Tag Archives: Privacy

Roundup: A failed attempt at fundamental reform

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Fair warning that this is going to be super wonky and a dive into parliamentary nerdery, but it’s important to how our democracy functions. It seems that the government’s attempt to better reconcile our budget cycle and Estimates process has been declared a failure, and the deeply flawed system that has grown up over a number of years has once again returned, and that’s a huge disappointment because it was an important change that they were attempting.

Part of the problem here is that we don’t have a fixed budget date, but the Estimates cycle operates by a fixed calendar. What this has tended to mean is that the budget can be pushed back after the Main Estimates, which means that all of the spending that Parliament is supposed to approve winds up being reflective of the previous year’s budget, and then it’s up to the Supplementary Estimates later in the year to update the spending to what was in this year’s budget – a system that makes it difficult if not impossible to track spending, particularly as the accounting used in the Public Accounts at the end of the fiscal year is different still from both the budget and Estimates. If Parliament’s key function is to study these spending plans and expenditures and hold the government to account over them, it is a nigh-impossible task (which is one more reason why MPs have given up on doing it, and simply turned it over to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, which is a Very Bad Thing). It was Scott Brison’s pet project when he was at Treasury Board to try and better align these cycles, but that was easier said than done, particularly given some of the sclerotic processes within our civil service, and their attempt to try and get some money out the door faster with a $7 billion fund (derided by the Conservatives as a “slush fund” despite there being a list of approved items that accompanied it) never wound up actually working, and much of that money went unspent even though it was supposed to mean things happened faster. It’s a failure all around – both with this government and within the broader civil service.

I am hoping that the Liberals have taken what lessons they can from this and take more steps to rectify some of the problems, including assigning a fixed budget date so that the civil service can adjust their own cycles and processes to reflect this and the Estimates cycle can then reflect what is in the budget (and aligning the Public Accounts with these cycles would also help). This is at the very heart of how our parliament is supposed to operate, and if we can’t get this right, it’s a very, very bad sign for the health of our system.

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Roundup: The limits of Trudeau’s patience

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Late in the day yesterday, Justin Trudeau announced that he had come to the limit of his patience, that his calls for dialogue were not being heeded, and that it was time for the barricades to come down – something that was hinted at during Question Period a couple of hours earlier when the parliamentary secretaries sent to recite scripts said that “dialogue has its limits.” Trudeau did not say how those blockades were to come down – he wasn’t issuing orders to police, given that the enforcement was a matter of provincial jurisdiction, but part of the call was for Indigenous leadership to basically get their own people to stand down (though that didn’t seem to go so well on Wednesday after one Mohawk grand chief had to walk back his calls for de-escalation). And while some of the premiers, Scott Moe included, said they were pleased by the changed message, Doug Ford continued to blame Trudeau for things happening in his own backyard.

https://twitter.com/mattgurney/status/1230971079092514816

In the hours after the press conference, one sympathetic blockade south of Montreal was abandoned when riot police showed up to enforce the court injunction there. And in BC, the province’s Environmental Assessment Office suddenly told Coastal GasLink that they needed to engage in further consultations with the Wet’suwet’en people, since deficiencies in their previous efforts were pointed out to them over the course of the past couple of weeks, and were given 30 days to do so, which could further de-escalate the situation as the RCMP are moving out of their enforcement operations. But at the same time, that same group of hereditary chiefs has been shifting their demands, so that one minute on TV they’re saying the RCMP physically removing themselves from those operations was enough to start talks, the next minute putting out a press release saying that the RCMP needed to be out of their territory entirely, including routine policework, and then telling a radio station that because of Trudeau’s statement that they’re going to delay talks even further – all things that seem to me to further bolster Trudeau’s position that he’s been the reasonable one and the other side hasn’t been. And as for all of those people who insist that Trudeau is simply saying what Scheer did four days ago are ignoring the very important nuances of what has happened, as Andrew Coyne points out below.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1230958409530429440

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1230958637696344064

As for the handwringing by the likes of Scheer and Jason Kenney that these protests send a signal that things can’t get built in Canada, perhaps the signal is that things can’t get built the same way, cutting corners and running roughshod over these First Nations like they used to be able to. It’s like people who lament that we couldn’t build the railways these days, who seem to blithely ignore that said railways were built by displacing First Nations along its path, and importing virtual slave labour from China to do the work. If they think that’s the kind of thing that would fly today, then perhaps they need to give their heads a shake.

Meanwhile, Chantal Hébert worries that these protests were the “dress rehearsal” for future protests against the Trans Mountain construction, however I have a feeling that there are enough points of difference between the facts related to Wet’suwet’en territory and the Trans Mountain route that it will wind up playing very differently if that were to happen. Matt Gurney delves into the logistics and supply chains that depend on the rail corridors in this country, and how vulnerable the blockade has made us. Gurney also has a very good three-part series on Wet’sewet’en law and how it relates to the situation, which is well worth your time (parts one, two, and three). Paul Wells is dubious about Trudeau’s four-day limit to his patience, and the signals that it sends.

