Tag Archives: Parliamentary Budget Officer

QP: Taking the provinces’ phone calls

Posted on by

While Justin Trudeau was not only present, having already participated in the debate of the day (a rarity for any PM these days), his leaders opposite were not. Rona Ambrose was off to the UK Conservative caucus in Birmingham, while Thomas Mulcair was elsewhere. Denis Lebel led off for the Conservatives, demanding a signed softwood lumber agreement before it was too late. Trudeau responded by reminding him that the previous government neglected the file while his government has been hard at work in negotiations. Lebel moved onto the healthcare transfers file, demanding the government respect provincial jurisdiction, but Trudeau shook it off, ensuring that they were working together. Lebel insisted that there was peace with the provinces when the Conservatives were in charge and why wouldn’t the federal government just let them be rather than meddle? Trudeau insisted that the provinces were much happier now that the federal government answered their phone calls. Ed Fast got up next to decry the “carbon tax grab” being shoved “down the throats” of Canadians. Trudeau hit back that the previous government ignored the file and made no progress, while his government was. Fast tried again, decrying it as an intrusion on provincial jurisdiction, but Trudeau reminded him that they were indeed respecting said jurisdiction. Robert Aubin led off for the NDP, lamenting the “Harper targets” for GHGs, and Trudeau noted that they had just tabled their plan, and soon all Canadians — not just 80 percent — would be in a carbon priced jurisdiction. Aubin went again another round, got the same answer, and Linda Duncan took over in English, decrying that the announced starting carbon price was too low to be effective. Trudeau noted they were simultaneously developing a strong economy while being environmentally sustainable. Duncan worried the government was abandoning the clean energy future, but Trudeau reiterated his answer a little more forcefully.

Continue reading →

Roundup: No, the LG can’t threaten the premier

Posted on by

Sometimes you see a terrible column, and sometimes there’s such a piece of hot garbage that you need to don a hazmat suit just to approach it and get hosed off afterward like you just came out of a leaking nuclear reactor. The Toronto Sun’s Christina Blizzard delivered one of those yesterday.

That’s right – this columnist thinks that the lieutenant governor should threaten Kathleen Wynne to shape up or she’ll dismiss her, because 167 years of Responsible Government was just a failed experiment. One lesbian first minister in this province and we’ve decided that it was too much – time to hand power back to the queen and be done with it.

You see! Voters can’t be trusted! Obviously we’d be better off under absolute monarchy again because they won’t let such terrible governments to let themselves get elected and then implement the agendas that they were elected on. It’s like the fanboys in the First Order who remember the good old days of the Galactic Empire and preferred it to the messy democracy of the New Republic.

It’s called confidence. Whichever leader in the legislature or Parliament that can command the confidence of the chamber gets to advise the LG/GG/queen on how to exercise the powers of state. Not a difficult concept.

It is utterly galling that a columnist can be so utterly ignorant of basic civics that this is the kind of utter bilge that they spew onto newsprint. We do have a problem with basic civic literacy in this country, and when you have columnists like this spreading complete nonsense out of some sense of partisanship, it gives a warped impression to people who read this and makes them believe that it’s actually normal and expected that the GG or the LG can boss around a government that you don’t like. No. Absolutely not.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/775866168863260672

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/775866395414372352

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/775866681998635008

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/775868249749807108

So let me reiterate that Blizzard’s column is utter hot garbage. If the Sun had any shame, they’d pull it and apologise profusely for putting it out there, and Blizzard would be sent to a remedial civics course, but I doubt that’s going to happen because she’s just passionate about how bad Wynne is, or some bullshit excuse like that. So in the meantime, I’ll just leave this here:

Continue reading →

Roundup: An imaginary crisis

Posted on by

The summer hearings of the electoral reform committee have ended, and now they move to cross-country hearings before they begin their deliberations. The optimistic among them think they can achieve consensus. The remarkably optimistic insist that it’s going to be some form of proportional representation. And the Conservatives say that any consensus would be contingent upon a referendum, while some Liberals say that if they can get consensus there would be no need for one. So, with any luck, that means it’ll all go down in flames. That said, there was still more eye-rolling testimony yesterday that should be commented upon.

There’s this existential drama going on where a Liberal MP on the committee noted that they’re not in a crisis situation, so is this the best time to have the debate, and Elizabeth May, true to form, prompts a witness to say that we should change the system now before there’s a crisis. But what crisis are we talking about?

