Tag Archives: Privacy

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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Roundup: Brownface bombshell

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What felt like a few days of the campaign starting to get into more substantive issues and promises got derailed last night when Time Magazine published a piece that contained a photo showing Justin Trudeau in Brownface from 2001, when he was a teacher at a private school in Vancouver, and he dressed as Aladdin for an “Arabian Nights” gala. The campaign confirmed it was him, and a short while later, Trudeau addressed the reporters on his plane, took responsibility, admitted that he didn’t think it was racist at the time but understands that it is now, and that he was disappointed in himself – as well as the fact that he would talk to his kids in the morning about taking responsibility for actions (while he had been in the midst of contacting his racialized Cabinet ministers and one presumes caucus colleagues).

For opposition reaction, Jagmeet Singh spoke about the hurt this causes to people of colour and questioned Trudeau’s authenticity, while Andrew Scheer stated that the action was as racist in 2001 as it is in 2019, and that Trudeau isn’t fit to govern the country. (Reminder: Scheer has not apologised for his deeply homophobic comments in 2005, and just last summer his party was giving succour to racists as an attempt to score points against Trudeau who called out said racism). So we’ll see how much this dominates the news cycle for the next few days, and whether it hobbles Trudeau in any significant way.

Earlier in the day, Trudeau announced measures that would enhance CPP and OAS payments for those over 75 and widows, because they are more financially vulnerable, but also came under fire for not providing PBO costing for those measures – despite the fact that he said that would be released with the full platform. (More irritating was the fact that members of the media railed that Trudeau said that “portions” and not the full platform would be costed when the PBO doesn’t do full platform costings. All parties are just getting portions costed).

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Jagmeet Singh promised free dental care for households that make under $70,000 per year, and insisted it would be a “Day one” promise – and while he had a costing document, he didn’t have a plan for how exactly he was going to sell this to the provinces, whose jurisdiction this is, and who are unlikely to want to set up a very expensive new programme on their turf. Implementation matters.

Andrew Scheer spent the morning touting that his government would eliminate $1.5 billion in “corporate subsidies” every year – but promised to keep and beef up regional development agencies and to ensure they have regional ministers in them – a hotbed of pork-barrelling if history is any guide. More problematically, he didn’t exactly name what kinds of subsidies he would actually cut beyond a theoretical, and then produced a PBO document that basically said “You say you’ll cut this much, I guess we’ll take your word for it,” because they didn’t have details to cost out just what he planned to cut. While it’s likely these dollars exist and could be cut, it becomes politically dicey to do so in many cases, which is why previous promises to get rid of said subsidies never really pan out – constituencies need to be tended to.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1174383093152485378

https://twitter.com/twitscotty/status/1174319862803419136

Scheer also stated that he would “fast-track” any legal challenges to pipelines directly to the Supreme Court, which is a dumb idea and is only going to annoy the Court because if they’re the court of last resort, not a game of Mother, May I? Fobbing off tough political decisions to the court is not only cowardly, but it simply politicizes the courts and wastes their time when they have to tell politicians to sort it out themselves like grown-ups.

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Roundup: Cheap outrage over MPs’ spouses

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Long-time readers will know that one of my pet peeves is the propensity for my media colleagues to push cheap outrage stories, to trigger the hairshirt parsimony and tall poppy syndrome of the Canadian public, and lo, they did it again with the screaming headline that taxpayers footed the bill for $4.5 million in MP spousal travel over four years. Which is actually not a lot, particularly when you consider that we’re a big country, and that airfare is expensive here because of our duopolistic air carriers and lack of population density.

Of course, when I tweeted this out, I had all kinds of people yelling at me that Bill Morneau’s millionaire wife shouldn’t be eligible for sponsored spousal travel. The problem with this kind of qualifier is that it when you start qualifying who is and isn’t eligible for the benefits based on personal circumstances, you start running into the mentality that plagued the UK for centuries – that MPs were poorly compensated and essentially needed to be independently wealthy before they stood for office. We’ve seen enough people suggest that the Canadian Senate be run this way, with the ludicrous suggestion that it be a volunteer position. I would also add that the divorce rate for MPs is several times above the national average – if we start begrudging their ability to travel with their spouses to Ottawa and back, particularly if the distances are fairly large ones – we’d see even more divorces, or a pervasive belief that people with families shouldn’t run for office. I’m not sure who that would benefit.

