Tag Archives: Maple Crown

Roundup: Quality over quantity

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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.

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Roundup: Leitch keeps digging

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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.

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).

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.

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Roundup: Referendum lies and demagoguery

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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.

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Roundup: Trading one set of problems for another

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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:

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.

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.

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Roundup: Perverting the Westminster system

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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.

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Roundup: Peter Harder’s ham-handed problems

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First it was the curious announcement from long-time Liberal Senator (and one-time leader of the provincial Liberal party) Grant Mitchell was stepping away from the senate caucus to sit as an independent. For someone as nakedly partisan as Mitchell, it was a curious move that raised a number of questions for me. Then, later in the evening, news came down that Peter Harder, the “government representative” in the Senate, will be naming a deputy and a whip, and that whip was to be Mitchell. (The deputy was named as Diane Bellemare, who was a Conservative senator who quit that caucus a couple of months ago and became a founding member of the Independent Working Group). In amidst a number of smartass remarks going around the Twitter Machine about how an independent whip was supposed to work, I will offer again the reminder that in the Senate, the job of the whip is more about logistics and administration with things like assigning offices and parking spaces, and with organizing committee assignments and seeing that absences are filled on committees than it is about telling senators how to vote. Likewise, deputy leaders in the Senate are much more equivalent to House Leaders in the Commons, where they help determine scheduling of debates on bills and so on. But given that Justin Trudeau was looking to shake up the way the Senate operates, thus far it has mostly been about rebranding the office of Government Leader in the Senate under a new name and maintaining the “not a minister in name only” fiction that Harper employed when he wanted to put distance between himself and the Senate. Add to that the odd insistence that Peter Harder sit as an independent while taking on this role, which is problematic at best. But if his job is just to represent the government, and to shepherd legislation through the Chamber, then why does Harder need a second person to do the House Leader-equivalent work, or a whip for the independents – particularly when the Independent Working Group has been working on developing a system of administrative representation for those unaligned senators. It smacks to me that Harder, whether with the blessing of Trudeau or not, is trying to impose a top-down organisation for unaligned senators in the chamber rather than letting the bottom-up process that the Working Group is engaged in run its course. While I’m not indulging the conspiracy theories that this is all a crypto-Liberal charade playing out, I do think that Harder is overstepping here by a great degree. Sure, it looks greatly symbolic that he got a Conservative and a Liberal with him to do these tasks, but it does look like he’s trying to impose something on the new independent senators that currently goes against what the Senate rules allow (being of course a caucus organisation that is not tied to an existing federal political party). As with Harder trying to get an inexplicably big staff for the job he says he plans to do (as opposed to the old job of Government Leader), this new move is problematic. It could very well be that Harder doesn’t know what he’s really doing and how the Senate operates, which was always the going to be a problem when Trudeau insisted that his “representative” would come from the first batch of independent appointments. But these ham-handed moves are making that problem all the more glaring. This is an increasingly obvious example of Trudeau not thinking through his Senate plans and ballsing it up as he goes along because he doesn’t understand the institution either, and that is a problem.

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Roundup: No appetite for back pay

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With parliament resuming this week, all attention is on whether or not Senator Mike Duffy will resume his duties. After all, there have been a few signs of activity in his office, with computers being updated and such, but there remains a question as to whether his health will allow it, but we’ll see. As for the question as to whether he will be getting any back pay for his time suspended without it, well, senior senators are not so keen. In fact, the phrase “no appetite” is continually used, and they are quick to point to the fact that the Senate’s internal discipline – which the suspension was part of – was based on the Deloitte audits and not criminal findings of guilt or innocence, thus his acquittal by the courts makes it largely an irrelevant issue as far as they’re concerned. I would also add that should Duffy decide to press the issue, well, there are a few well-placed senators who around this issue who are known to leak things to the media, and who will undoubtedly start doing so about any other skeletons in Duffy’s closet that they are aware of. Meanwhile, there remain questions back in PEI about whether Duffy remains qualified to represent the province, as there is still a level of distrust that he is actually a resident (and given that it sounds like he spent the bulk of his time on suspension in Ottawa, well, that doesn’t help matters much). Meanwhile, some Conservative senators are grousing a little bit that Senator Peter Harder isn’t really providing much in the way of answers during regular Senate QP (as opposed to ministerial versions thereof). I think they’re being a bit unfair, considering that he’s been on the job only a couple of weeks and hasn’t yet staffed up his office, nor really had a chance to get proper briefings from the Privy Council Office (because yes, he has been sworn into the Privy Council to take on this job, making him a quasi-minister) on the files that he is likely to be asked about, or had much in the way of a briefing binder prepared, but it does put him on notice that they do expect him to step up his game in the role of “government representative,” particularly when it comes to being the conduit for holding the government to account. These are things that are important, especially as there are no opposition voices in the Commons from Atlantic Canada or the GTA, making the Senate’s role in asking those questions all the more important.

