Tag Archives: Parliament Hill

Roundup: All about Erskine-Smith

Posted on by

As was not a surprise, the Ethics committee met on the matter of hearing from Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, and the Liberals on the committee voted it down. The lead for the Liberals was Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, who is a more maverick Liberal in the ranks, and yet he said this motion was premature, said it was better to wait for Wilson-Raybould’s submissions to the justice committee, and stated bluntly that they weren’t the best committee to deal with legal issues. Oh, and he also stated that he got zero input from PMO, and he’s one of the more believable Liberals on that front, so it muffles some of the inevitable cries of “Cover up!” – especially as he says he’s of the opinion that the PM should give the blanket waiver of confidences so that the two resigned ministers can say their piece, because this whole affair is damaging the Liberal brand. So, frank speaking, but that won’t change the narrative any, unfortunately.

In the fallout from Monday’s leaks, the Canadian and Manitoba Bar Associations have put out statements condemning them, as did several MPs including Erskine-Smith. (It also emerged that Justice Joyal withdrew his name after Trudeau rejected it, for what it’s worth). Trudeau himself wouldn’t answer any questions on the leak, even to say that he would investigate where it came from (which should be a bare minimum considering the seriousness of it).

Meanwhile, the Star decided to host competing op-eds about whether dissident Liberals should be allowed to remain in caucus, with Sheila Copps saying no, and Erskine-Smith saying yes. Copps did raise a few interesting points about things that Wilson-Raybould has omitted from her repeated statements, but Erskine-Smith did have the better articulation of what it means to be an MP. Neil Macdonald also has little time or sympathy for the drip-drip-drip approach and wonders why journalists are going along with it, but does offer some historical perspective on MPs who work against their leaders and walk-outs. Susan Delacourt praises Erskine-Smith for his handling of the situation, and the frankness that PMO should be employing. Chris Selley rightly points out that the attempt to drag Justice Joyal into this Affair as a new low, while John Ibbitson says it’s a sign that those inhabiting the PMO have little regard for the rule of law. Paul Wells brings some more righteous fire to this whole debate, torching the cries to purge the party, the leaks of confidential information, and the underlying accusations of system-rigging.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1110628732882972672

Continue reading →

Roundup: Getting Trudeau to committee

Posted on by

The political theatre around the SNC-Lavalin/Wilson-Raybould Affair will again be back in full force today as the Conservatives are moving a Supply Day motion to have Justin Trudeau appear before committee to answer questions, which is procedurally awkward given that the Commons shouldn’t be dictating the business of committees, but that’s theatre for you. Of course, if Trudeau appeared, it would be doing so in order to answer for the conduct of his staff (given ministerial responsibility), but we’ll see if there is any appetite to make the committee process even more of a partisan gong show. (I’m guessing there won’t be, but stranger things have happened). Jody Wilson-Raybould is expected to be at committee either Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on her schedule, but maybe she’ll treat this like she did a Senate committee summons and simply refuse to show up.

What revelations did we get over the weekend? That Wilson-Raybould needed to make her pitch to Trudeau directly last Tuesday morning before he would let her address Cabinet; that Wilson-Raybould is a prodigious note-taker, forcing PMO to review their own notes about meetings with her; and that hey, Cabinet ministers are friends outside of work and sometimes get together socially. Shocker!

Meanwhile, Philippe Lagassé goes through the various Canadian politics tropes that this whole affair has been playing into – and are being challenged by – and what people should take away from them as the situation has unfolded. He’s also got a couple of other words of wisdom to take away from Michael Wernick’s testimony about his concern that people are losing faith in the government.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1099709688478744577

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1099712261046689792

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1099713329050734592

Continue reading →

Roundup: Wilson-Raybould emerges, is “proud”

Posted on by

While there were no actual bombshells in the ongoing SNC-Lavalin/Wilson-Raybould Affair, there were an ongoing series of curiosities yesterday, starting with that Cabinet meeting that ran way, way overtime, and which Wilson-Raybould apparently requested to attend and said request was granted. And when she did speak to the press, she said that she was still working out with her lawyer about what she could say, and that she was still a Liberal MP – oh, and she was “proud.” Because that’s how she answers every question ever. The Justice committee also agreed to hear from her and a number of other witnesses to get a better grasp of the Shawcross Doctrine, but there was a lot of grumbling about the fact that they didn’t agree to hear from Gerald Butts or any other PMO staff (which we should recall is in large part because of how our parliamentary system works, and the issue of ministerial responsibility – we don’t haul staffers before committees because their minister is responsible for their conduct, as inconvenient as that may be sometimes).

