Supply day motions – also known as opposition day motions – can be tricky business, and unless the opposition party that moves it isn’t careful, they can wind up giving the government a free pass on supporting said motions without fear of consequence. Never mind that the point of supply day motions is to debate why the government should be denied supply (and hence confidence), these have largely turned into take-note debates on topics of the opposition’s choosing. These free pass motions happened with surprising regularity in the previous parliament, with the NDP frequently offering up mom-and-apple-pie motions that the Conservatives would obviously support the intent of, despite never having the intention to follow through with substantive action on, because hey, the motions are non-binding, and why not look like they support the idea of the motion? And lo and behold, the Conservatives offered up just such a motion around the Supreme Court of Canada, imploring the government to “respect the custom of regional representation” when making appointments to that court, “in particular, when replacing the retiring Justice Thomas Cromwell, who is Atlantic Canada’s representative on the Supreme Court.” While I will quibble with their use of “custom” as opposed to “constitutional convention” (which it really is at this point), this was one of those motions worded just loosely enough that the government could vote for it (and it did pass unanimously, as these kinds of motions often do), and should they go ahead and appoint a non-Atlantic justice to the court, they have room enough to turn around and give some kind of a nonsense excuse like “Oh, we felt that such-and-such diversity requirement was more needed at this point,” or “we felt that the Atlantic nominees were insufficiently bilingual,” or what have you. Or, as the talking points have been turning to, they will point to the number of Atlantic nominees on the short-list and said that they got equal opportunity and were not prejudiced against or some such, and make the merit argument. Suffice to say, there is more than enough wiggle room, and for a party that was so recently in government, the Conservative should have known better than to word a motion in a way that the government can support and later wiggle out of. This having been said, the government has been under enormous political pressure from the premiers regarding this Atlantic seat, so it is not inconceivable that this as a step in walking back from having the nominations being too open, but that remains to be seen.
Tag Archives: Maple Crown
Roundup: Say no to a Charter Rights Officer
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is leading a push for the creation of an independent Charter Rights Officer for Parliament, and that sound you hear is my head hitting my desk over and over again. Because no. We don’t need yet another officer of parliament. We really, really don’t.
What we need is for MPs – particularly the opposition – to stand up and actually do their jobs, rather than fobbing off their homework onto yet another officer, who is accountable to nobody, whose reports they can then wield like some kind of a cudgel while not actually fulfilling their own responsibilities as parliamentarians (which, I will remind you once again, is to hold the government to account). The proliferation of officers of parliament has so diminished the capacity of the opposition to do their gods damned jobs in this country that it’s embarrassing, and since the inception of the Parliamentary Budget Office, it’s only become so much more egregious because now they can ignore the Estimates cycle entirely (despite controlling the public purse being the inherent definition of what MPs are supposed to do, and how they hold governments to account).
Oh, but it’s hard! Oh, but why not cede this to subject matter experts like lawyers and judges? Oh, why don’t we just start pre-referring all bills to the Supreme Court of Canada while we’re at it and turn the dialogue between the Court and Parliament into a game of “Mother May I?” Honestly, would it kill MPs to actually debate policy, which Charter compliance is a big part of? Parliament has responsibilities to fulfil. Why don’t we actually make them do their jobs rather than finding yet another excuse for them to avoid doing it?
https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/780387082682458112
https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/780387432789401600
https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/780396554620469249
https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/780400062300090368
I mean, given the current state of stare decisis, and the fact that s.1 is basically all policy arguments/analysis…
— Benjamin Oliphant (@BenOliphant) September 26, 2016
Roundup: Begin Royal Tour 2016!
The Royal Tour has begun, which means we’re already being inundated with a bunch of ridiculous stories about “is it worth the price,” or treating the Canadian Royal Family as foreign curiosities when the Canadian Crown is a separate and distinct legal entity from the British Crown (well, unless you happen to follow the logic of the previous government, whose changes to the Royal Succession Act without going the constitutional amendment route put us on par with Tuvalu in terms of making our relationship with the Crown a subordinate one, but we’ll see if that survives the court challenges). Suffice to say, yes it’s entirely worth it because it’s a very small amount of money, and their touring for a week costs us less than it does for Obama to visit for an afternoon, they draw a lot of attention to a number of worthwhile causes that the Governor General never could, and hey, we’re a constitutional monarchy so it pays for us to act like one from time to time. And to all of those pundits who insist that it’s time that we “grow up” as a nation and “leave the Queen’s basement,” how’s that republic to the south of us doing when it comes to selecting a head of state? Yeah, I thought so.
