Tag Archives: Justin Trudeau

Roundup: Term limit nonsense

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As we gear up for the Conservatives’ policy convention this weekend, one of the policy resolutions on the table is term limits for the party leader, which they propose to cap at eight years should the leader become Prime Minister. While this is an example of the grassroots showing some displeasure at Stephen Harper and his stranglehold over the party for well over a decade, it’s a terrible bit of Americana that people keep trying to import into our system as though it were a panacea to problems that exist here. They’re entirely wrong, however, but they keep trying. Over in the National Post, John Pepall argues that term limits are fundamentally undemocratic because they prevent people from having the choice of electing a popular leader for as long as they like, but while he has a point, I would stress that term limits in a Canadian context are a complete lack of understanding of our system of Responsible Government, which rests on the principle of confidence. After all, term limits are largely unnecessary because our system can dump a prime minister at any point by means of a vote of no confidence – something that can’t happen in the American system, as they don’t have a system based on confidence, but rather on defined terms, with the relief valve of recall elections in some cases. Otherwise, they are forced to wait out a term until the next election, while in a Westminster system, it can happen with a snap vote in the Commons. Of course, we do have the problem in this country particularly around being able to dump a leader who is not the PM because we have moved away from the caucus selecting the leader, to systems of either delegated conventions, one-member-one-vote, or the latest Liberal abomination, the “supporter category.” Caucus selection kept leaders accountable to them, and it kept them in check, whereas they accumulated more presidential powers as the base that elected them grew larger and they felt more empowered by their “democratic mandate.” While leaders can still lose membership reviews by party members (witness Thomas Mulcair), a caucus can still pressure a leader to resign these days by simply making their dissatisfaction public. In most cases, like with Alison Redford, all it takes is a couple of MPs/MLAs with enough of a spine to go public, and the leader sees the writing on the wall. In cases where the leader digs in their heels – as with Greg Selinger in Manitoba – it can become the death knell for that particular government, as we witnessed in that province’s election just weeks ago. But all of these upsets were accomplished without term limits, and respecting the principles of Responsible Government. Trying to graft on Americana will just turn our system into some kind of monstrous chimera that won’t actually be able to function – hell, the changes we’ve made to leadership selection processes so far have already damaged and warped our system and need to be undone. But if Conservative Party members want to actually respect our system of government, they’ll vote down this cockamamie policy proposal with extreme prejudice, and hopefully we won’t have to speak of this again.

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Roundup: A curious silence

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After a long weekend of seeing waaaay too much social media abuse hurled at Ruth Ellen Brosseau regarding The Elbowing, and both the Liberals and Conservatives coming to her defence, I am struck that no NDP MP has come forward to take any responsibility for the apocalyptic rhetoric they hurled at the Prime Minister on Brosseau’s behalf that she is now being blamed for, even though she didn’t actually say anything other than to acknowledge that yes, she was elbowed. Also, I remain bemused that people continue to muse about Justin Trudeau’s “anger management issues” and temper when it was Thomas Mulcair who exploded into a rage ball as it all happened, which forced MPs around to separate him physically from Trudeau. Also, amusingly, an Ontario newspaper took the Beaverton fake news article about the NDP showing up the day after The Elbowing in wheelchairs and neck braces as being true. So there’s that. Meanwhile, we’ve got a week for tempers to cool and to see if the House Leaders can come up with any kind of schedule regarding the remaining legislation that needs to be passed while ensuring the opposition feels they’ve had enough time to debate the assisted dying bill, while also noting that it looks like Parliament will sit extra late this year as the Senate contemplates those bills with likely amendments, and keeping in mind that President Obama is due to address a joint session of Parliament on June 29th – which is after the June 23rd date that the Commons was supposed to rise for the summer.

