Tag Archives: Procurement

Roundup: The Norman trial collapses

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As expected, Crown prosecutors announced yesterday that they were staying the breach of trust charges that had been laid against Vice Admiral Mark Norman regarding the leaks of cabinet confidences related to a shipbuilding project, and people who don’t pay attention to details decided that the timing was suspicious and spun a number of conspiracy theories, many of them around the fact that Andrew Leslie was due to “testify against” the government. (Reality check: Leslie agreed to be a character witness for Norman months ago, and PMO was fully aware and there were no indications that they tried to dissuade him from doing so). With that out of the way, Norman made a statement about bias and presumption of guilt by senior levels of government, and his lawyer, the formidable Marie Henein, threw shade at PMO – stating that while the prosecutors acted independently, she felt PMO was withholding documents for far too long in the process – and the suggestion is that some of the Harper-era documents were what eventually exonerated him (though the Crown attorneys said there was no one piece of evidence that was responsible). As this was happening, Harjit Sajjan announced on his way into caucus that the government would pay Norman’s legal expenses. Norman later met with the Chief of Defence Staff, General Jonathan Vance, who said that with this out of the way, that Norman would be returning to duty soon, though we’ll see if it will be back as vice-chief of defence staff, as the role has since been filled by someone else. There are lingering questions – lots of them – about what happened here, but there aren’t likely to be many answers anytime soon given that the trial for the bureaucrat also charged with leaking information is coming up.

And great Cyllenian Hermes, were there a lot of hot takes on the end of the Norman trial today. Christie Blatchford described Norman’s ordeal, while Andrew Coyne has so many questions. Susan Delacourt and Matt Gurney both point out that this could remove one controversy from Justin Trudeau’s plate before the election, but both point to the lasting reputational damage that this has helped to inflict on Trudeau.

I have a few comments of my own that nobody seems to have brought up – one of them is to point out that the RCMP unit that investigated the leak was apparently the same one who investigated Senator Mike Duffy, and so ballsed up that investigation that we all know how it ended. Perhaps we should question whether this investigative unit is very good at their jobs. The other thing that bothers me in this whole affair was less about the leak than it was about what appears to be a high-ranking military official who balked when Scott Brison, the Treasury Board president, put the process on pause so that they could examine the sole-source contract granted by the previous government (as is the official version of events). Remember that this contract was granted after the House of Commons rose for the summer (and before the election call), and when Senators raised it while they still sat, the government offered no clarity or details, so there was no proper scrutiny at the time. That matters. But whether Brison paused the process to examine it, or to possibly open it for tender, it shouldn’t have been for Norman to work his contacts to try and pressure the government to resume the process (as is the allegation), because that undermines the civilian control of our military. Nobody is talking about his angle, which I think needs a better airing in all of this.

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Roundup: Green wins, and the AG’s report

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After the Green Party won their second seat in Monday night’s by-election in Nanaimo–Ladysmith, it was inevitable that we would be subjected to a litany of hot takes about what this means for the upcoming federal election, most of which I’m not going to bother reading because frankly, I’m not sure it means anything at all. The Greens have been doing well provincially on Vancouver Island, where this riding is, and more than that, this particular candidate was once an NDP candidate who was booted from the party (apparently for views about Israel), and when the Greens picked him up, he won for them, while the NDP vote collapsed. Add to that, Green wins in BC, New Brunswick and PEI were also predicated by incumbent governments who had been in place for a long time (well, in New Brunswick, it was a constant PC/Liberal swap), and that’s not necessarily the case federally. While Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh tried to spin this as “proof” that Canadians care about the environment (for which both will try to tout their party policies on the same) we can’t forget that Canadians want to do something about the environment in the same way that they want a pony – it’s a nice idea that nobody has any intention of following up on because it’s a lot of effort and mess. This has been proven time and again. I would also caution against the notion that this means that “progressive” votes are up for grabs, because the Greens, well, aren’t all that progressive. If you read their platform, it’s really quite socially conservative, and they had whole sections essentially written by “Men’s Rights Activists” because they have little to no adult supervision in their policy development process. So any hot takes you’re going to read about the by-election are probably going to be full of hot air (quite possibly this one as well).