Meanwhile, here are some photos from the arrival, along with a look at the symbolism of what Kate was wearing. The tour promises to focus on social issues like the environment, young families, and mental health issues. Sunday, they met with young mothers in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side battling addiction issues, before visiting the re-opened Coast Guard base at Kitsilano (which isn’t a dig at the previous government that closed the base at all). Later this week, they’ll visit the town of Bella Bella, which has managed to basically solve its suicide crisis.
https://twitter.com/adamscotti/status/779825920093728769
Roundup: A few more partial concessions
I’m about at the end of my patience with stories about moving expenses, just as news comes down that two more senior ministerial staffers have offered to partially reimburse their own expenses. This while we continue the smarmy remarks by the Conservatives who can’t decide if the perpetrators are cronies or millionaire BFFs, and the NDP perch on their sanctimony, and pundits across the nation clutch their pearls about how it doesn’t actually matter that all of these expenses were within the rules, that it’s all a matter of perception (which they incidentally are fuelling by the way in which these stories and columns are framed). Indeed, we have moralising columns mentioning entitlement, corruption, and how this puts things back on a “war footing.”
About the only salient bit of analysis that has been Robyn Urback’s (otherwise sarcastic) look at the Liberal damage control strategy pattern, which tends to be “ignore, defend, project, concede partial defeat.” And we did see elements of all of these, including the final two simultaneously as they not only had the partial concession of the repayments, but also the projection of looking at similar expenses within the Harper PMO, which they obviously spent Thursday night digging up from PCO records. And let’s be honest – as her first test, Bardish Chagger didn’t do much to help her cause when she would try to deflect with protestations that they were trying to help the middle class or building a strong team. (I will add that it may have been unfair for We The Media to castigate Trudeau for not giving the names of who the staffers were, given privacy considerations).
There was plenty of evidence or fact that Chagger could have used, from being more specific in pointing out the policies, or contextualising them as being a reflection of policies collectively negotiated with senior public servants (where changing policies could affect them), and most especially when the Conservatives were making cheap shots about the “personalised cash payments,” noting what those referred to precisely, which is not a payment in a brown envelope.
It's a taxable lump sum that is grossed up to mitigate tax impact. Any receipts you provide against that amount reduce 2/
— Rishi Maharaj (@9×19) September 22, 2016
It seems that it's a cash payout determined by how much of the cap on other entitlements the employee didn't use pic.twitter.com/8L6qfTr3nQ
— Rishi Maharaj (@9×19) September 23, 2016
so your package is: 1. a bunch of things the govt pays directly and 2. this personalized fund you can spend on whatever
— Rishi Maharaj (@9×19) September 23, 2016
But no, we didn’t get that, and instead of having a discussion based on fact, we got pabulum, and it feeds into this ugly and petty narrative that We The Media love to perpetuate, where we must reflect a nation that is so cheap that we must be mean-spirited about it (and I deeply suspect is part of our collective tendency toward tall poppy syndrome). I defy you find a single person who wouldn’t claim moving expenses that they were legitimately entitled to. But instead, I’m getting people barking at me over the Twitter Machine that these staffers should be volunteers, and that it’s some kind of awful crime that they get reasonably well compensated for doing a damned difficult job that most people wouldn’t want to go anywhere near. This is the kind of nonsense that we shouldn’t be feeding, and yet we can’t help ourselves because cheap outrage is such a quick and easy high, but like most highs, it leaves us empty and worse off in the long run.
Roundup: Productivity has context
Parliament resumes today, and it’s going to be the start of a heavy legislative agenda, as the government’s months of consultations start wrapping up and decisions get to start being made. And if you needed a reminder about everything on everyone’s plates, here’s a handy piece about the priorities and challenges for the three main parties this autumn, and Kady O’Malley’s list here too. That said, a Huffington Post article was circulating over the weekend that set my teeth on edge, “proving” that the spring session was the least-productive in decades.