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Roundup: Aftermath of The Elbowing

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In the aftermath of The Elbowing, the opposition decided to use it as leverage to their advantage. The morning was spent, first with a third apology by Trudeau, followed by endless debate on a privilege motion about the incident, and because privilege motions take precedence over everything else, it essentially held the Commons hostage to endless lamentations that compared Trudeau’s actions to those of a domestic abuser and drunk driver. No, seriously. The intent was clear, however – this procedural gamesmanship would keep up until the government dropped Motion 6 – their procedural nuclear option – and eventually the government did. Of course, because they backed down after showing their hand, it means that they’re going to have a much more difficult time controlling the debate in the future, with the likes of Peter Julian and Andrew Scheer opposite Dominic LeBlanc in House Leaders’ meetings, and future attempts by the government to move their agenda forward will be hard to handle as any future attempts will be met with more emotional blackmail, and already it now looks like the assisted dying bill is going to miss its June 6th deadline because of the government’s fumbling and the opposition shenanigans.

Reactions to The Elbowing were also all over the pundit class, but possibly the one that needs to be read first comes from Ashley Csanady, who reminds us that comparing Trudeau to Jian Ghomeshi after this kind of incident is really an insult to actual survivors of violence. Kate Heartfield notes that this incident is unlikely to damage Trudeau’s brand, while Matt Gurney sees the incident as one where Trudeau was trying to stay true to brand and show Decisive Leadership™ when it all went wrong. Susan Delacourt sees this as a teachable moment for the PM and his impatience with dissent in the Commons (which I don’t entirely buy given how much leeway he’s given dissent in his own caucus), and Tim Harper also sees a disdain for dissent coming out of Trudeau. Paul Wells sees this as the culmination of the corner the Liberals have painted themselves into, promising infinite debate on an infinite number of bills, while Don Braid sees flashes of Trudeau’s father and his infamous temper in this episode.

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Roundup: The elbowing

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I can scarcely express just how stupid things got yesterday because everyone needed to rush to score points. But here we are. Starting back at the beginning, the government decided to put a motion on the Notice Paper that was basically the nuclear option of time allocation measures – essentially suspending all avenues by which the opposition could propose dilatory motions until the Commons rises for the summer, so that they can get C-14 and a few other timely pieces of legislation passed. And the opposition freaked out.

Nobody is quite sure why the Liberals resorted to such tactics, but my working theory is that the closed-door House Leaders’ meetings have degenerated to being unworkable (not an unlikely theory considering that my sources told me in the previous parliament that Peter Julian was impossible to work with), and Monday’s surprise vote after the NDP lied about the motions they were moving that day broke the trust of the Liberals, who had been attempting to work amiably with them. It’s also possible that putting this motion on the Notice Paper was as the nuclear option – the threat to hold over their heads in order to try and force them to come to the table with reasonable requests for timelines on debates. Dominic LeBlanc went so far as to suggest that rather than constraining debate, they were trying to allow for more under this motion, not that the opposition believed him. Temperatures got raised, and QP was one of the most heated of the current session.

After QP and the Komagata Maru apology, the procedural games started up again, including a privilege motion from Julian about how terribly draconian these tactics were. Fast forward a couple of hours to the time allocation vote on C-14, and the NDP apparently decided to play the childish tactic of physically blocking the Conservative whip from being able to walk down the aisle. The NDP claimed they were just “milling about,” but people milling about don’t all stand facing the same direction, and both Elizabeth May and Andrew Leslie have confirmed that there were shenanigans being played. And it would seem that Justin Trudeau had lost his patience by this point, possibly because Christy Clark was waiting in his office for a meeting he was already late for, and he still had a Komagata Maru apology reception to speak at, also late for. And so he did something completely boneheaded – he got up, went to the NDP blockade, and reached through to grab the Conservative whip and pull him through (which he apparently didn’t appreciate either), and in the course of that, accidentally elbowed Ruth Ellen Brosseau. Moments later, he went back to apologise to her as she fled the chamber – apparently flustered and unable to cope – when Thomas Mulcair began screaming at Trudeau and jabbing in his direction, when suddenly MPs from both sides of the aisle went to pull them apart before things got physical. It was all over in seconds, and Trudeau apologised for his actions.

