Tag Archives: NATO

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: Use your Australian comparisons wisely

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If it’s not the leadership omnishambles in the UK that’s holding our attention, it’s the indecisive election result in Australia. While that would be something in and of itself, we find ourselves with pundits eager to take some lessons from Australia, only to completely balls things up along the way. To wit, Kelly McParland writing in the National Post delivered this hot mess yesterday which manages to conflate every possible thing in Australian politics in order to prove a point – not necessarily a bad point – but went about it in entirely the wrong way. So, for Mr. McParland’s edification, let’s break it down a little.

First of all, the “six prime ministers in six years” has virtually nothing to do with the ranked ballots in Australia. The system of caucus selection of leaders there (which is how leaders should be chosen, as I’ve argued elsewhere numerous times) has gone to extremes, creating a culture of paranoia and betrayal. But that’s not the fault of the ranked ballots since it’s a different process. That parties will spill leaders shortly before an election in the hopes of having a more appealing leader is party politics enabled by the ability to have spills, rather than the ranked ballot effect. Conflating them is not helpful.

The ranked ballots themselves allow for more small parties to exist independent of “big tent” brokerage parties because ranked ballots discourage tactical voting – something McParland neglects to mention while returning to the Canadian canard that the Liberals only want ranked ballots because they think they’ll clean up by getting everyone’s second place votes. That has led to the need for the Australian Liberals (read: conservatives) to require a coalition partner to govern, which is a consideration to make if we want ranked ballots, but it is a giant conflation to mix this in with the stability of their system and leadership woes.

The problem of the Australian Senate is the bigger nub of the argument, but which gets lost in the rest of the McParland’s confusing mess. The Australian Senate is chosen by single-transferable proportional voting, and the system has been effectively gamed in the previous election so that a bunch of marginal players got seats and subsequently created a huge problem in their upper chamber, requiring more tinkering of the system to be forced through and the Prime Minister calling for double-dissolution (so that both chambers be elected at the same time – a rare occurrence usually reserved for political crises) in order to break the legislative deadlocks. Those tweaks appear to be causing even more problems with this election, but we may see how it all shakes out in a few weeks. (Note that these ballots tend to be the size of placemats, because of the way they’re structured with the enormous number of parties running). And while the problems with these marginal parties being given outsized powers of persuasion in the previous parliament are very valid points to make, it gets lost in the sea of conflations that plagued the rest of the piece.

So I get McParland’s point about electoral reform advocates needing to be careful what they wish for, and can even agree with it to a large extent, this was utterly the wrong way to go about it.

Meanwhile, here’s a primer about Australia’s lengthy counting process – so lengthy that their Senate preferential distribution process could take over a month. Closer to home, here are some of the ways in which the electoral reform committee plans to engage with Canadians.

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Roundup: Happy Dominion Day!

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Happy Dominion Day! In lieu of the usual rant, today I leave you with a few items for your perusal: a look at ten animals that helped shaped Canada, a look back at the creation of the flag, 40 famous Canadians giving their memories of childhood summers, and Maclean’s has 111 stories from Canadians. Now go enjoy the day, to the sounds of my July 1st theme song.

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Roundup: A test of bicameral wills?

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Whether through stubbornness or pique, the House of Commons voted to adopt nearly all of the amendments the Senate proposed to Bill C-14, with the exception of the biggest and most important one – the one which would eliminate the requirement of a “reasonably foreseeable” death before someone could be granted medical assistance in dying. And then, the Commons more or less announced that tomorrow will be their last sitting day before they rise for the summer, essentially daring the Senate to return a bill to a chamber that has gone home (well, they are supposed to come back on the 29th for Obama’s address), and leaving the spectre of there being no law in place, which has all manner of medical community stakeholders concerned (never mind that the framework of the Supreme Court of Canada’s Carter decision is in place and would ensure that nobody would be charged for providing the service). It’s a little more ballsy than I would have given the Liberals credit for a few weeks ago, particularly before I saw the background paper that Jody Wilson-Raybould released with her…questionable justification for drafting the law the way it was. Now comes the difficult part – will the Senate stick to their guns and insist that the amendments to eliminate “reasonably foreseeable” be maintained if the bill is to remain constitutional, or will they back down because they’ve made their point and the Commons is the elected chamber?

This is the part where I chime in with a few reminders that this is the reason why our Senate exists the way it does – it enjoys institutional independence and cannot be threatened by the Commons so that they can push back on bills they find unconstitutional, particularly a controversial one like this, where MPs are proving themselves to be timid in the face of a Supreme Court of Canada decision that lays out what they deem to be an appropriate constitutional reading of the issue – something the government is basically flouting in an attempt to push back on this bit of social evolution for as long as possible. And as I’ve stated before, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the Commons is waiting for the Senate to “force” them to advance things. Will it turn into a ping-pong between the chambers? Not for much longer, I would say, but it is going to depend on who blinks. If the Senate does dig in its heels on this and insist that doing otherwise would be to let an unconstitutional bill pass, then there is every reason to suspect the government take the “forced into this” option and let the Senate be the punching bag when religious and disability groups complain. There are people suggesting that the Supreme Court should break the impasse, which I would loudly denounce because it’s the very last thing we need. It’s not their job, and it would signal a complete abdication of the rights of Parliament and Responsible Government that our predecessors fought long and hard for. (Also, stop demanding these bills be referred to the Court – legislating is not a game of “Mother May I?”). This whole exercise is why the Senate exists. Let’s let them do their jobs.

