Tag Archives: Parliamentary Budget Officer

Roundup: Application versus consultation

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The head of the new Senate Appointment Advisory Board appeared at the Procedure and House Affairs committee yesterday, and has raised a few issues about this new process that are a bit troubling, which has to do with applications – rather, that there seems to be an emphasis on application rather than nominations arising out of consultations. In particular, the ability for people to apply for a seat on their own seems to be at odds with some of the design of the advisory process. Emmett Macfarlane notes that this wasn’t how he envisioned the process when he was asked to help design it, and that it not only overly bureaucratizes the process, but it sets it up for a particularly unsavoury sort to want to apply, which I concur with. Why is this important? Because we’ve only spent the past number of months watching the trial of a certain Mike Duffy, who was well known for wanting desperately to become a senator for decades, and how he viewed such an appointment as a “taskless thanks” which would also provide him with all manner of perquisites – and witness how he managed to monetize all of his relationships as a result of his appointment, as we’ve witnessed in testimony. We also lived though the bizarre spectacle that was Bert Brown, “elected” senator whose self-appointed crusade for Senate reform comprised largely of unsolicited meetings with provinces to convince them of his plan (on the Senate’s dime), and taking to the op-ed pages to basically call his detractors Nazis (I’m not sure how else you take it when he reminds you of his family’s military service in WWII as a rebuttal). Some of the best senators we’ve seen are those who never expected an appointment, and who never would have sought office on their own – people like Roméo Dallaire. It’s also why I’m not sold on the NDP fear that this process will just be elites nominating elites – a broad enough consultation will bring people of accomplishment and expertise in a wide variety of fields than just academia. But at the same time, the Senate should be a place that rewards experience and expertise rather than being a repository for randoms, given their role to scrutinise legislation and act as the country’s premier think tank. I have a hard time seeing how hot dog vendors can fulfil those roles, no matter how many people they interact with in a day.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/695336557893431300

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/695341816439136261

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Roundup: A troubling allegation

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There’s a rather disquieting story in the Huffington Post that quotes a couple of unnamed former Senate staffers, who point the finger at Senate Speaker Leo Housakos as the source of the leaks of the Auditor General’s report into senators’ expenses. And to be clear, in the past couple of weeks, I’ve heard similar tales being floated by someone else on the inside who witnessed it happen, and later witnessed Housakos deny it to other Senators. And indeed, Housakos was in the big chair when he found a prima facia breach of privilege when Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette raised the issue in the chamber, and with that finding, it went to the Senate’s rules committee to study the matter; that study was suspended when Parliament was dissolved, but it could be revived once the committee is reconstituted. That breach of privilege is a pretty big deal, and the fact that more than one person is now coming forward to say something is telling. This going public is also going to put pressure on Prime Minister Trudeau with regards to what he’s going to do with the question of appointing a new Senate Speaker. To be clear, this is a Prime Ministerial appointment because, unlike the Commons Speaker, the Senate Speaker is higher on the Order of Precedence as he or she fills a variety of additional diplomatic and protocol functions that the Commons Speaker does not, and is considered a representative of the Crown. If the current representative is not deemed to be trustworthy, and has indeed violated the privilege of Senators for his own ends, then it seems difficult to see how he can be trusted to stay in the post, and it may light a fire under Trudeau to do something about it, while the rest of the Senate remains in the dark about how they’re going to organise themselves as Trudeau drags his feet.

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Roundup: No ideological obstruction

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There’s the Senate bat-signal again. Conservative Senate leader Claude Carignan says that his caucus won’t abuse their majority in the Senate to thwart Liberal legislation that comes forward, to which I say “Um, yeah. Of course.” Because wouldn’t you know it, Senators have a job to do, and they know it. Of course, I’ve never bought into the conspiracy theory that Conservative senators would be the puppets of Harper, trying to influence things beyond the political grave, or even the theory that they would be extra dickish just because they were Harper appointees. Then again, most people seem to forget that senators of any stripe suddenly get a lot more independent when the PM who appointed them is no longer in office, and they get really, really independent once leadership races kick off. So far we’re at the first of those two, and with the Conservatives as a whole allegedly experimenting with a less command-and-control style of leadership, we may see the yoke they unduly placed over their Senate caucus lifted. Mind you, we’re still waiting for a signal to see what Trudeau will do in terms of both the Speaker of the Senate and the Leader of the Government. Without a Leader, they might as well just cancel Senate Question Period, which would be a loss because it’s quite instructive for how QP in the Commons should be run. Some senators have floated the idea of just having Senate QP be about asking questions to committee chairs (which, incidentally, they already can do), but it’s not a good idea because those committee chairs aren’t going to have a lot to say about issues of the day, they won’t have access to briefing materials, and they aren’t conduits by which the government can be held to account, which is the whole point of QP – not asking details about committee work. But seriously – can we please stop worrying about fantastical hysteria about what the Senate is going to do? 99 percent of it is based on false assumptions and ignorance of the chamber, and it’s so, so tiresome. They have jobs to do. Let them.