Not well enough, apparently, as he did it again later when Brosseau reappeared in the chamber, but it doesn’t seem to matter because opposition MPs were now in point-scoring mode. Niki Ashton immediately got to her feet to decry that Trudeau had violated the “safe space” of the Chamber and NDP MPs started likening the incident to domestic violence, bullying and physical intimidation, and Julian talked about how his aunt was beaten to death. No, seriously. The Conservatives soon after began piling on, smelling blood in the water, and it devolved from there. Outside the chamber, Scheer and Julian took to the microphones to ramp up the spin, Julian deciding to drop the hints that there were “rumours” to the fact that Trudeau has some kind of history of violence, because there were points to be scored. And the faux outrage dominated the Twitter Machine as “fearful” MPs registered their shock and horror at what they’d witnessed. And it was just so stupid that I can’t even. Suffice to say, this looks like it’s going to boil down into privilege hearings in the Procedure and House Affairs committee, and we’re going to be subjected to weeks of un-clever “sunny ways” references, and suggestions that Trudeau is apparently unfit for office. It’s a good thing that next week is a constituency week, but I fear for what the final stretch of sitting weeks is going to be like if tempers are this frayed this early. I suspect it’s going to get really ugly from here.

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Roundup: Whose vanity project was bigger?

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Day after day in Question Period, we are being subjected to this constant narrative by the Conservative questions that the government – and more specifically Justin Trudeau – is just one big vanity project. Apparently there isn’t a day that goes by that Trudeau or one of his ministers isn’t trying to burnish their own profile, apparently, and the facts aren’t going to dissuade them from this narrative. The State Dinner in Washington? Apparently the president inviting Trudeau’s mother and in-laws was vanity. Trudeau stopping by that boxing gym in New York while already there on business, and seeing disadvantaged youth there? Vanity. Chrystia Freeland’s appearance on Bill Maher’s show while in LA to talk trade with local officials? Vanity. And now it’s the Destination Canada video that Trudeau appears in (never mind that it’s not about him)? Vanity. You can see where this is going. And the new word that Candice Bergen has been dropping to complete this narrative? That all of this supposed self-promotion proves that Trudeau is like a Kardashian. Oh, it’s not an insult, she suggests disingenuously, because the Kardashians work hard at promoting their brand, so obviously that’s what Trudeau is trying to do. So the obvious question to the Conservatives is that if Trudeau is simply busy with all manner of vanity projects, then what the hell was Stephen Harper’s web show 24/Seven? How is that not his own personal reality show à la Keeping Up With the Kardashians? While Trudeau has a personal photographer (Harper had at least two), he isn’t filming his exploits to promote himself under the guise of “a day in the life of a prime minister” or using taxpayer dollars to do it. But the Conservatives haven’t gotten past this notion that because Trudeau is photogenic and charismatic – something that Stephen Harper was not – it must mean that he’s not a Very Serious Person™. The problem is that the electorate didn’t buy that narrative during the election, and Trudeau has proven that he’s got the chops to do the heavy lifting for the job, he’s in the House of Commons more than Stephen Harper ever was when he was PM, he’s taking questions from the media, he’s made himself available, he’s answering questions, and I daresay he’s been more focused on the Canadian brand than his own personal one, but hey – it’s all self-promotion and “vanity.” It’s completely tiresome. That’s not to say that there isn’t a problem with the way Trudeau is using his popularity within his own party to turn it into a cult of personality, and there is a very big problem brewing as he is looking to reshape his party’s constitution to solidify that. That’s a huge problem. But it’s not something that the Conservatives can go after him in QP, and rather than try and find something of substance that they can hammer him on, we are subjected to this inanity instead.

