Tag Archives: Pensions

Roundup: The return of the Reform Act

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Despite hopes that we might be rid of this nonsense, Michael Chong is back with a vengeance, plugging for parties to implement the Reform Act when their caucuses meet in the coming weeks, and hey, he’s not done spouting a bunch of complete bollocks about the new legislation! A reminder: The Reform Act is de facto useless, and de jure harmful to our system of government. I’ve outlined it all before here, here and here, so that soil is well tilled, but suffice to say, it’s not going to empower MPs like he says as MPs already have that power but simply don’t exercise it. It will, in fact, do the opposite. But then there’s some troubling statements he made on Power & Politics last night regarding his idea of the role of the Senate when it comes to leadership votes. Not only did his bill define the caucus as MPs only, but he stated that senators have no role in the selection of an interim leader because it was about (in this case) choosing the “leader of the opposition” which had nothing to do with the Senate, since MPs didn’t choose their leader. Nope – all wrong. It’s about choosing the interim party leader, not just leader in the Commons, and senators are just as much part of the party as MPs are. That makes a difference, particularly if the interim leader is going to be making organisational changes within the party structure which senators are every bit as entitled to have a say in as MPs. Also, because that leader will be able to choose who the Senate leader is going to be (well, for the Conservatives anyway – mileage may vary for future Liberal interim leadership votes), they have a vested interest in who will be chosen. Chong insisting otherwise is being disingenuous. So why is he making the big pitch – other than for the sake of his legislative legacy? Because I’m pretty sure that he’s building himself up for a permanent leadership bid as the “great reformer.” It’s too bad that his reforms are a sham that only serves to entrench what problems have grown in our system. But it’s all about looking like you’re changing things, right? It’s cynical, and sadly, a great many people (my journalistic colleagues included) will lap it right up.

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Roundup: A refresher on the GG

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With a minority government likely in the offing – possibly Conservative, possibly Liberal – we’re seeing a spate of new articles about post-electoral scenarios and the role of the Governor General. While some of them get it more or less right, (my own offering a couple of weeks ago here), into the middle of this, Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch sticks his nose in and starts making trouble of his usual sort – deliberately misconstruing the system to his own ends. And then, unfortunately, As It Happens picked it up and ran with it without someone credible to counter it. Fortunately, Philippe Lagassé was already ahead of that game earlier yesterday morning, followed by a smackdown of Conacher later in the evening. I’ll leave you to it.

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Roundup: Aspirational job targets

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Stephen Harper’s election pledge du jour was a target of 1.3 million net new jobs by 2020, which sounds terribly impressive, but if you listen to the economists talk about it, there are a few caveats. Of course, we should note first that really, government’s don’t create jobs as such, but they can provide the environment that is conducive to investment and hiring. The question for Harper really is a) how many of these jobs would be created regardless of whatever you do, and b) what measures exactly are you proposing to create these jobs, considering that it’s becoming ever more clear that we’re moving into an era of really low growth. And no, just signing trade agreements isn’t enough, nor is just lowering taxes and calling it a day. The Conservatives asked Mike Moffatt and Kevin Milligan to check their figures, and both say that sure, it’s plausible – but it’s going to depend on strong global growth, immigration, and older workers staying in the workforce longer (as in not retiring). Mike Moffatt gives his analysis here, while Milligan (and others) have tweeted their comments.

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Roundup: No, Chong’s bill won’t give us Australian leadership spills

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News of the leadership spill in Australia, ousting Tony Abbott as prime minister and ending the greatest political bromance of the Commonwealth countries (Harper and Abbott were quite the mutual admiration society), we were suddenly inundated with Twitter musings about whether that could happen in Canada, thanks to Michael Chong’s Reform Act which passed this summer. While Kady O’Malley offers the “in theory” answer, the in practice answer is that no, it couldn’t happen here, because Canada has a terrible system of leadership selection that purports to “democratise” the system with grassroots involvement, but instead created an unaccountable and presidentialised system of an overly powerful leader that has little fear of their caucus turning on them, because caucus didn’t select them. When it comes to removal, selection matters. A lot. Chong’s bill, perversely, makes an Australian situation less likely by raising the bar for leadership challenges to happen in the first place, and would instead give us situations like what happened in Manitoba where a sitting leader was challenged, and when it went to a leadership process where he still participated and won based on the grassroots support when his caucus was no longer behind him, well, it’s ugly and it’s down right unparliamentary given that a leader needs to have the confidence of his or her caucus, and when they don’t but stay in based on grassroots votes, the system breaks down. Paul Wells cautions that reforming a system usually replaces real or perceive problems with different problems, while Andrew Coyne points out that being able to dump a bad leader quickly is the lesser evil of being stuck with them.