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Roundup: Two bills heading back

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It looks like the Senate has nearly finished with two of the contentious bills on its plate, and both are headed back to the Commons with amendments. The first is the obvious one, Bill C-14, where the biggest change has been to drop the requirement that a condition must essentially be terminal for the law to grant a medically-assisted death, but other amendments such as allowing for advanced directives failed in part because Senator Murray Sinclair made a compelling case that the language in the amendment was sufficiently unclear. The challenge there is that while the government promises further study in the language of the bill, there is little guarantee that will actually happen, or if it does, that legislation will follow, because MPs are terribly spineless about these sorts of things and they require being “forced” by the courts.

The other bill is C-7, the RCMP unionization bill, where the list of exclusions that the government had put into the bill has been removed, and somewhat inexplicably, a provision that a union certification vote has to be done by secret ballot was inserted (though I suspect the latter was a compromise with the Conservatives to get them to pass the more important amendment of striking down the exclusions). In that case, the government has a hard time justifying those exclusions, particularly as they both make little sense, and perpetuate the problems of the Commissioner’s office already having too much power, while it would continue to give him even more.

So what’s next? Once those bills head back to the Commons, we’ll see how much the government plans to dig in its heels, and how tough senators can talk about insisting that those changes be in the bills, particularly as they have the weight of the Supreme Court of Canada behind them in both cases. The biggest problem the Senate will face is splintering resolve – enough senators are not willing to stand up to the elected Commons even in the face of a bill that is likely not to pass constitutional muster because the Commons is the elected chamber. Never mind that the Senate was created as an appointed body so that it could do just that – stand up to the elected chamber when need be, because their lack of a need for re-election allowed their reflection on bills to be more “sober,” and this is a case where that particular “sobriety” is needed in the face of pressure from religious and disability groups. But, as I maintain, it remains likely that the Commons is looking for an excuse to be “forced” to accept these changes, and the Senate threatening to use their veto would be excuse enough for MPs to make the needed changes in a way that allows them to hide behind the Senate and skirt responsibility, as they did the courts before them. We’ll have to see.

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QP: Not taking the budget bait

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The day before budget day, and the Commons was not as full as it could or should be. Rona Ambrose led off, her mini-lectern on Andrew Scheer’s desk as it often is these days, and she read some concern about her supposition about the budget. Justin Trudeau insisted that they had a plan, and that the previous government didn’t get the job done. Ambrose tried to retort that they had the best job creation record in the G7, then turned a lament about raising taxes. Trudeau reminded her of the debt-to-GDP ratio. Ambrose insisted that investment has “fallen off the cliff” since the election, but Trudeau responded that economists said that this was the time to invest. Denis Lebel took over to ask about public confidence in the economy, which Trudeau reiterated their investment promises, and Lebel lamented the state of the forestry industry as an example of a measure needed in the budget, but Trudeau didn’t bite, and told him to wait for the budget. Thomas Mulcair was up for the NDP, and decried Bombardier’s plan to outsource some jobs, and demanded the protection of jobs in Canada. Trudeau agreed that they wanted to protect good jobs, which was why they were taking the time to assess Bombardier’s proposal. Mulcair demanded commitments on EI, for which Trudeau reminded him that they made commitments in their platform and they would keep that promise in the budget. Mulcair switched to English and lamented the conditions on First Nations reserves, for which Trudeau yet again reminded him that they made promises to renew the relationship, and that the budget would contain historic investment. For his final question, Trudeau asked about a family where the children were kidnapped to Kurdistan. Trudeau insisted that the return of those children were a high priority.

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Senate QP: Sajjan takes the heat

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Senate QP invites a minister, round three, with special guest star National Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan. There were a few technical issues with the earpiece at the centre desk on the floor, and the Liberals invited Sajjan to use a desk on their side instead. Senator Carignan agreed, saying that it was technically the government side of the chamber, and once Sajjan was settled, Carignan led off, asking if Canada was officially at war with ISIS as France and the United States were. Sajjan gave a personal definition of war as being what we remember with the World Wars, and that this conflict was not of the same scale, but that didn’t lessen the commitment to the fight.

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Roundup: A vote for support

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

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Roundup: 100 days without unicorns

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

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Roundup: A dubiously predicted rejection

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There are days when the Senate bat-signal shines in the sky, and I’m likely to sigh and say “Oh, you again.” And it’s one of those times, wherein the Hill Times writes a screaming headline about Liberal senators saying they’ll oppose an appointed Government Leader, only for the story to be about one unnamed Senate Liberal source (not even necessarily a senator) saying that they might objet to an appointment, but no one really knows because it’s all up in the air. So, chalk another one up for hyperbole without any real basis for it. Now, it does seem like there are some issues that need to be sorted, such as whether they count as a Recognized Party for budget reasons when it comes to leadership, but that would seem to me to be an issue that they could solve internally as the Senate is self-governing. And for sure, the sense of uncertainty amongst Senate Liberals is likely getting frustrating because I’m sure they’d like to know if there will be things like Senate Question Period still carrying on without a member of the government to hold to account, or how they will shepherd government bills through the Chamber, or even how they will organise seating (as there really isn’t a government and opposition side any longer), but again, it’s all up in the air. One does hope that the Liberals on the Commons side will start getting more communicative about what’s going on, seeing as having a functioning Parliament would be a good thing to get sorted, but it seems that we have to remain patient a little longer. Hyperbolic headlines don’t help.

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