Tag Archives: Marijuana

Roundup: A hopeless court case

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It’s one of the most predictable performative dances in Canadian politics, which is that when you lose at politics, you try to drag it to the courts to fight your battles for you. In this, case, a UBC professor (and local Fair Vote Canada) president wants to launch a Charter challenge around electoral reform. And in order to do that, he’s talking about getting pledges of around $360,000 in order to get through the legal process.

The problem? This is an issue that has already been litigated and lost. The Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the appeal of the case that arose out of Quebec, which means it’s considered settled. The current electoral system is legal, it is constitutional, and while you get the odd prof here and there who tries to make an argument to the contrary, it’s settled law. And unlike some of the reversals we’ve seen the courts make over prostitution or assisted dying, there has been no great groundswell change in society that would justify the court in re-litigating the matter. In other words, he’s trying to raise money from people who are desperate to find a lifeline now that their political solution is gone that this is basically a scheme for lawyers to take their money.

This tendency to try and use the courts to overturn political decisions is a growing one, but it’s the same mentality as people who write to the Queen when they lose at politics. Have we had cases where governments have passed bad legislation and the courts have overturned it? Certainly. But political decisions are not bad legislation, and it’s not up to the courts to force governments to adopt what some people consider to be more favourable outcomes. It’s called democracy, and we have elections to hold governments to account for their political decisions. It’s also why I’m extremely leery of people calling for a cabinet manual, because it means that more groups will start trying to litigate prerogative decisions, and that’s not a good thing. It’s time these PR proponents let it go and try to fight it again at the next election. Oh, but then it might become clear that this really isn’t an issue that people care all that much about. Shame, that.

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Roundup: The spectre of a Leitch Party

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A rather remarkable exchange happened during Trudeau’s visit to Nunavut when he was pressed about his electoral reform promise. Trudeau responded to his questioner “Do you think Kellie Leitch should have her own party?” and laid out a realistic case where parties like that can hold enough seats to affect the balance of power in a parliament. His questioner was taken aback and “respectfully disagreed,” which isn’t surprising because the narrative we are always given when it comes to proportional representation is that it will give us nice left-wing coalition governments forever, which is certainly not the case, and we need to challenge that particular narrative more often, and to point to what’s happening in Europe right now. And to be honest, I’m glad that Trudeau is being a bit more forceful on this point about the potential rise of extreme parties and that such a system would be bad for Canada. Big tent parties have done a lot for this country, and have moderated a lot of regional tensions within them.

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Of course, Trudeau bringing up Leitch in such a manner could have unintended consequences of its own.

In a not unrelated note, Michelle Rempel was at an immigration conference in Montreal, and she noted her frustrations in bashing her head against her own party as much as she was with the Liberals that she is critiquing. And she made some very salient points in here about how we can’t pretend that we’re immune to populist rhetoric in this country, because we have a history of it bubbling up (hello 1993 election) and the sentiments still exist here where you have groups of disenfranchised people looking to blame Others. And this brings us back to why changing our electoral system to give incentives to these elements to form their own parties and try to win seats that they can use to leverage power is a very real and present danger. Add to that, there are concerns from experts in the field that the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the States is bubbling up here and fuelling a rise of racism in this country because it’s being seen as more socially acceptable.

So do we change our system to incentivise these voices to better organise and try to win themselves political leverage? Or do we do we maintain institutions and practices that have been successful in dispersing these elements because they know that there is no pathway to victory by pursuing it? It seems to me that it’s a fairly simple answer.

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Roundup: A petulant motion

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The degradation of Supply Day – otherwise known as “opposition day” – motions continues apace as the NDP have chosen to be completely petulant about their day today, using their motion to get the House to say that the government misled them on their promise to end First-past-the-Post and call on the government to apologise. It’s petty and cheap, and it’s going to be no fun for the Liberals on House duty to have to eat some of their own words on the need for electoral reform, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that this is not what an opposition day motion is supposed ot be doing.

As a quick refresher, the purpose of Supply Days is for the opposition to demonstrate why the government should be denied supply – meaning the money that they want to spend to run the government. In other words, the day is to be spent arguing about why the government shouldn’t be spending money they’re asking taxpayers for. It’s part of the job of the House of Commons in holding the government to account by controlling the purse strings, which government can only spend with their approval. But that’s not how it works anymore. Now, it’s any topic under the sun.