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Roundup: Fill in the blanks

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None of what happened with the Amherst branch of the Royal Canadian Legion announcement yesterday was out of the ordinary or unexpected, but it was one giant confirmation of what we are seeing daily in the debasement of our politics. Conservative MP Scott Armstrong mistakenly sent out a press release that still had all of the track changes, and it showed very clearly that it was a fill-in-the-blanks job. Because gods forbid an announcement was made that wasn’t pabulum. Pretty much all political speech has become this – checklists of talking points that need to be ticked off in whatever the context. Giving a members’ statement? Here are the talking points you need to say – or better yet, here’s the fill-in-the-blanks statement we’ll hand to you. Going on a panel show at 5 o’clock? Here are the lines you can deliver, and the slogans you need to recite. The funny thing is, I’ve met MPs who’ve gotten media training – which they paid for out of their own pockets – and they can do without all of this box-checking, blanks-filled-in pap that they would recite otherwise. But those MPs made the choice to not do what their fellows were doing, and proved they could speak on their own without sounding like a babbling idiot. But most MPs don’t take the time to learn how to speak in public, or in the media, or how to write a speech on their own. It’s mostly just a handful of veteran MPs who can do it these days, and that doesn’t bode well for the future seeing the number of incumbents who aren’t running again. Unless MPs start to do something about their own situation – or better yet, voters demand that they do – we’ll wind up with a parliament of MPs reading more of these scripts like robotic simpletons.

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Roundup: A curious recommendation

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The Senate’s national security and defence committee released an interim report yesterday on countering the terrorist threat in Canada. The report made some 23 recommendations, many of them critical of what the government has and has not yet done, such as making it a criminal offence to be part of a terrorist organization, or having a “no-visit” list to keep known ideological radicals out of the country. The one that got the most attention on Power & Politics and subsequently the Twitter Machine was recommendation 9, which suggests the government “work with the provinces and the Muslim communities to investigate the options that are available for the training and certification of Imams in Canada.” And then they were off about how this was criminalizing speech and thought, and how it was likely to be a Charter issue, but actually reading the report itself, the preceding section noted the problems of amateur prison proselytizers, and that members of the Muslim community were concerned about foreign-trained imams spreading extremist ideology, and noted that certification is already the case in Europe. Not much further down in the report is a reputable Calgary imam talking about how extremist ideology is being protected on campuses under the guise of “academic freedom.” In this context, the recommendation doesn’t seem nearly as extreme as it was presented, but hey, it’s not like that context made it into some of the articles (not that surprising, unfortunately). This having been said, there remain problems with the report, which is why the Liberal senators dissented from the report, looking for more counselling, early intervention, study of the roots of radicalization, and more importantly resources for RCMP that the government seems reluctant to do. Is it perfect work? No. Is it better than we’d get from the Commons? Yes. It’s also still an interim report, and more work will be done on it in the next parliament, so perhaps things will improve with it before the final version is issued. In the meantime, it’s not a bad thing that senators are actually talking about this issue without relying solely on slogans.

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Roundup: An implicit repudiation

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It was Auditor General day yesterday, and as usual, there were some stories that didn’t get a lot of attention, like CBSA’s computer systems, and some which are somewhat alarming, like the fact that twenty years later, Health Canada still doesn’t have a real plan to deal with superbugs, that there are some serious deficiencies when it comes to nursing stations with remote First Nations, or that the Royal Canadian Mint and the Office of the Canadian Forces Ombudsman had some spending issues. But the most interesting bits were in two chapters – one on tax expenditures, the other on the release of male offenders from corrections. In essence, both are repudiations of the way that this government has been managing things. Tax expenditures has a lot to do with the mass proliferation of those boutique tax credits that this government likes to throw around in order to target voters, but as the AG points out, it’s done with little scrutiny, and not enough information on them gets back to Parliamentarians to hold that spending to account. (Couple this with the report on Monday about the growth in tax complexity, and it should be a big red flag). As for offenders, too many low-risk offenders are not getting parole when they are eligible, and that makes reintegration harder, and recidivism more likely because they don’t get the monitoring that comes with parole. Add to that, the squeeze on programming resources within prisons and the removal of incentives to do the programming means that too many offenders are being released without having completed their rehabilitation programmes, which is also alarming. It’s also the direct fault of this government and their tough-on-crime policies what have made a virtue of trying to keep people in prisons longer, and then justifying it by saying that they won’t be on the streets to re-offend (never mind that in the vast majority of cases, keeping them in prison longer does more harm than good). And as the AG pointed out, it’s more costly to keep them in prison longer and without gradual release and programming, they get released with a higher chance to re-offend. In other words, we’re paying more to get poorer results because it’s easier to try and get votes by appealing to the sense of retribution rather than rehabilitation. Well done, guys. Slow clap.

