Tag Archives: Justin Trudeau

Roundup: Fighting to preserve parliamentary privilege

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Senator Mike Duffy’s court challenge started yesterday, and the Senate as a whole fought back to have the Chamber excluded from his lawsuit under the rubric of parliamentary privilege. The Senate’s privileges include the ability to discipline its members – and this needs to be reiterated firmly, because as a self-governing body with institutional independence, that’s the only way that senators can be disciplined outside of a criminal process. This is also why there is a differentiation when it comes to the judge asking the hypothetical about the Speaker shooting someone – privilege does not necessarily cover criminality.

Part of what Duffy’s lawyers are trying to argue was that the Senate’s punishment of his suspension without pay should be subject to judicial review because he was acquitted of all charges by the Ontario Superior Court. The problem is that he was found to have broken several of the Senate’s rules, regardless of what the court found, and the Senate is empowered to deal with those breaches as they see fit – not to mention, it was also about making sure that discipline was seen to be done, which was important for a body that was facing scandal and public outrage. This doesn’t mean that they went about it in the best way, however – the pressure (especially coming from PMO, which the Senate leadership at the time capitulated to) wanted to have these suspensions out of the way immediately, and so Duffy’s interventions were cut short, and Senator Pamela Wallin never got her chance to defend herself at all because of the haste. Due process was not necessarily followed, and yes, that’s a problem. However, that is not a problem that can be sorted by means of judicial review, because that would undermine the Senate’s ability to be self-governing (just like the Senate subjecting itself to external financial control like the Auditor General wants would undermine its privileges and ability to be self-governing).

It can’t be understated how damaging it will be if we let the courts start interfering in the operations of Parliament, in either the Commons or the Senate. The constant injunctions to legislation, the threats of lawsuits, the massive breach of the doctrine of separation of powers – it’s not something that we should mess with. Duffy may feel he was treated unfairly – and maybe he was to an extent – but it’s no reason to start pulling bricks out of the wall when it comes to privilege. And if the judge has any sense, she’ll respect that separation and take the Senate out of the lawsuit.

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Roundup: Craven and unnecessary

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While Andrew Scheer continues his effort to woo Quebeckers to the Conservative cause, he’s apparently decided to start carrying the Bloc’s water for them, and yesterday morning made the “important” announcement that a Conservative government would ensure that there was a single tax form for Quebec. Which…is a problem that the Quebec government created for itself and could put an end to at any time they choose by returning to the federal tax form that all other provinces use. Scheer insists that this is about listening to Quebec, but it’s just a bit more craven than that, and yes, it’s a promise fraught with problems when you get into the details. It’s also interesting to note that his message changed over Twitter over the course of the day, which makes it all the more curious that he seems to be doing this on the fly.

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Mental health and Hill staffers

A Liberal Hill staffer, Paul Wernick, went public about a second suicide attempt, brought on by crippling depression and the stress of sixty-hour work weeks that life on the Hill is known for. His story makes some very important points that more Hill denizens should beware of – though he quit drinking years ago, there is a culture of drinking at the myriad of receptions that staffers attend with their bosses, and it can serve to self-medicate the stresses of the job, which is where things can get dangerous. There are resources available for staffers, but they may not be aware of them – Wernick says that he wasn’t, which shows that there’s still work to do when it comes to helping staffers out.

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Roundup: Equalization, feigned outrage, and outsourced research

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Apparently, we’re talking equalisation again after it was “revealed” that the current formula was renewed for another five years in the budget implementation bill and nobody cottoned on to the fact. Err, except that it was right there for everyone to see. And so you have a bunch of performative outrage from the likes of Jason Kenney about how this was the “deceitful scrapping of Equalization Renegotiation talks,” which is of course, utter bullshit but he need to create outrage that will drive his base – because if there’s anything that will be guaranteed to drive outrage in the West, it’s the deliberate lies being spread about how equalisation works in order to make themselves look like the victims in all of this (never mind that even in the depths of the recession they had the highest fiscal capacity in the country, and the fact that they have a deficit because they made the political choice to keep taxes low and not implement a PST in Alberta). But why be truthful and talk about the system honestly when you can foment outrage with lies? Way to go there. Sure, you can make the point that there could have been more public discussions around it, but there were discussions at the federal-provincial level, despite what Kenney claims.

