Tag Archives: Justin Trudeau

Roundup: Mindless PR propaganda

Posted on by

There are times when will indulge my masochistic streak. Yesterday was one of those days, when I took a deep breath, girded my loins, and read that Broadbent Institute “report” on Proportional Representation. And then proceeded to roll my eyes and sigh the whole way through it. To say that it’s an intellectual exercise would be an insult to critical thinking or, well, actual intelligence. No, it was but a mere collection of platitudes masquerading as serious argument (and it should not surprise me considering the source). If you too want an exercise in masochism, or you desperately want to hate-read it, it’s here, but I wouldn’t waste my time. The highlights consist of “OMG First-Past-the-Post is old!” and a bunch of charts that show how terrible “false majorities” are, except that there is no such thing as a “false majority” because the popular vote figure is a logical fallacy that neither reflects how the system is constructed, nor how elections are run. In fact, nowhere in the document does it actually give a proper recounting of how our system works, where you have 338 separate-but-simultaneous elections that each decide on who occupies a single seat to form a parliament, and that parliament determines who forms government based on who can command the confidence of the Commons. Instead, it calls FPTP elections “horse races” while proportional representation is “sharing the pie” (not how the system works – at all), and then talks at length about “fairness.” It talks about “wasted votes” as if they were a Thing as opposed to an expression by sore losers for whom votes only count if the person they voted for wins. It makes a bunch of bullshit platitudes about how PR will magically increase voter turnout (not true) and ignores that declining voter turnout is a widespread problem across all democracies regardless of electoral system. Accountability? Apparently not an issue because you have all kinds of parties to vote for! And any criticisms of PR? Brushed off and not actually explored. The worse sin of all, however, is the way in which it treats the political process, as though the vote were the end-all-and-be-all of engagement. False. Completely and utterly false, and that’s part of the problem that the magical thinking of PR advocates in general. You see, our system starts with joining a party, where you then participate in policy discussion leading up to resolutions at biennial policy conventions, and in participating in nomination races for candidates. Riding associations act as liaisons with caucus members to relay concerns, even if your riding is not represented by your party of choice, and one actively participates in the system. The ballot box is but one small facet of that process. But most people don’t know this because they aren’t taught it in schools, and PR advocates prey on this ignorance to push for their own magical solutions to perceived problems without a proper understanding of the ecosystem or the mechanics. So no, unless you’re going to represent the actual system, then no, you’re not having an honest discussion about PR, and that’s exactly what this report was – dishonest, jejune, and a sad waste of everyone’s time.

https://twitter.com/fatbertt/status/705081823639031808

https://twitter.com/fatbertt/status/705082136756424705

https://twitter.com/fatbertt/status/705083872577507328

Continue reading →

Roundup: Go knock doors

Posted on by

While I’ve pretty much said my piece on the Manning Conference, one last headline caught my eye yesterday, which was the “Traditional campaigns dead! It’s a digital world now!” variety, which made me roll my eyes a bit, but here it is. The “experts” – all American – talk about how Facebook and digital ads are where it’s at instead of TV advertising, but it seems to me like they missed entirely what happened during the last federal election – you know, something that the Conservatives might have a vested interest in actually learning from their mistakes in, rather than what is going on south of the border, with their utterly insane primary season and unlimited corporate and private money. Because seriously, if they paid attention to what the Liberals did here, it was actually a lot of traditional campaigning, which was door-knocking. Yes, they flooded social media with their “days of action,” which featured candidates and their teams – wait for it – door-knocking. There wasn’t a series of YouTube or Facebook ads that won the election for the Liberals – in fact, the only commercial that anyone remembers is the one with Trudeau on the escalator, and mostly because everyone tried to mock it (not all of it effectively). How often in the last decade did we hear about the Conservatives’ fearsome electoral machine with their CIMS database, and how that was helping them cut swaths though campaigns based on the smiley and frowney faces of voter identification? It didn’t win them the election. Yes, the Liberals rebuilt their own voter identification database (“Liberalist”), but again, what was it used for? Door-knocking, and canvassing donations, but it also bears noting that the Liberals did not spend the most money, disproving that money is what wins elections. So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll take the words of these American “experts” that the Conservatives enlisted with a grain of salt, while the traditional shoe-leather method of direct voter engagement and going from door-to-door is putting in the hard work that won a majority of seats.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The expanded deficit

