Tag Archives: Parliament Hill

Senate QP: O’Regan talks veterans issues

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The topic was veterans affairs, the special guest star was minister Seamus O’Regan, his first time at the Senate since taking over the portfolio. Senator Larry Smith led off, asking about a court challenge related to cuts on the medical marijuana programme for veterans, and in particular the minister’s comments on the need for research around the benefits for veterans with PTSD. O’Regan, after noting his last visit to the chamber being in 1990, said that they were deferring to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and as such, they did not prescribe or authorise medical cannabis, but will only reimburse for up to three grams a day. When Smith asked if cost was a factor in reducing the reimbursement from ten to three, O’Regan said that it was not a cost issue, but they were trying to strike a balance.

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Roundup: Erin Weir’s apostasy

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First thing Thursday morning, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh took to the microphone in the Foyer, caucus behind him, to announce that he had expelled Erin Weir from caucus following the conclusion of the investigation into harassment allegations. And to be clear, he wasn’t kicked out because of the conclusions, given that Weir agreed to anti-harassment training and conciliation with his accusers – rather, it was because he had the temerity to go to the media to respond to the leaked allegations made to him without getting the permission of the leader’s office. And then the other MPs told reporters that Weir “expelled himself” by doing so, because it meant there was no trust in that relationship. So…wow.

To be clear, we don’t have much in the way of details about the allegations that were sustained in the report, but we have Weir’s word for them, and the clues that Singh dropped. That the former senior staffer in Mulcair’s office leaked to the CBC forced Weir’s hand in responding (which he says he asked Singh’s office, and they never responded to him), and this was the basis of the policy dispute on the floor of the Saskatchewan NDP convention where that staffer threw her weight around, and then accused him of harassment. As for the three “sustained” incidents of sexual harassment, Singh said it was because Weir failed to read “non-verbal cues” but that when he was told his advances were unwarranted, he ceased. Weir says that he was told over the course of the investigation that it was essentially because he’s a “close talker” and failed to realize that it made some people uncomfortable, but he has no idea who his accusers were, and says that after the initial complaint about him that the party essentially put out a “call for proposals” from staff to see if there were any complaints, which does seem a bit suspicious. It also seems like there is a giant inflation in terms of what constitutes harassment and sexual harassment, particularly coming from an MP who is a bit socially awkward.

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Weir contends that he will sit as an independent for now, hoping that Singh will see reason, but given how the ranks have closed around him in a way they didn’t when David Christopherson got punished for breaking ranks on a vote suggests that Weir is now guilty of some form of apostasy, particularly that he had the temerity to defend himself in public when his accuser apparently leaked to the media to get ahead of the report when the leader’s office would have had him be humiliated publicly while he waited for permission to respond, which reinforces this notion that there can be cult-like behaviour in the party. Meanwhile, Don Martin suggests that the outcome of this mess suggests that this became a witch hunt, while John Ivison contends that this whole affair is not reflecting well on Singh, who continues to flounder as party leader. At Issue also took a look, and notes the rumours circulating that the party was looking for an excuse to boot Weir for whatever the reason.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau says they will not delay implementing legal cannabis, but that will still likely mean a September rollout, and that legalization is a “process.”
  • Scandal! The Trudeau family’s meals are prepared at 24 Sussex and then sent to Rideau Cottage by messenger! (Seriously? This is what we’re worrying about?)
  • The federal government will intervene in the BC Court of Appeal reference on pipelines. This is standard since their jurisdiction is up for question.
  • Bill Morneau says they’ll have a better handle on the costs to households from carbon pricing in September when all provinces have submitted their plans.
  • An audit shows that the programme to help veterans transition to civilian jobs was next to useless. The government has since switched to a different system.
  • Scott Brison isn’t looking to budge from his $7 billion fund in the Estimates to get programmes moving, while the real problem remains the sclerotic bureaucracy.
  • The government used their majority to reject nine of nineteen Senate amendments to the transport bill. Now we’ll watch senators huff and puff before passing it.
  • The Commons privacy committee is ordering Cambridge Analytica to preserve vital data in advance of investigation, given news of their bankruptcy proceedings.
  • The military is being accused of “brass bulge” as upper ranks are growing faster than the regular forces are.
  • In case you were curious, it turns out that part of why the parliamentary lawn is being dug up is because they have to replace the drainage pipes below it.
  • While the Supreme Court of Canada upheld his influence peddling conviction, Bruce Carson is likely to avoid jail time.
  • NDP MP Kennedy Stewart is considering a run for Vancouver mayor.
  • Here’s a good profile of Doug Ford, and what the experience of working with him on Toronto City Council was like.
  • The Canadian Press’ Baloney Meter™ tests the Conservative claim that they cut emissions without cutting taxes. (Ron Howard’s voice: “They didn’t.”)
  • Colby Cosh contends that our system worked in keeping outsider Kevin O’Leary away from political leadership (but that Doug Ford was a perfect storm).

