Tag Archives: Pensions

Roundup: Unger vs Black

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Further to Senator Black’s resignation from the Conservative caucus, we have a couple of reactions – first, an interview with Black by Jen Gerson, in which Black expresses his excitement for the “uncharted territory” of greater independence in the Senate. Second, a somewhat bitter response from fellow “elected” Alberta Senator Betty Unger, who repeats some of Senator Plett’s accusations about Black’s attendance, and goes on to assert that senators should be in a caucus to give them some kind of accountability. Oh, and then there’s Kady O’Malley, who notes the “disappointment” of Senator Tannas in his response to Black’s decision, in which she reminds them in her own Pollyana-ish way that yes, they can still work together even if they’re no longer in caucus together.

Among the responses are some particular problems with the conceptions of how a caucus can and should operate, and part of that stems from the fairly unique situation of how the Senate was being run under the Harper government. Unger is correct in that being part of the national caucus brings more perspectives and allows more participation (which is one of the reasons why Trudeau’s decision to banish senators from his caucus was short-sighted), but her conception of caucus providing “checks and balances” to senators is a bit mystifying, particularly considering that there is little that a caucus could do to actually control a senator given that they have institutional independence under our constitution. Sure, they can threaten them with being removed from a committee or from participating in travel, but that’s the extent of it, and if a senator feels a particular conviction on an issue, then that’s a risk they can and have taken before.

As for Black, being part of a caucus in the Senate doesn’t mean that he is forced to toe any particular party line, whether they achieve consensus on a position or not. Granted, since he has been in the Senate, it was operating in a more tightly controlled environment because the Conservatives had largely trained their new senators to believe that this was the norm, that they could be whipped, along with some cajoling about how they needed to go along with things under the rubric of “you want to support the prime minister, don’t you?” And that would usually cow them into line, never mind that there are no actual levers of power for a government to assert in the Senate. Black and Unger both have always been in the Senate where they were told that there was this expectation, and now that they are in opposition and the party is in a leadership convention, they are suddenly finding themselves without that same comfortable feeling of obligation to the person who appointed them (never mind their “elected” status – it certainly didn’t mean anything for their “elected” predecessor Bert Brown, who insisted that senators had to dance with the one who brought them). Black obviously decided that he felt freer in this environment and wanted to push it further. That’s his prerogative; Unger feels the need for structure, and that’s legitimate, so long as she knows that she has that institutional independence and that there is no such thing as caucus control for a senator (and I’m not sure that she does, given her Senate “upbringing”).

But honestly – between the fetishisation of “independence” and the wrong-headed notion of “checks and balances” that don’t actually exist, neither are really on the side of the angels on this one.

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Roundup: Automatic disqualifiers

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It has been talked about before on this blog, and will probably be talked about again, but the selection process for those 19 vacant Senate seats is now open, and the process allows people to nominate themselves if they so choose. There’s a good piece about this and how it contributes to selection bias in the appointment panel, but the head of said panel insists that they are reaching out to all manner of groups to get names to consider but they are using the individual application process to help broaden the search to ensure that they don’t miss out on anyone who is worthy of the job. Of course, self-selection should probably be considered as criteria for elimination off the start – usually it tends to indicate a particular over-inflated sense of self (and yes, I do know of a couple of people who have been looking to get their names submitted as part of this process, and yes, they are a bit narcissistic), and a betrayal of what a Senate appointment should be about. Really, it should be about a way of contributing to public service when one’s career is winding down, and of being able to contribute to the public dialogue given a particular perspective. It’s almost like a form of recognition for doing good work over a lifetime, and being given an opportunity to give back a little more (because really, the salary isn’t as generous as people like to portray it as, given the amount of work that tends to be involved). It’s always been a bit contentious when prime ministers appointed people in terms of their age and place in their career. Some, like Chrétien, tended to appoint them too old so that they only had a short time to contribute, which hurts the ability to have the Senate serve as a chamber of institutional memory and longer-term vision. But sometimes they appoint people far too young – Harper’s appointment of Patrick Brazeau being but one shining example of how poor of a choice that really was. Let’s hope that this is one of those considerations that the independent panel becomes a bit more cognisant of as they move ahead with this next phase of their task.