Posted on by

The big news yesterday was of course Bill Morneau’s fiscal update, in which he said that the deficit was slated to rise to $18.4 billion – and then everyone freaked out. But if you take a breath, you’ll see that in there is about $6 billion of wiggle room (or “fudge” as Andrew Coyne called it) when they adjusted down the growth projections of private sector economists – which have been particularly optimistic. As well, much of the current-year deficit is driven by lower revenues rather than new spending, despite what the Conservatives say, which is why the Liberals thought it clever to remark in QP yesterday in response to questions about the deficit that the Conservatives and NDP would be cutting all over the place in order to keep a balanced budget (to which Lisa Raitt, on the evening politics shows, rather indignantly replied “You don’t know that.”)

https://twitter.com/stephen_tapp/status/701758020103983104

https://twitter.com/stephen_tapp/status/701799653826813952

As part of the changed fiscal picture, the “savings” the previous government booked for changing public service sick leave is now back in books (not that it would have actually achieved savings in the first place). Stephen Gordon wonders if spending to spur growth is the right policy when this period of low growth may not actually be temporary, but rather might be the new normal. Kevin Milligan on the other hand notes that because it’s so cheap to borrow right now that going into deficit won’t really cost as much in the future, as we are not in the same situation as we were 25 years ago. Maclean’s charts the worsening fiscal situation. Kevin Page has questions about the “holes” in the fiscal update. Morneau also hired Dominic Barton as a growth consultant, which likely means a focus on Asia.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/701796830795931648

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/701797622537986049

Continue reading →

Roundup: A vote for support

Posted on by

We have the motion on the Order Paper now for the debate and eventual vote on the newly refocused mission in Syria and Iraq, and to the relief of those of us who care about things like Crown Prerogative and the powers of the executive, it’s crafted simply in the language of supporting the mission. This is critical, because asking for authorisation is a giant can of worms that nobody really should want to even contemplate opening, but even with this language, it’s going to cause headaches going forward. To recap, asking for authorization is something that launders the prerogative and thus the government’s accountability. When something goes wrong, they can shrug and say “the House voted for the mission,” and to varying degrees, the Harper government did this, particularly with relationship to Afghanistan. These non-binding votes are a rather unseemly bit of political theatre that purports to put the question to MPs – because apparently they need to have buy-in when we send our men and women in uniform into danger, or some such nonsense – and it gives parties like the NDP a chance to thump their chests about peacekeeping and pandering to pacifistic notions (and does anyone seriously buy that nobody is trying to stop the flow of money, arms and fighters to ISIS without Canada butting to the front of the line to finger-wag at them?), and parties like the Conservatives a chance to rail that they were doing so much more when they were in charge (when they weren’t), or when they were in charge, to pat themselves on the back for everything they were doing (when really, it tended to be a bare minimum at best, or a symbolic contribution at worst). Of course, all of this could be done with a simple take-note debate without a vote, which is how it should be, because a vote implies authorisation, and that’s how the NDP have read each and every vote in the past, and they will loudly remind everyone in QP and elsewhere about it. Trudeau has been trying to keep expectations measured by saying that they recognise the role of the executive in making these decisions – but he went and proposed a vote anyway, muddling the role of MPs in this situations like these. That role, to remind you, is to hold the government to account, so if you’re going to have a vote on a military mission, then one might as well make it a confidence vote because foreign policy and control of the military is at the heart of the Crown’s powers. (These authorisation votes that aren’t confidence measures are playing out in the UK right now, which is making a mess of their own system, for the record). Trudeau should have known better than to continue this pattern of confusion and left it at a take-note debate, like it should be. A vote, whether it’s an actual authorisation or just a declaration of support, only serves to make the waters murky, which we need our governments to stop doing before they do lasting harm to our system of Responsible Government.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/698151173568729088