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Roundup: The Sophie Grégoire Trudeau problem

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The issue of assistants for Sophie Grégoire Trudeau has become a bit ugly in social media, and overblown in the political arena while opposition parties on both sides of the spectrum try to cast the prime minister’s family as being these out-of-touch elites (some of it completely speciously, as the Conservatives try to equate Trudeau’s statement about not needing government funds for childcare and suddenly billing for nannies was hypocritical, despite the fact that he wasn’t the leader of a G7 nation before), because if there’s nothing that this country loves, it’s cheap outrage. And really, that’s what a lot of this is, combined with some garden variety sexist expectations that she should be a doting wife and mother in the home, taking care of meals and childcare on her own without any public profile. But before we delve into it further, a couple of important reminders.

Seriously, for the love of all the gods on Olympus, stop calling her the First Lady. We don’t have a First Lady in Canada because we have a royal family, and the closest equivalent – aside from Prince Philip as the Royal Consort – is the somewhat antiquated term of the Chatelaine of Rideau Hall.

No, this is completely wrong. We don’t elect governments or parties in this country. We elect 338 MPs, who come together in a parliament that forms a government. So in essence, we did elect the family that came along with the MP who was able to form a government.

And this really is the important point. We have a constitutional monarchy so that the royal family takes on the ceremonial and celebrity functions and prevents the Head of Government from becoming a cult of personality. Unfortunately, in this age of media and social media, where the Trudeaus are consider bona fide celebrities in their own right, it has created a kind of cult of personality (which is only worsened by the fact that the fact that Trudeau was elected by a nebulous “supporter class” means he is accountable to nobody and he knows it). So when the public comes looking for Grégoire Trudeau to do speaking engagements and to do the kind of celebrity outreach that members of the royal family do so well in the UK (but certainly less so here because of their relative absence), how are we supposed to react? What expectations do we put on her as the spouse of the Head of Government, who has no defined role? While I have no objections to the nannies or single assistant (Trudeau is prime minister of a G7 country, and demanding that his spouse do all of the domestic work is frankly odious, particularly given her diplomatic expectations), I find myself torn about the need for additional help. I have no doubt that she needs it, because she has chosen to parlay her celebrity toward charitable causes. And it’s less about the taxpayer’s money that rubs me the wrong way, but the fact that this is getting uncomfortable under our system of government and constitutional traditions. That we have a prime minister who has formed a kind of cult of personality is very uncomfortable, but it’s not a problem with an easy solution, short of insisting that members of the royal family start spending more time on our shores to do the work of the celebrity face of our constitutional order. Is the solution to have the party pay for her added assistants? Maybe. Or to charge speaking fees on a cost-recovery basis? One can imagine the howls out outrage that an “elite” is charging charities money already. There’s not an easy answer, but the discomfort around the larger problem of where our system is headed is something that we should be talking about. Unfortunately, that conversation is being drowned out by cheap outrage and the June and Ward Cleaver crowd, which is only making this whole exercise reek.

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Roundup: Who to blame for short timelines

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Our friend Kady O’Malley penned a column over the weekend about how anyone upset about the tight timeline of the assisted dying legislation should be upset at the fixed election date instead of the Supreme Court for imposing the deadline. And she’s right, but I’m not particularly enthused about her suggestion that the election date be moved to earlier in the year instead of October, as that date pretty much wipes out the fall sitting of Parliament. I mean, that is a valid point, but if you were to ask me, the real suggestion would be to simply eliminate the fixed election date as we already have a constitutional requirement that elections be held every five years, whereas the fixed date is a particular bit of Americanisation that is supposed to provide stability but just winds up making the whole system worse off, from turning Question Period into an unrelenting series of election ads, to simply changing the government’s calculations on policy to suit that date rather than supposedly helping the opposition by giving them more predictability when it comes to election timing. It didn’t, incidentally, stop the speculation of early election calls since pretty much every media outlet continued to ask whether there would be an early call (as is permissible, since the legislation can’t actually bind the powers of the Governor General), so it’s not like it changed that conversation any. That all being said, I would like to note that while many people quite rightly point out that there was no obligation on the Supreme Court to give the government that year (plus the extra four months) to come up with a bill, but could rather have struck down that prohibition immediately and we would have had few ill-effects, I will point out that without a deadline, MPs would simply keep putting off the legislation under the constant plaintive wails that it’s “deeply personal” and “a difficult subject.” Our MPs, in the event you haven’t noticed, are a lot that really are pretty lacking when it comes to moral courage to deal with difficult things. Instead, they wait for people to bring it to the courts in order to be “forced” to deal with it, and if you look at the pattern from the last decade or so, their response is to half-ass some rushed legislation in response, decry the courts for forcing them into such a compromise position, and leave it for it all to be challenged in court once again. That we have a new government doesn’t seem to have changed the pattern too much, with overly cautious legislation that doesn’t appear to meet the test laid out by the Supreme Court in the Carter decision, while MPs fall all over themselves to declare that it’s a “deeply personal” issue while wailing plaintively that there are no provisions for more palliative care in a bill that is about changing Criminal Code prohibitions. So rather than blaming the fixed election date (which is a valid position), I choose instead to blame our rather spineless crop of MPs, who have mostly chosen to complain about the lot they’ve been given rather than rise to the occasion.

