Tag Archives: Procurement

Roundup: A headache over added and subtracted seats

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The question of seat redistribution and the allocation – and subtraction – of seats has been simmering, and the premier of Quebec is demanding that the prime minister step in and guarantee that Quebec not only retain the seat it is slated to lose, but also to guarantee that because of the notion that Quebec constitutes a nation within Canada, that they must be guaranteed that their share of seats never drops even if their population grows at a much slower pace than other provinces. The problem with that? It would require a constitutional amendment to do, using the 7/50 formula (seven provinces representing 50 percent of the population). And that could be the tricky part.

Of course, the obvious solution is to tinker with the seat distribution formula, which the Conservatives introduced (fully intending to screw over Ontario for new seats along the way). But as I stated in my column a couple of weeks ago, we would probably be better served adding far more than just four seats – something more like 40 would be better for everyone, especially because it would mean better populating committees and keeping parliamentary secretaries from voting positions on them. Mike Moffatt and I discussed this over Twitter:

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1456558821942431744

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1456560023383969796

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1456590475985571840

Furthermore, if we stay at the current redistribution formula, that sole new seat in Ontario is going to cause a lot of problems with redrawing boundaries (which will then have provincial reverberations, because Ontario provincial ridings mirror their federal counterparts, with the exception of an additional seat in Northern Ontario for better representation. Once this reality starts to sink in, perhaps the government would start considering boosting that formula to avoid these kinds of headaches.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1456593608648298498

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Roundup: Clear and concise, to counteract Poilievre

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Earlier this week, to accompany the release of their Monetary Policy Report, the Bank of Canada released a sixty-second clip over social media to explain their assessment of the state of the Canadian economy in plain language. And it was great.

This kind of communication is essential, especially now, for the Bank because of the level of noise and misinformation that is being promulgated, particularly by certain members of Parliament who have made it their mission to politicise the work of the Bank, as they spout facile talking points about the current state of inflation that have zero bearing on the actual causes. And if it’s not Pierre Poilievre, my reply column is full of chuckleheads who think they know better, and inflation truthers (which are the gods damned worst). So yes, this kind of clear, simple-to-digest communication is especially needed by the Bank, much like the Cases in Brief have become an essential form of communication from the Supreme Court of Canada. This is a great initiative from the Bank, and hopefully we’ll see more like it in the future.

On a related note, former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge says that the current governor is on the right track with the economic recovery and where inflation is going, so if you needed an additional vote of confidence that they know what they’re doing, there you have it.

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Roundup: Rejections without significance

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Because it’s a story that refuses to die, we now know that both the Bloc and the NDP have rejected the four main votes in the (garbage) Reform Act, and now we await the Liberals, who will in turn doubtlessly reject it as well whenever they finally have their first official caucus meeting, and of course, we have political scientists trying to derive meaning from these refusals, as they have tried with the Conservatives agreeing to the four votes.

The simple truth, however, are that these votes really don’t matter because the legislation is garbage. The power to elect caucus chairs doesn’t require its adoption, as we’ve seen, and the power over the expulsion of caucus members is largely illusory anyway because it tends to depend on what the leader says either way. I would be hugely surprised if the caucus and the leader ever parted ways on whether or not to boot someone out of the club, as that would create a schism and be a sign that the leader was on the way out. As well, the power of the caucus to pressure a leader to resign is actually better off without the Reform Act because what the Act winds up doing is protecting the leader by setting a high threshold and requiring a public declaration to trigger a vote, which can invite retribution. It has been far more effective to push a leader out with one or two public declarations by brave members that signal the writing on the wall rather than demanding a twenty percent threshold.

In the Hill Times piece, the Act’s author, Michael Chong, pats himself on the back for codifying these sorts of caucus decisions, but codifying them is part of the problem. Our Westminster system tends to work best under conventions that aren’t codified because it affords them flexibility and the ability to adapt, whereas codification is inflexible, leads to testing of the system and the pursuit of loopholes and getting around what has been codified. It’s the same with setting that threshold to push out a leader – it winds up insulating the leader more than empowering the caucus, and we’ve seen leaders resign with far less pressure than what this codified system affords, not to mention that by Chong codifying that party leaders must be selected by membership vote in the actual Parliament of Canada Act as a result of this garbage legislation, he has made it even harder for parties to return to the proper system of caucus selection and removal of leaders as we need to return to. Chong has screwed Parliament for a generation, and it would be great if the talking heads would stop encouraging him.

