Tag Archives: Jason Kenney

Roundup: New Cabinet Eve

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Welcome to Stephen Harper’s last day as Prime Minister. Tomorrow is the big day, and if you’re in Ottawa and want to take part, well, Rideau Hall is getting it all set, with big screens on the grounds, and helpful hints on attending (like you can’t park there and you’d better wear comfortable shoes, because you might be standing from 10 am to 1 pm). The cabinet will also apparently arrive by bus rather than everyone in their own individual cars, and it sounds like there will be some sort of interaction with the crowds, so I guess we’ll see how that all goes when it happens. Suffice to say, it again marks a change in tone from the last guy. If you’ve missed the others so far, Kady O’Malley gives a good primer on how to form a cabinet, while Nick Taylor-Vaisey fills you in on some more of the background details, like just what is a cabinet, and what are the oaths you need to sign? And no, I’m not going to engage in any cabinet speculation, because it’s a bit of a mug’s game at this point. I also don’t really want to get into the “gender quota versus merit” debate because it’s not a debate. There have always been quotas, be it linguistic, regional or even religious (when that mattered), more than merit, and I can’t believe that this is even a conversation, but whatever. The real question is how many women get into the “big” portfolios of finance, foreign affairs, justice, or defence.

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Roundup: Free-ish trade deal with TPP

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So, the TPP got signed, in case you missed the entirety of the news cycle yesterday. The Supply Management system was almost entirely left intact, and what tiny bit of market access that TPP countries gained will be more than compensated to the dairy farmers with very generous subsidies, and thus the Dairy Cartel was sated. Also, the auto parts content rules were kept largely intact as well, not that Unifor seems to care, as they’re going full-on protectionist and crying doom. Harper of course was touting the deal, while the Liberals sounded broadly supportive but wanted more details plus a full discussion in parliament when it comes to enabling legislation. The NDP, however, are still warning doom and taking the tactic of “Nobody trusts Stephen Harper” and latched onto Unifor’s claims that 20,000 jobs were imperilled. So there’s that. Economist Trevor Tombe takes us through why the deal is good for the country, while Andrew Coyne laments the timidity of maintaining the barriers we did.

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Roundup: Let the equivocation begin

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With three weeks left in the race, we’ve started seeing Thomas Mulcair start equivocating – or clarifying in any case – some of the policy planks he’s been running on. In many of those cases, it’s starting to make his promises look far less impressive. Take childcare – he is now talking about sitting down with provinces and using some of their existing spaces toward his “one million spaces” goal. One example was with Ontario, and the two years of full-day kindergarten offered in this province, so how does that get counted into with is childcare pledge, and the funding questions that go along with it? Add to that, with some 900,000 spaces already in existence across the country, does that mean that his plan will simply be to add another 100,000 spaces over the next eight years and make sure that they simply cap the fees at $15/day? Or is it still supposed to be a million new spaces? With his cap-and-trade announcement, he says that provinces can opt-out so long as they meet or exceed the federal objectives. But does that not then become essentially the Liberal position, where the provinces take the lead while the federal government establishes the targets? And didn’t he denounce that very notion? Mulcair has even started back-pedalling a little on his criticism of “useless” senators, saying it was only the institution he was denouncing (which, I’m sorry, is absolutely not what he said at the time). As crunch time approaches I’ll be interested to see how much more “clarifying” happens between the different parties, and how much of that clarifying goes against what they were saying the whole time.