Which brings us back to the issue of whether or not this change in the budget implementation bill was done underhandedly. Obviously the fact that it was a) in the budget; b) in the budget implementation bill for all to see; and c) raised at committee, clearly it wasn’t being hidden very well if that was the intention. Add to that, there have been ongoing consultations at the ministerial level for months, which again, not exactly being done sneakily. Paul Wells dug into the paper trails and found all of the receipts. And yet it’s being decried as having been done in some underhanded fashion. Why? Because the Globe and Mail reported that this was done “quietly.”

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If this is indicative of any problem, it’s the fact that our opposition parties are not doing their jobs. The Conservatives have long-since outsourced their opposition to the Globeif their QP questions are anything to go by (and confirmed by this latest “outrage”), not to mention the outsourcing of yet more homework to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and more to the fact, rather than doing their jobs of scrutinising the legislation and the budget, they spent the entire spring session railing about the India trip, inventing much (though not all) of the outrage out of whole cloth, and demanding the “costs” for the carbon tax where much of the data is already publicly available or does not exist where provinces have not yet come up with their plans. But instead, they spent their time trying to invent smoking guns that would “prove” that this government is out to raise taxes to pay for their deficits (again, ignoring that the funds from carbon prices all get returned to the provinces). If you’re the Official Opposition and can’t do your own homework, then what exactly are you doing? You’re in parliament to do a job – not to generate outrage clips for social media. And yet here we are.

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Roundup: Silence from Trudeau on child removals

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While all attention is glued to the horror show south of the border when it comes to child removals from migrant families, there is a lot of commentary around the conspicuous silence by this government, and from Trudeau in particular. While he said that he’s not going to “play politics” around this, some of his ministers have made comments to the effect that this policy is “simply unacceptable,” but Trudeau is largely mum. If anything, the government has taken a particularly defensive tone by talking about how much work they’ve done to reform immigration detention in this country, and to not separate children from their parents and only detain when necessary (and the record has improved, but it had some particularly dark spots in recent years, from suicides in detention to people being housed in provincial jails when there were no other immigration detention facilities available). There is an assumption that this is because he’s trying to “play nice” with Trump, but I’m not convinced about that.

If anything about the particular problem we’ve had with irregular border crossers over the past two years has shown, it’s that there is a narrative about how Trudeau’s #WelcomeToCanada tweet created the crisis. I’m not convinced that it did, but that’s the narrative. Given this crisis at the American borders, with migrants coming in from conflict zones in Central America, and with global refugee numbers at an all-time high, you can bet that Trudeau is doing his level best to be circumspect in all of his statements, not because of Trump, but rather to avoid another surge of migrants headed for our borders, and into a system that is already swamped (in no small part because they’ve been unable to make timely appointments to the IRB, and because it’s still under-resourced). Now, if Trudeau made sweeping condemnations about what’s happening in the US, that could be seen as another open invitation, which would stress our system even further. Add to that the calls from the NDP and others to suspend the Safe Third Country Agreement – a move that would immediately cause a massive rush for our ports of entry to claim asylum, again, swamping our already stressed system, beyond the diplomatic escalation that removing the “safe” designation from the US would cause. And the Trump administration may be fine with it, and do all it can to push more of their migrants to our borders and say “good riddance.” Regardless, I see Trudeau’s silence as an abundance of caution and trying not to create a larger border crisis than the one he’s currently dealing with, no matter the fact that what’s happening in the States is unconscionable.

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Meanwhile, as if to highlight Canada’s own record, there was testimony before the Senate Aboriginal People’s Committee about how child removals within Indigenous communities continues to erode them, given that currently child welfare workers are more likely to separate children from their families than get proper assistance for those families in crisis, and that the numbers today are akin to another residential schools system. So, yeah. We don’t have a clean record, and I’m sure this would quickly be thrown in the government’s face if they said anything.