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Roundup: The $3.5 million witch hunt finds no witches

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In Alberta, the Committee on Un-Albertan Activities – err, Allan Inquiry – released its final report, a year late and millions of dollars over-budget, and it concluded that there was no illegality or nefarious activity with regard to environmental groups who may have received some funding from international donors when it comes to opposing the oil sands and other oil and gas activities. Dollars that went toward campaigns against the energy sector were fairly minor, and had little-to-no impact on projects not moving forward (because market forces did the job just fine, thank you very much). In other words, the province spent $3.5 million on this joke of an inquiry, and tried to claim it was money well spent, because the government is nothing more than a total clown show.

And then there were the lies – the minister insisted that the inquiry was never about finding illegality (untrue – there are receipts), and Jason Kenney outright lying about what the numbers in the report stated, because he needs to try and spin it in the worst possible light to both justify the exercise, and to continue trying to point the populists he stoked in a direction other than his.

https://twitter.com/charlesrusnell/status/1451353269708603397

https://twitter.com/charlesrusnell/status/1451353273781293094

Meanwhile, prime minister Justin Trudeau is pouring cold water on Kenney’s referendum rhetoric, reminding him that a provincial referendum is not an amending formula for the constitution – seven provinces representing fifty percent of the population is. More to the point, Kenney sat around the Cabinet table when the current equalisation formula was last amended, so he can’t claim it’s unfair as he’s the one who helped put it into place. Because seriously – claiming it’s unfair because Albertans pay the same federal taxes as everyone else is just political bullshit masquerading as a grievance, even though it’s a grievance that has largely been created for the sole purpose of driving populist anger.

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Roundup: Performative consultations by the PM

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It is performative consultation season, and lo, prime minister Justin Trudeau held meetings with Erin O’Toole, Jagmeet Singh and Elizabeth May yesterday, and the versions of the conversation released by readouts from both the PMO, O’Toole and Singh’s officers were…quite something. (Thread here). O’Toole demanded an end to CRB and an end to the “wedge politics” around vaccines, while Singh demanded CRB continue, and for the government to drop future appeals of litigation around First Nations children. Both were play-acting tough in their readouts, even though Singh is but a paper tiger. Trudeau’s readouts, meanwhile, were similar and bland, listing the already circulated “priority” items he wants to address right away (and yet is delaying recalling parliament), with no indication of what the other parties said, or if any kinds of agreements were reached.

Something that did come out of the readout with Singh was that Trudeau is in favour of continuing hybrid sittings, and Pablo Rodriguez’s office confirmed that, which is really, really disappointing and frankly mind-boggling. We are not in the same phase of the pandemic, and we are in a place where, with mandatory vaccination and masking, MPs can all safely attend parliamentary duties in-person, end of story. Carrying on hybrid sittings – which only the Liberals and NDP favour – are frankly unjustifiable, given the human toll that the injuries take on the interpreters, and the incredible amount of human and technical resources that they consume (and which have starved the Senate of necessary resources because the Commons gets priority). And just imagine telling the interpreters that they have to keep being subjected to injury because MPs are too gods damned selfish or lazy to do the jobs they’ve bene elected to do. Parliament is an in-person job – it depends on building relationships, which happens face-to-face. Hybrid sittings were 100 percent responsible for the last session devolving into complete toxicity, and if you don’t think that congeniality matters, remember that things don’t get accomplished without it. Those five months of procedural warfare didn’t happen in a vacuum. Saying they want hybrid sittings to carry on is both irresponsible and corrosive to parliament as a whole. There can be no justification for carrying them on.

Meanwhile, in case you thought it was just opposition parties making demands of the government before parliament is summoned, we have plenty of civil society groups calling for the paid sick leave for federally-regulated employees to happen immediately (erm, not how the legislative process works, guys), decriminalisation of illicit drugs, and for refugees and undocumented healthcare workers to be allowed access to a programme that would grant them permanent residency status.