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/698151589626966016

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/698151991277723648

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/698152397277917184

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/698153619657461760

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/698154371541032961

Continue reading →

Roundup: 100 days without unicorns

Posted on by

We have reached 100 days since the election, so expect to find any number of analyses and think-pieces about the “milestone,” like this one here from CBC. The Canadian Press had their enumerated list of what promises have been kept, what hasn’t (like promised gun-marking measures), and what’s in progress, which is handy to have. And while Trudeau has come out and said that perhaps they won’t meet the deficit targets made during the election, the economy being what it is, hay is certainly being made over it – particularly from the Conservatives, who have pounced on that singular National Bank forecast that said that perhaps the deficit will surpass $90 million over four years. Of course, nobody knows if that will be the case, particularly if the stimulus the government is pouring into the economy does manage to kickstart growth, and when the economy grows, deficits shrink on their own. That said, everybody leaping onto this report before we’ve even seen a budget is pretty ridiculous. The NDP’s release on the 100 days, however, was a bit more…fanciful. It contained a laundry list of woe, from their mischaracterisation of the tax cut, the fact that other promised spending hasn’t happened yet, the continued deliberate conflation of signing versus ratification of the TPP, the lack of new GHG targets or action on legalising marijuana – all giving the impression that such things can happen at the snap of a finger, without debate, without a budget, and apparently all by Order-in-Council rather than with legislation in many cases, is a bit ridiculous. The only valid point they do make is about parliamentary secretaries and committees (and as discussed earlier in the week, their own record of centralisation in this area is nothing to be proud of). The fact that they came out with such a list full of dubious complaints seems to be a return to true third-party status, where they can rail into the wind without the benefit of a reality check, belies a particular lack of lessons having been learned in the previous election or self-awareness about what they’re saying. Nobody is expecting them to roll over and applaud the government – but at least make the criticisms valid ones, rather than complaining that they didn’t have enough unicorns in the parade. The opposition has a serious job in holding the government to account. It’s a pity that our two main opposition parties seem incapable of taking that job seriously, as demonstrated yesterday.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Application versus consultation

Posted on by

The head of the new Senate Appointment Advisory Board appeared at the Procedure and House Affairs committee yesterday, and has raised a few issues about this new process that are a bit troubling, which has to do with applications – rather, that there seems to be an emphasis on application rather than nominations arising out of consultations. In particular, the ability for people to apply for a seat on their own seems to be at odds with some of the design of the advisory process. Emmett Macfarlane notes that this wasn’t how he envisioned the process when he was asked to help design it, and that it not only overly bureaucratizes the process, but it sets it up for a particularly unsavoury sort to want to apply, which I concur with. Why is this important? Because we’ve only spent the past number of months watching the trial of a certain Mike Duffy, who was well known for wanting desperately to become a senator for decades, and how he viewed such an appointment as a “taskless thanks” which would also provide him with all manner of perquisites – and witness how he managed to monetize all of his relationships as a result of his appointment, as we’ve witnessed in testimony. We also lived though the bizarre spectacle that was Bert Brown, “elected” senator whose self-appointed crusade for Senate reform comprised largely of unsolicited meetings with provinces to convince them of his plan (on the Senate’s dime), and taking to the op-ed pages to basically call his detractors Nazis (I’m not sure how else you take it when he reminds you of his family’s military service in WWII as a rebuttal). Some of the best senators we’ve seen are those who never expected an appointment, and who never would have sought office on their own – people like Roméo Dallaire. It’s also why I’m not sold on the NDP fear that this process will just be elites nominating elites – a broad enough consultation will bring people of accomplishment and expertise in a wide variety of fields than just academia. But at the same time, the Senate should be a place that rewards experience and expertise rather than being a repository for randoms, given their role to scrutinise legislation and act as the country’s premier think tank. I have a hard time seeing how hot dog vendors can fulfil those roles, no matter how many people they interact with in a day.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/695336557893431300

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/695341816439136261

Continue reading →

Roundup: 10 grievances aired

Posted on by

“It’s a new way to interview the prime minister!” CBC declared, as they promoted their latest gimmick – their “face-to-face” special with the prime minister, in which they selected ten Canadians from around the country to come to Ottawa, and each have a ten minute conversation with Justin Trudeau about whatever their issue is. I watched the one-hour special (not the individual interviews – sorry, but I try to have a life), and was underwhelmed. Why? Because it wasn’t actually interviewing the PM – it was ten people coming largely with a personal grievance to be aired.