The Conservatives have been engaging in their own shenanigans with supply days, arguing one this week that was supposed to be about getting the government to agree not to tax health and dental benefits, but because they wanted it to be defeated, they got cute with the wording so as to proclaim that Canadians were too burdened with taxes and so on, knowing the government wouldn’t support it. And when they defeated it, they took to Twitter and QP to decry the government not ruling out taxing these benefits despite the fact that they had stated clearly that they would not. But hey, why not play silly buggers with parliament’s time?

Even worse than motions designed to get the government to vote it down by using cute language are the “mom and apple pie” motions designed to get the government to support them in the hopes of embarrassing them into taking action on a file, and as happened so often during the Conservative years, the government would support the motion, pat themselves on the back, and then do nothing while the NDP howled about it to little effect. It was a government that had no shame, but it was a too-cute-by-half motion to start with.

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Like Philippe Lagassé says, less theatrics, more accountability. And that’s exactly what we’re not seeing in any of these motions, when it’s the fundamental job of every MP in the Commons.

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Roundup: MyDemocracy survey says…

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The results of the MyDemocracy.ca survey got published yesterday, and it’s full of some fairly contradictory results about people generally being reasonably satisfied with our system (or at least not wildly dissatisfied), preferring constituency connections and accountability (but also co-operation, which makes accountability difficult), while also wanting more diversity of views (unless it lets in radicals and extremists). Also, no mandatory voting, online voting, or lowering the voting age. (Full report here). So yeah. And already you’ve got Nathan Cullen sore that it doesn’t say “Canadians want PR” because that’s not what it was asking. Anyway, Philippe Lagassé is best positioned to weigh in on it, so here we go:

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Reading through the methodology and the reasoning behind the questions was fairly illuminating and something the detractors of the survey should probably want to actually do before they scroll ahead to where they go “Why doesn’t it say that Canadians really want proportional representation? Stupid biased survey” because we know that’s what they want to hear.

Of course, if you ask me, this should provide enough justification for them to smother this whole thing in the cradle and wash their hands of it, saying it turns out that Canadians aren’t too concerned with reform and hey, it turns out it’s way more complex than we thought so yeah, bad promise, we’ll do better next time, and then move onto some actual topics of importance than just trying to appease a few sore losers.

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Roundup: Chagger on fundraising

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Government House Leader Bardish Chagger talked to the Huffington Post, and the headline had all of my media colleagues grasping for their pearls as she declared that the House of Commons was not the place to discuss Liberal fundraisers. And if I’m going to go full pedant on this, she’s right – to an extent. On its face, fundraising is party business and really nothing to do with the administrative responsibility of the government. Why this current round of eye-rolling nonsense around so-called “cash for access” fundraising (which isn’t actually cash for access in the sense that we got used to talking about with Ontario) is because the opposition is trying to link those fundraisers with conflicts of interest from the government, all based on insinuation with no actual proof of quid pro quo. But because there is this tenuous connection, the questions are being allowed, and they get to make all manner of accusations that would otherwise be considered libellous before the cameras under the protection of parliamentary privilege. Indeed, when Ambrose accused the government of acting illegally with those fundraisers, Chagger invited her to step outside of the Chamber to repeat those accusations. Ambrose wouldn’t, for the record.

Where this might resonate are with memories of the previous parliament, with endless questions about the ClusterDuff affair, and the operations of the Senate, and those various and sundry questions that came up time and again, and which were rarely actually about things that were the administrative responsibility of the government. And every now and again, Speaker Andrew Scheer would say so. But contrary to the opinions of some, this wasn’t something that Scheer made up out of thin air.

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In fact, Scheer was too lenient for many of these questions, and there are sometimes that I think that Regan is even more so. Most of the NDP questions asked during the height of the ClusterDuff affair were blatantly out of order, asked for the sake of grandstanding. That the questions with the current fundraising contretemps have made this tenuous link to government operations and decisions is the only thing that makes them marginally relevant to QP. That said, the hope that this will somehow tarnish the government or grind down their ethical sheen generally depends on there being actual rules broken or actual impropriety, which there hasn’t been. Meanwhile, a bunch of issues that the opposition should be holding the government to account for are languishing because they need to put up six MPs a day on this. But hey, at least they’re providing clips to the media as opposed to doing their jobs, right?