Odds and ends:

A documentary crew is looking to film the Senate’s third reading speeches and vote on the bill to end whale and dolphin captivity.

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Roundup: Another cry for technocracy

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After Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office weighed in on the government’s figures in advance of the election, he too finds that the province’s deficit is probably bigger than reported, as will its debt figures be. The accounting dispute between the government and its Auditor General remains in the air, while there are doubts being raised as to whether there are really surpluses in the pension funds in a meaningful sense. And it’s all done Andrew Coyne’s head in, because now he thinks that it’s time to simply take away any financial reporting away from a government, and turn it all over to a neutral, arm’s length, third-party body because the alternative is to let governments and other political parties spin and manipulate about what’s in the books. In his estimation, Auditors-General and Parliamentary Budget Officers/Fiscal Accountability Officers are of little use because their reports and opinions are not binding, who can pretend that they’re related to matters of opinion and accounting disputes, while opposition parties aren’t doing the job of accountability because they use the same torqued figures for their own purposes.

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But I think that Coyne is completely off the mark here, because he places too much faith in the words of the current watchdogs. We’ve seen examples where the Auditor General has been wrong – the Senate audit being a prime example where he was out of his depth, based a number of findings on opinion that were later overturned by a former Supreme Court of Canada justice hired to adjudicate the findings, and further legal analysis of his findings poked yet more holes in his analysis. We also see numerous examples of where the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s methodology is suspect (to say the least), but we rarely see these challenge being made public in the media because the media takes the words of these watchdogs as gospel, which should be alarming to anyone who engages in the slightest bit of critical thinking. To turn even more of our government’s fiscal processes over to yet another unaccountable technocratic body strikes fear into my heart because the people we keep demanding we turn this power over to are not infallible, and there are no ways for us to hold them to account – especially if the media refuses to do so responsibly either.

So while I can sympathise with Coyne’s frustration – and the situation in Ontario is particularly egregious, with all three parties guilty of playing along – the answer is never technocracy. We may get the governments that we deserve, but that also means that we, the voting public, need to do a better job of doing our own due diligence and demanding better, and we’re not – we’re just shrugging our way toward oblivion, which is part of the problem.

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Roundup: Scheer’s vague hand-wavey promises

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We’ve been through a week of particularly misleading rhetoric about the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report on the impact of a $50/tonne carbon tax on the Canadian economy, where the figures about the “damage” it would cause to our economy supposes that the money collected would be either lit on fire, or given in lump sums to individual families rather than recycled in provincial tax cuts or other measures. But confident that it reinforces their narrative, the Conservatives have been parading it around as “proof” that they are right to oppose carbon pricing. To that end, while doing the rounds on the Sunday political shows, Andrew Scheer said that his party’s climate plan – yet to be revealed, but he promises that’ll happen before the 2019 election – will both meet Paris Accord targets but won’t impose a carbon tax. That’s…special.