Meanwhile, here’s a look at the Senate’s revamped communications effort and the team they’ve assembled to do the work, which is moving away from bland and safe to being more response and proactive in reaching out to showcase the work of the Senate and of individual senators.

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Roundup: Rebutting the reformers’ complaints

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If it were possible for someone to write a column that was basically one long subtweet, then I’m pretty sure that it’s what Andrew Coyne did with his column on electoral reform, with me as his unspoken target – particularly as he parroted several of my arguments (that no one else seems to be making) without actually getting their substance correct. So here we go.

When proportional representation advocates complain that the allocation of seats among the parties in the legislature does not resemble their relative shares of the votes cast — with the especially unhappy effect of allowing a minority of the voters to rule over the majority — first past the post’s defenders reply: why should it? Members were elected in 338 separate riding elections, not in a single nationwide vote.

Yes, and that’s pointed out for a number of reasons – that the vote share figure that reformers cite as evidence is not actually real (hence its use as evidence is meaningless), and the fact that each MP is elected to a single seat in a separate election has a particular meaning that gives them individual agency rather than making them a thrall of a particular party. This is an important consideration in the electoral system because it gives a clear line for how MPs are empowered, which is what we keep insisting we want. It also demonstrates that if the complaint is that MPs aren’t empowered, it’s because it’s their own choice or ignorance – not the electoral system that is at fault.

When reformers point out the imbalance this creates between voters — in a given election it typically takes many more votes to elect a member from one party than another — first-past-the-posters look positively mystified: everyone gets one ballot. And when the former observe that under first past the post the votes cast for anyone but the leading candidate in a riding are “wasted,” in the sense that they do not contribute to electing anyone, the latter lose all patience. How could any of the votes have been wasted, they ask, if all were counted? The candidate who was elected may not have been everyone’s choice, but he still represents everyone.

Here Coyne adopts the same specious math that the Broadbent Institute was pushing over Twitter yesterday, which ignores how ridings actually work, and that elections are 338 separate events, and mashes the figures together and divides by 338, pretending that it’s a number with meaning when it’s not – just like the popular vote. It’s pretty much like bringing a unicorn to a logic exam. As well, he doesn’t make a compelling argument about why votes are “wasted” because it ignores the broader political ecosystem. It has little to do with the fact that the MP who won the seat represents everyone, but that the vote itself is but one small piece of political engagement. Casting a vote is not the end-all-be-all of political engagement. Rather, the system is built for people to be joining parties and engaging at a grassroots level to develop policy and for riding associations to act as interlocutors between the local community and the caucus, even when they don’t have a local MP in that party. As well, the percentage by which the MP won the seat is a figure that matters. If it’s by a slim margin, then those votes against are certainly not “wasted” – they have a meaning in the message that it sends to the MP about where his or her support lies. That matters.

To reformers’ complaints about how the system works, in other words, the answer commonly offered is: that’s how the system works. It is as if that were not just the system we have now, but the only system there is. And of course if you assume that then yes, reformers’ objections become literally incomprehensible. They might as well object to the weather. If only one member can be elected per riding, then obviously it’s silly to talk about wasted votes, or to complain that voters who supported another candidate are not represented. That’s life. Suck it up. The resulting parliament was not proportional? That’s not how our system works.

No, that’s not why one has to point out that it’s how the system works – one needs to point that out because you need to understand how the system works before you go about changing it, which usually means breaking things and making them worse. It has been proven that every time we tinker with our system, we make it worse, which leads us to want to tinker with it more, breaking it even further. Why? Because people don’t understand how the system works, so they assume that it’s broken, particularly if they get emotional that it doesn’t do what they think it should. This is the whole premise of my book – that we need to stop and understand how and why things work the way they do before we go about messing with the system some more because history has shown repeatedly that tinkering makes it worse. Ignorance is literally killing our democracy, and no matter how well intentioned its reformers tend to be, they almost always make it worse.

At any rate, it’s worth debating. Some might argue that single-member ridings give constituents a clearer sense of who to take their problems to, and who to hold to account. Others might reply that, with several members competing to represent them, constituents might get better service: if one didn’t answer your letter, another might.