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1125798043905818624

Auditor General’s Report

The big news out of the Auditor General’s report was of course the backlog that the Immigration and Refugee Board faces regarding asylum claimants in Canada. The Conservatives, naturally, have jumped on this to “prove” that the current government has somehow broken the system, but every single expert that was cited over the day yesterday said that the Liberals inherited a system that was already broken (some went so far as to say that the Conservatives deliberately broke it in order to force a crisis that would allow them to adopt more draconian measures – though those backfired in a spectacular way, worsening the backlog), and that they have taken steps to increase the IRB’s resources. I wrote about some of these issues a while ago, and the IRB was starting to streamline some of their processes and start making use of technology like email (no, seriously) that cut down on some of the bureaucracy they were mired in – but as with anything, these kinds of changes take time to implement and have an effect. But expect the narrative of the “broken” system to continue in the run up to the election. Meanwhile, here are the other reports:

  • Half of Canadians who call a government call centre can’t get through, which is blamed on technology that was allowed to go obsolete
  • The RCMP are still not adequately prepared to deal with active shooter situations.
  • Our tax system hasn’t kept up with e-commerce and needs modernization
  • The mechanism to prevent governments from doing partisan advertising has little documentation and rigour.

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QP: The Auditor General’s report on the IRB gets play

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While Andrew Scheer was off in Montreal to give a foreign policy speech, Justin Trudeau was present — as was a beaming Elizabeth May. Lisa Raitt led off, asking about the planned loss of jobs for people with developmental disabilities at Library and Archives, and Trudeau read a script about the Accessibility Act, and at the end, Trudeau noted that the contract was extended. Raitt then moved onto the Auditor General’s report on the backlog in the immigration system, and Trudeau responded that the system had been broken the previous government and that his government had invested in it, cleared the legacy backlog, and were transforming the system. Raitt called the Roxham Road irregular border crossing an “express entry” system, and Trudeau called out her fear-mongering before noting that migration was up across the world and Canada is committed to a fair process. Pierre Paul-Hus repeated Raitt’s question in French, and Trudeau read the French version of his first response. Paul-Hus went with the angry follow-up, calling the system “broken,” and Trudeau repeated that in the face of fear and division, Canada was doing what it could. Jagmeet Singh was up next for the NDP, and in raising the recent report on the loss of biodiversity, he demanded the NDP’s environmental bill of rights be adopted. Trudeau stated that while the NDP were all talk, his government was taking action. Singh repeated the question in French, and Trudeau repeated his response. Singh then read about a catastrophic drug case in Ontario, demanding immediate action on pharmacare, and Trudeau read about the planned Canada Drug Agency in the budget. Singh repeated the question in English, and got a same response from Trudeau in English.

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Roundup: The rot Chong won’t address

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Conservative MP Michael Chong took to Policy Options yesterday to decry that the unilateral expulsions of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from the Liberal caucus was indicative of a “deeper rot” in our parliamentary culture. His solution? Just make some amendments to his garbage legislation Reform Act to better enforce the called-for votes to implement at the beginning of each parliament, or to do away with the voting entirely (which was a compromise to make the bill palatable), and ensure that the measures in the bill are fully enforceable regardless. And I just can’t even.

Chong keeps insisting that his garbage bill was going to “rebalance” the power between MPs and party leaders, but it does nothing of the sort – much like this omnibus motion that Liberal MP Frank Bayliss is proposing to amend the Standing Orders (which Chong is a co-sponsor of). These kinds of measures don’t actually attack the root of the problems facing our parliament, and in the creation of new rules, they simply create avenues for unintended consequences that make things worse. (For more on the Bayliss motion and why it’s a problem, see my weekend column). The solution is not, and will never be, more rules. The solution is to do away with the rules that have made things progressively worse, and to start rolling back the changes that our MPs keep making in the vain hopes of improving their lot when all they need to do is assert the powers that they already have.

I fear I am getting repetitive about this point, but until people start listening, I will keep saying it – the biggest root cause of the problems in our system, particularly where it concerns the “balancing” of powers of MPs vis-à-vis the party leader, is the party leadership selection system. Unless caucus members can select the leader, any attempt made by them to remove the leader, garbage Reform Act or no, will be seen as illegitimate precisely because the current selection system insulates leaders with a false notion of “democratic legitimacy.” And Chong knows this, but keeps trying to burnish his garbage bill in the hopes that it will somehow shine. It’s not going to happen, and MPs telling themselves that the solution is more rules are simply deluding themselves. More rules got us in this situation. More rules keeps taking power away from MPs under the guise of “rebalancing” or “restoring” that power, and this cycle keeps repeating. It needs to stop, and it means MPs (and the pundit class of this country) need to stop believing this mythology. The only solution is caucus selection of leaders. Anything else is a mirage.

