Tag Archives: Parliament Hill

Roundup: An unexpected shuffle

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Yesterday’s Cabinet shuffle came with a few surprises, but the biggest was probably the decision to move Jody Wilson-Raybould from justice to veterans’ affairs – a move which can only be interpreted as a demotion, despite both prime minister Justin Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould making the argument that it was insulting to veterans to think of them as a lesser consideration. Added to that, Wilson-Raybould got defensive and put out a lengthy press release that said she wouldn’t discuss why she was moved, as that’s the prerogative of the prime minister (true), but then went on to laud all of her accomplishments as justice minister (which she bizarrely abbreviated as MOJAG – Minister of Justice and Attorney General, the first time I can recall such an abbreviation being used). The problem, of course, is that there was a lot of talk about how things were not going well in her office. I personally heard from a number of people in the legal community about their concerns about the managerial competence within Wilson-Raybould’s office, particularly around staffing key positions such as the Judicial Affairs Advisor – necessary for the appointment of judges, and a post that was left vacant for months at a time, as the number of vacancies began increasing, and still have a significant backlog in place. There was also a lot of staffing churn within her office, which should be a warning sign that not all is well. And more reports came out yesterday that there had been some tensions around the Cabinet table when it came to Wilson-Raybould, so the fact that she penned a defensive release probably speaks volumes.

As for the other ministerial changes, David Lametti (my Canadian Lawyer profile here) replaced Wilson-Raybould, who replaces Seamus O’Regan at veterans’ affairs, O’Regan moving to Indigenous services to replace Jane Philpott, who in turn replaced the departing Scott Brison. Trudeau added a new portfolio to the mix – rural economic development, under new minister Bernadette Jordan, who is now the Nova Scotian in Cabinet. That portfolio is another one without a ministry, and it looks like it’ll be housed within Innovation, Science and Economic Development, where all of the other regional development ministries are housed, but as with a growing number of portfolios under this government, it’s another minister without a line department of her own, which I find a bit concerning.

Meanwhile, there are so many hot takes on the shuffle, starting with Chantal Hébert, who says the few changes mean it’s steady-as-she-goes for Trudeau before the election. Likewise, Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column says these changes highlight that there is little room for experimentation, this late in the current parliament. Mercedes Stephenson echoes the sentiment, with some added details on O’Regan’s time on the veterans file. Paul Wells brings the shade when it comes to the performance of this government, and the inability for any particular minister to make any meaningful changes in the face of bottlenecks of authority in the PMO, and a government too afraid to make any changes so close to an election. Mike Moffatt delivers a thread on the challenges of rural economic development, and why the portfolio might be a good idea after all.

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Roundup: On those marginal tax rates

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Given the debate that his happening south of the border when it comes to agitation for a 70 percent marginal tax rate on high earners, it’s only a matter of time before the left-leaning contingent of Twitter starts agitating for the same here. The problem, of course, is that you can’t simply import the same concepts between the US and Canada and expect it to be analogous, or at the very least analogous at one tenth the figures in the US. To demonstrate, economist Kevin Milligan took the Canadian data and mapped out what that would mean here. And lo, it’s not an analogous situation (though I suspect it won’t stop left-leaning Twitter from repeating these American talking points one bit).

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Roundup: CSIS’ hackers

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So that story about CSIS looking to hire hackers and data scientists? Well, some of the concerns raised about the story may have been overblown. Maybe. Stephanie Carvin – who used to be an analyst at CSIS – has some thoughts on the issue and what it represents.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1081183300738342918

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I do wonder if We The Media are capable of asking some of the right questions when it comes to our intelligence services, and whether we treat them with too much suspicion because they’re a world of secrets and we don’t get to learn them, and that they not able to operate transparently. Not that they’re above scrutiny – they’r enot, and the fact that we’ve now got NSICOP to provide parliamentary oversight is a long overdue step up in that direction – but we can’t treat everything they do as inherently problematic.