This I can’t figure out. We’ve had 149 years post-Confederation of free and fair elections, and reasonably good governance, and do I keep needing to remind everyone that the system isn’t broken? Because it’s not. And people who tend to talk “crisis” have been the ones from whom that crisis is that the party they favour didn’t win. “Oh, but Stephen Harper!” the exclaim. To which I remind them that he wasn’t a Bond villain. Yes, he bent the rules of Parliament to their breaking point, but that had absolutely nothing to do with our electoral system and everything to do with all of the other tinkering that we’ve done to our system in the name of making things “more democratic,” like changing the way we select leaders. Harper had a “democratic mandate” from his party members, the cachet of having united the party, and an immense amount of goodwill among the party members for that. But he was also unchallenged by his own party members for his going too far and his excesses because the party members let him, in large part because of civic illiteracy on their part in not knowing they had agency enough to push back, and their accountability measures having been weakened by successive generations of ways in which people tinkered with the system. This whole electoral reform exercise is just tinkering with the system on a more massive scale, and I have zero confidence that things will end up better because (to quote Colby Cosh), it’s a contrived moral panic over a solution in search of a problem. There is no crisis. There will not be a crisis, and it will certainly not be over the perceived legitimacy of a so-called “false majority” (which doesn’t exist because it’s a sore loser term to try to make a Thing out of a logical fallacy). The crisis is one of civic literacy – not the electoral system. Attempts to cast it as such are disingenuous in the extreme.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Fear change of government!

Posted on by

Another day, another round of completely objectionable things heard regarding electoral reform that need to be countered. Most egregious of all today was Elizabeth May’s musing about the nature of government under current and PR systems.

And then my head exploded.

It sounded for a moment there like May was advocating for a system of basically permanent governments that don’t change, and that basic accountability – i.e. “throwing the bums out” – was a bad thing. It boggles the mind that this would be considered a good thing. Is it a good thing that countries like Germany, Austria and Sweden have basically had one-party rule for decades, where coalition partners get shuffled and that’s that? That hardly sounds like a healthy democracy because longevity can certainly breed complacency and to a certain degree corruption. May also assumes that the “consensus building” of coalitions would somehow produce superior governance without looking at the effect it has on accountability (when everyone’s responsible, then no one’s responsible), or that the watered-down outcomes and lack of ability to govern effectively in many cases is really better than a system that allows for decisive action but also the ability to hold those who take action to account for those decisions. Seriously, though, this dislike of accountability mechanisms is very concerning. Also, this notion that the “right parties” will always be in power to get these mythical better outcomes.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/771181766413398020

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/771182236003512324

And then there’s Andrew Coyne, who again cherry-picks his railing against the arguments to keep the status quo with regards to the arguments about stable governments (as though other PR countries operate on a system of responsible government), or that our current system has been riddled with regional parties that we warn about in PR countries (ignoring that regional parties don’t last long in our system precisely because they can’t get power), and buying into Ed Broadbent’s ridiculous revisionist mythologizing about the NEP.

I’ll end on one good note, which was Samara’s call for better civic education. That should be what the government spends its time, energy and resources on rather than this ridiculous quest for a new electoral system, but it’s a start that people are calling out for it.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Case management conundrum

Posted on by

MPs complaining about the changes to the way that immigration files are handled returns to an old bugaboo of mine, and as it seems, Aaron Wherry’s as well. In other words, MPs shouldn’t be doing immigration casework, because it’s not what they’re there to do.

https://twitter.com/aaronwherry/status/765943599573897216

https://twitter.com/aaronwherry/status/765944593057808384

https://twitter.com/aaronwherry/status/765952888388583424

What I will add to this is that MPs’ jobs are not just as legislators, but rather, their primary function in a Westminster system is to hold the government to account – something that most MPs spend very little time doing these days. And the civil service has a lot to blame for this, don’t get me wrong, and everything I’ve heard has indicated that they are just as culpable by not even looking at some files until the MP’s office brings it up to them in cases, and that’s unacceptable. But we shouldn’t be making this situation worse by reinforcing the broken system that has MPs playing this role, because that’s a losing proposition. There needs to be political will to fix those problems, and if MPs would rather spend that will to reinforce the broken system (because they think it will win them local votes), then the cycle perpetuates. Enough has to be enough. Let’s draw the line.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Trading one set of problems for another

Posted on by

Day three of the electoral reform committee, and it seems to be the first time that we actually got a bit of pushback from a witness list that is stuffed full of proponents for reform that refuse to either properly examine our system as it currently exists, or who dwell on fantasy versions of electoral systems. (Kady O’Malley’s liveblog here). In particular, one of the experts, Andre Blais, showcased his research to show that different voting systems had little impact overall on things like voter turnout or satisfaction with the system, which is not surprising at all. So many of the arguments that reform proponents will put forward about how changing the system will fix these woes without realising that every system has their own set of problems and you just wind up trading one set of problems for another (but given that they tend to focus only on delusional, unicorn-filled happiest possible outcomes, this is not a surprise). Likewise, Blais’ research didn’t indicate that there was any greater spirit of compromise in other systems that relied on coalitions, because it’s not like other systems are all around a circle singing Kumbaya.