Why this is a problematic measure is that it’s focusing solely on the number of bills passed over those ten months (really, only about five of which was when Parliament was sitting). It’s a purely quantitative analysis that says absolutely nothing about the context of what happened, or about the bigger picture of what the government accomplished. And really, I will be the first person to say that the decision to pull the plug on the Friday they did was about forcing the Senate to pass the assisted dying bill, when they were actually scheduled to sit for a couple of more days, during which time they could have passed two more bills that were ready to go, but they didn’t, and that does deserve mention, but that’s not in there at all. What we get are Conservatives cherry-picking trips and “photo ops” – because who needs multilateral engagement, am I right? – rather than on some of the additional hurdles that the session faced. One of the biggest hurdles was around that assisted dying bill, and the fact that the opposition parties demanded far more hours of debate at second reading than the bill deserved (remember, second reading is about the principle of the bill, not the specifics), and they got huffy when the government tried to push those additional (useless) hours of debate into late nights to keep the agenda going, and when they tried to bring in a procedural hammer to move bills through, the Opposition blew their tops and we wound up with The Elbowing and the subsequent fallout from that. Let me remind you that the Conservatives fully participated in the days of psychodrama that followed, and now they have the gall to say that the government didn’t get enough done? Seriously? They were equal participants in determining the Commons’ schedule of what took place (especially the demands for more second reading debate on that assisted dying bill), and I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that when they were in government, they sat on that bill and didn’t move it despite its deadline. So yes, I find this whole accusation to be the height of cheek, and the analysis should have included far more context around the events of the spring.
Roundup: Quality over quantity
Every time I see a piece that presents the shockingly low numbers of women in politics in our country, I tense up a little. Not because the numbers are terrible – because let’s face it, they are – but because almost always, these tend to be quantitative lists trying to talk about a qualitative problem. Lo and behold, we have yet another of these in the Ottawa Citizen this morning, but there are a few figures in there that need to be unpacked a little more.
The one that really bothers me and deserves to be contextualized is the one percent change between number of women in this parliament and the previous one, and this is where the quantitative/qualitative aspect really comes into play. First of all, the House of Commons is larger in the current parliament by 30 MPs. This means that a one percent gain in a larger Commons means more women on an absolute numbers basis, and that matters. The other, more important fact, however, is the quality of the female MPs we elected this time around. In 2011, let’s face it – much of the increase came from the number of NDP MPs who were accidentally elected following the “Orange Wave” – candidates who hadn’t been properly nominated, had never been to their ridings, never campaigned in them, and were just names on a list that the party put there in order to ensure that they could max out their spending limits. When a wave of sentimentality overcame the Quebec electorate, they got elected. Much was made of the number of young women that were elected, but qualitatively, most of them were underwhelming MPs, whose only real skillset was in reading the scripts that were put in front of them and throwing tantrums in the media when they needed some attention. Most of them, fortunately, didn’t get elected again. That said, for the 2015 election, the Liberals put into place a system to seek out and encourage more women to seek the nomination and to support them in winning it. Qualitatively, you got better MPs who were not just names on lists, who proved they could fight and win both a nomination race and an election by doing the work of door-knocking and being engaged, and more of them wound up in the Commons. It’s a qualitative improvement that can grow further in the next election.
This is why suggestions about changing our electoral system to incorporate lists in order to get more women and minorities into the Commons frustrates me, because there is an implicit message that women and visible minority candidates can’t fight and win elections on an equal basis. I think that’s wrong, and targets the wrong problem because it ignores the complexities and realities of our nomination system and ways that it needs to be improved – such as how the Liberals started doing – and how that changes the game on the ground. The problems in our system when it comes to getting women elected are cultural, not mechanical. Simply changing the electoral system to artificially inflate the numbers of women won’t solve the underlying problems, but merely mask them. We should remember that every time these quantitative lists are released.
Roundup: Leitch keeps digging
So many hot takes on Kellie Leitch and her need to keep digging when it comes to her “Canadian values” test proposal. Leitch continued to insist that this is a topic worthy of discussion, and proposed yet more “Canadian values” to back up her claim, and this time, those values include “equality of opportunity, hard work, generosity, freedom and tolerance,” with a focus especially on the tolerance part. She also denies that this targets Muslims in any way and doesn’t think that characterisation is fair. So there’s that. Oh, and you can add Deepak Obhrai to the list of leadership candidates opposing Leitch’s position, and Maxime Bernier gave a somewhat muddled response that he believes there are Canadian values but you just can’t test for them.