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Roundup: Salaries are not cement

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As the debate over the proposed changes to the Parliament of Canada Act continues to roll along, some of us are struck by the fact that the whole framing of the debate continues to be utterly wrong – that the wrong headline on the Canadian Press piece about prime minister Justin Trudeau looking to “cement” the changes in order to make it harder for a future prime minister to roll them back is completely wrong, given that the PCA has nothing to do with the appointment process. And yet, here we are, once again debating the independent appointments commission, when the actual changes to the Act involve salaries for caucus leaders and some organisational issues. Virtually all of these have been extended to the Independent Senators Group, from committee chairs and assignments, to a role on the Internal Economy Committee, budget allocations for their leadership’s office (aka the “secretariat”), and so on. The only thing they can’t get currently, which they need changes to the PCA for is a higher salary for their leadership team. Fair enough, one might say, but considering that they eschew the label of a caucus, and the roles of both government and opposition, preferring to be neither fish nor fowl, it does make it a bit harder to justify that they should be on equal footing to them. In practice, they are very much a caucus, but this is what the changes they are asking for boil down to – it has nothing to do with “cementing” the changes to the institution, and it would be great if the pundits and journalists talking about this issue could grasp that basic fact.

With that in mind, Colby Cosh penned a fairly (deservedly) harsh piece about the changes to the Upper Chamber, and the fact that Trudeau is creating a Frankenstein’s monster that has more to do with his trying to absolve himself of his responsibility for the Chamber than anything. And Cosh is absolutely right – this has been about Trudeau washing his hands of any whiff of scandal in the Upper Chamber since he became leader, consequences be damned. And there have been real consequences – Trudeau centralised power within his caucus because he got rid of the voices with the most experience who could push back against him without consequences (it’s not like he can threaten not to sign their nomination papers), and got rid of the bulk of his party’s institutional memory in one fell swoop. He’s also losing his ability to get his legislation through the Chamber because he named someone inept as his “representative” (who should be a full-fledged Cabinet minister in order to ensure proper lines of accountability) who refuses to negotiate timelines on bills in the manner in which the Senate operates.

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This having been said, I will again reiterate that what we should strive for is for the ISG to become like the crossbenchers in the Lords, but that depends on a strong enough Liberal and Conservative contingent to provide balance, and this prime minister has no interest in that, preferring to continue with this experiment in Frankenstein’s Monster until he gets burned by it. And while I’m sure that there will come a reckoning, that the ISG will fracture, and eventually some of its members will drift to an established caucus, it may be some time before that happens and sanity starts to prevail in the Chamber. I just wouldn’t count on this prime minister to provide any of it.

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Roundup: Trudeau’s year-end musings

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It’s that time of year, when the prime minister is starting his rounds of year-end interviews, and thus far, with CTV and The Canadian Press having been done so far. Some of the newsworthy moments have been that he is saying that he is looking for a way to get out of the weapons deal with Saudi Arabia. He also says he’s not planning on an early election (to which I would say of course, because he’s going to have too hard of a time getting everything he needs to get done before the fall, so why would he want to go early?) There was also some very careful language around Energy East, both in that there is not a current proposal on the table so any talk of it is hypothetical, but also that under the current approach, there is no support for the project in Quebec, which could mean that under a different environmental assessment regime (like the one they’re planning in Bill C-69) they may have better luck. Maybe. But I did find the qualifier very interesting. He also pushed back against some of the simplistic notions around the deficit in some of his clearest responses to date (though he still used much of the same pabulum language), so that’s maybe a sign he’s improving on that file. Maybe. He also warned about using populist anger over issues like immigration, which immediately made the Conservatives get huffy and say that he was launching personal attacks, and so on.

Out of all of this, I was most interested in what he had to say about the Senate, and how he plans to make changes to the Parliament of Canada Act, though the headline says this is about trying to make it harder for a future PM to make changes to reverse his reforms – though the Act wouldn’t do that at all, nor does he actually say that in the interview quotes, so I’m not sure where they got that notion from. I am on the record as saying that I think they should hold off on these changes for now, because the Senate has made sessional orders to do everything that they need them to do around the additional caucus funds and so on, and because it’s simply too early to make these kinds of permanent changes to the legislative authority given that the “reforms” have been ham-fisted and ill-considered, and we could very well be creating even more problems for ourselves down the road. But they want to ram this through before the election, and there is going to be a fight on their hands to do it, so we’ll see how that plays out in the New Year.