From here, Coyne goes off about how maybe multi-member ridings would be better, possibly sprinkled in with single-member ones where they would be too large (hello, all of rural and remote Canada), which immediately brings up questions about how that could possibly be considered a more fair system. And while he touches ever so briefly on accountability, he gets the premise wrong – an MP’s job is not to “service” one’s constituents. It’s about holding the government to account. This, however, is lost on the reformers, whose fetishisation with fantastical notions about “representation” overshadow all other aspects of how the system works in its broader ecosystem. Yes, representation is a part of it, but it is not the totality, and yet that is what all of their reforms are geared toward with no regard for the bigger whole.

So no, it’s not about whether other systems are possible – it’s about not making things worse because you don’t understand how things work now. That’s a very different thing entirely.

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Roundup: More awful electoral reform questions

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Another day, another meeting of the electoral reform committee, which produced yet more kinds of awful. Marc Mayrand, the outgoing Chief Electoral Officer, gave a few facts to MPs, like the fact that a referendum (if the enabling legislation were changed) would cost about $300 million to run, or the fact that Elections Canada could be ready in time for a 2019 election under a new system, provided that everything was settled by May of next year. (Note: This may be overly optimistic considering the constitutional questions raised by some kinds of voting systems). But some of the worst moments were around questions raised to both Mayrand and his predecessor, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, about things like online voting.

No. No, no, no, no, no. The problem with online voting has zero to do with encryption technology and everything to do with the secrecy of the ballot, and anyone who confuses the two needs a smack upside the head. The secrecy of the ballot is ensuring that nobody sees who you are voting for, so that you can’t be rewarded or punished for it, you know, like in the era of “rum bottle politics.” And you can’t ensure the secrecy of the ballot with online voting. “But what about mail-in ballots?” you ask. Well, the proportion of those is so small that it’s a compromise that we have to make. Online voting is not comparable.

https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/751122720520282113

This particular intervention is complete nonsense. Does David Christopherson not take the phone calls of his constituents unless they can prove that they voted NDP? Does he not present their petitions in Parliament? Oh, so he does? Then they don’t “get nothing,” and it’s fundamentally wrong for anyone to suggest otherwise, and proof that they don’t know what it means to be an MP.

And then there’s this specious and utterly wrong nonsense, because it’s fundamentally dishonest. Do you know how many voters it took to elect Elizabeth May? 37,000 votes. We have ridings, where people decide who gets to sit in each seat. We don’t apportion seats based on the number of votes they receive, and to try and present it as such in order to prove some point is basically lying. And yes, this is the kinds of discourse that this process is bringing out, so well done everyone.

And then there are the editorials and op-eds. Christina Spencer is not at all impressed with how this committee has gotten started (and I can’t say that I blame her – it’s been pretty awful). Kelly McParland thinks the Liberals are counting on apathy in order to get their preferred electoral system through (hence their reluctance for a referendum), while Michael Den Tandt thinks the insistence of “focus grouping” their electoral reform consultations is really a shell game of “trust us” while they push ranked ballots through. Colin Horgan suggests that the “electoral reform toolkit” is an attempt at making the conversation appear to be more grassroots.

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Roundup: Use your Australian comparisons wisely

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If it’s not the leadership omnishambles in the UK that’s holding our attention, it’s the indecisive election result in Australia. While that would be something in and of itself, we find ourselves with pundits eager to take some lessons from Australia, only to completely balls things up along the way. To wit, Kelly McParland writing in the National Post delivered this hot mess yesterday which manages to conflate every possible thing in Australian politics in order to prove a point – not necessarily a bad point – but went about it in entirely the wrong way. So, for Mr. McParland’s edification, let’s break it down a little.

First of all, the “six prime ministers in six years” has virtually nothing to do with the ranked ballots in Australia. The system of caucus selection of leaders there (which is how leaders should be chosen, as I’ve argued elsewhere numerous times) has gone to extremes, creating a culture of paranoia and betrayal. But that’s not the fault of the ranked ballots since it’s a different process. That parties will spill leaders shortly before an election in the hopes of having a more appealing leader is party politics enabled by the ability to have spills, rather than the ranked ballot effect. Conflating them is not helpful.

