Tag Archives: Procurement

Roundup: Pledging more action on mass graves

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In the wake of the discovery of the mass grave of Indigenous children at a former residential school in Kamloops, there was a lot of attention directed to the prime minister, particularly on the slow rate of progress on implementing the calls to action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Trudeau, for his part, stated that sure, Cabinet could have swooped down and unilaterally taken actions, but that they would have been the wrong actions because they need to be done in consultation with Indigenous people, and consultation takes time. (Indeed, it seems that every time the government is ready to move forward on something, a number of Indigenous groups declare that it’s all wrong and demand that they start over again with grassroots consultation).

Another recurring narrative throughout the day was the demand for more funding to search other sites, and pointing out that the federal government denied the TRC the $1.5 million they were asking for to do that work in 2009 – but most people failed to follow up and see that the current government did fund that work for up to $10 million in 2016, on top of other ongoing funding for this kind of work to carry on. The minister, Carolyn Bennett, also noted that communities did not want the government to simply hire archaeological firms to do the work, but wanted to do it on their own, which is why the government is providing funds for those who want to do it (though there seems to be some contention about that in the Kamloops case when it comes to who was paying for the ground-penetrating radar).

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A couple of other observations – one is that I find the Conservatives’ sudden insistence that this government move expeditiously to implement all of the Calls to Action to be a bit precious given that they dragged their feet on taking this action when they were in government (including denying the funding to search for such grave sites), generally contenting themselves that they made the official apology and established the TRC. (Similarly, their demands that the MMIW National Action Plan be completed immediately also rings hollow considering they resisted calling such an inquiry). The other observation is that the Catholic Church has yet to acknowledge any culpability or apologise for what happened at residential schools, or to offer any compensation, remains a problem, but I’m not sure just how much pressure the federal government is able to put to bear on them for it. Of course, we have seen similar abuse scandals and mass graves in other countries, where race cannot also be considered a factor, and this will complicate the simplistic narratives being applied to this discovery. There is a lot for us as a society to come to terms with, and there shouldn’t be easy answers to be drawn from it.

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Roundup: A flawed way to fix the CRA’s mistakes

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Remember the issue with self-employed Canadians applying for CERB, and being told they were eligible for gross income only to later be told that no, it was really net, and they may have to repay it? And then the government came to the realization that they were going to find themselves in serious trouble (such as a class action lawsuit) if they didn’t change course, and let those CERB payments go ahead? Well, for the people who made repayments, they can get that money back – but they have to apply for it. And that becomes the real trick.

With that in mind, here is Jennifer Robson raising some concerns with the whole thing, because CRA is not doing this very well. And that could be a problem for some of the people this is supposed to have been helping in the first place.

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QP: Confusing rapid and PCR tests

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For a Thursday with no ministers in the chamber, we had not one but two Liberals on the government benches — Mark Gerretsen, and Francis Drouin. Erin O’Toole led off, script on mini-lectern, and he complained there wasn’t a national rapid testing regime like Taiwan has, and then complained about the contract with Switch Health at the border. Patty Hajdu reminded him that he was conflating rapid tests – which they sent to provinces – with the PCR tests that Switch was contracted to perform at the border, and that if was worried about rapid tests, he should talk to premiers. O’Toole complained that Switch was missing its timelines in one in six cases, and 5000 cases that failed. Hajdu noted that those tests take longer because they’re PCR tests, and they were bringing on more corporate partners. O’Toole accused the government of changing the law rather than the company when it came to missing certain days, and Hajdu insisted this was incorrect, and that they were doing full due diligence to ensure travellers were protected. O’Toole then switched to French to repeat his first question, and Hajdu reiterate that O’Toole was conflating rapid tests with PCR tests, and that they are used differently. O’Toole then condemned the lack services in French at the border with Switch Health, and Hajdu agreed that this was essential, which is why Switch doubled their French capacity and they added another supplier.

Christine Normandin led for the Bloc, and she complained that the motion on Bill 96 didn’t pass, and wanted assurances that the province could use Section 45 of the constitution to make the changes — which is a trap. Mélanie Joly assured her that they were working to protect the French reality in Canada. Normandin assured her that this wasn’t a trap, and wanted those assurances, and Joly again would not give her the assurance she was looking for.

Jagmeet Singh led rose for the NDP in French, and he demanded the federal government stop banks from raising fees, for which Chrystia Freeland went into an assurance about the taxes on luxury goods. Singh repeated in English to add emphasis to the same question, and Freeland repeated the same talking points under the rubric of people paying their fair share.

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Roundup: From ombudsman to officer?

