Tag Archives: Justin Trudeau

Roundup: An unexpected reversal

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So, after the somewhat unexpected reversal of last night, I looked back to something from the past few days to help explain this bit of insanity that we’ve all witnessed. Michelle Rempel heard this from Republican officials late last week when she asked them how this all happened:

Here’s a look at what a Trump presidency is going to mean for Canada:

As the numbers tightened, we saw this going around:

https://twitter.com/kfile/status/796206974652321794

Meanwhile, a reminder about the underlying attitudes:

https://twitter.com/james_j_gordon/status/796200489918623745

I’m going to wait before I can have much else to say about the power of nativism, and this “drain the swamp” ethos that has taken over so much of the rhetoric in the campaign, and the part that civic ignorance feeds into the politics of resentment that in turn fuels this kind of thing. But wow.

I will say how glad I am once again to live in Canada, with a constitutional monarchy and a system of Responsible Government, with a Supreme Court that isn’t partisan, and with a neutral civil service. Because we’re probably going to be reminded about how important that is in the next few years.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau will be stopping in Cuba and Argentina on the way to the APEC meeting in Peru, and everyone is recalling his father’s frienship with the Castros.
  • The government has named a five-person panel to make recommendations regarding overhauling the National Energy Board.
  • Here’s a look at the latest round of Order Paper questions, with questions on alcohol on government flights, classified documents and ministerial swag.
  • Here is your look at ministerial expense repayments for various and sundry reasons.
  • The Victims of Communism memorial is now up for a new design from five different bidders, to go with its new location. The original design is out of the running.
  • Correctional Investigator Howard Sapers is leaving the job and will be leading a review of segregation in Ontario prisons.
  • Conservative MP (and former sportscaster) Kevin Waugh thinks that female athletes are treated better than their male counterparts, and is being criticised for it.
  • The first Conservative leadership debate is tonight.
  • The premier of PEI is (rightfully) expressing some scepticism over the province’s electoral reform plebiscite results, and reformers are howling as a result.
  • My Loonie Politics column looks at whether the instances of Liberal backbenchers voting against the government are really signs of independence showing.

Odds and ends:

The Yukon Liberals won the territorial election on Monday night, and Trudeau congratulated prospective new premier Sandy Silver.

Both women candidates in the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race have dropped out citing harassment and intimidation.

Roundup: A warning or a betrayal?

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Justin Trudeau made some comments to Le Devoir about the reduced sense of urgency around electoral reform, and a bunch of people – notably the NDP – freaked out. Trudeau said:

Under Stephen Harper, there were so many people unhappy with the government and their approach that people were saying, ‘It will take electoral reform to no longer have a government we don’t like’. But under the current system, they now have a government they’re more satisfied with and the motivation to change the electoral system is less compelling.

And then comes the parsing of the rhetoric – is he trying to walk back on his election promise that 2015 was the last election under first-past-the-post, or is he trying to give signals to the electoral reform committee as they begin to draft their report after their summer of consultations across the country? To the NDP (and Ed Broadbent of his eponymously named Institute), Trudeau’s comments are a betrayal because to them, he can only deliver proportional representation or bust. Their working premise is that Trudeau was saying that because the system elected Liberals it’s fine, but when it elected Conservatives, it was broken. But I’m not sure that’s what Trudeau was actually saying, because the prevailing popular discussion pre-election was that reform was needed because any system that delivered Conservative majorities was deemed illegitimate – one of those kinds of talking points that gives me hives because it presumes that electoral reform needs to be done for partisan reasons. And to that extent, Trudeau is right, that the sense of urgency has decreased because the Conservatives are no longer in power, so there’s less clamour for it to happen. There is also the theory that what Trudeau was signalling was that there are degrees of acceptable change, and that without as much broad support that smaller change like ranked ballots could be something he would push through (seeing as we all know that the committee is going to be deadlocked).