Throughout this bit of cheap outrage, Jody Wilson-Raybould’s spousal flights were singled out in a separate piece about cabinet ministers and their spouses’ travel costs. That a Vancouver MP’s costs would be higher should be no surprise, and it could very well be that they are higher because they may have been booked last-minute rather than in advance (given that they are simply treated by the MP and their spouse as points rather than being given a dollar figure as their expenses limit). Suffice to say, these kinds of stories are pretty gross when you stop and think about it, and the performative outrage over taxpayer dollars that are packaged in a way to look big and without sufficient context is one of the biggest problems we have in Canadian politics, and why we make the lives of our MPs so miserable.

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Roundup: Equalization and Spending

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Over the long weekend, one of the best things that I read was an exploration by economist Trevor Tombe about Alberta’s misplaced anger over the so-called “unfairness” of equalization, as the real issue is the fact that they have disproportionately higher salaries (and fiscal capacity) than everyone else in the country. Meanwhile, Tombe also has a good thread on the history of federal transfers to and from Alberta, and it’s interesting to get some of that perspective.

Meanwhile in Alberta, the McKinnon Report on public expenses was released yesterday, detailing that there needs to be some $600 million in cuts if the budget is to be balanced between 2022-23, and while it notes that it the province needs more stable revenues (*cough*sales tax*cough*), though it didn’t get into their revenue problems, as it wasn’t their mandate. That means that there are going to need to be cuts to healthcare and education. Here are three surprising tidbits from the report (but also ones that I think need to be drilled down into – for example high public servant salaries are not because of cost of living, but competition with the private sector, and high college drop-out rates are likely to do with jobs in the oil patch). More in this thread from Lindsay Tedds.

In reaction, Jason Markusoff points to the fact that the report’s conclusions were predetermined, given that it was created specifically to find cuts as raising revenues was not an option they were allowed to present, and it bears reminding once again that Alberta is in deficit because it chooses to be so – they could raise their revenues and not rely solely on oil royalties anytime they wanted, but they don’t want to (so all of those pundits taking this report as proof that the province has a spending problem are being a bit too cute about it). On a broader perspective, Max Fawcett argues that if Alberta wants to send a message that if they really want to have their issues taken seriously, they need to stop voting Conservative – and then enumerates all of the ways in which the federal Conservatives have taken the province’s votes for granted as they did things that disadvantaged them.

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Roundup: Flashbacks about prorogation

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It was a day of flashbacks to 2008, as Boris Johnson asked the Queen to prorogue the Parliament in Westminster, and social media had erupted with cries of “coups,” “dictatorships,” and wannabe constitutional scholars ignoring nearly two centuries of Responsible Government as they tried to implicate the Queen in granting Johnson’s request. Of course, there are some fundamental differences between now and the 2008 prorogation, such as the fact that there will still be a “washing up period” of a few days, as is traditional with UK prorogations, and time where the opposition can still try to move some kind of motion to try and stop a no-deal Brexit, though I’m not sure what mechanism they would use. A private member’s motion would be non-binding (and would carry only the symbolic weight of the Chamber), while a private members’ bill would try to impose some kind of negative obligation on the government – even if it could be sped through in those final days – and if there is no no-deal option on the table, it would then impose the necessity to have some kind of deal, which the Commons has already rejected. There is also the option of moving a non-confidence motion in those remaining days, which could topple Johnson’s government, ostensibly. The prorogation is also for a couple of weeks, and will return Parliament by October 14th, which still leaves it time to do something about Brexit before the October 31stdeadline. Johnson’s move may be dubious – and a dick move – but it could have been much worse. It’s not a coup. It’s not demolishing democracy. And it’s not eliminating parliament as an obstacle to Johnson – in fact, it may have only made it worse, as the move signals his desperation.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1166695661108105216