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Given previous Conservative positions on this, it’s likely that this will involve either magic, or some particularly onerous and costly regulations of industry that will simply internalize the costs (which get passed onto consumers) rather than having that cost be out in the open so that people can see it in front of them and make choices appropriates – you know, a market pricing mechanism that you would think a conservative party would favour over red tape and regulations. (This of course assumes that they are actually a conservative party instead of a right-flavoured populist party, which we know that they’ve become). They will claim that they had a record of carbon reduction while in office, but it had zero to do with their own politics, and everything to do with Ontario shuttering their coal-fired electricity plants and the economic downturn. Remember that their “coal-fired regulations” applied to new plants which hadn’t been built yet, and their sector-by-sector regulations were slow to roll out, and steadfastly strayed away from our biggest-emitting sectors, like the oil sands (which they still haven’t given any indication how they would mitigate their emissions without carbon pricing to drive innovation). I suspect we’re going to be looking at some hand-waving about future technology that will magically remove carbon from the atmosphere, but I leave myself room to be pleasantly surprised.

Meanwhile, on the subject of carbon pricing, here’s Andrew Leach to correct some of the performative outrage and bad economics that have been passed around in the past week.

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Roundup: Yes, the Conservatives did it too

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Amidst the faux drama in QP this week about the apparent discrepancy between the Dogwood Initiative getting funding for an anti-Kinder Morgan activist while the government refuses to give funding to groups that use such summer jobs grants to pay for students to distribute fliers of aborted foetuses, or to groups that refuse to hire LGBT students, I find myself losing patience with the constant refrains that if the Conservatives engaged in this kind of behaviour, there would be riots in the streets.

Reminder: the Conservatives did engage in that kind of behaviour. They wantonly defunded all manner of organizations, whether they ensured that women in developing countries could access safe abortions, whether they advocated for women’s equality here in Canada, or if they were ecumenical social justice organizations that engaged in education and outreach at home and abroad. They defunded the Court Challenges Programme which helped ensure that minority groups like the LGBT community could do the work of bringing their challenges to the Supreme Court of Canada (because it’s expensive and law firms can’t do it all pro bono). They cut funding to HIV and AIDS services organizations and diverted all manner of funding to a vaccine initiative that they then flaked out on and frittered away millions of dollars so that they had no impact (and the results of those cuts are still being felt today as the current government wants to shift funding priorities to prevention). They prioritized refugee resettlement for Christians in the Middle East over Muslims. They engaged in abusive auditing over charitable organizations that opposed them ideologically. All of this happened, in the most petty and mean-spirited manner at that, and there weren’t riots in the streets. There were a handful of protests, and the media barely mentioned a number of these cuts.

Is the way that the government handled this attestation on the Summer Jobs Grants heavy-handed? Yes. Was the wording clumsy? Probably. But groups aren’t being denied funding because they’re faith-based – they’re being denied funding because they’re refusing to either sign the attestation, or they’ve tried to rewrite it to suit themselves, despite the fact that the government has said repeatedly that “core mandate” refers not to values or beliefs, but daily activities. In all of the rhetoric and pearl-clutching, the actual facts are being distorted and need to be called back into focus. We also need to focus on the fact that the real problem here is that MPs get to sign off on those grants, which is a violation of their roles as guardians of the public purse, and instead makes them agents of the government in distributing spending (clouding their accountability role). But sweet Rhea, mother of Zeus, this constant invocation that “if the Conservatives did it…” is bogus and amnesiac. They did it. All the time.

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Roundup: The struggle of independent senators

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Despite the news being a day-old yesterday, the departure of Senator David Adams Richards from the Independent Senators Group got a bunch of tongue wagging, and even more wannabe comedians making lame jokes about Senate independence. Richards stated repeatedly over the past two days that he wasn’t pressured to vote or do anything by the ISG, but wanted to be “truly independent,” though I’m not sure he quite understands what he’s signing up for. Amidst this, the memo written by Senator Gold to his ISG colleagues about his conflict with just how independent they can be without defeating government bills also hit the news (despite the fact that I wrote about this in my weekend column), which got even more wannabe commentators to start opining about who is really independent in the Senate without having a clue about what is going on. (I will credit Althia Raj as being the only person who did have a clue yesterday, so there’s that).