There were a few other gems, like this one:

The NEP has become this cultural myth in Canada where everyone assumes that something or another would have prevented it. For the longest time, it was the assumption that a Triple E Senate would have been powerful enough to stop it, and now the argument is PR. These theories ignore the basic math of the sheer weight of the proportion of the country that was in favour of the Programme versus the weight of Alberta, no matter whether they had more votes in the Commons or the Senate. But by all means, mythologise away.

This one is more self-explanatory – in some PR countries like Germany, you can’t vote out governments. Central parties stay in power for decades and simply shuffle around coalition partners, and that makes accountability a very difficult thing under those systems, which is another reason that I don’t think they’ll actually solve anything because the ability to remove a government or a party is as important as how you vote them in – if not more so. Accountability matters.

Meanwhile, the Elections Commissioner is recommending a number of changes to election laws to bring them up to date with our social media age, and part of the piece is devoted to that jackass in Nova Scotia who got charged for posting a photo of his marked ballot as though the secret ballot doesn’t exist for a reason. It’s the same reason why online voting will never be able to guarantee that one’s ballot is actually secret, and we might as well surrender ourselves to the return of rumbottle politics if we start making it acceptable to post photos of marked ballots.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Patterns on the witness list

Posted on by

The electoral reform committee returns next week, and so far I see a lot of proponents of proportional representation on the witness list, not that this surprises me in any way, as well as an academic proponent of a referendum on electoral reform – also not a surprise. So look forward to plenty of glowing recommendations about how electoral reform will solve all of our political ills.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for some background reading the Library of Parliament has some updated publications in store – one on the history and evolution of our electoral laws, and another that provides an overview of our current electoral system and those employed elsewhere. That one I found particularly lacking, especially in the language it used to describe the current First-Past-the-Post system, adopting wholesale the arguments about “disproportionate” seat counts (logical fallacy), the supposed advantages of “regional parties” or “regional strongholds” with no discussion of brokerage parties, and buying into the arguments about voter turnout without being critical about them (this is a broad problem across all western democracies no matter the electoral system). The rest was an overview of other electoral systems, examples of their use in other countries, the history of electoral reform initiatives in Canada, and some adjacent issues like mandatory voting, online voting (with zero mention about the concerns of the secrecy of the ballot), and lowering the voting age.

What was missing from this tepid report was any discussion on the impact of these electoral systems, such as government formation or accountability, which boggles my mind. It’s literally taking a piece of a complex ecosystem and treating it in isolation with no regard for how it will affect all other aspects of it, which is a huge part of the electoral reform discussion. What kind of government you get after you vote in that system is kind of a big deal. And even bigger deal is how you get rid of that government in a subsequent election, which is not easy to do in most systems other than FPTP because the tendency is for a big central party to just shuffle around their coalition partners, and that can be an even bigger headache, delivering policies that only a tiny fraction of the population voted for. You’d think this would be relevant to an examination of electoral reform proposals, but apparently not according to the analysts at the Library. You’ll excuse me if my faith in this government’s process has just sunk even lower.

(Hat tip to blog reader PierreB for pointing these reports out)

Continue reading →

Roundup: Specious arguments about political bullying

Posted on by

As someone who writes a lot about our democratic system (true fact – I have a book about it coming out in March), I read a lot of really dumb things that people try to assert in order to make a point. The Citizen had an op-ed yesterday that pretty much takes the cake for specious reasoning when it comes to asserting that our electoral system somehow turns everyone into petty bullies. That’s right – it postulates that First-Past-the-Post is responsible for The Elbowing that happened a couple of months ago. No, seriously. It’s such a moronic argument that I. Can’t. Even.