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1166717156140244992

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https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1166683151588057089

All of this being said, we need to also remember that some of the received wisdom of the 2008 prorogation crisis needs to be challenged. For example, people keep insisting that Michaëlle Jean was wrong to grant Harper the prorogation (ignoring that if she refused the advice of her prime minister, he would have been obligated to resign, which would have created a whole other constitutional crisis), that an opposition coalition would have been able to take over. The problem is that said coalition was never really viable, and pretty much everyone knew it. And this was proven correct by the fact that it did not survive the prorogation period. Had it done so, had they banded together and moved a motion of non-confidence, then formed a coalition, then sure, it would have proven that it was viable, and it would have reinforced that the system was working (as it did in when Sir John A Macdonald did not survive a prorogation to avoid a confidence vote around the Pacific Scandal). But the coalition fell apart, proving that Jean was right to simply grant the prorogation – making Harper stew about it for a few hours – and doing her job in acting on the advice of a first minister. But you’re going to hear a rehash of the coalition fanfic of the day, and we need to remember that it was only that – fiction.

Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt offers her thoughts on the prorogation, the disconnect between parliaments and the outside world, and the idle speculation about whether Stephen Harper’s 2008 prorogation may have inspired Johnson.

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Roundup: The bitumen-soaked petard

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Probably the most important piece you could read from yesterday’s offerings was this analysis from energy economist Andrew Leach, who dismantled much of the logic behind the Conservative environmental “plan” that Andrew Scheer was so proud of. Aside from the fact that it lacks detail, it’s full of contradictions (such as eschewing carbon taxes, and yet does largely the same thing with large emitters), and a lot of things that don’t make sense. Leach not only calls out the fact that the “plan” is full of straw men and distractions (such as the focus on raw sewage), but probably most devastating is that he punches holes in the plan for the Canada Clean Brand™ that Scheer is trying to promote – the notion that Canadian products are “cleaner” and should displace those abroad, thus keeping Canadian jobs and still (ostensibly) lowering emissions. And while that may be true enough with aluminium, it’s certainly not for our oil exports, which kind of blows the whole thing out of the water. Oops.

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Roundup: Partisanship and thoughtlessness

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There was an interesting piece out yesterday about a study that showed that those with strong partisan leanings were less likely to be able to correctly identify current events, and are likely using news to confirm their existing views rather than being well informed. It’s not too surprising in the current milieu, where partisanship it turning more toward tribalism as we are apparently trying to import America’s culture wars into Canada out of some misplaced sense of envy, however I worry that this will be the kind of study that will simply turn into an exercise in confirmation bias by all sides – partisans and supposed non-partisans alike.

Let us first recall that partisanship is not actually a bad thing – it’s fundamentally about a contest of ideas and values, which is a good thing in politics. While everyone likes to talk about “evidence-based policy” and doing what’s best for all, there are fundamental philosophical differences about what that may be – and that’s okay. That’s good for democracy! Let us also recall that party membership is of fundamental importance in our system of government, and it’s one that has been gradually been debased as leaders have grown too strong and have hollowed out their parties – in part because memberships have allowed it rather than jealously guarding their own powers. We need more people to be party members, because that’s where grassroots engagement happens. We should resist the temptation to turn this kind of a study into an excuse to debase this kind of engagement in the political process.

We should also note that a big part of the problem is a lack of media literacy – particularly as the study also points to people being unable to locate where how their partisan biases line up with media outlets (which is also not a surprise, because people will paint an outlet with bias if they don’t like a story that makes their team look bad). So long as people don’t have these media literacy skills, any partisanship gets conflated with their preference for their own “teams,” and that helps magnify the kinds of problems that this study points to. It’s a complex problem overall, but we can’t simply say “partisanship makes you stupid,” as will be the temptation. Partisanship on its own doesn’t make you stupid – but if it’s mixed with other kinds of ignorance, it adds fuel to the fire.

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