For context, here’s a look at the very curiously similar language used by SNC-Lavalin in their in their representations to support the deferred prosecution agreement legislation, and that of other intervenors. Here’s a legal discussion about what constitutes solicitor-client privilege when you’re the Attorney General, while former litigator Andrew Roman goes through what could be constituted solicitor-client privilege and cabinet confidence in this situation, and doesn’t believe that either applies. Oh, and another SNC-Lavalin executive had fraud and bribery charges thrown out of court because they took too long to get to trial, with the judge admonishing the “culture of complacency” in the Crown’s office.

In pundit reaction, Susan Delacourt looks at Butts’ exit as an object lesson against concentrating too much power in the PMO – something Trudeau swore he wouldn’t do, and yet ended up doing anyway. Chris Selley looks at Butts’ departure as an opportunity for the PM to get some new advisors who are based in this reality. Andrew Coyne has questions about Butts’ resignation, and points to some key lines in his resignation letter that may provide clues as to what’s to come. My column wonders if Wilson-Raybould is playing us by keeping voluntarily silent and letting everyone else fill in the blanks.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Too big to prosecute?

Posted on by

So, yesterday was a bit of a day, wasn’t it? To recap – the Globe and Mail published a piece that cited unnamed sources that the PMO had leaned on then-justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould to direct the Director of Public Prosecutions to abandon the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin as part of an ongoing corruption trial (related to Libyan contracts) so that they could take a deferred prosecution agreement instead – basically a plea deal administered by the courts, which the Director had thus far refused to do. (Note: For the Attorney General to make such a direction to Public Prosecutions, it must be done publicly and published in theCanada Gazette. This is not something that can happen on a whim). The story goes that Wilson-Raybould refused, and coincidentally she was shuffled from the post weeks later. Justin Trudeau refuted this, but because he strictly said that he and his office didn’t direct Wilson-Raybould or now David Lametti on this file, everyone parsed that as not saying he didn’t apply pressure, only for Lametti and every other Liberal put out on the file later in the day to add that he didn’t direct or put pressure on them. For what it’s worth.

https://twitter.com/btaplatt/status/1093545282858614785

Now, I have questions. If the PMO applied this pressure, it would be a Very Bad Thing. And we don’t know if they did or didn’t. However. The Globe story gets out the red ball of yarn and starts pinning lines between different items on the conspiracy map, and some of those items I have a problem with being there. One of those items is that the government passed amendments to the Criminal Code that enabled there to be deferred prosecution agreements back in the spring, and one of the “sources” that the Globe taps insists that this was done solely to benefit SNC-Lavalin. And I have a problem with that. Why? Because I wrote about those provisions back when they were being debated, and I spoke to a number of lawyers who specialise in white collar crime. If this had been solely for the benefit of SNC-Lavalin, I would have expected them to say that this makes no sense in the bigger picture, but they didn’t. Instead, they said that these changes barely had Canada keeping up with other comparable jurisdictions (and in fact, some said that they still kept us behind). The consensus was that these kinds of changes were long overdue. And there is a record of government consultations about this issue that produced a report. For this to be a “direct line” doesn’t hold any water. “Oh, but they lobbied!” Of course, SNC-Lavalin lobbied. It was in their interest to do so. That’s not a revelation, nor is it any indication that the government actually listened to them. They’re also trying to get judicial review of Public Prosecutions’ decision not to offer them a deferred prosecution, but that doesn’t mean they’ll get it either. We also need to remember the size of SNC-Lavalin, and how many thousands of jobs and billions of dollars they have on the line, particularly in Quebec, and if any party thinks that they’d “get tough” on them with that on the line, they’re deluding themselves. (This is part of the problem with oligopolies in Canada).