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Roundup: Bernier booted from shadow cabinet

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The surprising news last night was that Andrew Scheer had finally had enough and removed Maxime Bernier from his shadow cabinet, reassigning his critic portfolio to Matt Jeneroux. The ostensible reason that Bernier was booted? That he uploaded that chapter from his cancelled book in which he decries the tyranny of Supply Management. Never mind that the chapter was already floated to the Globe and Mail and was published weeks ago, which led to the outcry that had Bernier pull the book until his political retirement. Scheer said that this constituted Bernier breaking his word to caucus on the book, never mind that it was already in the public domain.

A more plausible explanation? That Scheer was getting a lot of heat about Bernier’s views about Supply Management in the face of Trump’s tweets about dairy tariffs that are part of the system, where the government could point to Bernier being on Scheer’s front bench as proof that the Liberals cared more about Supply Management than the Conservatives did. In fact, the swipes about this got increasingly nasty in QP the last few days, to the point that Luc Berthold got right indignant about it when it was thrown in his face yesterday. Add to that, there’s a by-election coming up in a rural Quebec riding, where this is one of those issues that they care a lot about, and Scheer (who is campaigning there later this week with the former Bloc leader who has renounced separatism and taken out a Conservative membership card) wanted to prove that he’s listening to Quebeckers on Supply Management – even though Bernier himself is a Quebecker. (Note: This is also why the Conservatives rarely ask Supply Management questions in English during QP – this is all about pandering for Quebec votes).

I do think that this is further proof that there is little room in the current Conservative party for actual free-market conservatives, and that they are working hard to cravenly embrace right-flavoured populism that is divorced from the values that they claim to espouse (as I wrote a year ago when Scheer first won the leadership). My only question now is whether Bernier will be banished to the nosebleeds along with fellow disgraced caucus member Kellie Leitch.

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Roundup: Derailing a summit for macho posturing

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So, that was quite some G7 summit. I would say that I can’t even, but, well, at this point, it’s becoming harder and harder to be surprised by the Trumpocalypse, so, yeah. For those of you who missed the drama – and it was a hell of a lot of drama – Trump played nice until he took off early from the summit, and then after Justin Trudeau gave a press conference in which he tried very hard to downplay any tensions, but reiterated the same statement’s he’s made plenty of times over the past couple of weeks in talking about how the US tariffs are kind of insulting, and that no, he has no intention of agreeing to a sunset clause with NAFTA, that Trump tweeted up a storm from Airforce One about how Trudeau had stabbed him in the back, and how the steel and aluminium tariffs were in response to our dairy tariffs that form part of the Supply Management system (which puts a lie to the claim that the tariffs were for national security reasons), and that he had instructed his officials to no longer endorse the communiqué that he had previously agreed to. Sunday morning, Trump’s mouthpieces were arguing that there was a special place in Hell for people who negotiate in bad faith with Trump. Oh, and they pretty much confirmed that Trump is going on this rage bender because he wants to look tough in advance of his talks with North Korea, which is…novel. And ridiculous. But to her credit, Chrystia Freeland continued to take the high road, while Trudeau carried on with his meetings with the “outreach” countries who also attended the G7.

Here’s a recounting of the behind-the-scenes moves from the weekend, including the Friday night session between the leaders to hammer out the joint communiqué, and how that was already unravelling the next morning. Senior officials continue to be puzzled by the whole thing, considering that Trudeau has been consistent in his messaging. Trudeau and Freeland tried to keep the focus on what was accomplished – the fund for girls’ education in war-torn regions and the oceans plastic charter (that neither the US nor Japan signed onto, for the record). In the States, John McCain tweeted his support for Canada in this (but it might help if congressional Republicans stood up to Trump over this, but we’ll see if that happens). And that famous photo that everyone is sharing? Other leaders, including Trudeau’s official photographers, are tweeting other angles of it.

In hot takes from this weekend, Evan Solomon says that the government’s tactics need to change as waiting out Trump’s moods is clearly no longer an effective strategy. Scott Gilmore offers suggestions as to how to boycott Trump’s business interests. Paul Wells takes a few well-deserved shots at Trump’s talking heads, and suggests that their calling Trudeau weak is because he hasn’t been, and that perhaps it’s time for Canada and its allies to give a retaliatory response that is worth the Americans fearing.