While the CBC pats itself on the back about this little exercise, and good on them for trying it, I just felt like there actually wasn’t anything new here. That Trudeau agreed to do this wasn’t a surprise in the least – connecting with “ordinary Canadians” is his shtick. He spent the better part of the past three years doing just that. If the last guy agreed to do this – that would be news. Trudeau? Not so much. That it feeds into this toxic narrative that there is an “Ottawa bubble” that must be broken out of is also annoying, because it presumes that the higher-level discussions that happen here aren’t important or that they don’t matter to “ordinary Canadians” when everything that happens here does impact, whether they see it or not. And with these airing of grievances, what I saw demonstrated was an expectation from these “ordinary Canadians” that the prime minister must not only have facile solutions to complex problems – many of which are not even within his own jurisdiction – but that there was an expectation that he personally should be doing something for them, and for their personal situation. Is this the expectation that people have about the way that politics works? That there is some kind of entitlement that voters have for their problems to be solved if they complain to the people in office about them? Maybe this is a reflection of who the CBC chose for their ten people, and that it’s not more reflective of the broader population as a whole. Suffice to say, I came away from the whole thing feeling worse for having watched it, but then again, maybe I’m not the audience for these kinds of things.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Forcing internal reform

Posted on by

With the Senate back in session, the uncertainties of how it will operate in this new environment are starting to make themselves be seen. With each passing day, the lack of Senate Question Period becomes a little more awkward, and until new government legislation starts coming down the pipe, much of their debates right now are about just how they plan to organize themselves. Part of these are the debates about breached privileges – not only the continuation of the investigation of the prima facia breach from the previous parliament about the leak of the AG report, but also Senator Housakos’ complaint that the lack of a government representative doesn’t allow senators to properly do their jobs, and a new complaint today about how the rights of independent senators are being breached in the way that committees are currently organising themselves. In this case it was Senator Wallace, who recently left the Conservative caucus of his own volition, essentially complaining that he couldn’t get a committee assignment that he’d asked for (and the only one that was offered to him he turned down). And it’s already been raised in this parliament that the way committee assignments are determined are a problem for independent senators, and it’s a debate that needs to be had – particularly if there is to be a new batch of independent senators on the way in (though I don’t expect them all to remain independent, nor should they, really). And until some real work starts to land on the Senate’s docket, these kinds of organizational debates are going to dominate for the weeks to come, which may start to reshape how the organisation functions as a whole. If Trudeau did one thing in his non-constitutional Senate reform promise, it was to force the chamber to reform itself from within. One just hopes that the end result hasn’t broken it for the sake of better optics.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Cauliflower concerns

Posted on by

The NDP put out a press release yesterday, which was essentially an object lesson in precisely what not to do when trying to make hay out of a political issue. The issue – rising food prices, and in particular, the rising cost of fruits and vegetables, and the lament that cauliflower is now a “luxury item.” Err, except that it’s not. And worse, that its “inexplicable” rise in price is entirely explicable – there’s a drought in California, and then there was a frost, which reduced the supply, and the increased demand lately (because it’s a trendy food right now) means that, thanks to the basic laws of supply and demand, the price spiked for a few weeks. And lo, it’s come back down again. And let us not forget that fresh fruits and vegetables in the winter is actually a luxury that our parents pretty much never had. They attempted to use the release to highlight inequality – Mulcair put out a release a couple of days previous, lamenting that Trudeau didn’t bring up inequality during his speech at Davos – but most of the claims in the cauliflower release were spurious. Transportation costs are not increasing – the crashing price of oil means that the cost of fuel is coming down by quite a lot. And the lament that the December rate of inflation was 1.6 percent? Um, target inflation is two percent, so unless they have another target in mind, that might be a policy they want to put out there. Rising food costs also have a lot to do with the lower dollar, and if memory serves, the NDP were lamenting that the dollar was too high (no doubt because they felt it was depressing the manufacturing sector, never mind that there are deeper structural issues than just the dollar alone), and that’s the thing about a low dollar – that it reduces your purchasing power, particularly if the fresh fruits and vegetables that don’t grow in this country in the winter have to be imported. To cap it off, the release offers no actual suggestions for what they’d like to see – only a vague statement that the upcoming budget is an opportunity to do something about inequality. So what, pray tell, is up for offer? Socialist wealth redistribution? The government is already raising taxes on the wealthiest one percent and offering more transfers to poorer families. So in totality, one has to ask if there as any adult supervision in putting out this hot mess of a press release, because the evidence before us makes that assertion unlikely in the extreme.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Appointment board terms

Posted on by

The Order in Council relating to the new Senate appointment board was made public yesterday, and some of the details were tweeted out (as below, with commentary). Of note for me when you read the terms was that this interim process for the first five appointments will be done by engaging with civil society groups of various distinctions. The permanent process going forward will be the one that invites people to nominate others (or themselves) as vacancies come open.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/690289470709563392

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/690289727677829121

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/690290163809959937

Continue reading →