Tag Archives: Nominations

Roundup: Ignoring legal advice

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Looking through the government documents made available to the public during the court challenge on the government’s niqab ban during citizenship ceremonies, a pattern emerges quickly – that the department knew this was a non-starter, and they tried to offer alternatives for accommodation. Jason Kenney, the minister at the time, would have none of it, and pressed ahead anyway. And lo and behold, he used an instrument to implement a ban that was out of order. The Federal Court has said so, and the Federal Court of Appeal upheld it in a ruling from the bench, and this didn’t even touch the Charter arguments. But it shouldn’t be a surprise given the frequency at which this government’s legal and constitutional positions keep getting struck down by the courts, whether it’s with certain mandatory minimum sentences, or the Senate reference. People wonder what kind of legal advice they’re being given, and as this particular case clearly demonstrates in the documents, they’re being told that their positions don’t hold water – and yet they push ahead anyway. As we saw in the Duffy trial that the government created their own legal advisor position within the PMO, never mind that they have the Department of Justice who should be providing them with legal advice. The plain reading of what this means of course is that they didn’t like what Justice had to tell them, so they found a workaround to give them legal advice they found was more palatable. It all seems like such a waste of time, energy and taxpayer’s money – this from a party who insisted that they were going to put an end to waste in government.

https://twitter.com/michaelplaxton/status/646638431653765120

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Roundup: Globe Debate debacle

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The big “economic debate” was last night, hosted by the Globe and Mail, and well, it wasn’t exactly edifying on any account. The moderator was also commenting, he rushed segments so the leaders were alternating between slow points and rushing through, and then there was the shouting and the non sequiturs. And what non sequiturs they were – I’m not sure what C-51 had to do with taxation, but Thomas Mulcair brought it up anyway. Truth be told, much of the “debate” was leaders trying to go down their talking point and catchphrase checklists. Alas. Kady O’Malley offers advice for future single-issue debates, while Drake Fenton gives an ode to the moderator’s bell/egg timer. Reaction from the Citizen’s pundit panel, Paul Wells, and Micheal Den Tandt.

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Roundup: About that “costed” plan

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The NDP released their “costed” fiscal plan yesterday, which was not in fact the full costing that they had promised, but rather a broad-strokes framework, full of vague line item names like “Helping Families Get Ahead” and “Help Where It’s Needed Most” rather than actually talking about their childcare plan, and their promises around the healthcare escalator. (That escalator, incidentally, has confused a lot of reporters in the room). It’s kind of ironic that after a week spent baiting the Liberals on releasing their costed platform, the NDP didn’t actually deliver theirs. Suffice to say, the analysis to date seems to be that the NDP platform relies on the Budget 2015 numbers – numbers which are no longer relevant as the price of oil has crashed even further, and GDP growth is nowhere near what was projected and likely won’t be anytime soon, which blows a hole of several billion dollars into the assumptions. It also relies on the same austerity that the Conservative budget is built upon, despite what the NDP insists. The Conservatives and Liberals immediately panned the document, but that’s not a surprise. Being as I’m not an economist, I’ll leave the comments for those who are, and they have plenty to say (with some background on how to read these kinds of documents from Kevin Milligan here):

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/644266217994215424

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https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/644258642158596096

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/644306950700724224

https://twitter.com/rolandparis/status/644332078855815168

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Roundup: The grasping of straws

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While we may be past the halfway mark in this campaign, we’re also well into the territory when things start getting a bit…surreal. Or utterly nonsensical. Take your pick. All of it done in the breathless hyperbolizing that parties do in order to try and make their rivals look bad. If you take a look at any Conservative press release, the sections comparing “Justin and Mulcair” are full of ridiculous non sequiturs that have little or nothing to do with the topic at hand. The Liberals are trotting out Jean Chrétien to say that Stephen Harper has “shamed” Canada (never mind that the rest of the world really doesn’t care). And the NDP have been taking the cake for some of their criticisms, which are starting to sound more like grasping at straws. They held a news conference with Charlie Angus to decry Justin Trudeau for “smearing” small businesses when he pointed out that wealthy people self-incorporate to pay lower taxes. And then Angus admitted that it’s a problem and they need to “tweak” the system, but still tried to insist Trudeau was smearing. Their line of attack about not being able to trust the Liberals not to make cuts is predicated on the 1990s, never mind the fact that the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is nowhere near what it was the. And now Thomas Mulcair is brushing off the concerns of the premiers for his plans, whether it’s Senate abolition (which most don’t support), or childcare (which the provinces are expected to pay 40 percent of), or even their balanced budget pledge, of which provincial transfers are an issue. But he’ll have a “mandate” he says. Never mind that he sounds like he’s already over-reading it when he hasn’t even been given one. Suffice to say, the talking points from all sides are getting ridiculous. And we still have a month to go.