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/788788763854077952

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/788789074228371457

Kady O’Malley, on the other hand, thinks that Trudeau is signalling to the NDP and Greens that they should be willing to compromise on PR during the committee deliberations, or he’ll deem it a stalemate and either walk away or put it to a referendum, where it would almost certainly be doomed. Rona Ambrose says that it could signal that Trudeau is backing down, which the Conservatives would like (and to be perfectly honest, I would too because the system is not broken and electoral reform is a solution in search of a problem). That he may have found the excuse to back down and admit this election promise is a failure – and then move on – would be the ideal move in my most humble opinion.

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Roundup: A dying brand of politics

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As tributes to Jim Prentice continue to roll in, we see one in particular from Michael Den Tandt, who says that the particular blend of civility and competence that Prentice had is becoming a fading quality in politics, not only looking south of the border to the giant tire fire that they call their presidential election, but also toward the Conservative leadership race in this country. Why is it fading? Because that kind of politics isn’t selling to the angry populist wave that seems to have captured so many imaginations, and in that race, it’s less Maxime Bernier who is capturing that angry populism (despite his claiming the “Mad Max” label by being “mad” about so many government problems) than it is by Kellie Leitch and her campaign manager, Nick Kouvalis. And case in point, Leitch officially launched her campaign on the weekend (remember, it was just an exploration beforehand), and lo, was it full of angry populist rhetoric that doesn’t make a lot of sense when you actually listen to it. Leitch continues to insist that she’s not anti-immigrant – she just goes about completely mischaracterising this country’s immigration system (you know, which the government that she was a part of had an opportunity to apparently do something about over the last decade and apparently didn’t), and pits “good” immigrants against “bad” ones – which, to be fair, is something Jason Kenney got really good at over his time as the cultural outreach guy in the Conservative party. Suffice to say, here are Justin Ling’s tweet’s from Leitch’s launch, and if it sounds like her going down the angry populist checklist, it’s because that’s what it pretty much is – which lends a little more credence to what Den Tandt was saying about Prentice’s breed of politician fading away.

https://twitter.com/Justin_Ling/status/787359199957245952

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Roundup: The outsider instinct

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Over in the National Post, Michael Den Tandt offers the theory that Donald Trump and his excesses have poisoned the well for other “outsider” candidates worldwide, and that his flash-over-substance style will make others take a second look. Citing the Conservative party leadership in Canada, Den Tandt supposes that this dooms a potential candidacy by Kevin O’Leary, just as Boris Johnson basically outsidered-himself out of the running to be prime minister in the UK – but I’m not sure that I buy the premise of the argument.

I think that there remains a hankering for outsider candidates despite Trump, and that that precisely because he’s poisoned the well that we’ll continue to see these kinds of players railing against the establishment. As is playing out in the Conservative leadership race here, we’ll see more candidates establish themselves as outsiders struggling against the party “elites” because that’s the narrative that has been blown wide open in recent years. (See: Kellie Leitch and Brad Trost). Den Tandt acknowledges that Tony Clement dropped out because he was unable to attract donors for being too conventional and too much an established politician, which I think is part of what blows his whole thesis out of the water. It wasn’t that Clement got in the race too soon, it’s that this notion of needing to find an “outsider” is a particularly strong influence in the zeitgeist right now, especially for conservatives who feel that the establishment has been letting them down, that it hasn’t gotten them where they need to be (witness how Harper’s incrementalism has largely been undone in a matter of months, if you don’t count the permanent fiscal chokehold that the GST cut has put into place). I think it’s why Leitch is taking the Ford Brothers/Nick Kouvalis route of yelling “gravy train,” and why Maxime Bernier is playing entirely against the rest of the party’s established policies and is getting attention for it. Everyone wants to play against the establishment and they are looking for the right way to do it. I don’t think we’ll have another Donald Trump – it would be hard to get that kind of unconstrained id and utter narcissism in a single package again – but I think there is absolutely going to be yet more people trying to find the right balance. I’m not sure it’ll be as successful in Canada as it might be in the States (particularly as our system is not really broken like theirs is), but the impulse to find that outsider is still pervasive, and it will be felt in the race here.

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Roundup: What free market mechanism?