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Roundup: Sore loserism and entrails

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If you had any money riding on who would be the first to whine that Thursday’s election result was a signal that we need electoral reform, and if you chose Elizabeth May, well, collect your winnings. I spent much of Friday responding to this nonsense, but I will reiterate a couple of points – that if you blame the system because your party did not do better, you’re already missing the point. We’ve seen it happen time and again that when a party has a message that resonates, it’s the non-voters who come out, not the committed party base, and we had increased turnout on Thursday night which meant that people were motivated to throw the bums out. Similarly with Trudeau in 2015 – a significant uptick in voter turnout because they had something that they wanted to vote for/throw the bums out. This matters, and whinging that the system isn’t fair is missing the point entirely. The system works. It needs to be allowed to function the way it was intended. What doesn’t help is using a false number like the popular vote in order to make it look like the system is unfair in order to justify your disappointment is the epitome or sore loserism.

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In terms of reading Thursday night’s entrails, here’s Paul Wells taking a detailed look at the three campaigns and how each succeeded and failed in their own ways. CBC has a look at how Ford’s use of simple and vague messaging made him look sensible to an angry population. Robert Hiltz looks at the ways in which the Liberals defeated themselves by their craven attempts to hold onto power. Nevertheless, Wynne’s surprise concession days before the election may actually have saved the seats the Liberals did win, according to exit polling done, so that particular strategic calculation may have actually paid off.

Jen Gerson wonders if Doug Ford’s win isn’t akin to a Monkey’s Paw curse – getting what you wish for at a terrible price. Andrew MacDougall wonders what Ford’s win means for modern conservatism given that Ford isn’t really a small-c conservative, nor were his outlandish promises. Similarly, Chris Selley looks at the phenomenon of Ford Nation, the Harper Conservatives that surround him, and the way that Andrew Scheer has suddenly attached himself to the cause. Andrew Coyne (once you get past the griping about the electoral system) warns politicians and pundits not to overread Thursday’s results (hey federal Conservatives and your crowing in QP on Friday – this especially means you), and further wonders if Ford will pull a “cupboard is bare” routine to keep carbon pricing to use the revenues. Jason Kirby mocks up what Ford’s first speech might look like, by referencing earlier speeches about bare cupboards.

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Roundup: Ford’s win, and echoes of 2011

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So, that was an election, Ontario. I’m sure we’ll be full of hot takes, followed by the ritual lamentations about vote-splitting, and there will be a bunch of sanctimonious claptrap about “strategic voting,” but in the meantime, I am reminded of 2011. Why? Because with a Progressive Conservative government and an NDP official opposition, we may find that for the next little while, we’ll see a number of those MPPs talking about how great it is that there’s some real choice in visions in Ontario, and isn’t it great that those mushy-middle Liberals are out of the picture? And while we got a bunch of that in 2011, we also quickly found that the NDP MPs that did get elected in their big wave were not all up to par, and they went on an aggressive lockdown orchestrated by the leader’s office (or interim leader, as the case quickly proved to be). And it was that lack of real competence that ensured that the Liberals still in the chamber quickly became the grown-ups in the room. Question Period didn’t really start until then-interim leader Bob Rae stood up, and he ran circles around both the opposition and the government, frankly. And I suspect that it had something to do with how the Liberals were able to rebuild as quickly as they did – because people quickly started to clamour for a centrist vision that they could rally around. But it also didn’t happen without a lot of hard work, and a leader who emphasised the importance of that. We’ll have to see where the Liberals in Ontario land. As of the time I’m writing this, there is enough fluctuation still that we’re not sure if they will keep official party status at eight seats, and with Kathleen Wynne’s resignation as party leader, that leaves it open to see how these Liberals will get their acts together to provide that centrist voice (which was somewhat lacking under Wynne – who did win her own seat, incidentally). And in the meantime, here’s some advice from Jean Charest about rebuilding a devastated party.

Meanwhile, in hot takes, Justin Ling looks at the hard time that Doug Ford will have when it comes to trying to dismantle the cap-and-trade system in the province as well as fight the federal carbon price backstop, while Chris Selley notes that this is a bit of a blank slate because we have no coherent vision of what the party’s vision really is after their unrealistic platform. John Ivison asserts that this is the dawn of a new era of combative federalism, with Ford voting against everything coming from Ottawa. Paul Wells looks at the immediate problems for both Ford and Justin Trudeau coming out of last night’s election.