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Roundup: May’s magical thinking

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It was Elizabeth May’s turn to go before Peter Mansbridge last night, and as with all other leaders, she too got the basics of government formation wrong – but unlike the others, May just got it wrong in a different way. She insisted that if Harper got a minority government, the opposition parties should be able to call the Governor General to insist that they get a chance to form government before Harper. Nope, that’s not how it works, because the incumbent remains the Prime Minister until he or she resigns. That’s because the position can never be vacant. Ever. Her Majesty must always have a government in place, and it’s the GG’s job to ensure that happens. So really, no matter the result on election night, the leader whose party wins the most seats isn’t invited to form government – the incumbent is still the government until they choose to resign, which may or may not involve testing the confidence of the Chamber first. May also revealed that she has the GG’s number and will make that call herself, as though he is obligated to take it. Remember of course that May has also previously written the Queen about issues, and treated form letter responses as vindication. It’s part of her particular problem of over-reading her mandate – she’s hugely conflated her role as an MP with that of being in government in the past, and it’s a problem with how she interacts with the system. It’s also part of her curious insistence that somehow, a handful of Green MPs sitting in opposition and not in a coalition cabinet would magically make a minority parliament a less fractious place. How, exactly? Did none of the proponents of more minority governments learn any lessons from the three minority parliaments prior to 2011? Apparently not, because the magical thinking prevails.

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Roundup: Uncomfortable tax truths

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It’s one of those funny things that happen during campaigns, when one leader tells an uncomfortable truth about an issue, and the other leaders rush to condemn him or her about it. In this particular incidence, it was Justin Trudeau telling Peter Manbridge that he was less keen on a blanket reduction in small business taxes than he was in tweaking the system, because a “large percentage” of those small businesses are wealthy Canadians using those businesses to pay less tax. And he’s absolutely right about it – particularly after changes were made to the system a few years ago that basically turned it into an income-splitting mechanism for some particularly wealthy Canadians. The Conservatives and NDP, however, are outraged, as they are promising small business tax cuts, the NDP going so far as to demand that Trudeau apologise for “smearing” small businesses – except that they don’t have the facts on their side. The Canadian Press’ Baloney Meter™ checked out Trudeau’s statement, and found it to be true, with minor quibbles about the meaning of “large percentage.” (Trudeau seems to be relying on the studies that say that up to 60 percent of small business filers are problematic). There is also the added contention that another good percentage of these filers aren’t actually job creators, like the Conservatives and NDP keep saying – mom and pop shops aren’t, for example. Economist Kevin Milligan delves further into the issue, and notes that Quebec has been making changes to their small business tax laws to ensure that companies have at least three full-time employees to be eligible – thus ensuring that it’s a “ job creator” and not a couple splitting income or a mom-and-pop shop that has no intention of hiring someone else. It is a problem that needs fixing and not platitudes, and it’s good that at least one leader sees fit to recognise that fact, and has so far stood up for it despite the heat he’s taking.

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Roundup: Harper’s Westminster mistake

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It was a fairly combative interview, as Stephen Harper sat down with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge, but there was a fairly important point to make, which is that the understanding of the Westminster parliamentary system that he espoused was totally wrong. Harper stated that he wouldn’t try to form government if his party didn’t win the most seats, which is an interesting political commitment, but his assertion that it’s the way the convention works in a Westminster system is wrong and has nothing to do with the actual way that governments are formed. What I will say is that this certainly seems to answer all of the paranoid delusions of the Harper Derangement Syndrome-types out there who insist that he’s going to try to hold onto power at all costs, and that even if he can’t win a majority that he’s going to still test the confidence of the Chamber and call a snap election immediately if he doesn’t get it, etcetera, etcetera. That’s certainly not the message that he’s been giving, and really, he’s not a Bond villain. Making him out to be such is counterproductive and simply wrong. Here’s Mansbridge’s behind-the-scenes look at the leader interview series, the biting satirical Twitter account Canadian Median Voter weighing in on Harper’s understanding, plus a reminder that Thomas Mulcair has said pretty much the very same incorrect things, and a reminder of how things actually operate.