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The Conservative reaction to the imposition of a federal minimum carbon price has been fascinating, in part because of just how counterfactual it would be to how an actual conservative party would behave. You would think that an actual small-c conservative party would believe in market principles and would think that imposing price incentives (the carbon price) would be great because it would force the market to innovate to reduce the costs associated, hence reducing the carbon emissions in the least onerous way possible with the costs being fully transparent.

But no. We don’t actually have a small-c conservative party in this country, we have right-flavoured populists who would rather rail about “taxes on everything” and give sad homilies about how hard done by the workers of this country are, and how carbon taxes are just letting millionaires claim tax credits on the backs of the ordinary people of this country. No, seriously – these are things that the Conservatives have said in QP. And Rona Ambrose then goes on TV and says that the government should be regulating major emitters in a way that won’t cost consumers (never mind that regulations are the most costly mechanism available and it simply hides the true costs). It’s mind-boggling.

And so we now have all but one leadership candidate railing about carbon taxes, and the only one who agrees with carbon pricing, Michael Chong, insists that this is the wrong way to do it, that it should be revenue neutral for the taxpayer (never mind that provinces could institute that if they want, but they are given the flexibility to do with as they choose). Meanwhile, Paul Wells takes a torch to Lisa Raitt’s overwrought homilies about the poor people suffering under carbon taxes, and applies a little math to the analysis, which doesn’t fare well for Raitt. Likewise, Andrew Coyne laments the lack of a serious discussion on carbon pricing as the cheapest and least onerous way to reduce emissions. But this is currently the state of conservative politics in this country.

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Roundup: Unseen consequences and consolidating power

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In discussions around the Senate modernization report earlier this week came the question of fallout from Justin Trudeau’s decision to kick his senators out of national caucus, and how that spurred part of the reform discussion within the upper chamber (the interminable Duffy-and-company related expense issues being another of those triggers). While Paul Wells notes some of those consequences and how the decision was a good foretelling of Justin Trudeau’s management style, comments made by Senator Serge Joyal also caught my attention, particularly around the unintended consequences of the banishment.

One of the things about having senators in national caucus is that they have the benefit of being the institutional memory of parliament, because they’re there over the course of several parliaments and aren’t prone to a lot of turnover like the House of Commons is. That means they’re not always finding their feet like MPs are, or concerned about their own re-election, like MPs are, and they’ve also been there and done that with a lot of proposals that keep coming around. Kicking senators out of caucus is to forgo a lot of that knowledge and experience which is bad enough, but Joyal pointed to another problem, which is that it points to even greater centralisation of power by the leader’s office because there are no longer senators in the room to tell newbie MPs when they are or aren’t bound to follow leaders’ orders. And that’s actually a pretty salient point considering the context of Trudeau and the his own power consolidation.

By being chosen in the manner that he was – by “supporters” as opposed to caucus or even party membership, Trudeau is accountable to nobody, his selection base being so diffuse and nebulous that it could not be replicated. That allows him to argue that he has the “democratic legitimacy” to do what he wants, and demands that caucus fall into line as a result. One of his earliest actions was to kick out senators, while ostensibly about making the upper chamber “more independent,” which in a sense it will, but it also removes those voices from his caucus that can speak up about any way in which he may be inappropriately using his powers as leader. Add to that the way in which he and his team managed to push through changes to the party’s constitution that centralises policy-making into his office (under the rubric of being “more responsive” and “more modern”) and eliminated any regional power bases that could challenge his supremacy as leader, well, the picture starts getting all the more clear, that he has consolidated a very great amount of power at the expense of his party’s grassroots and caucus, more than any other party leader has in this country thus far, and that should be concerning to anyone who respects the particular accountability mechanisms inherent in the Westminster system. Joyal is right to make this point, but one suspects that few people are willing to listen, chalking his concerns up to the wounded feelings of being turfed. They’re not, and we should be paying attention to this consolidation of power.

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Roundup: Accountability that never was

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It feels like a while since I’ve had to go to bat for the existence of the Senate, so Robyn Urback’s column in the National Post yesterday was pretty much the bat-signal shining in the sky. To wit, Urback somewhat lazily trades on the established tropes of the Senate, and takes what was a joke on the part of Senator Nancy Ruth about airplane food (cold camembert and broken crackers was a joke, people! Senators are allowed to have a dry sense of humour, last I checked) to clutch her pearls about how terribly elitist and entitled our senators allegedly are (when really, the vast majority are very much not).