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Roundup: Urging calm, patience, and police action

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Yesterday was a long and very busy day, as everyone scrambled to get their say on the ongoing protest and blockade situation across the country, with a mounting economic cost to them. First thing in the morning, the AFN National Chief, Perry Bellegarde, and several First Nations leaders held a press conference to ask the Mohawk protesters to dismantle the barricades – not as surrender, but as compassion for those who would soon be affected by shortages – but one of those Mohawk leaders also noted that his band office has been locked out and protesters among his own people say they want him out. A short while later, Justin Trudeau gave a speech in the House of Commons to counsel patience and to reiterate that dialogue remained the best way to resolve the situation – something Andrew Scheer denounced as weak, and he continued to insist that the police end the protests, insisting that this was but a group of “professional protesters” and “radicals” and that the “real” position of the Wet’suwet’en people was for jobs and resource development (even though he later said he hadn’t actually spoken to any of them) – something that both Peter MacKay and Erin O’Toole also echoed, because police action has never gone badly before. Oh, wait. (Marilyn Gladu, for the record, wants the military to step in). Shortly after Trudeau’s speech, he had a meeting with Yves-François Blanchet, Jagmeet Singh, and Elizabeth May, and made a pointed remark that Scheer had not been invited because his remarks were “disqualifying” – which led to Scheer’s agitated breathy and high-pitched performance during QP. Oh, and while all of this was going on, some activists in Victoria tried to perform a “citizen’s arrest” on BC premier John Horgan (and they got arrested instead).

By the time the five o’clock politics shows rolled around, Carolyn Bennett had concluded a meeting with some of the hereditary chiefs – who stated on one of the shows that they wouldn’t actually negotiate until the RCMP were off of their territory – and Marc Miller refused to discuss whether that was on or off the table when asked, leading the pundits to make hay of that. (“He didn’t say no!” is the worst impulse in journalism, guys). Oh, and hilariously, Jody Wilson-Raybould offered her services as a mediator, as though anyone in the government would be willing to trust her. As the day wound down, Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe said he was holding a meeting of premiers today because Trudeau “refused to act” – though I’m not sure what exactly he proposes, unless it’s to try to direct provincial police forces to start cracking skulls, both violating the rule of law and making the situation worse. And that’s where we are.

Meanwhile, here is a good primer written by a lawyer and a law professor about what “rule of law” means and why it’s important – as Scheer and company keep misusing the term. Heather Scoffield sees the business impacts of the blockades and deduces that it will be impossible to resolve them both quickly and peacefully – it would have to be one or the other. Andrew Coyne counsels patience in threating the needle that the protests can both be illegal while still noting that using force will only create martyrs. Matt Gurney worries that if the blockades go on much longer, they could fuel populist anger and damage the cause of reconciliation. Paul Wells attempts to make sense of the day that was, and the Liberals’ high-wire act in the middle of it all.

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Roundup: Checking Scheer’s privilege

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The solidarity protests with the Coastal GasLink protesters continue across the country, and police continue to hold off on enforcement while dialogue continues – Carolyn Bennett is slated to meet with chiefs in BC, while Marc Miller will be meeting with the Mohawk protesters in Ontario today using the protocols of the covenant chain. And amidst this, Andrew Scheer decided he needed to get involved. It didn’t go well.

Scheer’s tone deafness over the “privilege” remarks likely stem from the belief that the Conservatives have convinced themselves of, that it’s just rich, foreign-funded radicals who are protesting while the First Nations want the projects to proceed because jobs – which some do, but it delegitimizes the legitimate grievances and differences of opinion within Indigenous communities (even if all of the protesters aren’t themselves Indigenous). Add to that, Scheer’s insistence that ministers should be directing the operations of the police is wrong-headed (and dangerous – this is how police states happen), which forgets that even if Bill Blair could get on the phone and direct RCMP to enforce injunctions, the ones in Ontario that have shut down the rail network are squarely within the jurisdiction of the OPP. Oops. There may be some debate over how much authority that governments have to direct enforcement in cases like these, but Scheer (and Scott Moe, who has also been echoing his comments) should know better. That they don’t is a bad sign for the governance of this country.

Meanwhile, Chris Selley decries the ongoing blockades but makes some interesting points about the way in which the male hereditary Wet’suwet’en chiefs displaced the female hereditary chiefs who were in support of the project. Colby Cosh is bemused at how threatening commuters in Central Canada is the kind of leverage that Alberta could only dream of having. Matt Gurney recalls Christie Blatchford’s book on the Caledonia crisis, and how the Ontario Progressive Conservatives apparently didn’t learn anything from what happened then, given their absolute silence over what is happening under their jurisdiction.