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Roundup: Starting the Big Move

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Yesterday was the final day that Centre Block was officially in operation. As of today, the big move starts happening, starting with the House of Commons chamber, and will be followed by the other major offices, like the Speaker, the prime minister and leader of the opposition, with the heritage furniture that will continue to be in use. And once that’s done and the building is empty, they can start to open up walls and ceilings to figure out the state of the building, and determine what needs to be done in terms of renovations and restorations, and from that point determine a price tag and timeline. At present, everything is just a guess, so we’ll have to stay tuned. (Here’s a photo gallery of the current House of Commons and Senate, and the new Commons).

The Senate, however, is a different story. Recent testing of the new chamber brought to light the fact that there are acoustic problems related to sound leakage that were first identified two years ago, and despite assurances from Public Works, it wasn’t addressed. That means they have to install new sound baffles which will delay the move by several weeks, which means that there will be even fewer weeks for the Senate to address its full Order Paper in the New Year. Committees can still meet in the meantime, but it seems the Conservatives have decided to engage in some gamesmanship over Bill C-69, which has the Independent senators are complaining about stall tactics.

Meanwhile, here is a lengthy thread looking at the new Senate building, and six facts about the building, its history, and the new renovations.

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Roundup: Closer examinations of Canadian populism

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The topic of populism has been coming up a lot lately, in a variety of contexts, and there were a couple of interesting discussions around it in the Canadian context over the past couple of days. One is an examination by Frank Graves and Michael Valpy that looks at some of the demographic factors in Canadian populist sentiment, and digs out some interesting things like broader support among male millennials, and even some immigrant communities (though I would note that it’s not that difficult to get immigrant communities to turn against other newcomers – particularly asylum seekers – a technique that Jason Kenney tried very hard to exploit when he was federal immigration minister. The piece is worth digging into, and I had to read it a good two or three times before I started to appreciate a lot of what was contained within.

Another interesting piece was a look at the construction of Alberta conservatism, which goes beyond fiscal and social conservatism – indeed, when polled on values, much of the province actually skews toward fairly centrist values – and yet they disproportionately gravitate toward conservative parties out of a sense of brand identity, which is particularly curious, though one should note that political parties have been losing their ideological bases in favour of left-and-right flavoured populism over the past number of years. And populism is very much a factor in the Alberta voting populace, as the examination shows, which includes the distinction of populism as something that appeals to the “pure” homogeneity of a “people.”

To that end, here’s a good thread that digs into what sets populism apart from democracy, and why it’s something we need to pay attention to as this becomes an increasingly important part of the Canadian discourse.

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Roundup: Complaints without suggestions

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In the wake of the First Ministers’ meeting last week, we’re still seeing a lot of narratives in the media about how the prime minister hasn’t yet taken any steps to help the province in the short term – a take that is ignorant because it fails to comprehend what the situation about the price differential is. At its core, it’s a supply and demand problem, with too much supply and not enough demand, which drives prices down. Nothing the federal government can do will fix that in the short term. Buying rail cars is medium-term at best, but may simply being throwing money away given that once the Line 3 pipeline is up and running, it’ll outstrip the capacity of those trains right away – and I can’t stress enough that we are again in the midst of a global supply glut, so putting more product into a full market isn’t going to help matters.

And while this happens, we see more nonsense like this column from former Alberta MLA Donna Kennedy-Glans, which incoherently rambles about Trudeau not respecting the nation and inciting Western alienation. Which is ridiculous, because there is not a single fact in the piece, nor is there any suggestion of anything Trudeau could do about Alberta’s situation. It’s just angry flailing. Part of the problem that people – and Albertans especially – keep ignoring is that what’s happening with their prices right now is the result of decades of structuring their oil export market on the assumption that the Americans would be perpetual customers, which didn’t see the shale oil revolution that upended those assumptions, and they haven’t managed to pivot to overseas markets on a dime because obviously pipelines take a long time to build, and people don’t necessarily want them going through their backyards. It’s hard to blame Trudeau for that – any prime minister (or premier for that matter) would have a hard time dealing effectively with this state of affairs, and no, carbon taxes have nothing to do with this situation, nor does the desire to change environmental assessment legislation, because the current system isn’t working either. But Albertans – and I speak as one – both tend to be allergic to self-reflection (recall how they recoiled at Jim Prentice suggesting they take a look in the mirror, and elected Rachel Notley as a result), and a they like to blame Ottawa for their problems – especially if there’s someone named Trudeau in charge. We should be better than this.

