Tag Archives: Maple Crown

Roundup: De-Canadianizing the Crown

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A decision from the Quebec Superior Court came down yesterday which will have grave constitutional implications for Canada, yet few people actually know or understand it. The case challenged the royal succession law that the previous government passed as part of the series of reforms passed in all of the realms that share Queen Elizabeth II as their respective monarch, and by most reckonings, the Canadian law was a complete sham, simply assenting to UK legislation, in essence subordinating the Canadian Crown to a subset of the UK crown, despite the fact that they became separate entities after the Statute of Westminster in 1931. The Quebec Superior Court, however, sided with the Department of Justice, that the monarch was the same per the preamble of the constitution as opposed to a separate legal entity, and essentially reducing Canada back to a subordinate British colony, all because the Harper government didn’t want to go through the necessary steps of doing a proper constitutional amendment to change the Office of the Queen to match the aims of reform. So long, Queen of Canada. We hardly knew you.

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Roundup: No ideological obstruction

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There’s the Senate bat-signal again. Conservative Senate leader Claude Carignan says that his caucus won’t abuse their majority in the Senate to thwart Liberal legislation that comes forward, to which I say “Um, yeah. Of course.” Because wouldn’t you know it, Senators have a job to do, and they know it. Of course, I’ve never bought into the conspiracy theory that Conservative senators would be the puppets of Harper, trying to influence things beyond the political grave, or even the theory that they would be extra dickish just because they were Harper appointees. Then again, most people seem to forget that senators of any stripe suddenly get a lot more independent when the PM who appointed them is no longer in office, and they get really, really independent once leadership races kick off. So far we’re at the first of those two, and with the Conservatives as a whole allegedly experimenting with a less command-and-control style of leadership, we may see the yoke they unduly placed over their Senate caucus lifted. Mind you, we’re still waiting for a signal to see what Trudeau will do in terms of both the Speaker of the Senate and the Leader of the Government. Without a Leader, they might as well just cancel Senate Question Period, which would be a loss because it’s quite instructive for how QP in the Commons should be run. Some senators have floated the idea of just having Senate QP be about asking questions to committee chairs (which, incidentally, they already can do), but it’s not a good idea because those committee chairs aren’t going to have a lot to say about issues of the day, they won’t have access to briefing materials, and they aren’t conduits by which the government can be held to account, which is the whole point of QP – not asking details about committee work. But seriously – can we please stop worrying about fantastical hysteria about what the Senate is going to do? 99 percent of it is based on false assumptions and ignorance of the chamber, and it’s so, so tiresome. They have jobs to do. Let them.

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Roundup: No, Chong’s bill won’t give us Australian leadership spills

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News of the leadership spill in Australia, ousting Tony Abbott as prime minister and ending the greatest political bromance of the Commonwealth countries (Harper and Abbott were quite the mutual admiration society), we were suddenly inundated with Twitter musings about whether that could happen in Canada, thanks to Michael Chong’s Reform Act which passed this summer. While Kady O’Malley offers the “in theory” answer, the in practice answer is that no, it couldn’t happen here, because Canada has a terrible system of leadership selection that purports to “democratise” the system with grassroots involvement, but instead created an unaccountable and presidentialised system of an overly powerful leader that has little fear of their caucus turning on them, because caucus didn’t select them. When it comes to removal, selection matters. A lot. Chong’s bill, perversely, makes an Australian situation less likely by raising the bar for leadership challenges to happen in the first place, and would instead give us situations like what happened in Manitoba where a sitting leader was challenged, and when it went to a leadership process where he still participated and won based on the grassroots support when his caucus was no longer behind him, well, it’s ugly and it’s down right unparliamentary given that a leader needs to have the confidence of his or her caucus, and when they don’t but stay in based on grassroots votes, the system breaks down. Paul Wells cautions that reforming a system usually replaces real or perceive problems with different problems, while Andrew Coyne points out that being able to dump a bad leader quickly is the lesser evil of being stuck with them.

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Roundup: Mulcair’s Senate delusions