Kellie Leitch has been offered a job as head of the Archeologists Association due to her love for digging. https://t.co/ZdgtwCjkCG
— Justin Ling (Has Left) (@Justin_Ling) September 6, 2016
In terms of pundit reaction, Michael Den Tandt seems to think that Leitch is going nativist for the sake of deepening her fundraising coffers, while Matt Gurney sees Leitch’s proposal as unworkable, but not really offensive per se. Susan Delacourt sees problems for Leitch from the perspective of a party that doesn’t seem to want to embrace a young female leader, though she may have tapped into an anti-immigrant sentiment within the ranks, while Madeline Ashby looks at the inherent contradictions in Leitch’s position. My own Loonie Politics column on Leitch’s campaign looks at the ways in which she and some of her fellow campaigners are picking and choosing which intolerances to run on, and her own tone-deafness about it (which, given today’s added comments, seem to really fit the bill).
.@supriyadwivedi on the idea of screening potential immigrants for 'anti-Canadian values' #cdnpoli #pnpcbc https://t.co/uZ6WFpIiT3
— Power & Politics (@PnPCBC) September 6, 2016
In other Conservative leadership news, Brad Trost thinks that he can unite the party around his economic ideas while still running as a social conservative, and Deepak Obhari has filed his papers and is officially in the race.
Roundup: Referendum lies and demagoguery
So, the electoral reform committee was back again yesterday, and they heard from two academics – one was an avid proponent of proportional representation that Elizabeth May fangirled over so hard, while the other was a former Quebec MNA who spearheaded that province’s failed attempt at moving to a multi-member PR system. There wasn’t much takeaway from either, other than Arend Lijphart (the former of the two) was a big fan of multi-member ridings in Canada (because apparently the problem of enormous rural ridings escapes him), and the fact that he felt that we should avoid a referendum because like Brexit, it would fall victim to demagoguery and “outright lies.”
To which I immediately have to ask – whose lies? The proponents of the status quo, or those of the advocates of PR? Because having seen both in the state of the debate so far, they’re equally odious. How about the lies that majority governments formed under our system are “illegitimate?” Because Lijphart was peddling that one. Or the lies about “38 percent of the vote gets 100 percent of the power”? Because a) the popular vote figure doesn’t actually exist (it’s a logical fallacy based on a misreading of our elections as a single event when they’re 338 separate but simultaneous events), and b) even in proportional systems, parties don’t get a share of power equal to their share of the vote, particularly if they are not part of the governing coalition and even if they are, the “share” of power will not be equal to their vote share. How about the lies about how voter turnout will suddenly blossom under PR? Because research has demonstrated that the most increase we might see is maybe three percent (because declining turnout in Western democracies is a widespread problem that has nothing to do with the electoral systems but rather a great many other factors). How about the common lies of PR advocates that votes are “wasted” and that they don’t count if the person they voted for doesn’t win, and that they system is so unfair? Are those lies any better than the ones about how a PR system would turn us into Israel or Italy and we would have nothing but unstable governments, and the sun would become black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon become as blood? Or are the lies that PR advocates tell okay because they’re well intentioned and lies about a future full of rainbows, gumdrops and unicorns better than lies about doom and destruction? Is pro-PR demagoguery morally superior to the demagoguery of status-quo doomsayers? That’s what I’d like to know.
Roundup: Trading one set of problems for another
Day three of the electoral reform committee, and it seems to be the first time that we actually got a bit of pushback from a witness list that is stuffed full of proponents for reform that refuse to either properly examine our system as it currently exists, or who dwell on fantasy versions of electoral systems. (Kady O’Malley’s liveblog here). In particular, one of the experts, Andre Blais, showcased his research to show that different voting systems had little impact overall on things like voter turnout or satisfaction with the system, which is not surprising at all. So many of the arguments that reform proponents will put forward about how changing the system will fix these woes without realising that every system has their own set of problems and you just wind up trading one set of problems for another (but given that they tend to focus only on delusional, unicorn-filled happiest possible outcomes, this is not a surprise). Likewise, Blais’ research didn’t indicate that there was any greater spirit of compromise in other systems that relied on coalitions, because it’s not like other systems are all around a circle singing Kumbaya.