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Roundup: Mulcair’s political demise

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Well, that was unexpected. After the NDP voted to adopt a resolution that would see them take the Leap Manifesto back to their riding associations for further discussion – much to the protests of their Alberta delegates – Thomas Mulcair took to the stage to give a lacklustre speech that was basically a rehash of his election speech for the past, oh, ten months, with the whole laundry list of applause lines and nothing about why he deserves to stay at the helm. And when the party voted, they voted 52 percent in favour of a leadership review. Mulcair indicated that he plans to stay on as interim leader until a new one can be chosen, which may be a process of up to two years, but we’ll see how long that lasts once the caucus and national council have had their deliberations. Suffice to say, there has been a tonne of reaction. Jen Gerson digs into the events a little more including some local reaction to the Leap Manifesto resolution adoption, while Jason Markusoff discusses that adoption on the Alberta NDP. Markusoff and John Geddes enumerate eleven signs that showed that Mulcair wasn’t going to win the review vote. Here are the five steps the party needs to take next regarding the leadership, and a look back at the results of leadership reviews in years past. CBC looks at some possible contenders for the leadership contest, while Don Braid advises Rachel Notley to divorce her party from the federal NDP. Chantal Hébert notes that the writing was on the wall for Mulcair from the start of the convention, while Michael Den Tandt says that the Leap Manifesto will sink the NDP permanently. Paul Wells delivers a tour de force with the questions that the party now has to grapple with as they choose that new leader, and the divides that future leader will have to straddle.

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Roundup: Slowly effacing the Crown

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There has been a certain level of trepidation amongst monarchists when the Liberals came to power, given their penchant for rewriting Canadian monarchical symbols out of things in order to focus on the maple leaf. When Trudeau announced that there would be no changes to our relationship with the Crown, there was a bit of a sigh of relief, particularly when he said that he would not be de-royalizing the service names of the Canadian Forces, but they are slowly and subtly reversing some of the Conservative restorations of monarchical symbols, starting with generals’ rank pins. They had gone from maple leaves, reverting to the older crowns given that hey, this country is a constitutional monarchy and the head of the Canadian Forces is the Queen of Canada. But now they’re turning back into maple leaves. The official excuse is that it’s easier for our international allies to recognise, but I am suspicious that this isn’t in fact a reversion to traditional Liberal effacing of monarchical symbols. What especially makes me insane about this is that it reinforces the narrative that the Conservatives as the party of the monarchy, inherently politicizing the Crown which should never, ever happen, and which is really, really irresponsible for the Liberals and NDP to engage in. Like, completely and utterly boneheadedly irresponsible. The Crown is our central organising principle. It is the centre of our constitutional framework. I cannot emphasise enough that letting one party drape themselves in the glow of the Crown unchallenged is beyond negligent. Worse, they not only let it go unchallenged by buy into this completely wrong narrative that they’re reverting to Britishisms when the Canadian monarchy is separate and distinct (well, more or less, but there is not grey area thanks to the Conservatives’ completely boneheaded royal succession bill). Rather than defending the Crown of Canada, you now have parties that are playing stupid political games around it, and doing lasting damage to Canadians’ understanding around our very constitutional framework. So slow claps all around, because this is the height of ignorant wrongheadedness. Everyone needs to be spanked for this petty and irresponsible nonsense.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/716069134925103104

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/716069379809480705

Update:

I may have been hasty about the pips, as there may be good reason to change them. The rest of my points, about allowing the Crown to be politicized (especially since it allows more clueless journalists to put this frame around it), and my own trepidation about the Liberal penchant for effacing Crown symbols, remains.

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Roundup: Doing the policy heavy lifting

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If you were to turn to the Big Book of Canadian Political Journalism Clichés, you’d find pages of tiresome and frankly libellous descriptions of the Senate of Canada. And oh, look – The Canadian Press drew from a number of them to craft the lead of their latest piece: “Canada’s Senate, often accused of being an anachronism, is being asked to wrestle with the futuristic dream of driverless cars.” Of course, the accusations of being an anachronism often come from clueless political journalists who recite the received wisdom around the Upper Chamber with little or no critical insight or understanding of Chamber, its actual role, or its operations, and they treat it like a joke, which makes ledes like this commonplace. “Isn’t it hilarious that the Senate is supposed to look at future technology? Aren’t they all ancient, napping in the Chamber? LOL,” and so on. And then this line a little further down in the piece: “His request for a Senate study is part of the Trudeau government’s attempt to recast the much-maligned upper house as an independent and valued institution that has an important parliamentary role to play.” Um, no, it doesn’t need to be recast as having an important role to play because they’ve always had it. The Senate has been doing the kinds of cutting-edge policy study and research that the Commons can’t or won’t for decades. Just in the last parliament alone, they studied things like BitCoin and crypto-currencies, and they have been debating legislation on growing issues like genetic privacy that the Commons continues to shirk while they snipe at one another over partisan issues. But hey, when asked to do a comprehensive study on the regulatory, policy and technical issues that need to be addressed by the growing field of driverless cars, hey, it’s all a big joke because it’s the Senate. That kind of tiresome attitude is part of why the studies and reports that come out of the Senate – which in many ways acts like a built-in think tank for Parliament (and a hugely cost-effective one at that) – tend to go under the radar. Some reports get a couple of days of press, such as the very good report on the Canada-US price differential (which the previous government then largely ignored when they went to craft legislation to close that gap – an issue now moot thanks to our falling dollar), but for the most part, the media will ignore the studies. It’s really a shame because there is a lot of good work in there that is worth a lot more discussion and attention, lest it gather dust on a shelf. But why actually turn to those studies when we can make jokes about the Senate, malign its denizens thanks to the actions of a couple of bad apples, and ignore the actual work while grumbling that they aren’t elected? It’s too bad that We The Media can’t take these things more seriously, as we would all be better off as an informed citizenry as a result.

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