Tag Archives: Procurement

Roundup: Resurrecting sham “elections”

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As part of his ongoing fit of pique against the federal government, Alberta premier Jason Kenney has decided to revive one spectacular bit of political bullshit theatre that some of us had hoped was now dead and buried – the sordid practice of Alberta’s “consultative elections” for senators. The whole notion is unconstitutional, and while the Supreme Court didn’t explicitly rule against the provinces setting up their own “elections” as part of the Senate reference, it was certainly implicitly in there, both in the notion that a consultative “election” creates an expectation of legitimacy, but the logic behind it was also completely blasted during the hearing, when Justice Thomas Cromwell asked if a consultative election is fine, why not a consultative auction? Not to mention that the entire election process in past elections has been little more than the electoral equivalent of a show trial – a sham that resembles electoral democracy but is simply designed to return only candidates from a certain party to then form an illegitimate demand that they be appointed. Kenney’s attempt to say that this gives them “accountability” is ludicrous on its face because they don’t face re-election, so there is no actual accountability that can be exercised. The whole farcical exercise has more in common with the sham elections held in communist countries than it does with the actual electoral practices in the rest of Canada, and the fact that Kenney is looking to resurrect this demented kabuki is just more of his campaign of snake oil and lies whose only point is to keep stoking the irrational anger of Albertans and hoping that it won’t blow up in his face. It inevitably will, however, and the whole country will pay the price for Kenney’s arrogance in believing he can manage the monster he created.

In other news of Kenney’s political bullshit theatre, his piece by Chris Turner dismantles the whole raison d’être of Kenney’s so-called “war room,” by pointing to the literal conspiracy theories that underpin the whole thing, and the mythology that Kenney is trying to spin around why capital has left Alberta’s energy sector. And it’s complete myth, but it gets repeated uncritically constantly, and it goes unchallenged by the media, and yet Kenney is creating this $30 million spin machine to further reinforce this mythology and conspiracy theorism, because again, it feeds the anger of his base, telling them that it’s not the fault of the world price of oil that their fortunes have changed, but rather that it’s the sinister forces of dark foreign money that is really behind it all. Without putting too fine of a point on it, this is the kind of thing that fuels the kinds of populist movements that breed fascists. But Kenney doesn’t care, because he thinks he can control it.

Meanwhile, Kenney has suddenly changed his story about the incident where he handed out earplugs during that debate in the Alberta legislature, and it’s gone from it being “light-hearted morale-boosting” to “one of my MLAs has tinnitus and was being shouted at,” which the video clearly didn’t show, and it’s just one more example of Kenney’s smile-and-lie show that he puts on for media interviews, and you can’t help but feel sorry for the interviewers because trying to disentangle his egregious lies is a Sisyphean task.

https://twitter.com/EmmaLGraney/status/1142194069902364680

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Roundup: Disingenuous threats to national unity

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As bullshit political theatre goes, Jason Kenney continues to exercise it to its fullest as he released an “urgent letter” to the federal government yesterday, co-signed by five other premiers (four of them conservative, one of them without ostensible party affiliation) to demand that both bills C-48 and C-69 be withdrawn, and warns of consequences to “national unity” if they are not. And it’s a bit galling to play the national unity card, considering that it’s both groundless and petulant – like a tantrum where a child threatens to hold his breath until he turns blue to teach his parents “a lesson.”

Nobody is going to pretend that these are perfect bills, but for the purposes of what is being argued, neither can do the harm that Kenney and his allies are claiming. For example, C-48 will not landlock their resources, and there has been expert testimony to say that it would have a negligible impact on the oil and gas sector because there are no pipelines along that route, nor are there any planned (thanks in large part to how badly the Conservatives botched the Indigenous consultations on the Northern Gateway project). And C-69 is not going to make major infrastructure projects impossible – if anything, it would have a better chance of streamlining environmental assessments by ensuring clearer lines and better scoping of those assessments, so that there can be more focused work with the assessments. But the status quo is simply a path of more litigation because the current system is badly flawed. The branding it as the “no more pipelines bill” is and always has been disingenuous and an outright lie, but that’s what this all boils down to.

Kenney and company have lied repeatedly about the current government’s environmental programme – abetted by the fact that this government can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, and they somehow refuse to call Kenney, Scheer, and company, on their bullshit. And given that Kenney managed to win an election by whipping his electorate into a state of irrational anger with a diet of lies and snake oil – anger that won’t abate now that he’s in charge – the attempt to export that technique to the rest of Canada is dangerous, but they don’t seem to care. That is the real threat to national unity, and it’s Kenny and company who are stirring it up, and they should be called out for it.