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Roundup: The meaningless debate over Teck Frontier

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The debate over approval of the Teck Frontier oilsands mine is reaching completely absurd levels, right up to warning that this will be an existential crisis for Confederation if the federal government rejects it. There is a fight brewing within the Liberal caucus, and Jason Kenney’s bombast is back to its dangerous stoking of anger for promises that nobody can deliver on. Conservative talking points, as with Kenney’s, are full of complete mistruths about the proposed emissions targets of the mine if it goes ahead, and they exaggerate the initial environmental assessment, which was skeptical about many of the claims the company made about their emissions. That Teck has promised to try and be carbon neutral by 2050 is also something that should be taken with a massive grain of salt because they haven’t outlined how they’ll get there, and it sounds an awful lot like technosalvation – that they hope to develop some miracle technology between now and then.

And it’s just so stupid because it’s unlikely that the project would even go ahead even if it were granted approval, and yet this is somehow supposed to be the great saviour of the Alberta economy. It won’t be. Teck has stated that even if they get approval, they would need another partner, more pipeline capacity, and the price of oil to be at least $75/barrel, and it’s currently sitting around $50, and unlikely to start climbing anytime soon as the global supply glut continues, and the shale boom in the US continues to drive down prices.

Nevertheless, a number of outlets are reporting that the federal government is preparing a fiscal rescue package in the event that it doesn’t get approval, which people are already panning as tone deaf, and the death knell of investment in Canada, but not one of them is looking at the current economics – that even if approved, it’s not financially viable, and as Andrew Leach points out, there are plenty of other approved projects that are not moving ahead because it’s not economically viable. Should the government prepare fiscal rescue packages for that eventuality too? The problems in the province and in the sector are not the fault of the current federal government, as much as people like to blame them. It’s a bigger, structural problem that has been decades in the making, and the ship isn’t going to be turned on a dime. Blaming Trudeau won’t solve anything.

Meanwhile, if you think this is somehow related to the former Bill C-69 and its environmental assessment process, it’s worth a reminder that this assessment process is under the process that the Harper government put into place, and even then, it’s not like this project is getting anywhere. That should be another signal.

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Roundup: Orphan well alert

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A story that did not get enough attention yesterday was out of Alberta, where the organization that is tasked with cleaning up abandoned oil wells is sounding the alarm that the provincial regulator’s rules are not sufficient to prevent the creation of more of these “orphan” wells – at a time when more companies are offloading assets to smaller companies. This is the kind of practice that usually results in the orphaning of these wells in the first place – that the smaller companies start losing money when the price of oil tanks, and they can’t live up to their obligations to clean up the abandoned ones with the money they’re making from the active ones they’ve bought along with them.

This issue was the subject of a Supreme Court of Canada decision last year, where the court said that bankruptcy trustees who take up these companies with the orphan wells can’t simply abandon these obligations under their bankruptcy proceedings as they’re trying to sell the active wells to new buyers – that their environmental obligations can’t be jettisoned because it’s inconvenient for them. (More on the underlying issues here). This also reinforces the polluter-pays principle, which governments say they’re in favour of – except when it’s inconvenient. Like right now, for Jason Kenney.

Why this issue deserves more attention is because Kenney (and to a lesser degree Scott Moe, who is following the pattern set out for him by Brad Wall) has been demanding that the federal government spend their dollars on cleaning up these orphan wells under the rubric of it being job-creation, or good for the environment. Kenney’s demand for retroactive stabilization funds as an “equalization rebate” (which is ridiculous) has been cited on more than one occasion as a means of using the funds for this purpose, which would essentially be offloading the responsibility onto the federal government because the regulator hasn’t been doing an adequate job when these sales happen, and the provincial government hasn’t created strict enough regulations to prevent these wells from being orphaned in the first place. That’s something that we should be holding him – and the industry – to account for, but that means cutting through the obfuscation. There should be no reason why the federal government should be taking on this expense, but this is what they are being asked to do.

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Roundup: Considerations for Teck

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We’ve been hearing a lot about the proposed Teck Frontier oilsands mine in northern Alberta lately, and demands by Jason Kenney and a number of Conservative MPs that its approval be fast-tracked as close to immediate as possible. Energy economist Andrew Leach has a few thoughts on the matter, particularly of how to reconcile Teck in the broader scope.

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Roundup: Immutable committee math

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In a move that is possibly quite disappointing, the Liberals got unanimous consent yesterday to suspend the sections of the Standing Orders governing the powers of parliamentary secretaries – which could be an issue if they plan to put them back on committees with voting powers and the ability to move motions and so on. Some of you may recall that when this was the standard practice during the Conservative era, these committees simply became branch plants of the ministers’ offices, and everything was stage-managed within an inch of their lives.