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Roundup: Items left undebated

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With the Commons now having risen for the holidays, there is another day or two left of work left in the Senate before they too head off for their holidays, but as Kady O’Malley points out, they are having a bit of a problem getting any bills that aren’t supply-related passed in any reasonable timeframe. The extent to which this is an actual problem just yet is up in the air – yes, fewer bills have passed to date in this current parliament, but some of them have been pretty major issues (like assisted dying), while we’ve also seen far less use of procedural tools like time allocation to ram through bills without sufficient time for debate or committee study. (We’re also not seeing massive omnibus bills being rammed through either, so points for that).

Part of the problem is simply that senators are letting items stand on the Order Paper in their name for weeks at a time, which is not uncommon in the Senate, but there has been little effort to move some of these pieces forward, and I’m not entirely sure why. In my own estimation, part of it has to do with the new normal in the Senate, where there is no longer a government caucus, and the Government Leader – sorry, “government representative” thus far hasn’t really been communicating much urgency on any particular bills so far as I can tell. Maybe I’m wrong, as I’m not privy to any discussions that he is having with other caucus leaders. Some of it I would imagine is delay engineered by some Conservative senators because they feel that measures were adopted too quickly by the House of Commons without what they would consider to be adequate scrutiny (which I would imagine the ostensible reason on holding up debate on the trans rights bill would be), while some of it is partisan stubbornness (like the bill to undo changes the previous government made to unions or citizenship revocation). Senator Peter Harder could start to invoke time allocation on those bills if he so chose, and with there now being enough non-aligned senators having been appointed to surpass the votes of the Conservatives in the Chamber, he may now be in a position to convince them that this is the way to go.

Time allocation is a tricky beast in the Senate, however, and while the previous government did not hesitate to use it in the Senate when they felt they needed to, it is a blunt instrument and Senators need to be careful that they’re not putting themselves in a position of being treated like backbenchers in the Commons. Part of what needs to happen is clear lines of communication between the government and senators who want to speak to bills so that they have timelines in mind (and to be fair, some of them may have a lot on their plates right now). But there shouldn’t be an expectation that bills need to be sped through the Senate just because they’re government bills – they already get priority in all aspects of the Senate process, but if there is a sense of urgency, that needs to be communicated.

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Roundup: A bad term-limit promise

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Senator John Wallace announced yesterday that he’s keeping his pledge to Stephen Harper and resigning after eight years in the chamber despite the fact that he won’t have reached the mandatory age of 75. Of the other cohort of Senators that Harper appointed in late 2008, only Pamela Wallin has indicated that she plans to also end her term after 8 years – but not including the time she was suspended, so she’s got a couple of years left to go. Other senators from that cohort have either said that their pledge was conditional on Harper’s reform plans, which went down in flames after the Supreme Court of Canada shot them down spectacularly, or that they still have things left to accomplish, which is fair. But you know there is a whole crowd of people waiting for them to fail to live up to this “promise.”

Here’s the thing – it was a bad promise that Harper never should have extracted because short term limits are antithetical to the design of our senate, and that a mandatory retirement age of 75 is actually part of its structural guarantees. By having security of tenure, senators are able to exercise institutional independence, and by ensuring that they have employment until age 75, there is not the temptation for them to try to curry favour with the government in order to try and win some kind of post-Senate appointment (be it a diplomatic posting, or heading and administrative tribunal or commission). The lack of term limits like Harper was proposing were part of what is supposed to keep senators more independent and less beholden to the party leaders than MPs are. But it’s not like Harper was trying to undermine the Senate’s ability to be independent – oh, wait. He spent his nine years in power doing exactly that. So no, I will not be joining in the chorus demanding these senators resign, and in fact, I think Wallace is making a mistake in doing so.

Meanwhile, the Senate has grave concerns about bill S-3 on gender inequities in registering First Nations identity with the government, which the minister herself has acknowledged has problems but she wants them to pass it anyway because there’s a court deadline which she said they couldn’t extend, but now it looks like they’re going to. Also, this was a government bill introduced in the Senate so you can’t even claim that it goes against the will of the Commons. Once again, the Senate is doing its job, and oh, look – Andrew Coyne is furiously clutching his pearls over it, while National Post reporter’s description of the current state of the Senate is that they’re moving away from rubber-stamping bills which was never their role in the first place. Honestly, my head is about to explode about this. Again.