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The current military ombudsman is trying to pitch the notion that the government doesn’t need to create a new independent body to investigate complaints about sexual misconduct – rather, he is pitching that his office can do it, if only parliament would loosen his shackles and let him report to them directly rather than to the reporting to the minister of defence. I am dubious, and a little alarmed.

For starters, I am not certain that he is actually the best-placed person to field those complaints, rather than a centre that specializes in it, that is properly trauma-informed and so on. There is a reason why the Deschamps Report called for an independent body to do this kind of work, and I’m not sure that the military ombudsman is independent enough (especially as many of those who fill the role have military backgrounds, and are just as likely to be inured to the highly sexualized culture in the Forces that is part of what needs to be changed). It also detracts from other work that the ombudsman should be doing around other aspects of military life than just this particular aspect of it.

The bigger part I am reticent about, however, is because the very last thing we need is yet another unaccountable Officer of Parliament, as we already have far too many, and some of them are problems. Look no further than the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who is turning himself into a media darling and who is going far beyond his legislative mandate, but because he is accountable to no one – and because he is being encouraged to keep going beyond his mandate by the media – he is really pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable. As for a military ombudsman, you don’t have to go too far in history to see others who held the role who were also becoming problematic – one of whom was also becoming a media darling, and who got increasingly erratic as time went on (especially once he was no longer in the job). It’s not the kind of person who should be in a role that has no accountability, and if it’s happened once, it’s likely to happen again, particularly in the current environment. I’m not unconvinced that the current reporting mechanism of the ombudsman’s office isn’t a problem, but there needs to be another solution than creating another Officer of Parliament.

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Roundup: Refusing to enforce quarantine orders

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There were a couple of notes around the border and quarantines yesterday that I thought bear some additional note, particularly in light of the rhetoric we’re hearing. The first is that it looks like as many of a third of air travellers are able to avoid hotel quarantine and the Public Health Agency of Canada won’t provide a breakdown of figures as to why. There is a fairly obvious answer to this, which is that as part of the hotel quarantine programme, the government also allowed for a metre-long list of exemptions that are applicable to these travellers, because remember that there is ostensibly very little non-essential travel happening right now – I heard a figure that travel volumes are about five percent of what they were pre-COVID. Given how many of these hotel quarantine exemptions have to do with certain essential travel reasons, it should not be a surprise that as many as a third of these travellers are able to bypass that system. The fact that there are as many exemptions as there are should be up for debate, however, because it does undermine the whole point of quarantine, but it’s hard to have that discussion when every time you turn around, someone else is demanding another exemption – and it really doesn’t help when the party in the Commons howling that the border is too lax is at the very same time trying to get an exemption for returning snowbirds.

And then there is the question of enforcing the Quarantine Act, and we find that Alberta hasn’t signed onto the Contraventions Act, which makes it easy for their police to do the enforcement, and to issue fines for those who break it. (Saskatchewan also hasn’t signed onto the Act, but there are no airports currently open to international travel in that province). And this is completely baffling, because you would think that the provincial government would want to empower their peace officers to do the enforcement work if they are so concerned about variants coming in over the borders that they would want to ensure that they are actually enforcing quarantine orders in the province, but apparently not. This makes it all the more difficult to swallow Jason Kenney’s insistence that the federal government hasn’t done enough about the border – they have clamped down as much as they are really able to under the constitution, and they have empowered the provinces to enforce quarantines, but oh, Alberta refuses to take responsibility for doing so, while they complain.

I will also note that the fact that Ontario has signed onto the Contraventions Act means that their own complaints about quarantines and lax borders are all the more hollow. They have all the tools they need to enforce the orders, and they are also largely refusing and blaming the federal government. And worse, nobody is holding them to account for their failures to exercise their own powers in their own areas of jurisdiction to do so – especially not the media. This is a problem, but hey, keep writing stories about “finger-pointing.” That’ll help.

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QP: Inventing an “Internet Czar” out of whole cloth

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For Wednesday, proto-PMQ day, Justin Trudeau was present, as was the usual Liberal placeholder, Mark Gerretsen. Erin O’Toole led off, script on mini-lectern, and he led off by accusing the government of moving the goalposts on vaccines, blamed him for not getting any last winter (when no one else in the world did), and Trudeau reminded him that they had stated the goals of three million doses by the end of March and they got well more than anticipated. O’Toole raised the CanSino conspiracy theory and accused Trudeau of wanting lockdowns until Thanksgiving, and Trudeau stated that by accelerating first doses means people can do more with one another in the summer, in advance of getting their second doses in the fall. O’Toole then accused the government of “stealing doses from COVAX” and of being late by trying to partner with CanSino, and Trudeau reminded him they have seven signed contracts and none were with a Chinese firm. O’Toole declared that we were in a third wave because of the CanSino non-deal, and Trudeau called out the misinformation and disinformation coming from the opposition. O’Toole then switched to French to repeat his first question, and got the same answer about first doses meaning a better summer.