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Roundup: The Conservatives’ anti-refugee inertia

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With opinion galvanizing around the Syrian refugee crisis, there are calls for the government to do more – even if the opposition parties’ targets remain a little on the weak side in the overall picture. Cities and provinces – in particular Quebec – are pledging to do more, but they are bound by the pace that the federal government sets. And above all, that is the real problem with Canada’s response. Chris Alexander has been subtly blaming the UNHCR for their slow and onerous process while trying to cast his government in a positive light for trying to change that, except they’re the ones who’ve made the system far more onerous in the first place. I’ve covered the refugee file for a number of years, most especially when I was writing for Xtra, and a consistent theme emerged was that every time the Conservatives changed the rules, they were making it harder for refugees to make it into the country. In a particular bid to try to keep out refugee groups that they didn’t want to deal with – Mexicans and Roma are two that immediately come to mind – they continually tinkered with the rules, going so far as to create a “designated country of origin” list to make it easier to reject and deport those groups, no matter that a high volume of them had legitimate claims. They shortened processing times on arrival to prejudice the system against them, particularly when it’s difficult to get documentation, and denied them avenues of appeal. And overseas, they’ve understaffed embassies and missions in areas with high refugee populations and outsourced refugee determination to the UNHCR, which doesn’t have the resources and capacity to do that. Here in Canada, they’ve shifted their focus to private sponsorship away from government sponsorship, and even when they try to assist private groups, they don’t give them the assistance that they really required, such as capacity building. And then there was the whole issue of cutting off healthcare for refugee claimants, which was also used as a means of disincentivising people from coming over. Add to this a focus on risk assessment and then prioritizing minority populations in places like Syria and Iraq, and suddenly it’s no wonder that they’re moving at a glacial pace when it comes to getting more refugees resettled in Canada. The lack of political will to tackle this refugee crisis has been long-standing and a long time in the making. There are plenty of things that they could do, as Joe Clark explained, such as putting people on the ground in the region, doing security checks there, relieving the UNCHR of all of the work of refugee status determination, and arranging transportation rather than offering them loans for it (because if there’s one thing that refugees need it’s to be nickel-and-dimed by the Canadian government). They have the capacity, but they’ve spent so long trying to choke off the flow of refugees that the law of inertia has taken hold, and they can’t turn the ship around. I don’t think enough people are calling them out on this fact.

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Roundup: Refugee crisis derails the election

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News that the family of that Syrian boy who drowned off the coast of Turkey was trying to get to Canada and had been rejected touched off a political firestorm yesterday, and it wasn’t until hours later that some clarity was brought to the situation – that the sister of the boy’s father was in Canada and applying to sponsor her family, starting with her older brother, then the child’s father and his family (which included a wife and another son, all of whom were lost when their boat capsized). Chris Alexander made a show of “suspending his campaign” to come to Ottawa to meet with officials, but his campaign really wasn’t suspended – he just wasn’t door-knocking, and then he hid out from the media in the airport and ended up going out a back way in order to avoid them. Statements from the aunt in Vancouver and the government clarified some of the statements around the events with their refugee application, but much of the damage had already been done, and the government looks poorly for it – particularly because of the slow pace at which they are assisting refugees in the area, and padding their figures with those refugees from Iraq, and the fact that they appear to be cherry-picking those from religious and ethnic minorities. Harper hasn’t really helped, insisting that this is really about ISIS and saying that it’s more important that we carry on the fight against them – never mind that a) Assad and the Syrian government forces have killed more Syrians by far than ISIS or any other faction, and b) air strikes are not going to stop ISIS and the government knows it. He also insists that we’re one of the most generous countries in assisting refugees, but the numbers simply don’t show that. University of Ottawa professor Roland Paris shares some thoughts on the situation, while Scott Gilmore argues that we should take in twenty times the number of refugees being promised now, up to as many as 200,000, which we could pay for by cancelling a couple of boutique tax credits. Michael Petrou notes the real problem of the war in Syria.

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Roundup: Scaling back on tax promises

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With a boatload of spending promises but almost no details in how he plans to pay for the, Thomas Mulcair appears to be scaling back on how much of that shortfall he plans to make up by raising corporate income taxes because as he’s quickly learning, that’s not going to raise all that much money. He also likes to use the phrase “making different choices like cancelling income splitting,” but that’s also maybe a couple of billion, which isn’t going to pay for a whole lot. It also seems to me that by pushing back a number of promises, like the childcare spaces, to full implementation some eight years down the road, it seems to indicate a theory that economic growth is on the way, and soon there will be plenty to fill the coffers. That ignores the fact that a) the projected surpluses depend on continued austerity, which the NDP keep promising to reverse, and b) economists are starting to warn that this slow growth may be the new normal and not just a hangover from the last financial crisis. With no plans to create economic growth coming from any of the parties, it’s going to be uncomfortable trying to come up with promises for major spending plans while maintaining balanced budgets, like they also plan. (And yes, the Liberals still have their own costing figures to produce as well). What the corporate tax piece doesn’t mention are the NDP plans to tax stock options, which economist Kevin Milligan has questions about:

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On the campaign:

  • Stephen Harper announced yet another boutique tax credit, this time for membership dues of service organizations. Also, he’s not changing his limited questions policy.
  • Justin Trudeau sent a letter to Quebec premier Philippe Couillard outlining his desire to be a “true partner” of the provinces.
  • The Liberals are expected to announce a major policy around veterans’ benefits today.
  • Here’s a recap of last week on the campaign.