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Roundup: Problematic leaked recommendations

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On Monday, the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women will give its final report, and judging from the leaked copy, there will be some consternation with the conclusions, particularly that it considers the deaths as the victims of a “Canadian genocide.” While previous inquiries and even statements by the former Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin, have used the term cultural genocide, this report allegedly drops the qualifier. That will likely be a hurdle because there would seem to be an implication that a genocide implies an organised effort – which there was on the cultural side (because it was inconceivable to think that they shouldn’t be converted to Christianity and “civilised” because that was the dominant cultural framework), but I think it will be hard to stretch that to deaths that are more attributable to poverty and intergenerational violence – we can’t forget that the vast majority of perpetrators of these deaths were Indigenous men (and that there are even larger numbers of Indigenous men who have are missing and murdered).

As for recommendations, the headline one also appears to be problematic – that instances of domestic violence against Indigenous women that result in death be regarded as first-degree murder – and that the use of “Gladue principles” be reviewed with cases of deaths of Indigenous women. That again will be problematic because the Supreme Court ruled on those principles as a way of addressing intergenerational violence that leads to higher rates of incarceration for Indigenous people, and again, if the majority of perpetrators of violence against Indigenous women are Indigenous men, does this recommendation then not demand that more Indigenous men be incarcerated? While the recommendation is rooted in the principles of denunciation and deterrence, I’m not sure that’s sufficient given the broader implications. As well, some of the recommendations like making Indigenous languages official and on par with English and French don’t seem to grasp the practical considerations of ensuring that there be federal services provided in 60 different Indigenous languages.

It also sounds like the government isn’t going to readily accept all of these recommendations Carolyn Bennett has been pre-consulting on what she’s been hearing out of the Inquiry, and she’s not in favour of harsher sentences because it goes against evidenced-based policy as to what is effective. She also noted that their bill on changing child welfare systems for Indigenous communities will do more to prevent the intergenerational violence that the current broken system does. We’ll see what the formal report and its apparent 230 recommendations entail, and what the government’s response will be, but this leak and Bennett’s response sounds like they won’t be endorsing the whole thing.

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Roundup: Incoming amendments

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There are a tonne of amendments coming out in committees in the Senate, and there are likely going to be some fairly major developments and debates on these in the coming days – particularly once the House of Commons starts debating (and ultimately rejecting) a number of them. One of the more unexpected ones for me were the fairly major amendments to the solitary confinement bill. I was fully expecting the committee to recommend the bill not proceed because the courts had already found the bill unconstitutional and the committee was on the road to deeming it unsalvageable. Apparently, they’re going to make amendments instead, so we’ll see where this goes, because they have at least two court decisions on their side already.

The legal and constitutional affairs committee has also amended the Criminal Code revamp bill to ensure that there are tougher sentences for those who perpetrate domestic violence against Indigenous women. The problem? Well, most of those perpetrators are Indigenous men, and there is already a problem with over-incarceration, so this is going to be a tough needle to thread (but we’ll see how they attempt to do so.

Meanwhile, it looks like that major revamp of C-69 – the environmental assessment bill – was left intact at report stage on a vote on division, which means that they didn’t hold a standing vote, but were simply acknowledging that the vote was not unanimous. It’s a bit…suspect that they chose to go this route, considering how many of these amendments essentially gut the bill (and were indeed written by oil and gas company lobbyists, which totally isn’t problematic at all). But what is ultimately happening here is that these senators – and Senator Peter Harder in particular – are going to send this to the House of Commons so that they can reject them, and then send it back to the Senate where they will ultimately pass it after some minor theatrics, because of the will of the elected house, and so on. It’s not exactly the bravest route, and for the opposition in the Senate, it forces Trudeau to wear the decision more directly. There may yet be senators who will try to move amendments or delete some at third reading, but given Harder’s stance, I think the strong impetus will be for them to get the Commons to make the defeats so as to protect their own backsides from the wrath of Jason Kenney and others.

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Roundup: From a bad bill to a useless one

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Rona Ambrose’s judicial training bill looks like it may have some life left in it, as Independent Senator Pierre Dalphond himself a former judge, has started making deals and compromises to see the bill go ahead in an amended form. Working both with the bill’s Senate sponsor and one of its critics, Dalphond has come up with an amended version of the bill which should address most of its critics, and apparently got a procedural deal passed in the Senate as a whole, which gave instruction for the legal and constitutional affairs committee to hold a special session next week to deal with the bill, outside of the normal process where it would be dealing with government business (which is the whole reason the bill hasn’t gone anywhere – the committee is loaded with government bills, which Senate rules state needs to take precedence).