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1093504225944965122

There is also the point about Wilson-Raybould in this. Many people, pundits included, are suddenly treating this story as some kind of exoneration for her demotion, and ignoring the fact that there were very real reasons for why she was replaced, many of which had to do with the fact that she wasn’t managing her office competently, and she was making questionable staffing choices in her own office. I have my own unnamed sources in the legal community who can point to her incompetence, and this is now being swept under because she’s suddenly being hailed as a hero – which is another reason why I have some suspicions about the source of this story (and why she hasn’t been in a hurry to offer any denials, only a “no comment”). The Globe story and its reporters are also trying to draw a line in her post-shuffle release about the justice system being free from political interference, but again, this was also taking place in the backdrop of the Meng Wanzhou extradition affair, and questions about the rule of law clanging around, so again, I have doubts that there is a direct connection.

So what next? Well, we can expect another few days of communications incompetence from Trudeau and the government because that’s what they do every single time something blows up on them, and eventually they’ll be forced to be more candid, but by then, everyone will have parsed everything to death and filled in the gaps with their own wild theories. Because this is a government that can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, and they make things worse for themselves every single time. There are demands for a police inquiry or a full public inquiry, but I have my doubts that Trudeau would call one so close to an election – but stranger things have happened.

Meanwhile, Chris Selley points to the shocking levels of cynicism that this whole story displays, while Susan Delacourt notes that the silence around Wilson-Raybould is allowing the “ring of truth” to overshadow a more complicated actual truth (and also hints to possible morale problems in the Liberal caucus). Paul Wells offers some withering analysis of what’s gone on with this, and the way this is reflecting on certain senior PMO staff, which could be a growing problem.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Polling on magical parties

Posted on by

I am not a big fan about reporting on polls, which makes me particularly aggrieved that we saw a few stories today about the latest Angus Reid poll that postulated a hypothetical “Western Canada Party” and how that would skew the vote for the established parties. Why a poll like this is especially irksome is because when you invite people to vote for a hypothetical that has no leader, or policies, or structure, or even raison d’être, then it simply becomes a repository for unicorns and pixie dust. You’re inviting people from four fairly disparate provinces to join forces, when you have separate grievances with the federal government, and you think you’d make a coherent political force out of it? Really? What exactly is anyone supposed to take from this message, other than people have vivid imaginations?

Of course, the idea is pretty ludicrous on its face – it could never be anything other than a protest party that couldn’t aspire to power by sheer mathematics – and it builds on some particular mythology around the Reform Party that I’m not sure necessarily reflects history. You have people like Deborah Grey who hears this and just sighs about the notion about splitting the Conservative party again (though there is plenty to debate about how we qualify the “reunification”). Should Andrew Scheer read this poll and take it as a warning that his Western base thinks he’s pandering too much to Quebec? We’ve already seen him embrace some outright tinfoil hattery because he’s been spooked by Maxime Bernier and losing those votes – will he crank up his faux-Saskatchewan credentials to eleven for the rest of the election to keep pretending that he’s one of them to bash away at the federal government? Will we hear big and small-c conservatives double down on the faux mythology of Alberta’s conservativism (and if you haven’t yet, please do read Jen Gerson’s exploration of that mythology here). “Ooh, but protest vote!” people will handwave. But BC and Alberta would be protesting against different things – and different parts of BC would have different protests at that. Grievance-mongering is not a path to sustainable politics. Polls like this just confuse issues and make people think that there are magic wands – or in this case, magical political parties that could somehow cure all of their woes by forcing Ottawa to take them seriously, somehow. But that’s not real life, and politics is hard work, which is not something that this kind of polling reflects.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Getting mad at algorithms

Posted on by

While the Conservatives spent their day in the House of Commons using their Supply Day motion to lay an unsubtle trap for the Liberals – demanding that they table a balanced budget and a written pledge to not raise any taxes, certain that the Liberals would defeat it so that they could turn around and say “See! Look! Trudeau is planning to raise your taxes!” – Andrew Scheer spent his afternoon getting angry at Google’s search algorithms.

The problem (other than the dangerous level of computer illiteracy) is that this was something that originated on a reddit thread that Scheer immediately latched onto.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1090332359650672641

https://twitter.com/cfhorgan/status/1090326614536146944

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1090333969319641089

Despite the afternoon of tweets pillorying Scheer and mock Google searches that put his image up for searches like “People who will never be prime minister,” it does actually score a deeper underlying point about this kind of virtue signalling over social media.