Here’s the thing – trying to blame the electoral system is a losing proposition because trying to prove the counterfactual amounts to pixie dust and unicorns. Electoral politics can get nasty because that’s the nature of competition, and even in systems that are supposedly built upon consensus models (such as the legislatures in the NWT and Nunavut), there is just as much bullying among MLAs that takes place as in the oppositional system we have here. There is all manner of fractious and nasty politics in countries that have proportional or ranked ballot systems because it’s almost like we’re all human beings or something. Add to that, trying to put the blame on the logically fallacious notion about “false majority” governments (which don’t exist because the popular vote is not a real thing – elections are not single events but rather 338 separate and simultaneous events that you can’t simply mash into a single statistic and expect it to be meaningful) doesn’t automatically turn the victors into bullies because it posits that either “true” majorities or minority governments would not be the same. That’s of course false, as large majorities can turn triumphalist and run roughshod over opposition parties just as much, and minority parliaments can be petty and nasty as parties clamp down in order to ensure that the government isn’t toppled, as our own recent memory shows. None of this has anything to do with First-Past-the-Post, and pretending that another system would force parties to work together forgets that it simply means shifting from one model of horse-trading and bargaining to another model, where there tends to be more extreme elements jockeying for power instead. So, to be quite frank, if this is supposed to be “kicking off” a discussion on electoral reform, it might as well be a tale that includes a vampire or two because it’s just as fantastic.

Continue reading →

QP: Genocide and refugees

Posted on by

Despite it being Thursday, there were no major leaders in the Commons today, which is a disappointing slide back to the poor attendance record of the previous parliament. Denis Lebel led off, referencing their opposition motion on calling ISIS a genocide and demanded support for it. Pam Goldsmith-Jones responded with the government line that the declaration is not a political one but a legal one, and it needed to have the endorsement of the International Criminal Code. Lebel moved onto the possible sole-sourcing of Super Hornets, for which Harjit Sajjan reminded him that the Conservatives were about to sole-source the F-35 fighters, while he had not yet made a determination. Lebel demanded a transparent process, and Sajjan reiterated that no decision was made. Andrew Scheer accused the government of playing politics with military equipment, and Sajjan snapped back that he has been in combat. Scheer then returned to the declaration of ISIS as a genocide, and Goldsmith-Jones repeated her previous answer. Peter Julian led off for the NDP, calling out the government on C-14’s constitutionality, and Jody Wilson-Raybould insisted that they came to the right balance. Julian and Ruth Ellen Brosseau said that the Senate was making the amendments that they had proposed, and to Julian, Wilson-Raybould repeated her answer while Jane Philpott responded to Brosseau that she hoped the Senate would pass it. Brosseau repeated her question in French, and Philpott reiterated that she hoped the bill would pass expeditiously.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A committee nobody will love

Posted on by

So, the government has put the notice on the Order Paper about forming their electoral reform committee, and there will be howls of outrage from all corners as this is going to please precisely nobody. Well, except maybe Liberals who will be controlling this process. In short, Maryam Monsef’s principles for democratic reform have been distilled to five points from eight, and the committee will be constituted of twelve MPs – six Liberals, three Conservatives, one New Democrat, one Bloc and Elizabeth May, but the Bloc MP and May won’t have voting rights in keeping with established practice. The committee will invite all MPs to hold town halls in their ridings and submit a written report back to the committee by October 1st, and the committee’s final report is to be delivered by December 1st. Of course, the NDP are going toe be livid because Liberals continue to make up a majority on the committee (which is legitimate given that they have the most seats) and that it doesn’t follow Nathan Cullen’s “proportional” idea – which, let’s be clear, was all about gaming the committee to advance his own proportional representation agenda. May is going to be upset because she’d not getting a vote, and she too is going to be railing that it won’t allow her to advance her own PR agenda. The Conservatives are going to be upset because the possibility of a referendum is not in this proposal, and they see that as their way of holding onto the status quo (which they feel favours their own chances). And I’m going to add my own particular objections that, as I’ve written previously, there are some serious problems with those principles that Monsef has laid out. We’ll see how this exercise goes, and I have a sneaking suspicion that these town halls may start to become sideshows as groups like Fair Vote Canada start trying to Astroturf them in trying to get PR advanced as the model to go forward (and given how PR advocates tend to operate, the insults and nastiness are going to start flying pretty quickly). There is also the (not unjustified) suspicion that the fix is already in, that the Liberals have their preferred model (likely ranked ballots) and that this is all a big production number to make it look like they’ve consulted Canadians, and that may very well be the case. Suffice to say, I suspect the next few months are going to be one giant headache, especially for those of us who are cognisant of the civic literacy issues at play.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/730215513821982721

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/730216383448031233

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/730216678756339712

Continue reading →