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Roundup: Not the safe space you’re looking for

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Over in the National Post, Ashley Csanady found that the student council at the University of Waterloo has taken to abusing the concept of “safe spaces” to try and move their council meetings behind closed doors. Apparently student leaders have argued – with a straight face – that these closed-door meetings would foster a “safe environment, and less scrutiny results in better decision-making.” All of which is complete and utter nonsense because as political actors, they have obligations to transparency in order that they may be held to account. If they’re uncomfortable being challenged in public, then they shouldn’t run for office (which is an issue I have with people who run for office at any level of government, particularly federally – if you can’t so much as ask or answer a thirty-second question in QP without relying on a script and having your hand held, why are you there?) Now, there is a time and a place for closed-door meetings, and in camera discussions in grown-up politics, but it’s not all the time, and it’s not so that they can feel “safe.” Sometimes it takes a while to come up with suitable language when you’re putting together a report, and there is a case that some of the Board of Internal Economy’s decisions do happen better behind closed doors because some MPs can actually behave like adults when no one else is around, and I’m not sure it helps when they’re not using it as an excuse to play up the partisan drama for the cameras – again. (Also, BOIE deals with a lot of personnel issues that have legitimate privacy considerations). Yes, there has been an alarming trend in federal politics to move all considerations of committee business behind closed doors, likely because the Conservatives on the committee don’t want to be seen being irrationally partisan when they deny opposition motions, but they’re not using – or rather abusing – the notion of a safe space, or saying that they feel threatened by the exposure. Not wanting to look like jerks on TV is not a reason to meet in camera, and yet they do it anyway, and we the public should hold them to account for said behaviour. Hopefully the students at Waterloo will also see thought this charade, and vote this council out next year as well.

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Roundup: Getting out the leg irons

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It was the image that launched a thousand attack ads – or probably will, at any rate, as Dean Del Mastro was marched out in handcuffs and leg irons, off to spend the night (at least) in an Ontario prison after being found guilty of breaking election finance laws. “Cheating is cheating,” the judge noted, and that it was a serious enough crime to warrant some kind of jail time, so she decided on a month – though he may get out by tomorrow on bail pending the appeal of his case. Del Mastro’s lawyer also tried to get other exceptions for Del Mastro – jail on weekends, numerous exceptions for the eventual house arrest provisions – because he has a farm and needs to feed the animals, and a job in Toronto, and so on. The judge didn’t appear to be buying it, and made a point about needing a jail sentence onto only to show the severity of the crime (hence denunciation and deterrence), but also the issue of time to reflect on his actions, thought may be asking a lot from Del Mastro, as he walked into the courtroom convinced of his own innocence, and has shown no remorse whatsoever, even though the judge noted that Del Mastro was prepared to falsify his own statements to try and get away with his overspending. Many will argue that leg-irons and jail time are overkill, give that he’s not a dangerous criminal, but it relies on the same logic behind putting white collar criminals behind bars as well – because making them pay a fine or just house arrest aren’t considered punishment enough for the severity of their crimes. Disagree with it all you want, but we have made this choice though our legislative regimes, and if we want to change that, well, there’s an election coming up. Meanwhile, Stephen Maher says the Conservatives’ treatment of the man who testified against Del Mastro leaves a lot to be desired.

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Roundup: No, they’re not new powers

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I’ll admit that there has been some terribly naïve punditry about Michael Chong’s Reform Act, and a lot of touchy-feely optimism about the fuzzy notion of “reform,” but perhaps one of the most gallingly maladroit to date has come from Campbell Clark, who wonders if MPs will actually get the will to confront party leaders with their “new powers.” Yes, that was the sound of me sighing deeply. “New powers.” For those of you keeping score, Chong’s bill did not give MPs any new powers. MPs had all the power in the world thanks to the way our system of government is designed – elected as an individual MP under the first-past-the-post system, they are empowered to give or withdraw confidence, whether it is to their party leaders, or to the government of the day in the Commons. That’s an incredible amount of power because confidence is how our system runs. The problem is that they stopped empowering themselves to exercise their power, deferring first to leaders who were no longer accountable to them after we broke our leadership selection system to make it “more democratic” by taking away that power from MPs and giving it to the party membership (a convention which Chong’s bill now cements into law), and later to leaders who gained the power to sign off on their nomination forms (a measure designed to prevent spoofing on ballots and hijacked nomination races). Sure, MPs still had power and they could exercise it – but it generally meant that enough of them had to defy the leader all at once to ensure that the spectre of group punishment didn’t draw further questions, and few MPs had the intestinal fortitude to risk their necks. They still, however, had that power. For Chong to claim that his bill grants “new” powers is bogus. As I’ve stated before, it actually takes power away because it did not actually do away with the nomination sign-off power in a meaningful way, and it raised the bar by which MPs can openly challenge a leader so it can no longer be a small group who has the gonads to go forward, but will now see the media demanding the 20 percent headcount. So will MPs have the will to use these “new” powers? Probably not, because the bar has been set higher. But in the meantime, we’ll have the pundit class praising Chong for his efforts and his “courage,” rewarding him for the campaign of bullying and attempting to disenfranchise an entire body of parliament along the way.