The ranked ballots themselves allow for more small parties to exist independent of “big tent” brokerage parties because ranked ballots discourage tactical voting – something McParland neglects to mention while returning to the Canadian canard that the Liberals only want ranked ballots because they think they’ll clean up by getting everyone’s second place votes. That has led to the need for the Australian Liberals (read: conservatives) to require a coalition partner to govern, which is a consideration to make if we want ranked ballots, but it is a giant conflation to mix this in with the stability of their system and leadership woes.

The problem of the Australian Senate is the bigger nub of the argument, but which gets lost in the rest of the McParland’s confusing mess. The Australian Senate is chosen by single-transferable proportional voting, and the system has been effectively gamed in the previous election so that a bunch of marginal players got seats and subsequently created a huge problem in their upper chamber, requiring more tinkering of the system to be forced through and the Prime Minister calling for double-dissolution (so that both chambers be elected at the same time – a rare occurrence usually reserved for political crises) in order to break the legislative deadlocks. Those tweaks appear to be causing even more problems with this election, but we may see how it all shakes out in a few weeks. (Note that these ballots tend to be the size of placemats, because of the way they’re structured with the enormous number of parties running). And while the problems with these marginal parties being given outsized powers of persuasion in the previous parliament are very valid points to make, it gets lost in the sea of conflations that plagued the rest of the piece.

So I get McParland’s point about electoral reform advocates needing to be careful what they wish for, and can even agree with it to a large extent, this was utterly the wrong way to go about it.

Meanwhile, here’s a primer about Australia’s lengthy counting process – so lengthy that their Senate preferential distribution process could take over a month. Closer to home, here are some of the ways in which the electoral reform committee plans to engage with Canadians.

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Roundup: Idle Brexit musings

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While everyone continues to talk Brexit over the weekend, and you have a curious number of Conservative MPs here in Canada almost irresponsibly tweeting gleefully over it, I am forced to wonder if they are not in fact trying to demonstrate enthusiasm for referenda in general, given their daily caterwauling for one on electoral reform in this country. That could be why their messages are so focused on the democratic result of it, as opposed to the substance of what the Brexit vote actually represented. But that’s just idle speculation, so take of it what you will.

Of course, talk of how referenda are terrible at determining issues of substance is also part of why that’s been on my mind, because I am leaning more to the side that the issue of electoral reform would require a referendum because of what it proposes to do, and I don’t trust that the government is going to get useful answers from a series of townhalls and a report from a committee whose composition has been gamed to look “fair” when the person doing the gaming has a specific goal and output in mind. Of course, an electoral reform referendum would be subject to its won particular brands of demagoguery, particularly considering that we have an appalling lack of civic literacy in Canada, and when nobody can accurately depict the current electoral system, we’re going to be subject to some propaganda on the change side of the referendum whose fictions will be as bald-faced as that which the Leave side promised in the Brexit campaign, not that it will matter to the casual voter because it plays into emotions about things that feel and sound “fair” without actually grasping the situation (which is a solution in search of a problem). The last referendum on electoral reform in Ontario largely failed because the government of the day was ambivalent, but the current federal government is not, and that worries me. So it’s something to consider.

Meanwhile, the meltdown happening in the UK’s Labour Party, with a problematic leader who refuses to resign in the face of a full-blown caucus revolt is another object lesson in why membership selection of party leaders is a terrible, terrible system because it gives those leaders an excuse to refuse to be held to account, citing a “democratic mandate” as Jeremy Corbyn is doing right now. And no, adopting the provisions in Michael Chong’s Reform Act where caucus can vote to remove a leader is not actually the solution because it entrenches that parties must elect leaders by way of their membership, and that disconnect between selection and removal creates enormous problems in terms of the legitimacy of the removal process. Accountability matters, and needs to be balanced with democracy. Membership selection of leaders does not provide the needed accountability, and the horrifying lesson of a leader who won’t be held to account is playing out right now and should give everyone pause about the system that we blazed the trail for in this country.