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Roundup: No, this election won’t be good for electoral reform

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I know that I really shouldn’t give bad columns more coverage, but I can’t help myself, because this is just the first of many that we are doubtlessly going to see in the coming months – that a Doug Ford win on Thursday could get the ball rolling on electoral reform, at least in Ontario. It’s a specious argument, but it’s attractive to a certain class of voter and wonk, so brace yourselves, because this red herring will be coming at you hard in the coming month.

Part of the problem with this particular column is that it doesn’t really make the argument why electoral reform is the logical follow-through for a Ford-led government, because most of the complaints have to do with how Ford won the leadership instead of Christine Elliott. This is not the fault of the electoral system – it’s the fault of our very broken leadership selection system and would largely be corrected if we returned to the system of caucus selection of leaders that our system is designed for. If we had that in place, Elliott would likely have been chosen because she was in caucus at the time that Patrick Brown challenged for the post (while he was still a federal MP, in case you’d forgotten). That would be two dark chapters in the Ontario PC party that could have been avoided, but I digress. The argument here should be that the Ford gong show should be an object lesson in how we need to restore proper leadership processes, where caucus can select and remove leaders in order to ensure that there is proper accountability and more importantly that leaders can’t throw their weight around, that caucus has more power to keep the leader in check. Sadly, that’s not the argument we got.

The balance of the column is a bunch of whinging that parties got majority mandates with less than 40 percent of the popular vote – never mind that the popular vote is a logical fallacy. It’s not a real thing – it’s an extrapolation that magnifies the sense of unfairness by those whose parties did not win, but it’s not a real thing because general elections are not a single event, they’re a series of simultaneous but separate elections for individual seats, and yes, that matters greatly in how the system works, how parliaments are formed, and in the agency afforded to individual MPs.

The other implicit argument being made in pieces like these, though this pieces doesn’t come out and say it, is that proportional representation will likely deliver us a series of coalition governments by nice leftist parties, and we’ll get solar panels on roofs, and great social programs, and no divisive politics because they’ll be forced to cooperate. Won’t it be great? Err, except that’s not what happens, and if anyone thinks it’ll be nice leftist coalitions in perpetuity, they should perhaps look at what’s going on in Europe right now, and how the populist mood there and in North America would have consequences in our own elections that wouldn’t be mitigated like our current brokerage system does, and that could be an even bigger problem. But that’s not the established electoral reform/PR narrative, even though it should be.

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Roundup: Wynne’s final gambit

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The big news over the weekend was the extremely curious decision by Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne to essentially concede defeat of the election days before the vote and urge Liberal voters to return enough MPPs to Queen’s Park to hold the NDP or the Progressive Conservatives to a minority, ensuring that neither party gets a “blank cheque” come Friday. Wynne also stated that she wouldn’t be premier after Thursday, but that’s not quite correct – she may signal her intention to resign on Thursday, but she would still be in the job another two or three weeks during the transition period because as we know, Her Majesty must always have someone there to give her advice. That’s how Responsible Government works, after all.

This having been said, I’ve had a few people ask me what I think of the move, and I’ve had a hard time with it. So little about this election makes any kind of sense, but here we are. Some political scientists say that this is a clever long game to keep her personal unpopularity from sinking the party entirely, and that seems to be echoed by members of her own party who were blindsided by the move, but who say that it may help with people who feel that they want to still vote for the local Liberal MPP but not for a continuation of the Wynne-led government. And after some consideration, I do think this is part of the calculation – to reassure Liberal voters (particularly in safer-Liberal seats) that they can still vote for their MPP and still have an eye on the bigger picture that won’t necessarily mean a Liberal government, as opposed to the supposition that this is just about handing votes to the NDP in a bid to keep Ford out of office.

Andrea Horwath, meanwhile, is already ruling out any kind of Liberal support to in a minority situation, which is a) not wholly unexpected for someone who suddenly has a shot at forming government; but b) is also potentially a dangerous gambit should she be forced to walk back from those sentiments if she does rely on having Liberal seats to keep her government from falling in short order. And it really is up in the air right now as to where things are sitting, so I’m sure we’ll be having all kinds of conversations about government formation in the next week or two. (If you need a head start, read up in my book).

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