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Roundup: Kenney’s a federalist, but…

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Jason Kenney made his triumphant return to Ottawa yesterday, now bearing the title of premier of Alberta, and he went before a Senate committee to a) bluster, and b) warn that if he didn’t get his way that separatist sentiment would rise in Alberta, even though he insisted that he’s a federalist, but this was somehow beyond his control. Erm, except an actual federalist wouldn’t give oxygen to these swivel-eyed loons, nor would someone who was actually concerned about the state of the federation feed them a diet of lies and snake oil to keep them angry for the sake of electoral gain.

Part of Kenney’s bluster was his threatening to launch court challenges against Bill C-69 if it gets passed in its current form, because he claims it intrudes on provincial jurisdiction – but he’s also said a lot of bogus things about the constitutionality of his promises (up to and including his threat about holding a referendum on equalisation, which he is also now equivocating on in the media), so I’m not sure he’s got a lot of credibility to spare in this legal analysis. But these kinds of threats also put me in mind a certain sense of contagion with the court cases around the carbon tax, and according to one environmental lawyer that I interviewed recently for an upcoming article, there is a sense that the provinces are trying to lay out markers in the area of shared jurisdiction, and this may be more of that – provinces trying to grab more power for their own sake.

The thing that really bothers me about Kenney’s “I’m a federalist, but…” line is that he doesn’t seem to care how dangerous it is, and how very antithetical it runs to his so-called “open for business” shtick. Do you know what drives away business investment (beyond destroying certainty by promising to tear up the environmental regime that they were partners in developing and increasing the political risk by constantly threatening lawsuits)? Separatist sentiment. Ask Quebec what it did for them, when all of those national headquarters fled Montreal for Toronto (remember when Montreal used to be the financial capital of Canada?) and their housing market plummeted? Yeah, not sure that’s something that Kenney should be trying to repeat, even if he’s using it as a threat. Beyond that, he can’t just say “I’m a federalist, but…” and not take some responsibility for the anger he’s stoked knowing full well that he can’t deliver on those promises, which will just cause that anger to fester. I know some people are trying to claim that he’s simply trying to channel that separatist sentiment into more harmless paths, but he’s courted it rather than smacked it down. “I’m a federalist, but…” just winks to them, and it’s beyond irresponsible.

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Roundup: Suspension as a first step

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The Senate’s Conflict of Interest and Ethics Committee has considered the Senate Ethics Officer’s report into the conduct of one Senator Lynn Beyak and found her response to be wanting. Because she has refused to acknowledge wrongdoing and hasn’t removed the racist letters from her website, let alone apologise for posting them, they are recommending that she be suspended without pay for the remainder of the current parliament (meaning that it would end when parliament is dissolved and the writs drawn up for the election). Part of the thinking is that the time away – without pay or access to Senate resources – will give her time to think about her actions, and they suggest that the sensitivity training about racism and Indigenous history should be out of her own pocket. And if she still refuses to take action, they’ll look at having Senate administration take the letters down from her site (though nothing would stop her from moving them to a site that she hosts on her own), and if she still refuses action, well, they can revisit her fate in the next Parliament.

A couple of things to consider in all of this. First – it may help to re-read my column on the subject – is that they are likely recommending suspension because they will be very reluctant to recommend full expulsion without exhausting all avenues, and to afford her every single bit of procedural fairness and due process they possibly can in order to ensure that if it comes to that, that they will be on unshakeable ground. Setting a precedent for the removal of a senator should be done very, very carefully, and it has been argued in some circles that the reason why Senators Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau remain in the Chamber are because the need to be politically expedient in their suspensions and not affording them proper fairness essentially made it impossible to recommend expulsion in the future because they could plausibly argue that they hadn’t been afforded the due process. Consider that lesson learned with how they are dealing with Beyak.

I can’t stress enough that recommending expulsion is an extraordinary step, and they can’t just do it because she’s an unrepentant racist (even though she doesn’t see herself that way) – especially because part of the whole reason the Senate has such strong institutional protections is because Senators are supposed to be able to speak truth to power without fear of repercussion. But it’s clear that this isn’t what Beyak is doing, and they need to go to great lengths to prove it and to provide enough of a paper trail to show that there is no other choice to deal with her than expulsion, because this is a very dangerous precedent that they would be setting. More than anything, the measures they are recommending are done in the hopes that she does the honourable thing and resigns, though it remains to be seen if she will get that hint (given that she refuses to believe that she’s done anything wrong). This will be a slow process. People will need to be patient. Demanding her immediate removal will only make things worse.