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It was Thomas Mulcair’s turn to talk to Peter Mansbridge, and it was a bit of a doozy. Not only because he too insisted that whoever wins the most seats should form government (with a bunch of “it’s a really complex constitutional question but…” thrown in), but rather because of his continued wilful ignorance about how he proposes to deal with the Senate. It’s not just about his fantasy notion that Senate abolition could ever happen (which it won’t), or that he’ll somehow be able to sit down with the premiers and make it happen right away (even if he brings the federal cheque book to the table, it’s still not going to happen). No, it’s his attitude for how he would deal with it should he form government. Not only are vacancies mounting, but he told Mansbridge that he wouldn’t even appoint a Government Leader in the Senate. This is actually a Very Big Deal. Why? Because if legislation is to pass the Senate, it needs to happen according to proper procedure, and proper procedure requires a government voice – particularly one from cabinet – to be in the Chamber to shepherd government bills through, an to answer questions on behalf of the government in Senate Question Period. Now, Harper has already been petulant about this when he refused to make his current Senate leader a member of cabinet (even though he still gets PCO support, and as we’ve learned, PMO handlers to deal with messaging), but there is still a government leader in there to do the things that he’s supposed to do. If Mulcair would be so completely cavalier as to further break an already damaged institution by refusing to let it do its job properly under the pretext of daring them to vote down bills passed by the Commons, it’s unconscionable. We have someone campaigning to be the leader of the country on a platform of thumbing his nose at the constitution, whether that’s around a refusal to make appointments, or in ensuring that it can do its job. And this is more than a question of “democratic expression” of a government that has won an election, as Mulcair phrases his bullying tactics – it’s about process. And what is democracy? Democracy IS process. Process matters, just like the constitution. Why are we giving him a free pass when he seems to be of the notion that the constitution and the institutions of parliament don’t matter?

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Roundup: The slippery slope of civic ignorance

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With Justin Trudeau adding his voice to those of the other leaders in completely misreading how a Westminster democracy works with the formation of government (albeit acknowledging that the incumbent does get the first crack), I think it’s quite apparent we’re in a crisis of civic literacy in this country. While Kady O’Malley gives a refresher here, there was an interesting idea posited by Leonid Sirota that we may be witnessing the birth of a new convention. I’m a bit sceptical about that, and would agree more with Emmett Macfarlane that it may be a political convention as opposed to a legal one, but it should also be a warning signal to our political actors that ignorance of the system, whether genuine or deliberate, does have broader repercussions. The system works the way it does because, well, it works. That’s why it evolved the way we did. To try and move it past that for crass political purposes demeans it, and opens a number of cans of worms that will do nothing more than create problems down the road that will be even bigger headaches. Better to learn and apply the system as it exists, rather than try to change the rules for petty reasons. Also, we need to stop dismissing these kinds of conversations as boring or pedantic because they matter. The rules matter. If we don’t point out what the rules are and that they matter, then it makes it easier for people to break them without anyone raising a fuss.

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Roundup: The anti-intellectual warning shot

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The markets are crashing, the dollar continues to plummet and the price of oil seems to be in free-fall, but what is it that has the Canadian commentariat entranced – well, aside from the latest Duffy minutiae? The fact that Doug Ford may be contemplating the federal Conservative leadership if Stephen Harper fails to win the upcoming election. It kind of makes me want to weep. “Oh, it’ll be hilarious!” the Twitter Machine keeps relaying, but no, it wouldn’t. It would be heartbreaking for what it means to democracy. As we saw with the Rob Ford years in Toronto, and as we’re seeing play out with the Donald Trump primary race in the States, what more rational people see as hilarious and unbelievable is being embraced by a share of the electorate who are disengaged and who believe that all politicians are liars, so they would rather someone who stands up there and “tells it like it is,” never mind that what they’re telling them is completely divorced from reality and also generally false. We are already dealing with an overload of anti-intellectualism in the Canadian discourse (and no, not just from the right-leaning populists – you should see the abuse heaped on the economists who dared to debunk the NDP’s minimum wage proposal earlier in the week). Do we need it compounded on the federal scene by such an individual? While people may treat it like a joke, it’s a legitimate threat. Remember that Rob Ford got elected mayor because the very people who dismiss the Ford brothers can’t seem to grasp that they do strike a chord with voters, and I can’t think of anything more terrifying for the future of federal politics.

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Roundup: Trying to politicize the GG

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In a move so stunningly boneheaded that I can scarcely believe it, the NDP have gone to Rideau Hall to ask the Governor General to wade in on the Senate residency issue – because there’s nothing like trying to politicise the GG to show that you mean business about a petty issue. It’s like Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition doesn’t have a clue about what Responsible Government – the central organising principle of our democratic system – actually means. Here’s a refresher for their edification – the Governor General acts on the advice of the Prime Minister because the Prime Minister holds the confidence of the House of Commons, which is the chamber elected for the purpose of granting or withholding said confidence. The entire history of the struggle for Responsible Government in the colonies that became Canada, back in the 1830s, was because they wanted to control the appointments made by the Crown, rather than leave it up to the colonial masters in the UK. The entire history of Canadian democracy rests on the fact that it’s the elected government that advises the Crown on who to appoint, and not the other way around. And yet the NDP seem to suddenly think it’s cool to ask the GG to weigh in on which appointments he thinks are okay or not. Charlie Angus may tell you that he’s asking for an explanation and that he’s not trying to draw the GG into the “scandal,” but with all due respect, that’s a load of utter horseshit and he knows it. He’s trying to get the GG to tell him that the PM is wrong so that he has “non-partisan” authority to make the claim for him; that’s never going to happen. Ever. It is assumed that the advice the PM gives the GG is legitimate because the PM has the confidence of the Commons. That means that the quality of that advice is a ballot box issue – if we don’t like it, we get to hold that PM and that government to account by voting them out. It is not up to the GG to veto it unless it’s so egregious that it’s a blatant violation of the constitution, at which point he refuses the advice and the Prime Minister is forced to resign. But as much as Charlie Angus might like to think that Mike Duffy is some unprecedented scandal that rocks the very legitimacy of the Upper Chamber (which they don’t believe is legitimate anyway, so this is grade-A concern trolling on his part), it’s not a constitutional crisis. It’s just not. Even if Harper’s advice was dubious, it was up to Duffy to ensure that he lived up to the terms of that appointment, and ensuing he was a proper resident of PEI – which essentially would have meant a hasty house sale in Ottawa, buying a year-round residence on the Island (and not a summer cottage) tout suit, and then maybe renting an apartment or buying a small condo near Parliament Hill as his Ottawa pied à terre, being a legitimate secondary residence. Duffy did not do that. He instead got political opinions to ensure that he was okay with the summer cottage and a driver’s licence and that’s it, when clearly that was not enough. He bears as much culpability in this as the PM for making the appointment – not the GG. Charlie Angus should be utterly ashamed for this blatant attempt to politicise the GG, but I’m pretty sure he’s incapable of shame.

