote, Wilson-Raybould stood up to put on the record that she abstained because the vote was about her personally, and she didn’t want to be in perceived conflict (which immediately created cries from the opposition that the PM should also have abstained), but she said she wanted to “speak her truth” as soon as she could. So that got more tongues wagging, naturally.

Emerging from this whole issue are the metaphysics of how the federal justice minister has a separate hat as Attorney General, and how the two roles can sometimes clash, particularly when it comes to political consideration. To that end, Colby Cosh delves further into this dichotomy and why that may be part of the cause of this whole affair to begin with. There are also a couple of worthwhile threads to read on it – one from Adam Goldenberg (one-time Liberal staffer and former law clerk to then-Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin) that argues that the Act requires a political consideration for deferred prosecutions in order for political accountability, while another litigator, Asher Honickman, disputes that – but agrees that the situation has a lot of nuance.

For context, here is an exploration of the role that Gerald Butts played in Trudeau’s PMO. Here’s the updated timeline of events as we know them so far. Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column explores how a Commons committee could run an investigation into an affair like the current one, but notes they’re not well suited to do so, and also details where it would break down into a partisan sideshow.

In punditry, Chantal Hébert makes the salient point that Wilson-Raybould is more in charge of the current situation than the prime minister is, which is an interesting dynamic.

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Roundup: We join you now from West Block…

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And so, the Big Move is complete, and the House of Commons has settled into its new home for the time being. Many MPs were still trying to find their way around the new building, going through wrong doors, coping with more cramped quarters, but they did make some history with the first instances of simultaneous interpretation of Cree in the Chamber thanks to Liberal MP Robert-Falcon Ouellette. The changes were all cosmetic as the partisan rhetoric on both sides largely remained the same dichotomy of pabulum from the Liberals, and lies from the Conservatives.

Just what kinds of falsehoods were being peddled? For one, the Conservatives leaned heavily on the notion that the Liberals had “raised taxes” on most Canadians, which isn’t actually true – it’s torque that comes from a Fraser Institute report that considers increased CPP contribution taxes (they’re not), and similarly calls the cancellation of non-refundable boutique tax credits in favour of the (non-taxable) Canada Child Benefit to be “tax increases.” Scheer lied that the government the government’s “own documents” show that they plan to raise the carbon tax to $300/tonne, which is also false, and as Alex Ballingall debunks here, it’s based on redacted documents that point out that higher prices will be needed to meet emissions targets, but don’t say that they are actually planning to do so. And Michelle Rempel also tried to make partisan hay of the fact that the government’s yearly quota of applications for family reunification immigration spaces was open for the space of eleven minutes before it maxed out and tried to equate this as somehow being the fault of asylum seekers who cross the border irregularly – another complete falsehood that Althia rage debunks here, and more to the point, Rempel is engaged in concern trolling – her own government did not prioritize this immigration stream and limited to 5000 cases per year while the Liberals increased it to 20,000. (They also tried to make the small number of spaces “fairer” by attempting to do it on a lottery system rather than one where high-priced immigration lawyers were able to get their files in faster, but that lottery system was abandoned this year). So yeah, the House was mired in bullshit today, but would the government refute most of this on the record? Not really – we got plenty of bland talking points instead that allowed most of these distortions to remain on the record. Slow clap there, Liberals.

Meanwhile, Chantal Hébert enumerates the government’s many self-inflicted wounds as the new sitting gets underway. John Ivison notes the same old fear and division being peddled by both sides despite the new digs. Paul Wells makes us feel bad for thinking that things might be different in the new locale. I was on Kitchener Today yesterday to talk about John McCallum, China, and the return of the House of Commons.

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Roundup: Making hay of Venezuela

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The situation in Venezuela has been getting political play in Canada, though perhaps not unsurprisingly from the NDP. Much of the party has long had a fascination with “socialist” regimes, both the Chavez regime in Venezuela, as well as Cuba (I was once at a house party with an NDP staffer who expressed shock that the Revolutionary Museum in Havana would have the audacity to subject her to propaganda when she was there to be inspired). It was perhaps least surprising that it would be Niki Ashton who put out the condemnation over Twitter for the Canadian government’s declaration to support the declared interim president of Venezuela in the bid to try and get a new round of free and fair elections up and running. This was echoed by one of the party’s by-election candidates, as well as newly nominated candidate Svend Robinson, who decried that the Canadian government was somehow following the lead of Donald Trump – patently absurd as we have not followed along with their Trump’s musing about military intervention, and the fact that we have recognised the last democratically elected leader in the country who has a constitutional case for the interim presidential declaration. And Jagmeet Singh? He offered a pabulum talking point that said absolutely nothing of substance, but did repeat the false notion that Canada is somehow following the Americans’ lead on this. All the while, Conservative and Liberal MPs started calling on Singh to denounce the Maduro regime in the country, which he hasn’t done, leaving the badmouthing to anonymous staffers.

