In a move that surprised pretty much everyone yesterday, the Bank of Canada lowered their already rock bottom prime interest rate to 0.75 percent as a means of dealing with the effect of falling oil prices on our economy, and in response, the dollar dropped even further. Bank Governor Stephen Poloz said that the upsides of lower oil prices could have positives, but as the economic forecast was also downgraded, he said that it could delay recovery by at least a year. Opposition reaction to the rate cut was that it showed the government was mismanaging the economy, but Justin Trudeau also wouldn’t say if he would run deficits, nor would Thomas Mulcair indicate how he would pay for his childcare promises. Andrew Coyne is not bothered by the falling dollar, saying we’ll adjust, though as I watch my purchasing power evaporate before my eyes at the iTunes store, I can’t say I’m too happy about it.
Tag Archives: Nominations
Roundup: Family-friendly has its consequences
It’s one of those kinds of piece that rolls around every few months, and Laura Payton has again taken a look at the toll to family life that an MP’s job takes, especially as several MPs have opted not to run again, citing that very reason. And that’s well and good, but the moment we get to talking about making Parliament more “family friendly,” we immediately start talking about things without acknowledging any of the very detrimental unintended consequences. Beyond better access to childcare on the Hill for MPs (as opposed to staffers), they immediately start talking about things like cancelling Friday sittings, electronic votes, and attending committees by video conference – all of which are actually terrible ideas. Losing Fridays would mean having to make up the time somewhere else, and since we’ve already cancelled evening sittings to make Parliament more “family friendly,” well, that’s out, and let’s face it – nobody wants to sit in July or August because Ottawa is pretty humid and gross – especially in some of those old stone buildings that aren’t very well air conditioned, never mind that MPs generally want to be on the barbecue circuit or spending time with said families now that their children are out of school. Electronic voting is also a bad idea because half of the point of Parliaments are the very important symbolism of having your representatives stand and be seen to be standing for what they believe in. An electronic tally may be more convenient, but it also damages the meaning of the act. The other reason why it’s terrible is because that’s one of the few times that MPs are all together in one place and can see each other and make contacts, whether that means cornering a minister about an issue that they need to have addressed, or simply building relationships. It’s the same with attending committee by video conference. You’re not forming those relationships either with fellow MPs, or with any of the witnesses appearing before you, and even while some witnesses to appear by video conference, that face-to-face contact and the conversations in the hallway afterward are all lost. Those are tremendously important. There are other ways for MPs to better schedule themselves, but already the parliamentary calendar has changed a lot to accommodate families and travel. The loss of evening sittings had a demonstrable impact on collegiality because MPs no longer ate dinner together. Losing more of that contact will have a crippling blow on the institution.
Roundup: Two rulings and a report for the Mounties
The RCMP were in the centre of the spotlight yesterday, with two Supreme Court judgements and a fact-finding report on the Moncton shootings all having been released. Regarding the former, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the ban on RCMP from collectively bargaining was unconstitutional, which opens the door for them to form a recognised police association (though they seem to be shying away from a full-blown union). This ruling has further reaching consequences as it also resolved some of the problems in the existing jurisprudence around freedom of association, which has been in a fairly bad state for the past four years or so since a previous decision introduced a great deal of confusion into the law. The second decision related to a challenge of the government’s wage rollbacks imposed on the Force in 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis, but the RCMP lost that challenge because of the fairly narrow way in which it was constructed and argued. As for the Moncton report, much of it focuses on the lack of training and slow roll-out of new carbines, confusion among communications and problems related to body armour, many of which are problems that date back to the Mayerthorpe massacre of four Mounties. Where these two stories intersect, beyond the RCMP issue itself, is that police association members are saying that they could have addressed some of these problems and had timelines established as part of a collective bargaining process, which of course they don’t have.