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Meanwhile, the Globe posted a nonsense story about equalisation – again – in that Quebec still gets it while Alberta is in a deficit, and I can’t even. You would think that a national newspaper could get the basics of equalisation right, but apparently not. To remind the rest of us: Equalisation is about fiscal capacity, not your province’s budget balance. Provinces don’t sign cheques over to have-not provinces, but rather, this is all money that comes from income taxes. The reason Alberta pays more is because they have the highest incomes in the country. Grievance politics, along with lazy reporting that confirms narratives rather than challenges them is largely what keeps this myth alive, and it should be stamped down.

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Roundup: Courting the tinfoil hat crowd

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Over the past few days, the Conservatives have been delving into tinfoil hat territory in their attempts to stir up panic and anger toward the UN compact on global migration, which Canada plans to sign next week in Morocco. According to the Conservatives, this non-binding political declaration will somehow erode Canadian sovereignty and be tantamount to “border erasure,” and that if you listen to the Twitter trolls picking up on Andrew Scheer and Michelle Rempel’s posts about this, it will make criticizing immigration a “hate crime.” All of which is complete and utter bullshit, and even Chris Alexander, one-time Harper-era immigration minister, calls this out as factually incorrect. And yet, the Conservatives plan to use their Supply Day today to force a vote on this very issue so that they can express performative shock and dismay when the Liberals vote it down.

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While Justin Trudeau and Ahmed Hussen have quite rightly called the Conservatives out on this issue as repeating Rebel Media talking points, I have to see this as yet another example of Conservatives not only shamelessly lying to score points, but trying to dip their toe into extremist territory, and the belief that they can just “just enough” extremist language and talking points to try and stir up enough anger and paranoia that they think it will move their poll numbers, but no white supremacists or xenophobes please, “we believe in orderly immigration.” And of course, real life doesn’t work that way, and they wind up stirring up elements that they say they disavow, but continue to wink at because they think it’ll get some kind of benefit out of it.

The other theory raised about why the Conservatives are going full steam on this issue is because they’re trying to head off Maxime Bernier, who is also trolling on this particular bit of lunacy. Why they think this would be a good strategy, I’m not entirely sure, but it’s not as harmless as they might think it is, and that should be concerning to everyone.

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Roundup: Refusing to learn their lessons

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A former PQ minister wants to run for leadership of the Bloc, and I just cannot. Can. Not. The challenger this time is Yves-François Blanchet, who served in Pauline Marois’ short-lived Cabinet, and has since taken on a political pundit career since being defeated in 2014. He apparently met with the caucus yesterday, and the majority of them – including their past and current interim leaders – all seem to like him, but I keep having to circle back to this simple question: did you learn nothing from your last disastrous leader?

I can’t emphasise this enough. Since their demise in 2011, the Bloc have had a succession of seatless leaders, including Mario Beaulieu (who now has a seat, incidentally, and is the current interim leader), and while he stepped aside so that Gilles Duceppe could return (unsuccessfully), they keep going for leaders who aren’t in caucus, and time after time, it goes poorly for them. Every single time, I have to wonder why they don’t simply do as our system was built to do, and select a member from caucus. Constantly bringing in an outsider does nothing for their profile (ask Jagmeet Singh how that’s going), and their leaders keep being divorced from the realities of parliament. And time and again, they keep choosing another outsider. Why do you keep doing this to yourselves? Why do you refuse to learn the lessons that experience has to teach you?

There is one current MP who is considering a run, Michel Boudrias, and if the Bloc was smart, they would choose him by virtue of the fact that he’s in the caucus, he’s in the Commons, and he knows how Parliament works. Of course, if they interested in ensuring he’s accountable (especially given just how big of a gong show their last leader was), then it would be the caucus that selects him so that the caucus can then fire him if he becomes a problem (again, if history is anything to go by). But that would take some actual political courage by the party, and given their apparent reluctance to learn the lessons from their mistakes, that may be too much to ask for.

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