So, to recap, the Independent Senators Group don’t whip votes or force attendance but organize for the purposes of logistics and to advance the cause of Senate modernization. Logistics include things like allocating office space, and also things like committee assignments, because of the way the Senate operations work, spots are divided up between caucuses, and the ISG is granted their share of committee seats. Any senators outside of the three caucus groups have a much tougher time of getting those committee seats. This is something that Richards is going to face if indeed he wants to do committee work. If he doesn’t, well, that’s going to be an issue because much of the value of the Senate comes from their committee work, which is superior to committee work coming out of the Commons by leaps and bounds.

As for the struggle for how independent Senators should be, part of the problem is that they’re getting a lot of bad and conflicting information, much of it coming from the Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative,” Senator Peter Harder, who is deliberately misconstruing both the history of the Senate, the intent of the Founding Fathers, and how the Senate has operated for 150 years. Part of this stems from the fact that he refuses to do his actual job – he won’t negotiate timelines with the caucuses because he thinks that horse-trading is “partisan,” and he wants to ensure that government bills can’t get defeated by means of a Salisbury Convention so that he doesn’t have to do the work of counting votes to ensure that he can get those bills passed. And the Independent Senators are caught in the middle of this, too new to understand what is going on, and getting a lot of bad advice from people who are trying to force their own ideas of what the Senate should look like, and they’re afraid of accidentally defeating a government bill and having public opinion turn against them as being anti-democratic, and the like. So there are serious issues being contemplated, and the commentary coming from the pundit class right now, who think they’re being clever but who actually don’t have a clue about what they’re talking about, helps no one. And if people want to grab a clue, I have a collection of columns on the topic they can read up on.

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Roundup: Convention resolutions to be forgotten?

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Coming out of the Liberal policy convention, the party’s top five resolutions were pharmacare, mental health, decriminalizing small amounts of drug possession, decriminalizing sex work, and protecting pensions. Some of the resolutions are controversial to members of caucus, and there’s no guarantee that any of these will show up in the party platform (or the Order Paper beforehand) despite its what the grassroots members allegedly want (big caveats here given how centralized and top-down this process has become under their new constitution), but maybe there will be pressure to implement them. Maybe. Trudeau doesn’t seem keen on decriminalization talk while the marijuana bill is still being debated (and he’s expending political capital on it).

Their big exciting Obama-connected guest (because that’s what the Liberals and NDP have grasped onto for the past eight or nine years) was David Axelrod, who said that the party needs to show that they are still change-makers and not the status quo, while he and Gerald Butts talked about political life. Dr. Danielle Martin, who makes the case for healthcare in the US, spoke about the need for universal pharmacare in Canada. Among the ministers who got up to speak to delegates, Ahmed Hussen talked about being racially profiled while he encouraged Liberals to combat racism. Trudeau’s own speech to the faithful included its share of digs at the Conservatives as still being the party of Harper, so good thing they can still draw on that particular bogeyman. New party president Suzanne Cowan spoke about how they all needed to be fundraisers going forward. And hey, the rank-and-file members were expressing some particular concerns about the rash of self-inflicted wounds that the party keeps enduring.

And because it wasn’t all sunshine and roses coming out of the convention, MP Francis Drouin is now facing an allegation of sexual assault from an incident that happened during the convention, and he’s put out a statement to say that an allegation has been made and he’s cooperating with the investigation – nothing else. It’s probably worth noting that there were harassment workshops at the convention that both Justin Trudeau and Kent Hehr attended, and the facilitator of said workshops noted that Trudeau simply listened and took notes throughout, which impressed her. So we’ll see what transpires from here.

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Roundup: A curious appointment bottleneck

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There was an interesting revelation in the Hill Timesyesterday in that the government is sitting on more than 100 vetted Senate candidates while twelve seats remain vacant, and yet put out a call for yet more applications while the advisory committees are all empty, which would be the people who are supposed to vet all of those incoming applications. But that number amazes me – 100 names that are vetted and ready to go for those twelve vacancies, and the government isn’t moving on them, adding one or two names every couple of months at random intervals. And don’t get me wrong – I’m firmly opposed to mass appointments, but that also means that the Chamber should be in full operation and that vacancies should be filled as they happen, which are one or two at a time. Add to that the fact that because these are all being named as Independents, the kinds of mentoring that should happen isn’t, so at this point it almost doesn’t matter if we get all twelve in one fell swoop because the result would be the same either way.