The amendments would ensure that a judicial appointee must commit to sexual assault law training as designed by the Canadian Judicial Council, and administered by the National Judicial Institute – moves that address many of the concerns around judicial independence (which likely would have rendered the bill unconstitutional), and would have created conflicts of interest where the bill as it stands would demand that future judges need to be trained by sexual assault survivors groups – the same groups that would normally be called upon to be expert witnesses in trials. This help to address other concerns about the bill, such as access for lawyers who aren’t in urban centres, or that requiring training before application would tip off coworkers to those lawyers that they were applying for a position on the bench. I remain curious what other objections the Canadian Judicial Council still has about the bill, but I guess we’ll find out next week when they will likely appear at the committee.

This all having been said, we need to remember that the Canadian Judicial Council has been seized with this issue for a few years now and has been ensuring that there is better training for judges, which is as it should be – the system is already working. That means that Ambrose’s bill is really, if amended, just another bit of feel-good legislation that MPs keep burdening the Order Paper with. (Note that as it stands, the bill is likely unconstitutional and actually a very bad bill despite its good intentions). And as with so many feel-good bills, it takes up all of the space in the media for little actual benefit, but that’s politics these days, unfortunately.

https://twitter.com/adamgoldenberg/status/1132389428910088192

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QP: Jerry Dias says hello

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Wednesday, caucus day, and the benches were full as all of the leaders were present for the day. Andrew Scheer led off in French, accusing Justin Trudeau of being the best thing that could have happened to Donald Trump, and called the New NAFTA a “historic humiliation.” Trudeau reminded him that the Conservatives first demanded capitulation, then praised the deal, and now they were all over the map. Scheer suggested, in English, that the steel and aluminium tariff deal contained a hidden quota, and Trudeau reiterated that the Conservatives had no consistent position. Scheer insisted that any better would have been the one that Trudeau got, and Trudeau reminded him that they couldn’t get other trade deals like CETA done while he did. Scheer then pivoted to the question of Unifor’s presence on the media bailout advisory committee, and Trudeau reminded him that the panel needed to hear not only from media owners but also the employees, while the Conservatives have a history of attacking labour. Scheer tried to carry on, and he rambled about spending limits, when Trudeau brought up the Conservatives’ changes to the Elections Act. Jagmeet Singh was up next for the NDP, and he demanded that the federal government join BC’s lawsuit against drug companies for the opioid crisis, and Trudeau took up a script to list actions the government has been taking. Singh tried again in French, and got the French version of the same script. Singh then demanded the government join US Democrats to fix the New NAFTA, and Trudeau took up a new script to read that the NDP criticised the deal in the House of Commons but privately praised it. Singh changed to English to accuse Trudeau of using misleading quotes, and Trudeau read some more quotes in response.

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Roundup: Federal jurisdiction wins again

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It should have been no surprise to anyone that the BC Court of Appeal rejected the province’s attempt to dictate the content of federally-regulated pipelines in a 5-0 decision. In other words, the province could not reject the transport of diluted bitumen through the Trans Mountain expansion by stealth, and in no uncertain terms. The province quickly announced that they would appeal this to the Supreme Court of Canada (though the 5-0 decision makes it more likely that they’ll simply say no thanks, and let the BCCA decision stand).

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1131972145507164160

While Jason Kenney was quick to crow over the Twitter Machine about how this was great news for Alberta, it seems to me that it’s rather great news for the federal government, because it upholds that they continue to have jurisdiction over these pipelines, and lo, they didn’t need to do some song and dance to “declare” or “invoke” it – because Section 92(10)(c) isn’t a magic wand, and it was already federal jurisdiction in the first place because it crossed provincial boundaries. And just like with the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal decision on the carbon price reference, it again showed that yes, the federal government has jurisdiction. After all, Kenney kept saying that the federal government should invoke 92(10)(c) because there BC’s position on this case showed that there was apparently some confusion around jurisdiction. But there never was any confusion – BC was trying to be too cute by half, and it didn’t work for them.

Speaking of Kenney, he was apparently in Toronto having a meeting with the Globe and Mail’s editorial board yesterday, and said that investors looking at climate risk was “flavour of the month” and they should instead focus on all of those “ethical oil” considerations instead. The problem there is that climate risk isn’t flavour of the month – it’s an existential threat to our economy. The Bank of Canada realized this and now lists it as a major risk to the country’s economy. The insurance industry really knows it’s responsible for billions of additional dollars in their spending over the past couple of years alone, thanks to flash floods, major forest fires, and so on. And have those “ethical oil” lines ever worked on anyone? I didn’t think so. But expect more of them to be bombarded at us in the near future as his “war room” gets underway to wage their propaganda campaign in “defence” of the industry.