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Roundup: On official birthdays

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It should not be unexpected that on Victoria Day, you would get some usual trite releases by the Prime Minister and the Governor General about the importance of Canada’s relationship with the monarchy, and so on. We got them. What we also got was a bunch of ignorant backlash.

Immediately a bunch of geniuses started to tweet back that it was celebrating Queen Victoria’s birthday, not Queen Elizabeth’s, and that Harper was an idiot, and so on. Err, except that those people were the ones in the wrong because since 1957, it was decided that the Official Birthday of the Canadian Sovereign would be Victoria Day, not the April birthday of the current Queen of Canada, Elizabeth II, nor the same official birthday as the Queen of the United Kingdom, which is in June. It’s like we have our own monarchy or something! Also, it has to do with the distinction between the legal person of the Queen of the Canada, and her natural person.

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Suffice to say, it’s a pretty sad statement as to the current state of civic literacy in Canada that this basic celebration of our Head of State has been completely lost to your average person. Granted, the PM’s tweet could have been better phrased, such as “official birthday” instead of “officially celebrate,” but still, the point stands. It’s time to take this basic education more seriously, Canada. Yesterday was pretty embarrassing.

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Roundup: Breaking the debates

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The Conservatives have decided that they’re going to opt out of the major broadcasters when it comes to election debates this fall, and will instead entertain the option of independents who don’t have the same kind of widespread broadcast capabilities, by accepting the invitations of Maclean’s/Rogers, and TVA in French. In a way, it’s more of this attempt to portray themselves as poor, put upon underdogs that the “big media elites” are trying to control – as though being in power for the past ten years doesn’t make them elites. There has been this particular undercurrent in pre-election conversation that they want plenty of debates because apparently it’ll be how they can trip up Justin Trudeau (ignoring both the fact that he cleaned up in his party leadership debates, and the fact that the more debates, the more chance that any gaffes will be minimised). It’s also a curious strategy that they would forgo the broadest audience that the major broadcasters’ consortium could provide – and a bit tone deaf as to the reality of the media landscape that they think that it’s just a matter of some university hosting an event and everyone brings their cameras. What it does is twofold – firstly, it’s a power game by the Conservatives to unilaterally pull out of the consortium negotiation process and throw everyone into disarray, and secondly, it’s an attempt to control those debates by creating a proliferation of independent offers that they can then cherry pick when it comes to things like format and hosting choices. It has also been pointed out how hypocritical their position is considering that they very rarely allow their candidates to even attend local debates, so for them to be concern trolling over the state of the leaders’ debates is a bit rich. Suffice to say, it’s throwing a lot of added confusion out there and is setting up a power play that will further break our system more than it already is.

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Roundup: A surprise visit

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Stephen Harper took everyone (and most especially assignment editors across the country) off-guard by taking a surprise trip to Iraq while headed to V-E commemoration ceremonies in the Netherlands. While in Iraq, he met with that country’s prime minister and announced $167 million in aid and security equipment promises ($139 million of which is actually for the region, including Lebanon and Jordan). Politically, he also gained the advantage of being in theatre, getting photos and video of him being near the front lines, and talking tough about terrorism and national security, which he sees as vote-getters and poll-movers after weeks where his messaging has been thrown off track by both the distraction that is the Duffy trial, and the pushback to the budget, which was only balanced by raiding the contingency reserve and EI fund. In other words, he needs to remind people why they should vote for him, and looking prominent in a place where we’ve sent troops is one way to do it. While there, it was also said that the investigation into the friendly fire death of Sgt. Doiron is complete, and was likely due to fatigue among Peshmerga fighters. That report is supposed to be released publicly back in Canada within a month.

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