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Roundup: A surplus thanks to federal funds

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Something jumped out at me yesterday while doomscrolling, which was New Brunswick crowing that they have a bigger-than-expected surplus thanks to all of the additional federal dollars that were sent to the province because of the pandemic. And it stuck in my craw a bit – provinces have been crying poor when it comes to healthcare dollars and around doing things like improving long-term care, and then they turn around and pat themselves on the back for running surpluses as a result of federal dollars. It doesn’t quite add up.

The fact that certain provinces have been using federal pandemic dollars to pad their bottom lines is a problem for Confederation, particularly as these very same provinces are demanding that the federal government turn over even higher healthcare transfers, and justifying it with historically inaccurate talking points about the original share of healthcare spending without also recognizing the other agreements made in the late 1970s. The current federal government is certainly willing to spend the money, but they have also learned that they don’t want to get burned by it like previous governments have. Recall that when the health transfer escalator was at an unsustainable six percent per year, provincial healthcare spending growth was in the low two-percent range, meaning those additional dollars were spent on other things that did not improve the healthcare system. Similarly, when Stephen Harper tried to buy peace with Quebec and sign a huge cheque to correct a fictional “fiscal imbalance,” the provincial government turned around and cut taxes, which wasn’t the intent of said funding, and yet it happened.

It’s with this in mind that Trudeau has promised that there will be strings attached to future health transfers, and he laid out what many of those strings will be in the campaign, whether it’s hiring targets for doctors and nurses, or minimum salaries for long-term care workers. And yes, premiers will bellyache about it, and the opposition parties will take up those cries in the House of Commons, but we have seen repeatedly over this pandemic that the provinces will demand money and then not spend the money they do get. Time for some accountability for dollars – because it’s all coming from the same taxpayer in the end, regardless of which level of government is trying to make their bottom line look better.

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Roundup: Counting down to Kenney’s referendum

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Alberta is a little over two weeks away from Jason Kenney’s bullshit “referendum” on equalisation, which won’t actually accomplish anything, but will send his rhetoric into overdrive. (This is also when he will be holding his equally bullshit “Senate nomination election,” which is also blatantly unconstitutional, but that is a rant for another day, and I’ve filed numerous columns on the topic already). This referendum will do nothing about equalisation – it won’t do anything about amending the constitution, and if he thinks he’ll bring the federal government to the table to renegotiate the terms of equalisation, Justin Trudeau will once again remind Kenney that he was sitting at the Cabinet table when Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty imposed the current formula. It’s a waste of time and money, all in the service of Kenney trying to continue to drum up anger at Ottawa as a way to distract the province from his own record of failure.

Meanwhile, here is Andrew Leach with a few thoughts:

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Roundup: Misleading to the point of misinformation

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As they tend to do after every election concludes, Power & Politics had David Meslin on to talk about electoral reform, because apparently, we are going to re-litigate it once again. (The saving grace is that this time they didn’t have Meslin using his LEGO to show different PR results). The problem? The graphic that the show produced as an example of how the results of this election would be under PR was essentially misinformation.

https://twitter.com/Catelli2Oh/status/1440818668217135110

The assumptions made to produce said chart is that Canada would employ a system of pure proportional representation, and then allocate seats in that regard. But this would be a PR system that nobody is actually asking for, and which would be unconstitutional because seats are allocated on a provincial basis, while such a system would be unable to take that into account under the current 338 seat model. That’s a pretty big deal. Most people advocate for some form of mixed-member proportional, where you vote for a local MP, and then vote a second time for a party, which will then allocate someone from a list into a number of seats designed as “top-ups” to make the seats more closely resemble the “popular vote” (even though such a thing is a logical fallacy under our current vote construction). Furthermore, it would assume that we’d have the same parties, which is unlikely (and Meslin went at great length about how great it would be for the big tent parties to break up), and even more to the point, under a different voting system, voting behaviours would be different. With all of this in mind, the fact that the gods damned CBC produced an infographic with a misleading characterisation of what Monday’s vote might have looked like under PR is not just irresponsible – it’s downright misinformation.

