The premiers met in Toronto yesterday, and the Canada Jobs Grant programme was again up for discussion, and it should be no great surprise that the premiers are still united in their opposition. In fact, they said that they are looking for some clear alternatives from Jason Kenney, if he is serious about there being flexibility in the programme. The premiers also wanted some clarity around foreign investment rules, never mind that Harper has previously said that he doesn’t want too much clarity in order to have wiggle room in the event that they want to block any acquisitions they find to be undesirable.
Tag Archives: Justin Trudeau
Roundup: Taking aim before the by-elections
One almost suspects that the Conservatives are worried about the Trudeau phenomenon in the upcoming by-elections as they continue to mount increasing attacks against him, whose relevance to reality slips further and further away. Today it was Peter MacKay suggesting that Justin Trudeau told schoolchildren that recreational drug use was okay and hay for legalising pot. Um, except that’s not what happened, but rather that at a school event he was asked about it, and Trudeau said that not only should children not use pot because their brains are still developing, but that right now the government’s approach was ineffective. Well done Conservative attack machine operating under MacKay’s name. Meanwhile in Toronto Centre, the NDP put out releases that decried how awful it was that Chrystia Freeland laid off all those journalists when she was at Reuters, but conveniently omitted the line from the story where the Reuters spokesperson specifically said the layoffs were not Freeland’s decision. Added to that, the NDP somehow intimated that they would protect media jobs by rewarding job creation with tax breaks. Erm, corporate taxes are not the woe that is facing the haemorrhaging media industry, and unless they plan to shut down the Internet and start subsidizing newspaper subscriptions, I’m not sure how exactly they’ll protect media jobs.
Roundup: Like a case of beer to a drunk
It has not been the Liberals’ weekend for communications strategies, it seems. After days of enduring the hectoring over “Ladies Night” and the facetious comments that Justin Trudeau made about China, along came the Liberal veterans affairs critic, Jim Karygiannis, where he went on Power & Politics and quoted the director of Wounded Warriors Canada in saying that giving wounded soldiers lump sum disability payments was like “waving a case of beer in front of a drunk,” as many will spend it on houses, fast cars, or their addictions, and he cited examples of these kinds of things happening where he met the individuals involved. And cue the outrage. Said director of the organisation immediately distanced himself from the comments over Twitter, and a few hours later, Karygiannis apologised – sort of. Suffice to say, it didn’t help the perception that the Liberals have their a-game on when it comes to media messaging.
Roundup: A mess of Harper’s own creation
All eyes will be on the Supreme Court this week as the Senate reference goes ahead. The fact that there will only be two sitting Quebec justices is a major bone of contention, and highlights the mess that the government made of the whole appointment process. A mess, it needs to be said again, they didn’t need to make. On the subject of the reference question, this piece looking at the abolition of Quebec’s Legislative Council is a neat bit of history, but actually has almost no use in terms of abolishing the Senate because the provinces aren’t federations. I’m not sure why this is such a difficult concept for people to grasp, and yet they keep pointing to places like Nebraska, New Zealand and Sweden as places that don’t have upper chambers – never mind that they’re either unitary states or sub-national governments, and don’t have the same dual federalism concerns that Canada as a whole does, which is why we need a bicameral legislature.
Roundup: Harper’s need for ambiguity
At a business school event, the Prime Minister said that they don’t want foreign takeover rules that are too clear because the government wants room to manoeuvre in the event that some takeover bids aren’t good for the country and need to be blocked. He also said that the free trade deals that they are negotiating with China, India and South Korea aren’t going to be the same as the EU trade deal just agreed to, as they won’t be of the same depth or comprehensiveness.
Roundup: Leading the RCMP, distracting the public
Senator Mike Duffy’s scorched-earth campaign continues as the CBC has obtained a letter the RCMP wrote last Friday, seeking documents from the PMO that were all mentioned in Duffy’s address to the Senate last week. Because that is something that these kinds of statements under privilege can do – direct the police where to continue their investigation. PMO, incidentally, says they’ve not received any such letter. But it has to be said that it would seem to shift the focus of the investigation from Duffy’s misspending to an attempt by the PMO to bribe, or otherwise influence a sitting legislator – a distraction that Duffy likely welcomes as he seeks to keep attention away from his own actions.
Roundup: No closure, new motions
There remains no resolution to the issue of the proposed suspensions in the Senate, as the Conservatives there found their attempt to impose closure to be out of order and they have pulled the motions in favour of a new one, which ties things up even further. Oh, but apparently their ham-fistedness is the Liberals’ fault, because they won’t stand aside and just pass it. Because yeah, that’s how things work in our parliamentary system. As it stands, those motions may not see a vote until Friday, but may stretch into next week. Glen McGregor checks Mike Duffy’s speech against his speaking notes, and where the deviations from Hansard were. Joe Clark doesn’t think too much of Harper’s handling of the whole Senate situation. Paul Wells dissects Harper’s role in the mounting problems facing him with the Wright/Duffy affair, and how his usual stubborn streak is playing out – in spades. Chantal Hébert wonders about Nigel Wright’s silence in the face of his demonization by Harper, and how he may be the one to bring Harper down. Andrew Coyne bemoans the way in which the Conservatives are chucking away the conventions that govern our parliamentary system.