Roundup: Voting attendance matters (Part II)
Following up on their report about MPs being absent from votes, the Ottawa Citizen tries to delve into the issue of just what happens to MPs who don’t show up. Usually, as these things go, the whips handle it and do so quietly. And if MPs don’t like what the whips have to tell them, then they have the option of walking – as it seems that Sana Hassainia did from the NDP. And as the numbers bear out, independent MPs with little incentive from party whips to show up, may just as well not. And that’s fine, really – if their constituents look at their voting records and see a whole lot of blanks, well, then they have a pretty good idea about what their MPs take to be a priority. What gets me is that the piece quotes the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation as saying that hey, MPs have plenty of jobs, and sometimes they’re more important than just standing up and sitting down. Except no – that’s one of the most important parts of being an MP, standing up for what they believe in, and being seen to do so, and being on the record for doing so. Voting is how things are decided in a democracy like ours, so when the people we send to make those decisions don’t bother to show up, well, it kinds of defeats the purpose. Despite the fantasy notions that people have about all the varied things an MP’s job is supposed to entail, it pretty much breaks down to holding the government to account, and the mechanism by which that happens is votes. It’s not rocket science. Making excuses for why MPs aren’t doing that job by voting – or having a good reason for why they’re not there to do so – doesn’t help the health of our system.
Roundup: Happy 200th birthday, Sir John A!
Tomorrow marks the 200th birthday of Sir John A Macdonald, our first prime minister and the man who made us. Unfortunately, because we don’t do a good job of recognising him, we’re not seeing too many celebrations around the country, which is a shame. And more recently, we’re seeing a rash of spiteful editorials, like this one, that declare that we should not celebrate him at all because he was a horrible racist drunk, or what have you. Never mind that everyone in the 19th century was pretty terrible, never mind that he was far more enlightened and moderate than most of his peers, never mind context or nuance as we read history – let’s grind some modern day axes on the backs of historical figures who can’t defend themselves! (Macdonald’s biographer, Richard Gwyn, offers a pretty good response to these kinds of articles here). In the meantime, Stephen Harper pens an op-ed in Macdonald’s praise, while Mark Kennedy wonders if any politician today could survive the scandals that Macdonald did (spoiler: probably not), and Aaron Wherry gets a roundtable of experts together to discuss Macdonald’s legacy. In the meantime, celebrate his birthday by watching the CBC film about the first steps toward confederation (online here), listen to some of his speeches as read by other former prime ministers, and certainly have a drink in his honour. Note that his favourite tipple was actually champagne, and not scotch, as so many people like to claim.
Roundup: A new posting for Kevin Vickers
House of Commons Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers has been appointed Canada’s new ambassador to Ireland, which seems like a fitting reward for the his heroic actions on October 22nd. Well, once you get past the questions about his diplomatic credentials (not that Ireland is likely to be a posting with actual diplomatic challenges). It also does leave one wondering about what will happen with the ongoing review of security on Parliament Hill in the wake of the shooting, since Vickers will no longer be around to answer questions. His deputy, Pat McDonell, will be assuming his duties for the time being, but if he doesn’t get the job full-time once Vickers is officially gone, it could mean that we might get a female Sergeant-at-Arms, as one of the other deputies who often sits in the chair is a woman. Kady O’Malley rounds up some of the reaction to the news.
Roundup: Support for Charlie Hebdo
In the wake of the deaths at French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris yesterday, we saw an outpouring of support from Canadian officials yesterday. Stephen Harper drew parallels to the attacks that happened here and in Sydney, Australia, in his statement, while Thomas Mulcair took the National Press Theatre to make his own statement, which also had the added symbolism of speaking to journalists in our own space after members of our profession were just gunned down. Justin Trudeau tweeted his support, but as he was flying off to the Arctic, wasn’t available for the media, and Marc Garneau was out in his stead. Editorial cartoonists around the world mourned the loss of their compatriots. Some of the better reaction pieces include Ishmael Daro, Colby Cosh, Scott Gilmore, Aisha Sherazi, Andrew Coyne, Matthew Fisher, and Terry Glavin.