Yves-François Blanchet led off for the Bloc, and he accused the government of wanting an election and invited all leaders to have a private meeting to come to a consensus, but Trudeau denied wanting an election while they were delivering for Canadians, and the Bloc are the ones who want an election by voting against a confidence motion. Blanchet repeated his invitation for a meeting to come to a consensus — which seems to be the opposite of an open legislative process — and Trudeau reminded him that all parties can reflect on the bill at committee, and repeated that he didn’t want an election.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, and in English, demanded “concrete action” on long-term care, for which Trudeau reminded him that there were $3 billion in the budget, and the government has been investing to create standards and to make permanent changes, but they need to work with provinces. Singh demanded more of the same, and Trudeau declared that the situation is deplorable, but they have stepped up as a federal government to assist the provinces, whose jurisdiction this is.

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Roundup: Telling them nothing of consequence

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Yesterday was the big day that the Commons defence committee had been waiting for – prime minister Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, had volunteered to testify about what she knew about the General Vance allegations, and the moment that she volunteered, opposition parties should have known that she wasn’t going to actually say anything of use to them. (And the fact that she volunteered after the government has been pushing the point for weeks that staffers shouldn’t be testifying because minsters are responsible under our constitutional framework is another problem, not the least of which is that they appear to have given up on being consistent).

And for nearly two hours, full of interruptions, points of order, and a whole lot of preening for the cameras by opposition MPs, Telford basically told them nothing of any consequence. She didn’t of the nature of the allegations, but she reached out to ensure that they weren’t a “safety issue” (i.e. assault as opposed to harassment). But in spite of her concerns, they didn’t learn any details, and on a broader picture, she often looks back in hindsight to wonder if she should have been pushing harder for transformational change in the military, or to look past Vance’s assurances that he was committed to doing that work. We should have expected that there wouldn’t be any sweeping new revelations going into this, and there weren’t. Of course, to the Conservatives, this “proves” that there is some kind of cover-up, but trying to go after Telford seems like a poor use of time when Harjit Sajjan is right there, waiting to be held to account for his numerous failings on this file. There needs to be some accountability on this, but the opposition just keeps flailing around performatively rather than being focused in holding the one person to account who needs it, and it’s not Telford.

Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt equates Telford to someone from the bomb squad in a movie, carefully dealing with possible explosives to ensure the PM doesn’t come to harm. Matt Gurney makes the salient point that it’s hard to fathom why Sajjan or Telford didn’t do more once they learned the PCO investigation was stalled (though I’m not really keen on Gurney trying to police Telford’s feminism).

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Roundup: Ambrose’s bill becomes law

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Bill C-3 passed the Senate yesterday and received royal assent. Many of you will know this as Rona Ambrose’s bill to mandate sexual assault training by judges, and it’s been a weird little ride through the parliamentary process, starting with Ambrose’s original bill in the previous parliament, dying on the Order Paper at the election, and the current government resurrecting it in principle, but not the same bill. Why? Because the original bill was blatantly unconstitutional in how it infringed on judicial independence, and was entirely unworkable in terms of how lawyers who wanted to apply to be judges needed to conduct themselves.

In order to make the bill palatable, it had to be rewritten as a hollow shell – essentially a suggestion for future judges, because anything else would be untenable. So we now have a useless but symbolic bill on the books that will do very little to solve the problem that Ambrose perceived, but instead will have new unintended consequences – namely, as former Supreme Court of Canada Executive Legal Officer Gib van Ert outlines here, that it has opened the door to new bills demanding that judges take training on any other area of law or policy that is the flavour of the day, and while they may be important in and of themselves, it is corrosive to judicial independence because it portrays them as being beholden to the whims of the government of the day rather than maintaining a distance and independence from that government’s wishes.

The more concerning aspect of this bill’s particular path however was just how uncritically it was treated by media outlets around the country. Ambrose would appear on the political talk shows every few months to complain that it was being held up by the “old boys’ club,” and not once did anyone mention the list of valid and legitimate complaints and concerns about the bill, in particular its dubious constitutionality. Not once. The first time it happened, I timed myself in that it took me twenty minutes to review Senate testimony at second reading to compile the list of problems that were raised. Twenty minutes of homework, and not one report or producer of a political show bothered to put in the work, and they simply let Ambrose talk about her bill uncritically, and unchallenged. Not one. It’s kind of alarming that something as important as judicial independence was quite literally ignored by every major outlet in the country, because they wanted to promote a feel-good bill about sexual assault training. That’s pretty concerning.