There were a few other gems, like this one:
Missed this earlier, but this is as ridiculous as those who think a Triple E Senate would have prevented the NEP. pic.twitter.com/pKNB2Lpk7T
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) July 28, 2016
The NEP has become this cultural myth in Canada where everyone assumes that something or another would have prevented it. For the longest time, it was the assumption that a Triple E Senate would have been powerful enough to stop it, and now the argument is PR. These theories ignore the basic math of the sheer weight of the proportion of the country that was in favour of the Programme versus the weight of Alberta, no matter whether they had more votes in the Commons or the Senate. But by all means, mythologise away.
Governments you can’t vote out because they just shuffle around their coalition partners! https://t.co/Rvod6IunYy
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) July 27, 2016
This one is more self-explanatory – in some PR countries like Germany, you can’t vote out governments. Central parties stay in power for decades and simply shuffle around coalition partners, and that makes accountability a very difficult thing under those systems, which is another reason that I don’t think they’ll actually solve anything because the ability to remove a government or a party is as important as how you vote them in – if not more so. Accountability matters.
Meanwhile, the Elections Commissioner is recommending a number of changes to election laws to bring them up to date with our social media age, and part of the piece is devoted to that jackass in Nova Scotia who got charged for posting a photo of his marked ballot as though the secret ballot doesn’t exist for a reason. It’s the same reason why online voting will never be able to guarantee that one’s ballot is actually secret, and we might as well surrender ourselves to the return of rumbottle politics if we start making it acceptable to post photos of marked ballots.
This is exactly why taking photos of ballots is a Very Bad Thing. Secret ballots exist for a reason. pic.twitter.com/709z1PBYUG
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) July 28, 2016
Roundup: Perverting the Westminster system
Amidst the various detritus floating out there of post-Brexit thinkpieces, one could blink and miss a pair of posts the Andrew Potter made yesterday, but let me state that it would be a mistake to do so. The first post was a response to another trolling post from someone else who stated that a Brexit vote would never have happened in the American system because of all of its various checks and balances. Potter, however, doesn’t rise to the bait in quite the way you would think, and instead looks at the ways in which Responsible Government in the UK has gone wrong of late, which led to this situation. Things like the referendum itself not being a usual parliamentary instrument, or the fixed-parliaments legislation, and the ways in which party leadership contests have done away with the usual accountability mechanisms on the leaders that are being elected rather than selected. In other words, it’s the perversions of the Westminster system that have caused the problems at hand, not the system itself that is to blame as the original trolling post would otherwise indicate. And for those of you who’ve been following my writing for a while, this is a recurring theme with me too (which you’ll see expounded upon in my book when it’s released next year) – that it’s the constant attempts to tinker with the system that wind up being the problem because we’ve been forgetting how the system is actually supposed to operate. If we left the system alone and used it the way it’s intended, we wouldn’t have these kinds of problems creeping in, forcing people to demand yet more tinkering reforms.
The second post from Potter is a continuation from an aside in the first piece, but it’s worth a read nevertheless because it’s a quick look at ways in which the changes that America needs to its system go beyond simple electoral reform, but rather a change to a Westminster-style parliamentary system rather than its current morass that more resembles a pre-Responsible Government reflection of the “balanced constitution” model that the UK was experimenting with at the time. One imagines that it would mean turning their president into a more figurehead role than also having him or her be the head of government as well as head of state as the office is now (this is the part that Potter glosses over), but the rest of the points stand – that a confidence-based system instead of term limits would allow its heads of government to burn out in a third term rather than create independent power bases that are then used for dynastic purposes (witness both the Bush and Clinton dynasties), that problems with things like Supreme Court appointments would rectify themselves, and that it would force reforms to their party system that would largely prevent the kind of outsider demagogue problem that we saw in the current election cycle with Trump and Sanders. It’s certainly thought provoking, and a timely defence of our parliamentary institutions as they are supposed to function.