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Roundup: Alberta sends the wrong (price) signals

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It was Throne Speech day in Alberta, and sure enough, it contained an ambitious laundry list of upcoming legislation designed to undo much of what the NDP had put into place as a means of “restoring” the mythical Alberta Advantage. (Full speech here). Shortly thereafter, the promised Bill 1 to repeal the province’s carbon levy was introduced – pretty much guaranteeing that the federal carbon price will be imposed once the bill is enacted. It doesn’t repeal all of the carbon prices in the province, however – it merely shifts them to the largest polluters, which does nothing about the demand side of carbon consumption, and won’t shift consumer behaviours, nor will it do enough for those large emitters, because for all of Kenney’s talk about looking to protect the energy sector, he just shifted the bulk of the burden onto them. (It also won’t really help consumers because poorer households will be worse off now).

Meanwhile, here’s Andrew Leach to explain why Kenney’s repeal of the carbon price is handing a rhetorical victory to Ontario, and why the reliance on magical technology from the future to reduce emissions won’t happen if there aren’t proper price signals to spur its development.

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Roundup: Rationalizing a deciding vote

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Yesterday, Independent Senator Paula Simons wrote a piece for Maclean’s to explain her vote last week that essentially ensured that the Senate’s transport committee would not vote to report Bill C-48 (the west coast tanker ban) back to the Senate without amendments. It’s a mere delay to the bill, ultimately, and it’s likely that the full Senate will vote to reject the committee report and may entertain another amendment or two at Third Reading, but I would be mighty surprised if this bill didn’t get pass largely unmolested. But as much as I do respect the good Senator, I will take exception to a few of the things she wrote in her piece.

The biggest thing I will always, always object to is when senators say that it’s not their job to defeat bills passed by the democratically elected House of Commons. That’s false – it’s absolutely their job under the Constitution – that’s why it has an unlimited veto. The question is when they should use it, and I’m not sure that this is a good example of a bill, because it doesn’t fail any particular constitutional tests (Jason Kenney’s nonsense rhetoric aside). But for as much as Simons prevaricates on the question of how appropriate it is to block bills in the newly empowered “independent” mindset of the Senate (insert more back-patting about the lack of whips here), she then says that the other tradition is to defend her region, which she did. I have reservations about this line of thinking, because it gives rise to parochialism and some of the flawed thinking that gave rise to a bogus school of thought that believed that a “Triple-E” Senate could somehow force the hand of a government with a majority in the Commons (rather than just become a repository for 105 new backbenchers). If she really were defending her region, she should remember that her region includes BC, whose northern coast the bill is intended to defend. As well, her concerns ignore the process that Trans Mountain has been undergoing for the past year – just because it hasn’t started construction doesn’t mean it won’t, and trying to provide an alternate route that was proved far more problematic in the past – witness the Federal Court of Appeal decision regarding Northern Gateway – I’m now sure that she’s doing anyone any favours by letting the rhetoric of Kenney and the oil industry dominate her thinking.

In the meantime, we should brace ourselves for another round of obnoxious talk about the “Salisbury Convention” (which doesn’t apply to Canada and never has), and about the original intent of the Senate. It won’t be edifying.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1130956002029916162

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QP: The ascribing of dubious motives

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With Justin Trudeau in Paris, and Andrew Scheer outlining his “vision” for the economy, it was up to Candice Bergen to lead off today, and she led off with the news of the formal arrests of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, and called the prime minister a coward — and got censured for it — and demanded he do something for it. Mélanie Joly told her not to play games with their lives, and said that the minister was in touch with her counterparts and Canada’s international allies to secure their release. Bergen then pivoted to the Mark Norman case, compared his treatment to that of Omar Khadr, and demanded a personal apology by the prime minister. Diane Lebouthillier replied in French about the independence of the investigation and prosecution. Bergen said that Norman can’t tell his story because of military guidelines and demanded the government give him an exception, to which Lebouthillier responded that committees are independent, as were the others involved in the case. Pierre Paul-Hus accused Justin Trudeau of not respecting Quebec which was why they didn’t want that contract to go to the Davie Shipyard as it relates to the Norman case. Lebouthillier reminded him of the contracts that Davie has received. Paul-Hus accused the government of wanting to “destroy” Norman, and Lebouthillier reminded him again of the independence of the RCMP and public prosecutor. Peter Julian led off for the NDP, and demanded a public inquiry into money laundering, and Bill Blair noted that there were measures in the budget to combat it that the NDP voted against. Alexandre Boulerice tried again in French, got the same answer from Blair in English, before he railed about the climate emergency. Catherine McKenna stated that the government has a plan which protects jobs. Julian repeated the question in English, and got much the same response from McKenna.

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