https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/641069383729741826

https://twitter.com/markdjarvis/status/640289615987929088

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Roundup: The big infrastructure spend

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It all being official that the Liberals are willing to run a small deficit in order to finance infrastructure spending in the hopes of boosting a stalled economy have turned the election into one with some real differences between parties, which incidentally seems to have also energised Harper’s performance at his own stops. The issue for the Liberals would seem to be now not only having to sell the idea of deficits – which they are attempting to do with the line of being the only party that’s being honest about the current state of the nation’s finances – but ensuring that the infrastructure spending they’re doing is going to be actually useful in the longer term. Sure, there is a big infrastructure deficit in this country for which this new funding is but a drop in the bucket, but if he wants to ensure that this is the kind of kick that will grow the economy, it should be in things that will have bigger impact – port infrastructure to get goods to market, ensuring that there is the kind of broadband access in places that need it to grow their business and attract investment, and so on. It shouldn’t be about short-term stimulus, lest the Liberals repeat the mistakes of the Conservatives in 2009-10. Not unsurprisingly, Toronto mayor John Tory and the president of the Canadian Federation of Municipalities both liked the announcement as it means more money for cities. Former PCO Clerk Kevin Lynch talks about the need for fiscal policy rather than just relying on monetary policy to try to grow the economy – and includes infrastructure spending as an example. Kevin Milligan examines the case for infrastructure spending at this time, and finds there is a plausible case for it.

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Roundup: Honesty in deficits?

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Balanced budgets and deficits continued to be a topic of discussion on the campaign yesterday, and it will continue to be so today as Justin Trudeau is set to unveil his infrastructure plan to boost the economy, which seems set to include some deficit financing for another year or two as the economy appears stagnant. Stephen Harper warns the other parties are looking at “permanent deficits,” but it bears reminding that according to the previous Parliamentary Budget Officer, the only way that Harper killed off is own structural deficit was in changing the health transfer escalator, leaving him with only a cyclical deficit (which persists, no matter how much they shuffle money around on paper to cover over it). The NDP continue to insist they won’t run a deficit, but they also seem to dispute that they would need to continue austerity and they would even do things like restore the health transfer escalator, which starts to boggle the mind. The Liberals seem to be looking to score points for honesty in that a) they don’t know the true state of the books, and b) the global economic situation, but one might also add that our debt-to-GDP ratio is in a good place now (as opposed to the eighties and nineties), so small deficits won’t affect our economic health that much. To that end, Mike Moffatt says it’s important to ask parties how they would manage deficits, because they are inevitable in the current economic climate, while Andrew Coyne says that we should be paying attention to the signals being sent by the leaders when it comes to deficits.

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Roundup: An questionable call to the Governor

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While I often cringe about the media’s reluctance to refer to Stephen Harper as prime minister during the writ period (as he remains prime minister and will until he offers the Governor General his resignation) out of an exaggerated sense of fairness, there was an incident yesterday where Harper himself blurred that line between being prime minister, and being the Conservative leader campaigning for his own ends. For the first time that I can recall, we got a press release that mentioned that the Prime Minister called up the Governor of the Bank of Canada. While the text was pretty banal, talking about “ongoing developments” in the global economy and the recent declines in the markets, it was still unusual because we never get these kinds of releases. Ever. There is a very clear separation between government fiscal policy and the monetary policy set by the Bank of Canada, and the two should never meet – in fact, there is an issue in Canadian history where the Prime Minister tried to interfere with the Bank of Canada, and the Governor of the day ended up resigning in protest as a result. While the purpose of Harper’s call to Governor Poloz is not mentioned, the fact that it came on the day where Harper’s campaign message was all about how only his party could be trusted to weather this global economic turbulence, well, it’s pretty icky. Harper subtly politicizes Poloz by using him as a campaign prop – look at my economic credentials! I’m talking to the Bank of Canada Governor, like an economic boss! For all we know, Harper and Poloz have a weekly call where they talk trends and forecasts, and so on, but if that’s the case, we never hear about it. This time, Harper made sure that we knew about it. I’m having a hard time trying to see how this is acceptable in any way.

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