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Roundup: Talking out the clock needlessly

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As you may have heard, Conservative MPs refused to let debate collapse on Mauril Bélanger’s national anthem bill yesterday, not allowing it to come up for a vote as had been hoped in order to fast-track the bill through the process owing to Bélanger’s condition. While this has been described as a “filibuster,” it’s not quite, but it was dickish behaviour, make no mistake – particularly the fact that all of the Conservative MPs were making the same points over and over again rather than offering any new criticism of the bill (with such novel excuses that it would be a slippery slope – references to God would be next in line, and woe be the age of political correctness, and so on). As a quick explanation, private members’ business cannot be filibustered because it is all automatically time allocated. Under the standing orders, each private members’ bill or motion gets two hours of debate – each hour separated by the precedence list of 30 items, meaning about six sitting weeks – before it goes to a vote. If bills pass the second reading vote, they go to committee for a couple of hours of study before they get another two hours of debate at report stage and third reading (again, separated by the precedence list of 30 items), and then they head to the Senate, where there is no time allocation and they will often get more scrutiny – particularly at committee – but government business taking priority means that they can sometimes languish there for months. In this particular case, there was a hope that debate could collapse and there would be no need for a second hour of debate, but they also requested that they could go straight into the second hour, but the Conservatives denied consent to do so. After all, they had planes to catch back to their ridings. If Bélanger’s health deteriorates further and he is forced to resign his seat – and he did come to the debate directly from the hospital – then it would be possible for another MP to take on the bill in his stead, but that tends to require unanimous consent, and if the Conservatives continue to want to be dickish about this, then they can deny it and the bill will die without its sponsor present. And because this is a private members’ bill, no other MP can launch a similar bill in this parliament, since there are rules around debating the same bill twice. The danger for those Conservatives, however, is that the Liberals can turn around and put it into a government bill and put it through the process that way, which gives them all manner of other tools to use to push it through – particularly on the Senate side. And while nobody is arguing that the bill should pass just because of Bélanger’s health, the argument is that it should have come to a vote so that it could pass or fail at second reading. While Conservatives argue that they have a right to talk out the clock, the fact that they kept repeating themselves is a sign that this was a dilatory tactic and designed to be dickish, which is what has enraged a number of Bélanger’s supporters. And really, it’s unnecessary because it looks like they’re bullying a dying man, and no good can come of it. We’ll see if anyone is willing to trade their upcoming slot in the Order of Precedence to move Bélanger’s second hour of debate up so the vote can be accelerated, but it shouldn’t have been necessary.