And this is part of the problem – we’ve seen this before with the issue of the UN global compact on migration, that Scheer started adopting tinfoil hat conspiracy theories to try and reclaim those votes that are suddenly gravitating toward Maxime Bernier. (I’m also not unconvinced that part of this Google search panic is some leftover James Damore “Google is full of social justice warriors!” drama that inhabits certain corners of the internet). The creation of this kind of alternate reality of conspiracies and lies that that they then turn into attack campaigns against media who fact-check and debunk their false claims, is them playing with fire. Making people believe disinformation may seem like a good idea to win a few votes in the short run, it has very long-term negative consequences that they seem utterly blind to. And yet, this is their current strategic vision. No good can come of this.

https://twitter.com/moebius_strip/status/1090370788694192128

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1090361590858371075

Continue reading →

Roundup: We join you now from West Block…

Posted on by

And so, the Big Move is complete, and the House of Commons has settled into its new home for the time being. Many MPs were still trying to find their way around the new building, going through wrong doors, coping with more cramped quarters, but they did make some history with the first instances of simultaneous interpretation of Cree in the Chamber thanks to Liberal MP Robert-Falcon Ouellette. The changes were all cosmetic as the partisan rhetoric on both sides largely remained the same dichotomy of pabulum from the Liberals, and lies from the Conservatives.

Just what kinds of falsehoods were being peddled? For one, the Conservatives leaned heavily on the notion that the Liberals had “raised taxes” on most Canadians, which isn’t actually true – it’s torque that comes from a Fraser Institute report that considers increased CPP contribution taxes (they’re not), and similarly calls the cancellation of non-refundable boutique tax credits in favour of the (non-taxable) Canada Child Benefit to be “tax increases.” Scheer lied that the government the government’s “own documents” show that they plan to raise the carbon tax to $300/tonne, which is also false, and as Alex Ballingall debunks here, it’s based on redacted documents that point out that higher prices will be needed to meet emissions targets, but don’t say that they are actually planning to do so. And Michelle Rempel also tried to make partisan hay of the fact that the government’s yearly quota of applications for family reunification immigration spaces was open for the space of eleven minutes before it maxed out and tried to equate this as somehow being the fault of asylum seekers who cross the border irregularly – another complete falsehood that Althia rage debunks here, and more to the point, Rempel is engaged in concern trolling – her own government did not prioritize this immigration stream and limited to 5000 cases per year while the Liberals increased it to 20,000. (They also tried to make the small number of spaces “fairer” by attempting to do it on a lottery system rather than one where high-priced immigration lawyers were able to get their files in faster, but that lottery system was abandoned this year). So yeah, the House was mired in bullshit today, but would the government refute most of this on the record? Not really – we got plenty of bland talking points instead that allowed most of these distortions to remain on the record. Slow clap there, Liberals.

Meanwhile, Chantal Hébert enumerates the government’s many self-inflicted wounds as the new sitting gets underway. John Ivison notes the same old fear and division being peddled by both sides despite the new digs. Paul Wells makes us feel bad for thinking that things might be different in the new locale. I was on Kitchener Today yesterday to talk about John McCallum, China, and the return of the House of Commons.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Recession fear-mongering

Posted on by

At an event at the Economic Club of Canada yesterday, Ontario premier Doug Ford asserted that the federal carbon price backstop – which will affect Ontario – will plunge the country into recession. That Ford wasn’t laughed out of the room is a bit more than curious, because that kind of assertion is beyond ridiculous. BC has had a carbon tax for ten years, and not only is not in recession, but is leading the country in economic growth. Quebec has a carbon price using cap-and-trade, and is also doing quite well in terms of its own economic growth. Alberta’s carbon tax didn’t cripple its economy either, and what fiscal troubles it has are related largely to the low world price of oil that stems from a global supply glut, the temporary price differential issue having pretty much been resolved before the production cut even went into effect, now that the American refineries are back in operation. “Oh, but there’s a report that says it’ll slow the economy!” Ford says – except that report says it’ll be about by 0.02 percent at a time when the economy is growing by two percent.