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Roundup: Victory for concern trolls

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Consider it a victory for the concern trolls, particularly those hosting the political shows, who spent four days hounding Senate Speaker Leo Housakos and Senators Carignan and Cowan over a trumped up appearance of conflict of interest because they had a role – and largely a peripheral one – in the establishment of the arbitration process and appointment of Justice Ian Binnie to oversee the Senate arbitration process. While Carignan repaid his staffer’s questioned expenses right away, citing it as an error, both Housakos and Cowan had legitimate differences of opinion with the Auditor General over the expenses he flagged, and both intended to take it to arbitration. Monday morning, they changed course, citing that they didn’t want to taint the process by any appearance of conflict, which if you ask me is a potential tacit admission of guilt, but also weakens any ability for senators to push back against what is looking increasingly to be a series of subjective value judgements made by auditors when it comes to expenses that were flagged. (And I’m not going to go into the way in which the NDP and others are conflating these legitimate grievances with notions of criminality other than to offer the reminder that Thomas Mulcair should be thankful he made the comments about Senator Housakos that he did during QP yesterday were made under privilege, lest he face a libel suit). The fact that members of the media torqued this angle of a conflict of interest – which did not bear itself out in fact – shows how much they feel no compunction or conscience about using the Senate as a punching bag because they feel they have public sentiment on their side – never mind that they were central in creating that public sentiment out of overblown rhetoric and hyperbole. It’s not that all of the AG’s findings will be questionable – the ones that Senator Eaton repaid certainly did not appear to be above board, but as Senator Plett remarks in his explanation for some of the flagged expenses, the auditors’ assessments can lack common sense. Of course, for all the concern trolling, it remains a basic fact that the figure of potentially misspent funds is actually tiny in context – and when you look at it in comparison to spending breaches in the Commons, it doesn’t even compare. But MPs won’t admit that they have a worse record, nor will they open their own books up, but don’t let the hypocrisy surprise you.

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Roundup: Playing Duffy’s game

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It didn’t take long, but the repudiations rolled in today of the story that Duffy wanted to be named an Ontario senator instead of a PEI senator. Senior anonymous Conservatives disputed that fact, though it is fairly well known that Duffy did have concerns about his residency, which is why Marjory LeBreton’s office had that political memo drafted to justify the appointment as constitutional – note that it was a political memo and not a legal one. When it was first reported on Tuesday that Duffy wanted to be appointed as an Ontario senator, it raised red flags with me as it was contrary to years of anecdotes about Duffy’s quest to be a PEI senator, right to the fact that he would check the pulse of an aging PEI senator every time he shook his hand, or the fact that he would play up his Islander heritage for his whole career. In other words, it sounded self-serving and likely out of the Duffy camp in order to try and deflect blame onto the Prime Minister – and that’s exactly the trap that the NDP fell into, when they again made an issue out of it in scrums and in QP. Yes, Harper bears responsibility for the appointment, and yes, if he was going to appoint Duffy as a PEI senator, he should have ensured that Duffy moved back there first (and likewise with Carolyn Stewart Olsen in New Brunswick), but we all know that the December 2008 appointments were made in a panic and the usual checks were left undone. It’s not a conspiracy, the way that the NDP keep trying to portray it. It was one cascading series of bad decisions and the associated damage control. Trying to paint it as nefarious rather than utterly incompetent isn’t really helpful, and it doesn’t make it any easier to make Harper’s judgement a ballot issue. Taking the nefarious angle plays into the narrative that Duffy has been trying to build for himself when he got caught out and tried painting himself as the poor victim in all of this, and I’m not sure that the NDP are doing themselves any favours by playing Duffy’s game for him.