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Roundup: A rare apology

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A trio of Justin Trudeau-related items in the news today, which makes me want to look at them together. The first incident of note was actually last in chronological order, but to me it seemed most significant, which is the fact that during Question Period yesterday, Trudeau stood up and apologised for having told reporters on Wednesday that opposition party obstruction was to blame for why a committee on electoral reform was not yet up and running, and pledged that he was still serious about the topic. I’m not sure that we ever saw Stephen Harper apologise, nor would we ever see it because that was a man who was not only determined to always be seen to be right, but he also had a particularly obstinate streak that made him dig his heels in rather than be proven to be wrong. Most often this was around the inappropriate behaviours of cabinet ministers, and rather than have them step down over wrongdoing, Harper would keep them in position well past the time that the heat was on them, and only shuffle them once the attention was elsewhere so it didn’t look like he was capitulating to demands of the reporters. Trudeau on the other hand owned up to what he had said, apologised, promised to do better, and even applauded when the MP who called him out made a slightly clever dig about it in his follow-up question. It was a show of humility and accountability that we are unused to seeing here. The second incident of note was after his speech on Fort McMurray at the start of the day, during Statements by Ministers (a practice in Routine Proceedings that the Conservatives had virtually allowed to fall into complete disuse). Rona Ambrose rose to give remarks in reply, and got emotional during it, and once she finished speaking, Trudeau was quick to cross the aisle to give her a quick hug – again, something that cold fish Harper was loathe to do, and only once gave awkward hugs around speeches related to either an MP’s passing or the attack on Parliament Hill (I forget which and tried to find a reference but couldn’t – forgive me). Trudeau remains a master of the humanizing gesture that helps to civilise politics in a way that we have become unused to after a decade of angry sound and fury. The third item of note had to do with a point of order raised after QP, when Blake Richards accused Trudeau of sticking his tongue out during a question raised by Diane Watts about P3 projects. Nobody but Richards seems to have witnessed this, but we do know that Trudeau does occasionally possess an irreverent side. Did he stick his tongue out? Maybe. Is it the end of the world if he did? Hardly, and in the theatrics of QP, it’s a bit tiresome but does raise the spectre of the “fuddle duddle” incident, if only less profane.

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Roundup: A pointless procedural dust-up

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The shine has come off around the medical assistance in dying bill, as the government decided that enough was enough, and it was time to send it to committee. So they invoked time allocation, and not surprisingly, there was all manner of outcry about how terrible this was, and Conservatives like Jason Kenney equivocating, insisting that they never employed time allocation on such sensitive life and death matters as this (ignoring things like safe injection sites or laws around prostitution as also being life and death matters for those that it affects). Kenney’s later assertions about what this bill will do were also…fanciful to say the least.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/727954797190479872

I will say that I have little sympathy for MPs who railed about the government cutting off debate, after two nights of midnight sittings and over 84 MPs having spoken to the bill. This is second reading debate, which is the principle of the bill. And I’ve listened to enough speeches to know that they all basically say “this is a very personal issue,” and “What about palliative care?” with minor variations throughout. The concern trolling about the conscience rights of doctors is also in there, never mind that this is a bill dealing with the criminal code and that issue is one for the provinces who deliver healthcare and the provincial certification bodies for physicians. There remains committee stage debate – which is the real meat of the bill – report stage once it comes back, and third reading debate. If MPs still have things to say, there remain plenty of opportunities, and the government also pointed out that some MPs had been up to speak several times on the bill, meaning that there couldn’t possibly be that many more MPs who needed to speak. And if you’ll forgive my particular cynicism, how many more times do we need to hear MPs read those same sentiments in the record over and over again? The government was already generous in the amount of time it gave to debate second reading – accusing them of somehow stifling debate or invoking closure were both patently wrong and false. And so, once all of the procedural wrangling and grousing was done, it passed second reading by a wide margin. Liberal MP Robbie Falcon-Outlette was the sole member of that party to vote against, and he went on Power & Politics to make a bunch of patently false equivalences between this bill and the suicide crisis in places like Attawapiskat, with a host of intellectually dishonest arguments strewn along the way. The bill also began pre-study in the Senate, where I expect it will get a much tougher ride, and there remains a very real chance that even if the bill passes the Commons unscathed that it will not do so in the Senate, and that it may not pass by deadline.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/727990740576403456

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