However.

I also have it on good authority that this may not be exactly as it seems. Part of the problem is that there is a shortage of warm bodies in the Liberal ranks to fill the committees, particularly if you have a Cabinet of 37 out of 157 seats, and what looks to be a prospective parliamentary secretary list of at least 46 (given that Economic Development with have separate parliamentary secretaries for each regional economic development agency). Then, subtract the Speaker and the Assistant Deputy Speaker, who can’t sit on committees, and that leaves them with 72 MPs (maybe less – a couple may also remain assigned to NSICOP, which pulled them from other committees in the previous parliament) to distribute across 27 standing and joint committees, where the parliamentary math in the current hung parliament would see four Liberal MPs per committee. Quite simply, they don’t have enough.

What I’ve been told by my sources is that what they may wind up doing is allowing parliamentary secretaries to sit as regular committee members on committees that aren’t those aligned with their minister, so that they would essentially be pulling double (or possibly triple) duty, especially if they remain on the committees aligned with their minister in a non-voting capacity. It’s not pretty, but it may be what winds up being necessary if they intend to live up to their promise to keep parliamentary secretaries from being voting members of their interested committees. (Are we ready to start having a discussion about having a more reasonable number of MPs for a country of our size? Because seriously, not having enough bodies is an actual problem that has consequences for the efficacy of the institution).

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Roundup: A promise weaselled out on

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A very important bill has been introduced in the Senate, that has been attempted on more than a few occasions now, and it’s a sign of a promise that the Liberals weaselled out on in the past. The bill? To restore Parliament’s ability to control government borrowing by way of votes – you know, like Parliament is supposed to do as part of their job of holding government to account by means of controlling the public purse. You see, back in the Harper era, they hid the change in one of their massive omnibus budget bills that stripped Parliament of the ability to vote on new borrowing, and instead turned it over to Cabinet. Senators caught it too late, and the bill passed, and whoops, no more ability for Parliament to hold government to account for it any longer. Senator Wilfred Moore introduced a bill to revert this practice on a couple of occasions, and Senator Joseph Day carried on with it in the previous Parliament, and has just reintroduced it in this one.

https://twitter.com/SenDayNB/status/1204502292076154880

The Liberals were all in favour of this back when they were in opposition, and made a big show about promising to restore this to Parliament – and then they weaselled out on it. What they did instead was introduced a debt ceiling of $1.168 trillion, after which Parliament would need to vote to extend it, and said that Cabinet only needed to report to Parliament every three years about the money it has borrowed, starting in 2020. Let me reiterate – they weaselled out of this promise, and at least there are senators who are alive to why this is important for Parliament.

These are principles that go back to Runnymede, and the Magna Carta in 1215, and made more explicit in 1688 when the king wasn’t able to borrow money without Parliament’s consent. The Conservatives broke this important principle of Parliament for their convenience. That the Liberals have refused to act on their promise to restore it is a black mark against them.

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Roundup: Frivolous lawsuits that help no one

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Because climate lawsuits on behalf of youths are apparently all the rage, another one has been launched, this time against the Ford government in Ontario, because of their cancellation of the cap-and-trade system and their challenging of the federal carbon price. I can barely even.

So, to recap: Lawsuits are about getting individual remedies, and these actions are not designed to do so. They are using “novel” Charter arguments, which are an abuse of process. It’s also trying to use the courts to impose public policy solutions, which is not the job of the courts. That’s not their function, and trying to use the courts because you lost at politics is not how things work. And further to that point, the courts are already overburdened, and these kind of frivolous suits – and that’s exactly what they are – waste everyone’s time and court resources, and I would fully expect the courts to impose costs on those who brought forward these complaints that waste everyone’s time.

I spent an afternoon on the Twitter machine of being accused of not taking climate action seriously because I made these points about this lawsuit, which is not the case at all. My point – as exemplified by the (very good) lawyer who joined in the fight over Twitter, is that this is a political problem, not a legal one. You don’t use a saw to hammer a nail, which is what this lawsuit is attempting to do. The courts are not the place for this because they can’t force a government to come up with a climate change plan that meets the expectations of scientists – that’s not how life works, and it’s not how democracy works. And sure, young people are frustrated with the slow action so far, but democracy depends on people organising, and that means doing the hard work of getting involved in riding associations, changing party policy though conventions, and agitating internally to do something. And it means organising. I can’t stress this enough – organise, organise, organise. Protest votes won’t get you anywhere – and let’s face it, that’s what Green votes are. That’s how you make change in politics, and the sooner that young people realise this – and you can join parties as young as sixteen and start volunteering and voting on nominations and resolutions – the more you will be effecting meaningful change. (Want to learn more about how that works? Read my book).

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