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Roundup: To give or not to give Sophie resources

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At his session-ender press conference, Trudeau highlighted three carefully chosen accomplishments, gave no additional clarity on the missing and murdered Indigenous women file, and didn’t commit to an open process for fighter procurement. All of that was par for the course, given that it was a lot of back-patting, but also a reminder that there is still a lot of work ahead, and he doesn’t want to look like he’s patting himself on the back too much. What I found more curious was in response to a question that he said that his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, should be able to have resources to carry out the duties that she has set about to undertake, but that he also doesn’t want to create a formal role for prime ministerial spouses going forward so that there is no obligation for the future. There is a certain amount of sense to this position, but it’s a very fine line to walk. Currently, she has one assistant and is given help from PMO staff on an ad hoc basis, as needed. Speculation with the staffing changes made to the household, particularly around nannies, has to do with creating space on the staff for an additional assistant for Grégoire Trudeau, but we have yet to see that materialise. None of it answers the specific existential question however on the role that prime ministerial spouses play. The reluctance to create an official position is a good instinct to have, especially because it bears reminding again and again that we are already a constitutional monarchy, and we have a royal family to take on these particular roles. In fact, the GG and his spouse also take on these kinds of feel-good roles in the absence of a more present royal family, which leaves very little room for a prime ministerial spouse to take it on. What they have to trade in – particularly Grégoire Trudeau – is a kind of celebrity status, especially as the previous few prime ministerial spouses haven’t had much in the way of a career of their own, and for Grégoire Trudeau, it has become her career to be a public speaker at events and for particular charity groups – and there’s nothing wrong with that. It nevertheless makes for a sticky situation with who pays for the help that such a career entails, particularly if it becomes an important optical consideration that she not be paid for the work (and if she were paid, even on a cost-recovery basis, one can already imagine people hissing “how dare she!” on accepting money from charities no matter that it’s the cost of doing business and standard practice). So we are between that proverbial rock and hard place. I don’t have a solution to offer either than to say that there is no winning, and it now becomes a way of finding the least unpalatable option, and that may wind up being what Trudeau is signalling – resources but the explicit rule that this is not formalising the role in any way. His reminding people that we have a royal family for these kinds of things wouldn’t hurt either so that we can stop this constant “First Lady” talk.

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Roundup: The quest for a less arbitrary majority

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The electoral reform committee met for the first time yesterday and got all of its housekeeping details out of the way – “electing” Francis Scarpaleggia as the chair (though it was unopposed) and naming Scott Reid and Nathan Cullen as the deputies, allocating clerks and resources, and starting to figure out when the meetings will begin, hearing from the outgoing Chief Electoral Officer to start with. But with all of this going on, it bears reminding what we are doing with this whole “reform” endeavour in the first place, much of which has to do with the complaints that parties that don’t get a majority of the votes wield a majority of the power. Joseph Heath writes a great piece debunking this kind of thinking that everyone should read, because it is a reminder that trying to find a “true majority” becomes a futile quest – there is enough arbitrariness in any system that there can never be an actual majority, but it is simply more naked under First-Past-the-Post. Changing the system just moves the goalposts in different ways – indeed, proportional systems just removes the possibilities of majority government with the horse-trading of coalitions, which brings yet more arbitrariness into the system. So good luck, committee members, with your stated goals for the system you wish to choose when they are built upon foundations of sand.

Meanwhile, as our friends in the media write yet more stories about what the committee will be looking at, can I please offer the reminder about doing some actual research when it comes to systems like ranked ballots. Consistently our media colleagues have repeated the grossly distorted line that ranked ballots somehow “increase the disparities of first-past-the-post.” We’ve seen this over and over again, especially as the NDP and their Broadbent Institute brethren have picked it up as a talking point. No.

This supposed fact comes from a single analysis done by CBC’s Eric Grenier using a single poll done around the time of the election regarding second choices. That’s it. It doesn’t detail how the system actually works and what it is designed to do, which is to eliminate tactical voting, and yet we’ve never heard that description used once. Oh, wait – I used it in a sidebar I researched for the Ottawa Citizen. But that’s it. It would be nice if other journalists writing about this file could actually go and do a bit of research on their own rather than repeating the talking points provided to them by partisans, because we might get a better understanding of what is actually up for debate.