Urback’s big complaint however is that despite Justin Trudeau’s promises of change to the institution, giving it more independence is apparently all a sham. There are a few problems with this hypothesis, however, and most can pretty much be chalked up to the run-of-the-mill ignorance of the institution, its history, and its proper function in our parliamentary system. Her complaints that the rules that allowed Senator Mike Duffy to claim all of those expenses is wrong, because rules have tightened since, and the fact that he can still claim for his Ottawa residence is the reality that comes with what we are asking of Senators. The problem with Duffy is that he never should have been appointed as a senator for PEI, and he was shameless enough to claim the expenses for his Ottawa residence without actually making a legitimate point of having an actual full-time residence on the island and a small condo or apartment in Ottawa for when the Senate was in session. Complaints that the Senate Liberals are simply declared to be independents while still remaining partisans ignores the substance of how they have behaved in the time since Trudeau made the declaration, and the fact that they have been kicking the government just as hard, if not harder, than the Conservatives in the Senate since Trudeau came to power. This is not an insignificant thing. But then there is Urback’s ultimate complaint, revolving around a canard about who senators are accountable to.

https://twitter.com/scott_gilmore/status/778683110376431618

The Senate was never made to be accountable to parties or party leaders. The whole point of the institution, and the very reason it was constructed with the institutional independence that it has (non-renewable appointments to age 75 with extremely difficult conditions for removal) is so that the Senate can act on a check for a prime minister with a majority government, and they have numerous times since confederation. It needs to have the ability to tell truth to power without fear of reprisal, and that includes the power to kill bad bills – because they do get through the Commons more often than you’d like to think. They have never been accountable to a party or leader, and that’s a good thing. Sure, they can act in lockstep with a party out of sentimentality (or ignorance, if you look at the batches appointed post-2008), but this was never a formal check on their powers, nor should it be. If Urback or anyone else can tell me how you get an effective check on a majority prime minister any other way, I’m all ears, but the chamber has a purpose in the way it was constructed. Getting the vapours over a more formal independence is ignorant of the 149 years of history of the chamber and its operations.

Where Urback does have a point is in noting that the independent appointments board made their recommendations on the short-list without having conducted any interviews or face-to-face meetings. That is a problem that undermines the whole point of the appointment process, because it leaves the final vetting up to the PMO. One hopes that this will be corrected in the new permanent process that is being undertaken now, but there are still worrying signs about how that is being conducted. Self-nominations and people getting letters of recommendation seems like a poor way to get quality people who aren’t driven by ego and status, and we can hope that this isn’t all they’re replying on.

https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/778418872185675776

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Roundup: Bernier’s Bay Street catnip

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Maxime Bernier gave a speech at the Economic Club of Toronto yesterday that was largely catnip for the audience there, saying that he wants to eliminate the capital gains tax, reducing corporate income taxes to 10 percent, making the accelerated capital cost allowance (ACCA) permanent, and eliminating corporate subsidies. While economics can point to the thinking behind some of Bernier’s plans (like below), others will point to the flaws in it, such as the ability to disguise salary as stock options that would no longer be taxed as capital gains, or the longer-term problems with the ACCA (like a new building being worthless for tax reasons in two years). It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Bernier’s ideas are largely slogans without a deep analysis of the real-world implications of them – kind of like how his plan to eliminate interprovincial trade barriers is just a gift to litigators rather than doing the hard political lifting necessary on such a file. Bernier has this kind of libertarian fanboy sense about him, that all of the problems can be solved by brandishing a copy of the constitution and shouting “freedom” will be all that’s necessary to kick-start a sluggish global economy, and that this will all be politically saleable to large swaths of the economy that have come to depend on government support in one way or another. And while yes, Bernier is indeed trying to bring some ideas to the table in this leadership contest while some of his competitors are trying to force the debate onto grounds of “values” and stoking national security fears, but it does remain true that it’s not really the point of leadership hopefuls to try and bring policy to the table that will change the direction of the party – that should be coming from the grassroots membership in a bottom-up and not a top-down process. But just remember – freedom! It’ll solve everything!