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QP: Getting the minister to stick to his talking points

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While we had a couple of leaders present in the Chamber today, the Liberal benches remained largely empty, with only Mark Gerretsen and Francis Drouin present. Erin O’Toole led off, his scripts on his mini-lectern in front of him, and in French, he quoted the Globe and Mail by saying that it was amateur hour on Bill C-10, and selectively quoted Michael Geist’s concerns about freedom of expression, and demanded the bill be withdrawn. Steven Guilbeault read a script that C-10 forces web giants to invest in Canadian and Quebec creators, and the Conservatives, by blocking the bill, were merely shielding web giants. O’Toole repeated the question in English, and got the same answer in English. O’Toole claimed that Guilbeault doesn’t understand his own bill, and he tried to conflate this with media funding, and called it a direct attack on free speech (something none of the experts have actually said), and Guilbeault suggested that O’Toole actually read the bill, because Section 2.1 states that individuals who upload content are not considered broadcasters. O’Toole the switched to French to complain that it was taking longer to approve immigration files in Quebec than in the rest of the country, and Marco Mendicino recited some reassuring lines about the value of immigration and reaching the right levels. O’Toole pivoted again, and in English, demanded action on Line 5, for which Seamus O’Regan noted the importance of the pipeline on both sides of the border, and why they were making that case.

Rhéal Fortin led for the Bloc, and he raised the General Vance allegations, and wondered if the prime minister considered it a problem that his defence minister didn’t alert him. Harjit Sajjan insisted that he followed the right procedures, and that they were committed to culture changes in the military. Fortin raised the notion of seeking Sajjan’s resignation and replacing him with a female defence minister, and Sajjan, naturally, disputed this.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, and in French, he demanded the government commit to waiving COVID vaccine patents, to which Mary Ng recited that they would participate in these negotiations at the WTO. Singh repeated the question in English, and Ng repeated her response.

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Roundup: PROC needs to grow up

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I find myself losing all patience with the state of Commons committees in the current parliament, and the shenanigans happening at the Procedure and House Affairs committee right now are really not helping matters – and to be clear, it’s all sides that are to blame here, with particular blame going to the prime minister himself for starting this particular farcical exercise of tabling a prorogation report and patting himself on the back for it, and then watching it all blow up in his face.

The notion of a “prorogation report” was always stupid. I get that the idea was supposed to be about trying to increase openness and transparency, and finding a way to demonstrate that tactical prorogations would be avoided, and so on, but it was dumb. The better alternative, as I pointed out in my book, was to restore prorogation ceremonies, where the government would have to have a public accounting of what they accomplished in the session and outlining how they felt that they accomplished the goals set out in the previous Throne Speech, before they set out for a new one. You get public accountability, and you get some pomp and ceremony from the Governor General or the deputy reading that speech (and it should be the GG – the practice of it being the Chief Justice is another one of those particular pieces of historical trivia that is infuriating in how it perverted norms that were carried on unthinkingly). But Trudeau didn’t go that route, despite having publicly mused about it, and here we are today.

The fact that the Liberals are filibustering at the committee is everyone’s fault. Yes, Trudeau should appear at committee to testify why he decided to prorogue – it’ll be a useless exercise in him delivering talking points, but it’s his decision and he should be questioned for it if this is the route that he chose to go. But trying to get Katie Telford violates the issue of not calling staffers because of ministerial responsibility, and summoning the Kielburgers and the people who run Speaker’s Spotlight to testify as well is beyond ridiculous, because they have absolutely nothing to say about the prime minister’s decision. Sure, the prime minister quite likely prorogued because of the constant WE Imbroglio circus going on – but those particular figures aren’t going to say anything useful to the committee about the prorogation report, which is what they are supposed to be debating. It’s all about trying to keep the WE Imbroglio in the spotlight for as long as possible, never mind that most Canadians have long since moved on from it, because the opposition parties think they can still use it to score points. Nobody is doing their jobs anymore, the notion of a prorogation report is a sham, and this whole exercise is just wasting parliamentary time, and exhausting the limited resources of hybrid sittings (especially the interpreters). Everyone needs to grow the hell up, and maybe, just maybe, Trudeau will have learned his lesson that this report was a dumb idea and he’ll do the right thing next time and restore the prorogation ceremony instead.

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