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QP: Not just the rules, but listening to Canadians

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With just a couple of QP session left in the year, all of the leaders were present today, interim or otherwise. Rona Ambrose led off, worrying that the prime minster was bragging about being the target of illegal lobbying — which was not what he said, but whatever. Trudeau said that wherever he is, he talks about growth for the middle class and all of those wonderful things. Ambrose wondered when money became more than ethics. Trudeau insisted that he has the same message everywhere he goes, about taxing the one percent more to cut taxes for the middle class. Ambrose asked the same again, got the same answer, and then she worried that his true priority was fundraisers and that he’s left the impression that he can be bought. Trudeau reiterated that they raised taxes on the wealthiest to cut taxes for the middle class. Ambrose accused the Trudeau Foundation of laundering influence to the PM, and demanded that he tell them to stop accepting foreign donations. Trudeau assured her that he severed his connections shortly after he became party leader and they advance the cause of the humanities in a non-partisan manner. Thomas Mulcair was up next, also concern trolling about fundraising, and Trudeau repeated his same points about their priorities. Mulcair demanded support for the NDP bill to “give teeth” to ethics rules, but Trudeau repeated his same points. Mulcair moved onto marijuana legalisation and demanded immediate decriminalisation. Trudeau reminded him that their objectives were to keep it out of the hands of children and the profits from the hands of organised crime, and that until the law was changed, it stands. Mulcair pivoted again to the situation of Stelco workers, and Trudeau said that they were engaged in the challenge.

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QP: Drones and saccharine points

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For a second day in a row, the PM was in town but otherwise occupied, and his seat would have been conspicuously vacant had a backbencher decided not to keep it warm for him (and the camera shot). After a number of statements in remembrance of the École Polytechnique massacre, Rona Ambrose led off, wondering why the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Inquiry is so slow to get started. Scott Brison responded with some fairly bland talking points about the accomplishments they have made toward reconciliation. Ambrose worried that the PM was making life more expensive for people, and Bill Morneau reminded her of the tax cuts they implemented along with the enhanced child care benefits. Ambrose decried plans to tax health and dental benefits, for which Morneau reiterated the lowered taxes, before noting that they were reviewing the tax code with an eye toward tax fairness and simplification. Ambrose switched to French to decry Liberal fundraising, and Bardish Chagger recited some French talking points about fundraising rules and the broader consultation program. Ambrose switched to English to demand to know if the PM has ever used a fundraiser to talk to anyone who was looking for something from the government. Chagger’s answer did not change. Thomas Mulcair accused the government of arranging a meeting with the Chinese premier in exchange for that person holding a fundraiser. Chagger’s answer was the same. Mulcair asked again in French, and Chagger repeated her response in robotic French. Mulcair then moved to the PBO report on funding for First Nations education, and Brison noted that the PBO pointed out that the previous government underfunded K-12 education, and that they were now closing the gap. Mulcair heaped on a number of accusations related to how the government was treating First Nations, and Jim Carr got up to clarify his remarks about protesters from last week.

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QP: Accusations of illegality

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Despite the fact that he was in town, Justin Trudeau decided to go to Shopify for Hour of Code instead of attend QP. Rona Ambrose led off, worrying about lost jobs, the Trumpocalypse of halved taxes to impact our economic competitiveness. Navdeep Bains responded, reciting some praise by companies who are investing in this country. Ambrose worried about plans to tax health and dental benefits, to which Scott Brison listed the ways in which they have made the system more progressive and the introduction of new child benefits. In French, Ambrose worried about what other taxes would be raised, and Brison answered partly in French about lowering taxes before switching to English to talk about the need for a strong middle class to have a strong economy. Ambrose then turned to a pair of questions on fundraising, calling them illegal. Bardish Chagger reminded her that the rules were strict and followed, and invited Ambrose to repeat any accusations of illegality outside of the House. Thomas Mulcair was up next, accusing Dominic LeBlanc of lying about business not being discussed at one of these fundraisers, and Chagger repeated the usual points about the rules. Mulcair asked again in French, got the same answer, and then demanded decriminalisation of marijuana in advance of legalisation. Jody Wilson-Raybould reminded him they were in the midst of a comprehensive review in advance of legislation coming in the spring. Mulcair asked again in English in a more snide tone, and Wilson-Raybould reiterated that the point of legalisation was to keep it out of the hands of children and profits from the hands of criminals.

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