Meanwhile, Canada is planning to host the other countries of the Lima Group next month in order to plan how to steer Venezuela back toward democracy, which totally sounds like us following the Americans and their musing about military intervention, right? Oh, wait.

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Roundup: Explaining the intractable

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Over at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative economics blog, Stephen Gordon grapples with the problem of how to explain carbon taxes to Canadians in a way that’s more meaningful and easier to comprehend rather than economics jargon. It’s a perplexing problem, and one that some economists on social media are trying to address – something made more difficult by the constant narrative of lies put forward by the likes of Andrew Scheer and his provincial conservative allies, for whom the verifiable benefits of pricing carbon are lied about and derided as making life unaffordable, or that rebates won’t change behaviours. Except that we have data that they do, but communicating those data is a challenge, and possibly an intractable one.

I would add that oftentimes, journalists don’t help because we largely have an allergy to anything that looks like math. If it doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, we immediately default to “it’s complicated” and shrugging, rather than figuring it out and communicating to people. I think we need to do better as well, and I try and to my part (for which I am rewarded with taunts that I am some kind of Liberal apologist, despite that carbon pricing is the favoured tool by virtually every single major economist and anyone who favours market solutions over government regulation), but it can be challenging, particularly when you are confronted by those who actively do not care about the truth. If we’re going to call out dishonesty in politics, we journalists need to do a better job of calling out these lies as we do with other false talking points – which means doing more than letting The Canadian Press write up a Baloney Meter™ article every now and again.

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Roundup: Another solution in search of a problem, by-election edition

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The good folks at Samara Canada have penned an op-ed in the Globe and Mail to call for legislation that demand swifter by-elections than currently exists, and would seek to remove the discretion of the prime minister in calling them. To this I say nay, because much like fixed election dates, this is a solution in search of a problem. Indeed, the piece entirely ignored that fixed election dates are not only antithetical to our system, which is based on confidence, but that it created a whole host of new problems and solved none. It used to be the big concern that prime ministers would call “snap” elections when it was deemed politically suitable, and that it wholly disadvantaged opposition parties. Of course, that’s entirely a myth that doesn’t survive actual scrutiny (recall that governments in this country were punished when they called elections too soon because they had good poll numbers), and fixed election dates instead created interminable election campaigns that required even more legislation to crack down on spending and advertising in defined pre-writ periods – something that wouldn’t need to exist under the proper system of ministerial discretion.

Throughout the recent round of braying to call by-elections, none of the arguments has convinced me that this is anything more than a moral panic. While the op-ed does correctly point out that MP offices remain staffed and operational, reporting to the party whip instead of the departed MP, the op-ed laments that there is no MP to push files through the bureaucracy – something that is not only not an MP’s job, but is something we should actually be discouraging because it sets up a system that starts to look corrupt, when it becomes who you know that will get action on your files. If anything, parties should actually take advantage of the fact that when a by-election hasn’t been called yet, it gives the riding associations ample time to locate a good candidate, run an effective nomination process, and then start door-knocking. If parties got their act together, they’d have more time to do this, rather than waiting months, and trying to get a hint as to when the by-election might be called before they even start their nominations – something that is absolutely boggling. Jagmeet Singh should have used the time to do the door-knocking at every available opportunity, and yet that didn’t seem to be the case for the months he was complaining that the by-election hadn’t been called.

You don’t have to convince me that it’s important to run these by-elections in a timely manner, and that having an MP in place as soon as possible is the right thing to do. It absolutely is. But more legislative constraints on executive discretion won’t solve any problems, and only creates more of them. We keep seeing this time and again, and yet we keep coming back to yet more proposals for even more of them, creating a spiralling cycle of more rules to fix a problem that was never actually a problem in the first place. Time to step off this merry-go-round.

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