The other thing that is very interesting is that in the interview with former appointment committee member Indira Samarasekera, she mentioned that they identified key skill areas that the Senate is in need of and that their names have reflected that, but these aren’t necessarily the people that Trudeau is naming in the long run. Which isn’t to say that Trudeau has simply been naming ideological Liberals and calling them Independents (despite what the Conservatives in the Senate are claiming), but it is hard to deny that there isn’t a similarity to most of the candidates in the fact that they tend to be activists from the social sciences as opposed to some of the business, foreign affairs, and trade experts that Samarasekera noted that they recommended. Despite this all, the piece provides an interesting window on just what seems to be the bottleneck in appointments that this government has a problem with making, and which continues to be a slow-moving crisis of their credibility.

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Roundup: Too omnibus or not too omnibus?

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The opposition is crying foul over the government’s 556-page budget implementation bill and moaning that it breaks the promise about omnibus bills. It’s not an unfair point, but one that requires a bit of nuance. For one, the government never promised that they would never table an omnibus bill – only that their omnibus bills would not be abusive, and yes, there is a difference. Omnibus bills can be useful tools, particularly if it’s regarding matters that would have a number of coordinated amendments to the same existing statute. That way, you don’t have six different bill all amending the same piece of legislation (like the Criminal Code, for example, or the Income Tax Act, if it’s a budget bill), possibly causing pile-ups of amendments to some of the same sections of the bill. The overriding criteria for it not to be abusive, however, is that it should all touch on the same subject matter. The abusive bills of the previous government didn’t do that, and they stuffed everything into it, including a number of unrelated measures (like environmental legislation) into budget bills in order to get them passed expeditiously – a technique they started during the minority years, so that they could huff and puff about confidence measures and not sending Canadians to the polls too soon; they simply carried on the technique once they had a majority.

Does this current budget implementation bill reach that level of being abusive? Not that I can see. Glancing through the bill, the only section that raises a possible eyebrow is the section within that creates the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act – the carbon tax legislation. Should it be separated? Well, it does have to do with fiscal measures as it deals with the federal carbon price backstop (which yes, is a carbon tax for those provinces who refuse to implement one), as opposed to, say, environmental assessments. And the government has pointed out that they have circulated draft legislation prior to this, so it’s not coming out of the blue or as a complete surprise stuffed into the bill along with a number of other surprises. But, if the opposition wants to challenge it, the Speaker has the power to split the bill if they can make their case convincingly enough. The other issue is that the government hasn’t pre-declared a timetable for when they want this to be passed, but it will likely mean some marathon committee time. Let’s just hope that the opposition doesn’t demand days and days of useless Second Reading “debate” first, which would eat into the committee time, because that’s where a bill like this should spend its time.

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Roundup: The big Mali announcement

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The formal announcement was made yesterday – six helicopters (two medical evac, four armed escorts) and approximately 250 personnel are headed to Mali as part of UN peace operations, and while this initial deployment covers off for German and Dutch forces that are pulling out, time there will be spent evaluating other ways that Canada can help build capacity in the country, which will involve training troops from other countries. While there have been some 162 peacekeeper deaths so far in Mali, all but four of those are from less advanced militaries than Canada’s, and the four Western countries’ deaths were related to a helicopter accident and not hostile actions. Chrystia Freeland did a great interview that helps lay out more of the details as to why Mali and why it’s taken so long.

Opposition reaction has been swift, and a bit curious. The Conservatives are demanding a debate and a vote on the deployment (reminder: a vote is wholly inappropriate because it launders the accountability that the government should be held to regarding the mission), while the NDP keep pointing out that this will not fulfil all of the government’s peacekeeping promises (not that they have claimed that it would), while demanding more details. Former senator Roméo Dallaire says that this is a good deployment, and reiterates that Canadians training troop-contributing nations and mentoring those forces will help to modernize peacekeeping.

In terms of hot takes, John Ivison sticks to the point that this is a political move by the government designed to help them get their UN Security Council seat as opposed to having anything to do with national security – err, except that peacekeeping isn’t supposed to be about national security. That’s kind of the point.

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