Roundup: Find a new narrative for Mulcair
Michael Den Tandt writes that Thomas Mulcair is the most effective parliamentarian that we have today – which makes me weep a lot, mostly because it simply isn’t true. Den Tandt focuses on the three main party leaders, and tries to rate them on performance versus the attention that they get, and his thesis is that Mulcair may be the most effective but gets least attention for all manner of reasons. But in his construction of said premise, he gets a few things wrong. For one, he claims that Mulcair ditched his speaking notes, which is absolutely not true. What Mulcair did was ditch the mini-lectern on his desk, but not until the heyday of Duffy questions, which really was Mulcair’s moment. It was his “prosecutor-in-chief” moment, which lasted for about two days, and then petered out, and he has yet to re-create the moment or the energy since. He still has his notes – they’re just on his desk, and he still reads from them, and it’s evident in both the tone and substance of his questions – particularly as he rarely asks direct follow-ups, and may not ask a follow-up until 20 minutes later in QP, or not at all until the next day. The problem remains that much of the commentariat remains fixated on this vision of Mulcair as “prosecutor-in-chief” and “best performer in the House” even though it was a two-day experience that has not been repeated since. Of course, they don’t attend QP and one isn’t sure how often they watch the forced perspectives on CPAC, so they can stick with this image and not have it shaken by daily exposure to what Mulcair is really like as a performer. And there are far better parliamentarians as a whole – those who show up for debates, fully researched and able to speak off-the-cuff, to ask or take questions, and to do more than simply read speeches into the record. They’re few and far between, but they do exist. Mulcair is not one of those MPs – not by a long shot. But somewhere along the way, those couple of days during the Duffy heyday has given pundits a narrative that they refuse to be shaken from. And it makes me sad that after watching Bob Rae wipe the floor with his opponents during QP for nearly two years, for whom Mulcair was a non-entity in comparison day in and day out, that his far superior performance is so easily forgotten.
Roundup: Attendance under the microscope
As one of those fun little articles to fill the pages over the holidays, the Ottawa Citizen looked at party leaders’ abysmal QP attendance records. What it showed was, predictably, pretty abysmal, with the Prime Minister coming in with the worst attendance record, and Justin Trudeau not far behind. As someone who attends QP regularly, I could have told you as much, but it’s nice to see some recorded figures and percentages, though when you think about it, Mulcair’s increase is really means he’s there one more hour per week. The piece also treats Friday QP as a regular day, which it hasn’t been as long as I’ve been covering it, but perhaps we should pay more attention to it and treat it as more than just a rump where those MPs who aren’t jetting off back to their ridings stay behind to hold the fort. There is one thing in the piece that did bother me, which was the load of nonsense that Peter Julian said about Michael Ignatieff, because it’s completely false. Ignatieff was there for QP on most days – far more than Harper was. The “not showing up for work” figure that the NDP used in the last election was based on voting records, and it was misleading because Ignatieff made a policy not to vote on private members’ business whenever possible in order to free his caucus to vote as they chose rather than to take direction from him. That meant he attended fewer of these votes, but the NDP falsely treated that as an attendance record. For them to continue to spread disinformation about Ignatieff’s attendance is shameful (but not surprising, alas).
Roundup: Destroyed text messages
Access to Information emails have uncovered another decision that doesn’t pass the smell test – in this case, the Canada Revenue Agency directing Shared Services Canada to purge their archives of BlackBerry PINs and SMS text messages. The claim is that these are transitory communications that don’t have any business value, but that claim is utterly laughable. Of course business communications are being one PIN-to-PIN, and anyone who believes otherwise is kidding themselves. Sure, some of them may be “don’t’ forget to pick up milk on your way home,” but that doesn’t mean that the CRA shouldn’t still be collecting these communications and sorting out the ones with business value. Oh, but wait – that’s the point, isn’t it? Having a channel of communication that isn’t being picked up by ATIP requests, just like when managers declare, “We’re not taking any notes this meeting” – never mind that it’s in contravention to the government’s own rules around this kind of thing. The Information Commissioner has agreed to look into this case, and has previously warned that this information isn’t being collected in most departments, when all it takes to capture it is to flick a single switch on the servers. As a result, we’re going to find ourselves in a position where there is no paper trail for decisions taken by departments – in this case, CRA – and future governments and future generations will be left to puzzle what was going on. You know, the exact opposite of the point of records retention and archives. That Shared Services meekly went along with the directive is also suspect when they should have pushed back to defend the value of the corporate memory contained within those archives. In other words, a failure all around.
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