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Roundup: Cabinet confidences for slogans

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In case you wanted to know why the government has chosen the slogan “Strong Proud Free” on their new ad campaigns that blur the partisan line, well, good luck, You see, they’ve been declared a cabinet confidence, which means that they’ll be sealed for twenty years. Ladies and gentlemen, the most open and transparent government in the history of ever! It’s one of those cases where one hopes that The Canadian Press will file a complaint with the Information Commissioner, because then there’s a chance that she’ll be able to actually examine the file (eventually – she’s a bit overloaded and has little operating budget left) to test whether it really should be a cabinet confidence, and if not, she can work what powers she does possess to get it released (though that is likely to mean going to court given the current sad state of Access to Information legislation). Elsewhere, a court case involving misconduct of the RCMP protection detail of the Prime Minister is looking to get the records in question sealed, apparently using clauses from terrorism trials, to keep information about the PM’s family private. While there is likely some reason to keep certain details private, and We The Media are generally reluctant to drag a politician’s family though the mud, RCMP misconduct is serious business and probably shouldn’t be kept behind closed doors for the very reasons why there have been problems in the Force for so long. Sunlight, generally, is the best disinfectant. But it’s not all bad news for Access to Information – a Federal Court judge ruled that government departments can’t charge fees for requested electronic documents, as they have been trying to do, as that undermines the very point of the Access laws in the first place, which are supposed to cost no more than $5, and it’s not like you’re photocopying or printing these documents – they’re already electronic. In all, however, it points to the genuine need to modernise the system, and this government just voted down a chance to do just that when they killed Justin Trudeau’s private member’s bill on doing just that.

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Roundup: Camembert and clutched pearls

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In the media feeding frenzy yesterday morning, appetites whetted by unconfirmed reports by CTV that some 40 senators got additional letters from the Auditor General looking for further clarifications on expenses audited, one particular senator got swarmed while waiting at an elevator. Senator Nancy Ruth, who is a character who shoots from the hip and a pretty deadpan sense of humour, expressed her concerns about the Auditor General not understanding the role that a senator plays – in her case, as a feminist activist who brings a gender analysis lens to the work she does in the Upper Chamber – and then noted that the auditors were getting really picky to the point of being weird, like asking why her assistant expensed a breakfast when she should have eaten on the plane on her flight from Toronto to Ottawa. Nancy Ruth, deadpan, said that airplane food was awful, with “ice cold camembert and broken crackers.” But immediately We The Media clutched our pearls that she made such a quip. Camembert? That sounds awfully fancy! Why, normal Canadians would only eat blocks of Kraft cheese, thank you very much. And suddenly it became held up as a symbol of the Senate’s problems, and its members’ “entitlements.” There is this terrible strain of petty cheapness in our media – we’re aghast that things cost money (look at the renovations to Parliament Hill, much of which had been allowed to deteriorate because of the optics of spending money), and if someone puts up a dollar figure without context, it’s all the more fodder. If someone makes a legitimate expense, well, “ordinary Canadians” don’t get these expenses (err, except they do), so we try and shame them for claiming things that are within the rules. The moral panic around taxpayer dollars can be terribly provincial because it tends to be so very petty, this enviousness that some people are rewarded for doing long and difficult work – and make no mistake, the life of a senator is far less glamorous than people like to make it seem, particularly if you have a gruelling travel schedule to a lonely city like Ottawa and back. And it is a lot of work, both on Senate files and the kinds of projects that Senators take on because they have a position and a platform by which to champion them. But rather than acknowledge it, we begrudge it and we try to make everyone resent it too. Is it any wonder there is such cynicism about politics in this country? We stoke it at every opportunity. Maybe the problem is us, and our inability to roll with a quip or a joke, too busy clutching at our pearls instead.

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