Good reads:

  • The Ontario government disputes Mulcair’s claim that they support his childcare policy because they don’t have enough information about how it will be funded.
  • Apparently we rank fairly low among OECD countries for public pensions.
  • Here’s a video comparison of the three parties’ childcare benefit promises.
  • Here’s a fact-check of Trudeau’s flexible work hours announcement (spoiler: It won’t amount to much).
  • Christopher Curtis offers a portrait of Trudeau on the campaign trail.
  • Aaron Wherry muses about the issues of control and how that erupted into the ClusterDuff mess.

Odds and ends:

As part of their announcement to protect BC salmon, the Conservatives used a picture of an Atlantic salmon. *slow clap*

Here’s a bit of Ottawa history related to our first general election.

Scott Feschuk gives us his take on the election to date.

Roundup: A mixed pipeline message

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There was confusion in the ranks yesterday as to just what the NDP position on the Energy East pipeline is. Recently they said that it was the “cornerstone” of their energy policy, and then comes an interview in L’Actualité where Mulcair is quoted as saying that he’s against it. And then Twitter went bananas. The NDP comms staff started rushing out transcripts and partial audio files to counter it, before their youth wing sent out a tweet cheering the opposition to said pipeline – only to have to delete it a few minutes later “for clarification.” Suffice to say, it did look a bit sloppy, and like he’s trying to give two separate messages to two different parts of the country – something that the party has certainly done before.

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Roundup: Farewells and self-awareness

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With 54 MPs not running again in the next election, we’re hearing a lot of teary farewells, and a number of them talking about their regrets for all kinds of things, particularly about some of the nastiness and the more toxic aspects of their career in politics. It’s more of what we saw in the Samara Canada series of exit interviews with MPs from previous parliaments, which culminated in the book Tragedy in the Commons, where MPs all bemoaned how terrible it was, and how the parties controlled everything, and how everyone else was nasty and partisan (but not them – even when you pointed to examples where they were engaging in that behaviour). What strikes me is that pretty much no MP you’ll speak to will take any responsibility for their own actions, whether it’s boorish partisan behaviour, letting the leader’s office dictate to them, or as is now commonplace, dutifully reading the scripts that are placed in front of them with no critical capacity to say no, I won’t demean myself in this way. (The obvious exception to all of this is Irwin Cotler, who has been a pretty exemplary class act throughout his time as a parliamentarian, but for pretty much everyone else this applies). When we listen to MPs get all teary and expressing their regrets, we should start asking them why they didn’t do something differently. And that’s really it – we elect MPs directly under our electoral system, and that empowers them to be the masters of their own destiny within the Commons (with the obvious exception of whips on things like confidence votes). They don’t need the Reform Act for things to change – they just need to take responsibility for their own behaviour and act like grown-ups. Sadly, the vast majority don’t and then blame everyone else, which is a sad state of affairs.

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QP: Misrepresenting the AG report

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Though Harper was off in the Baltic Sea visiting our frigate there, the other leaders were in the Commons for another QP running on fumes. Mulcair led off, flirting with libel with his assertions about the AG report on the Senate — grossly mischaracterising what was found. Paul Calandra reminded him that the non-partisan House Administration found problems with their satellite offices, and that he should repay them. Mulcair wanted Harper to take accountability for the senators he appointed, but Calandra repeated the satellite offices line. Mulcair then gave complete falsehoods about why Marjory LeBreton resigned as leader in the Senate, and got the same response from Calandra. Mulcair brought up Senator Carolyn Stewart Olsen and wondered about other senators who repaid expenses before the audit — which has nothing to do with the government. Again, same answer from Calandra. for his final question, Mulcair wanted the PM to ask the Pope to apologise for residential schools. Bernard Valcourt took this one, and gave some bland assurances. Justin Trudeau was up, and wondered about the Prime Minister’s 57 patronage appointments to the Senate as a lack of a desire for real reform. Paul Calandra said that Trudeau’s position made no sense, that he would appoint Liberals to appoint non-partisan senators. Trudeau gave a pitch for his plan in French, got derision from Calandra about relieving Liberal senators from the burden of having to attend his caucus meetings. Trudeau wanted the Prime Minister to end partisan appointments, but Calandra gave some broad-based derision of the Liberals in response.

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