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Roundup: Big tent divisions

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There was an interesting and perhaps somewhat revealing interview in The Hill Times yesterday where openly gay MP Rob Oliphant let it be known that despite the outward acceptance of LGBT issues in the Liberal Party, it is not a universally held opinion, and that there are still undercurrents of the “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude that still reside within some of its members. As an example, MP John McKay – a noted evangelical Christian – was quoted as saying that his feelings about same-sex marriage haven’t changed, even though he considers the issue settled. It’s that line between tolerance and acceptance, and Oliphant rather adroitly points out that the line is still there within his own caucus. It also seems to me to be a kind of oblique explanation for why the government wound up taking such a tough line on the assisted dying bill – to the point that they would rather see it go back to the Supreme Court of Canada in order to suffer a defeat and be “forced” to deal with the issue as it was originally laid out in the Carter decision rather than to go along with it on their own. There are other lines within the party where Trudeau has forced the issue with his candidates and caucus, such as abortion (McKay being an opponent, as was Lawrence MacAulay until Trudeau’s edict), and it would seem that the same line is being threaded with the assisted dying issue. The difference is that with this one, Trudeau did not force the issue with his caucus and insist that this is a Charter issue that they will be whipped on (never mind that the Carter decision very clearly stated that yes, this is a Charter issue and this is why the current law is not adequately ensuring access for these Canadians with grievous and irremediable suffering). And it did seem that it was originally going to be the case where this was going to be a whipped vote on Charter lines, but he backed away from that under some public pressure from the media. How much of that was from push-back from the caucus and the broader party membership remains to be seen, but it would seem that the attempt to create the broadest possible tent is forcing some uncomfortable compromises, and in this case, Trudeau made the calculation that this wasn’t a battle he was willing to fight within his own base, never mind that he had the Charter argument right there. Instead, we are left with an inadequate law that will be challenged again (and one hopes not at the expense of another suffering family), and the reminder that while the public face of the Liberal Party is one of progressivity, there remains a social conservative undercurrent of the party that the leader’s declarations haven’t entirely done away with.

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Roundup: Bills left unpassed

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While the House of Commons may have risen for the summer on Friday, they did so with an unusual number of bills waiting to pass third reading, not to mention the fact that Bill C-7 on RCMP unionization is heading back to them after the Senate amends it (and those amendments have passed at the committee stage and are awaiting third reading vote). What is most unusual to me is the fact that C-7 was another bill that was in response to a Supreme Court decision that also was granted an extension, and still managed to miss its deadline and remains un-passed. Now, the government is prepared to allow it go un-passed through the summer, despite the fact that while it was under consideration on the Commons side, they insisted they couldn’t make substantive amendments to the bill because of the deadline. That deadline has passed, and they are willing to now let it go through the summer, the sense of urgency suddenly evaporated? How? It makes no sense. And looking at the other bills that they haven’t passed yet, there are two that are both awaiting Third Reading and could have passed if they’d sat for an extra couple of days: C-2 on their vaunted income tax changes, and C-4 on undoing the Conservatives’ changes to labour rights. Why they’re letting these languish through the summer – particularly C-4, which keeps some pretty onerous regulations for labour unions on the books – is frankly mystifying.

I will say that the mood in the Commons was strangely exhausted by the time Friday rolled around, when they hadn’t even been doing late-night sittings up to this point in order to get things passed an off to the Senate (often with the expectation to get those bills passed as well before rising themselves). In fact, normally by this time, MPs are outright feral, and the tone in the Commons could generally be compared to jeering, hooting baboons. Mind you, we had The Elbowing and that associated drama a few weeks ago, and as someone remarked to me the other day (and if I could remember who you were when I had this conversation, I would credit you), they basically peaked too soon this year. And that very well could be. It still makes no sense that they would leave these two bills on the Order Paper waiting for final debate, or not waiting for C-7 to come back from the Senate. But then again, there have been a lot of questionable choices made this spring, so perhaps we should chalk it up to more of that.

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