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Roundup: A possible return to deficits

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The Parliamentary Budget Officer gave his pre-budget analysis, and said that while the books look balanced this year, the government’s continued focus on tax breaks, spending announcements and the low oil price environment could mean heading back into deficit in two years – not too surprising really if you’ve been paying attention. Part of the fiscal breathing room the government is using right now is coming from their decision to freeze EI rates rather than let them fall to a level that reflects the actual unemployment rate, which sounds a lot like the kinds of things they used to curse Paul Martin for doing. And then there are the asset sales, such as all of those GM shares – possibly sold at a loss – that just pad the books in the short term. But hey, they can claim to balance the budget without raising taxes (err, except for all of those tariffs that they raised this year) and try and sell that as sound economic management going into the election. The actual numbers tell a different story, as we’ve seen, but hey, why mess with a narrative?

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Roundup: The trial begins

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The day has finally arrived, and the Mike Duffy trial can begin – and let me say, if you were sick of hearing about it before it began, well, the wall-to-wall coverage is going to be insufferable, especially over the next two weeks until the Commons resumes its sitting, and we’ll get a budget. And you’ll forgive me if I’m not one of the people who is expecting this to be a litany of fireworks and bombshells that will damage the PMO. If anything, I would presume that the judge would take a dim view of any attempt to make this a trial of Stephen Harper’s government rather than of Duffy’s culpability in his own affairs. After all, he signed off on all of those expenses, and he bears responsibility for everything, up to and including accepting that cheque from Nigel Wright. The rest – trying to pry open the inner workings of the PMO, as much as Duffy’s lawyer may try to bring this up to portray Duffy as the victim or a pawn in these machinations, I doubt will hold much water. In fact, even the most recent “shocking” revelation has nothing to do with the PMO, but rather with Duffy’s own hand in things. So no, I really don’t think this is going to be cause for Harper to sweat or lay awake at night – one doubts that Duffy has too much dirt left that can damage him at this point. (Incidentally, the Maclean’s Duffy trial page is pretty sweet, particularly the Scott Feschuk humour pieces.)

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Roundup: Blowback on gun comments

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The backlash from the Conservatives’ fundraising appeal for rural gun owners is starting, from NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, to Quebec premier Philippe Couillard, to Ontario’s former attorney general. In fact, numerous legal authorities are reminding Canadians that they don’t have the right to use deadly force to protect their homes – unless it’s a case of self-defence, but those situations are rare, and use of force must be proportional in order to not be criminal. And then the PMO started backpedalling about things Harper did or did not say, and how they are aware of criminal misuse of firearms, all while the gun lobby is chafing that the government hasn’t gone far enough for their liking. See the swamp that the government has stepped in, while curiously trying to import a culture war that doesn’t actually exist in Canada. It has also been pointed out that Harper made the gun comments in part of a broader discussion of rural issues while in Saskatchewan, and that he missed the mark on some of the more pressing concerns in that area as well.

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Roundup: The unspoken morale problem

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As the results of the Senate audit draw closer, and senators are complaining anonymously about the way in which it’s being handled by the Auditor General’s office (and those that they’ve subcontracted to), what has been missing from the reporting is the blow to morale that has taken place in the institution. The constant air of suspicion, the questioning of expenses that should be no problem (like stamps for Xmas cards being sent to the States, or as the article describes, single phone calls and sandwiches) has made not only for some unhappy senators and staff, but it’s sucked the life out of the place, and their focus on the grown-up policy work of parliament – which we should expect from the Commons but don’t end up getting – is being completely sidetracked by the way this audit is being handled, and the time that it is consuming. It’s also to the point of invasive, where one senator mentioned that she had been asked for her personal journals by auditors. And the problem has become that because of the actions of those couple of bad apples – Duffy, Wallin, Brazeau, and Harb – that all senators are under a cloud of suspicion and are unable to push back without it looking like they have something to hide, rather than the fact that there is a genuine feeling like they are being abused by auditors who don’t understand the role of the Senate. One does have to wonder if there won’t be any long-term damage to what is going on, especially as blame is being laid on the institution, and not on the person who made appointments without due diligence.

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