Roundup: Nonsensical offers for backroom deals
Well, that was interesting. As the debate in the Senate over the suspension motions carried on, moving into the realms now of invoking time allocation and turning the motions from an independent one to government motions, something else completely weird and awkward happened. Senator Patrick Brazeau took to the floor and said that he had essentially been offered a backroom deal by the government leader in the Senate, Claude Carignan – that if he apologised to the Chamber and took full responsibility, then his punishment would be reduced. But none of it makes any sense, particularly when Carignan “clarified” that he was being too helpful and offered Brazeau options of how they could made amendments to the motion. But Brazeau doesn’t believe that he was in the wrong with his housing claims, and no amendments could have been moved because the Senate is still debating Senator Cowan’s amendment to send these three senators before a committee to have everything fully aired. Not to mention that Carignan said that suspension without pay still had to happen, so we’re not sure what could be negotiated other than perhaps the length of the suspension. And while the Conservatives in the House were demanding that the Liberal senators “step aside” and pass the suspension motions “for the good of the taxpayer,” the counter-narrative emerged that the Liberals were not going to be complicit in a cover-up – the notion that the only way all the facts will come out is before a committee where witnesses can be compelled to testify (and hopefully in a way that won’t interfere in the ongoing RCMP investigations). These Conservatives didn’t seem to remember that several Conservative senators are also against the suspensions – or are at least in favour of some better element of due process – though Harper took to talk radio in Toronto to urge those dissenters to vote for the suspension motions because it wasn’t about the RCMP investigations but about internal discipline – err, except there are some pretty valid arguments that at least some of these senators have been the victim of unclear rules and processes, and there are no established internal procedures for discipline this harsh, and they are very wary of setting a precedent that could be used against any others that the government of the day doesn’t like in the future. Not to mention that it is increasingly transparent that the Conservative brass wants this settled before their convention. And as for Senator Wallin, well, she continued to speak out, waiving her right to privacy with Internal Economy transcripts from in camera sessions, and tabling her own documents to help prove her case. Nothing is resolved, and the Senate returns Monday afternoon (which is another rarity, as normally only committees will sit on a Monday instead of the full chamber).
Roundup: Dramatic build-up, dull Speech
The pre-show for the Speech From the Throne wound up being a pretty exciting affair – first, a dust-up between PMO and journalists after PMO decided that only cameras could observe his speech to caucus but not reporters, to which most media outlets declared no reporters, no cameras, leaving only SunTV sending in a camera. Not that it mattered, as Harper’s account tweeted out the whole speech, once again bypassing the traditional media. And then, even more gallingly, the Conservative Party sent out a fundraising letter to members crying victim, that the mainstream media had hit a new low with their treatment of the party. No, seriously. As if that wasn’t enough excitement, shortly thereafter, there was a bomb threat at the Langevin Block – home of the PMO – where there was a suspicious package and someone taken into custody. A police robot was sent into the building to render the package “safe” before people were allowed back in.
Roundup: Special rules to punish Justin Trudeau
Because they are never short of such ideas, the NDP held yet another press conference yesterday to announced new proposals to make Parliament “more accountable.” What that really was code for was “let’s try to punish some Liberals, and in particular, Justin Trudeau.” You see, of their three proposals, the main one was to ban MPs and Senators from “double-dipping by banning payment for work that is part of their job as an MP or Senator.” Which is news to me because nowhere in any legal or constitutional text does it say that it’s part of a Parliamentarian’s job to be a motivational speaker. In fact, that’s the reason why certain MPs and Senators sign up to speaker’s bureaux – in order to do these kinds of gigs without having to expend their parliamentary resources on it, and because they’re not talking about matters that are related to their parliamentary duties, but usually their careers before they were in public life (Marc Garneau’s astronaut career, or Larry Smith’s football commissioner career for example), it makes sense not to treat it as part of their duties. Oh, but Justin Trudeau was able to make a successful living at this and still accepted speaking gigs after he got elected, therefore it must be awful and should be banned. Never mind that he almost always made money for the organisations that he was invited to speak at (with that one notable exception, where it was a case of organisational failure), or that the Conflict of Interest and Ethics commissioner cleared these gigs – this is strictly a case of cheap punitive politics. There can be cases made for the other two suggestions – banning parliamentarians from being on corporate boards (but family businesses are okay), and strengthening the powers of the aforementioned Commissioner – but they are less about scandals than perception. Parliamentarians have any corporate board work cleared by an ethics regime, and sure it could be strengthened, but there has yet to be a demonstrated case of any kind of influence peddling, and one suspects it’s simply a case of “corporations bad!” at work. And as for strengthening the role of the Commissioner, well, it seems to me that it’s the NDP who are in charge of the Commons Ethics committee and this has yet to make it onto the agenda when the review of her legislation is a year overdue. Perhaps if they made an effort to actually focus on that rather than play partisan silly buggers and constantly demanding investigations into the wrongdoing of individual MPs, then perhaps they might make progress on such a change.