Ford’s environment minister later took to TV to try and falsely insist that the federal Parliamentary Budget Officer projected a hit to the economy from a carbon tax (he actually said that it would only have an impact if revenues weren’t recycled in an efficient manner), and that BC’s carbon tax didn’t stop its emissions from growing (also false, because the emissions are far lower than they would have been without the price, while their economy continued to grow). So Ford is relying on lies to feed his false narrative that is trying to get the population angry so that they’ll vote out Trudeau. And what was Catherine McKenna’s response? Her same line about Conservatives wanting to make pollution free, and that they have no plan for the environment. So, the lies stand on the official record. Slow clap, everyone.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Trying to un-resign

Posted on by

Yesterday was the day that the Liberal drama in Burnaby South went completely sideways, as resigned candidate Karen Wang decided that she wanted to un-resign. And the Liberals said nope, and Wang’s attempt at a press conference turned into a gong show as she chose a location that she didn’t ask for permission from and they said nope. So, gong show. Wang later spent the day a) insisting she wasn’t racist, and this was all a mistranslation, and by the way a volunteer wrote the WeChat post anyway; and b) fending off the notion that she also tried to run for the Conservatives, by saying that the Conservatives had approached her after she ran for the provincial Liberals (remember the BC Liberals are more of a centre-right coalition than the federal Liberals are), and that she didn’t say yes to them. Oh, and she still supports the Liberals. And amidst this all, certain other anonymous voices in the local Liberal riding association are now saying that they warned the party that she was “difficult to handle.”

Meanwhile, this hasn’t stopped the utter lunatic notions floating around the national media that somehow the PMO engineered this whole incident in order to essentially hand the victory to Jagmeet Singh and the NDP, because the Liberals will ultimately benefit from his weak leadership carrying on, or something.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1085960409654255616

And then there are the NDP surrogates trying to insist that the Liberals are trying to spin this version of events, and trying to build the case that it’s really just racism that the Liberals and the mainstream media are to blame for Singh not having a seat or a national profile. And lest we not forget that Maxime Bernier’s candidate in the riding is polling higher than expected, which has people wondering if it’s Scheer who should watch out.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Another solution in search of a problem, by-election edition

Posted on by

The good folks at Samara Canada have penned an op-ed in the Globe and Mail to call for legislation that demand swifter by-elections than currently exists, and would seek to remove the discretion of the prime minister in calling them. To this I say nay, because much like fixed election dates, this is a solution in search of a problem. Indeed, the piece entirely ignored that fixed election dates are not only antithetical to our system, which is based on confidence, but that it created a whole host of new problems and solved none. It used to be the big concern that prime ministers would call “snap” elections when it was deemed politically suitable, and that it wholly disadvantaged opposition parties. Of course, that’s entirely a myth that doesn’t survive actual scrutiny (recall that governments in this country were punished when they called elections too soon because they had good poll numbers), and fixed election dates instead created interminable election campaigns that required even more legislation to crack down on spending and advertising in defined pre-writ periods – something that wouldn’t need to exist under the proper system of ministerial discretion.

Throughout the recent round of braying to call by-elections, none of the arguments has convinced me that this is anything more than a moral panic. While the op-ed does correctly point out that MP offices remain staffed and operational, reporting to the party whip instead of the departed MP, the op-ed laments that there is no MP to push files through the bureaucracy – something that is not only not an MP’s job, but is something we should actually be discouraging because it sets up a system that starts to look corrupt, when it becomes who you know that will get action on your files. If anything, parties should actually take advantage of the fact that when a by-election hasn’t been called yet, it gives the riding associations ample time to locate a good candidate, run an effective nomination process, and then start door-knocking. If parties got their act together, they’d have more time to do this, rather than waiting months, and trying to get a hint as to when the by-election might be called before they even start their nominations – something that is absolutely boggling. Jagmeet Singh should have used the time to do the door-knocking at every available opportunity, and yet that didn’t seem to be the case for the months he was complaining that the by-election hadn’t been called.

You don’t have to convince me that it’s important to run these by-elections in a timely manner, and that having an MP in place as soon as possible is the right thing to do. It absolutely is. But more legislative constraints on executive discretion won’t solve any problems, and only creates more of them. We keep seeing this time and again, and yet we keep coming back to yet more proposals for even more of them, creating a spiralling cycle of more rules to fix a problem that was never actually a problem in the first place. Time to step off this merry-go-round.

Continue reading →