It’s also concerning that Meslin thinks that as many as 21 seats for the People’s Party under such a system is no big deal, and he thinks we should have more radical parties for the sake of “innovation.” The notion of a far-right party getting 21 seats and putting them in the potential position to be kingmakers in a coalition government is frightening to say the least, but we’ve also seen in other countries that use PR, such as Germany and the Netherlands, that when far-right parties breach the threshold to attain seats, they grow in popularity because they are given respectability and a platform to espouse their views. One of the great strengths of big-tent parties, that Meslin completely ignored, is that they moderate extremes, which is actually a good thing in politics. Big tent parties build coalitions of regions and factions within themselves, rather than having smaller parties building the coalitions externally post-election. It’s one reason why radical parties are short-lived, and why disruptive parties tend to “self-correct” within a couple of election cycles, because they can’t maintain the necessary organisation that Canada requires. These are features of our system – not bugs, and it would be great if CBC didn’t turn to the same guy every election to make the same misleading points, time and again.

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Roundup: A promise of extra-illegality

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On a day of more organized protests outside of hospitals around the country, prime minister Justin Trudeau has decided the way to deal with this is…more criminal sanctions. Which is ridiculous, because there are already criminal sanctions around nuisance, harassment, and intimidation, and creating a law specifically for healthcare workers is kind of ridiculous and merely clogs up the criminal code – and I don’t care that they think they’re sending some kind of message. There are existing laws and police should enforce them. Of course, the NDP are saying that this was their idea first, while in more technical terms, Singh says that the victims being healthcare workers should be considered an aggravating factor during sentencing, but the effect is largely the same – this is virtue signalling using the Criminal Code rather than a useful exercise in enforcing existing laws.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1437477651225133056

In Alberta, however, premier Jason Kenney has been warning that he can use the province’s recent law about critical infrastructure – designed to criminalise Indigenous protesters who blockade railways or pipelines – and how they can apply to this situation because the law is so broadly worded. That alone should be concerning about how this law was intended to be applied, but nevertheless, this does appear to be an unforeseen use for this particular piece of legislation.

https://twitter.com/EmmaLGraney/status/1437470976472666116

Meanwhile, Althia Raj worries about Trudeau inflaming “divisions” in the country as the PPC gains more followers among these protesters and the anti-vaxx crowd, but this is a  credulous take if I ever heard one. These are not rational actors we are dealing with. They are part of an embrace of conspiracy theory that is happening across the Western world, for whatever the reason, and this is a very big problem. I’m not sure I see the utility in appealing for Trudeau to be soft-peddling to these conspiracy theorists, but I will note that there has been one party who has been winking and nodding to these conspiracy theories, and even going to far as to promulgating them in the House of Commons, and that party is not the one that Trudeau leads. There are consequences for O’Toole and company for doing so, and we are reaping what they’ve sown. It’s too bad that people in the media are not calling it out.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1437467693934854149

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Roundup: Promising to take credit for work already accomplished

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Erin O’Toole released his plan yesterday to ensure that the country would reach 90 percent vaccination rates – voluntarily! The centrepiece of this campaign? A series of mail-outs that would appeal to Canadians’ patriotism in order to get vaccinated. Because appealing to “personal responsibility” has worked so well in Alberta. O’Toole’s plan has some additional tinkering around the edges, such as free Uber and Lyft rides to vaccine appointments, or reimbursing employers for the time off to get it done – things that should not be the responsibility of the federal government, quite frankly.

One of the more galling aspects of his “plan,” however, is around booster shots, and insisting that they will “prioritize the signing of contracts” for booster shots – erm, except that the Liberals already did that. They have a contract with Pfizer to provide additional doses through 2024 if need be, which O’Toole is either lying by omission about, or he’s making a somewhat sexist attack against Anita Anand and slighting her work on this file – while literally promising to take credit for the work that she did. Either way, it’s both misleading and a bit gross, but when has it been anything but over the course of this campaign. (Oh, and his promise to “accelerate homegrown development and production of vaccines” pretty much ignores how vaccine development and production works, but hey, this is also the election where leaders keep promising a Green Lantern Ring to solve all of their problems).

Meanwhile, I can’t help but roll my eyes as Conservatives are clutching their pearls that the Liberals are releasing “negative” ads about them. The party has spent the past number of years going on a strategy of shitposting at every opportunity, and of giving their MPs free reign to proffer conspiracy theories like saying that the Liberals want to “normalise sexual relations with children,” and they get the vapours when the Liberals put out attack ads? Girl, please.

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1434194410263220225

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