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Roundup: Chagger vs Bergen

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The big news yesterday was Rona Ambrose shuffling up her shadow cabinet after the summer of leadership announcements, and naming Candice Bergen as the new Opposition House Leader in the place of Andrew Scheer. What is of particular interest is that you have two fairly inexperienced people in the role in both the government and the official opposition, which could make for some very interesting times going forward.

To refresh, the role of the House Leader is to basically determine the agenda of the Commons (deputy leaders fill this role in the Senate), when it comes to determining what items will be up for debate on what days, the scheduling of Supply Days for opposition parties, and basically doing the procedural management. Why the fact that two relatively inexperienced MPs will be doing this is interesting is because we’ll see what kinds of ways that they prioritise things. (Bergen does have experience as a parliamentary secretary and minister of state, but little in the way of procedural experience as far as I’ve been able to determine). What everyone will be paying attention to in particular, however is tone. The fact that for the first time in history, it’s two women in the role is going to have people waiting to see just how that affects tone (as Rosemary Barton gave as her item to watch in this week’s At Issue), because we have been fed a number of gender essentialist narratives that women do things differently and without as much of the partisan acrimony – not that I necessarily believe it, given that Bergen herself is a pretty die-hard partisan. The added spoke in this wheel is the NDP’s House Leader, Peter Julian, whom I have it on good authority is unreasonable to work with at the best of times. When the tension between the House Leaders boiled over into Motion 6 in the spring (and the subsequent The Elbowing that broke that camel’s back), I have little doubt that it had a lot to do with Dominic LeBlanc losing his patience with both Scheer and Julian (who totally insisted that they weren’t even being obstructionist, which I find a bit dubious). So will they be able to work together to push through what promises to be an extremely busy legislative agenda? Or will Bardish Chagger need to start resorting to procedural tactics to ensure that bills can get passed without endless Second Reading debates that the opposition refuses to let collapse so that they can get to committee (which was constant in the previous parliament when the NDP were official opposition). I’m not going to make any predictions, but it is something that I am very curious to watch as the era of “openness and cooperation” rolls along.

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Roundup: Leitch the desperate, hollow shell

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Apparently we’re still talking about Kellie Leitch and her “anti-Canadian values” screening, because why not? The Canadian Press kicked off the day by putting Leitch’s assertion that it would be akin to “asking some simple questions” to their Baloney Metre™, and lo and behold, the experts they spoke to pretty much laughed it out of the room, earning Leitch’s supposition a rare “full of baloney” rating. It seems that “a few simple questions” just teaches people how to lie to give the “right” answers, and that proper interviews with people trained to know whether people are lying is so prohibitively expensive that it’s never going to happen. So there’s that. Much later in the day, Jason Kenney decided to weigh in from Alberta, and pretty much eviscerated Leitch by saying that this position is a new one for her that she never articulated before in cabinet or caucus, and that she doesn’t understand the nuance around the issue. But then again, we’ve pretty much established that Leitch lacks any real semblance of emotional quotient or self-awareness, so her inability to grasp nuance should not be a surprise to anyone.

Meanwhile, Peter Loewen reminds us that we’re not as perfectly tolerant as we like to believe, and he has the data to prove it, which is why Leitch’s message will find a home in places. Scott Reid looks over the record of Leitch’s campaign manager, who helped Rob Ford get elected, and notes that by this point, Leitch is less of a candidate than a strategy in human form (which is kind of what Jason Kenney is hinting at when noting that this position is all new for Leitch). Paul Wells notes the low ceiling for the kind of rhetoric that Leitch is now taking on, and while he sees the strategic value in such a position, he also offers some ideas for better choices than Leitch. Tabatha Southey offers her particular acid take on the Leitch situation, and her insistence on digging so much that she is in danger of becoming a mole person. And of course, there’s the At Issue panel looking at Leitch as well.

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