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Roundup: Vetting judges? Oh noes!

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Yesterday the Globe and Mail had a story about how the current government will run potential judicial nominees through the Liberal party’s voter database as part of the vetting process, which was followed by an analysis of how many appointees were Liberal donors. This first came up weeks ago when yet another Jody Wilson-Raybould-related leak revealed that she was trying to “depoliticize” the appointment process by not providing certain information to PMO when she passed along recommendations, which is a problem – not that it was framed that way. This current story follows up on that, and has a few framing issues of its own. There are a few things to unpack in this, but first of all, I’ll let Adam Goldenberg point out a few issues with this analysis:

https://twitter.com/adamgoldenberg/status/1121013782795497478

https://twitter.com/adamgoldenberg/status/1121013787128156160

https://twitter.com/adamgoldenberg/status/1121013789766369280

https://twitter.com/adamgoldenberg/status/1121024056663400448

With this in mind, I have a few thoughts of my own – first of all is that I think Goldenberg is correct in his reminder that vetting includes political vetting – and the party’s database (as Susan Delacourt noted on Power Play) contains more than who donated – they will collect all manner of information as part of their construction of voter profiles, so it makes sense that they would also run potential appointments through this. (The fact that parties don’t have stringent privacy rules around their databases is a discussion for another day). Why? Because the prime minister is ultimately politically accountable for all Governor-in-Council appointments, and that includes judges. And so long as the prime minister is politically accountable, I think it’s reasonable that his office does whatever vetting they deem necessary – and there’s nothing in here to indicate that they’re checking to ensure that they’re voting for Liberal partisans, which we need to keep in mind.

The other aspect of his story that makes me a bit queasy is the implication that there is favour being shown to Liberal donors – and the math bears out a little bit that while seventy percent of appointees hadn’t donated to anyone, twenty-five percent of them donated to the Liberals, which is disproportionate to other parties. But we also need to remember a few things, the primary one being that we need to stop treating political donations as a bad thing. The donation limits in this country are quite small – you’re not going to bribe someone for $1200, let’s face it – and we donations are a form of engagement. Engagement is a good thing. The more we stigmatize past political donations – and those donations could be for a variety of reasons, such as an acquaintance running in a local campaign, or because they wanted the tax receipt – the more we send the message that engagement is bad, which is the very opposite of what we should be doing in a country where we already have abysmal levels of engagement, whether it’s taking out party memberships, donating, or volunteering (and yes, Samara Canada has done research on this). Pearl-clutching stories like this just reinforce this narrative, which is bad for democracy.

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Roundup: A trio of justice issues

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There were three major law-related stories in the news yesterday, starting with the announcement that Supreme Court of Canada Justice Clement Gascon has opted to retire early, citing “personal and family reasons.” This was quickly followed by Justin Trudeau announcing that a replacement process would be launched, and would again be headed by Kim Campbell, while the Conservatives followed a few hours later with a demand that this process not go ahead until the leak from the previous process was investigated (though the Privacy Commissioner is already on that case). The thing to remember of course is that there is something of a deadline here, being the election, and it’s more than possible that the Conservatives want this delayed so that they have the possibility of naming the next judge if they should happen to form government in October. For what it’s worth.

The second story was that of the carbon tax reference at the Ontario Court of Appeal, which was live-streamed for the first time in its history. The province’s argument apparently is that if the federal government is allowed to impose a carbon tax, that they’ll start intruding into other areas of provincial jurisdiction, which is…dubious. And it sounds like the judges weren’t having much of that line of reasoning either.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/1117808109802663938

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1117809485395816451

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1117811576940060673

The third law story of the day was the revelation that the directive around civil litigation involving Indigenous people that Jody Wilson-Raybould instituted as one of her last acts as justice minister has been fiercely contested within the department because it many cases, it amounts to litigating badly and not actually getting the courts to resolve the legal questions that are at issue, which they argue doesn’t actually help reconciliation because you’re not dealing with underlying issues that require resolution. The piece also noted the frequent and direct political interference that Wilson-Raybould exerted on civil litigation (which she can do as Attorney General, unlike the arm’s length nature of criminal prosecutions), sometimes undermining the arguments that Crown attorneys were trying to advance in the middle of cases. It’s fascinating reading and yet more insight into what was going on with Wilson-Raybould in the lead up to her being shuffled.

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Roundup: Statute or prerogative?

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Because there was (thankfully) not a lot of news this weekend, and I just can’t about the Alberta election right now (seriously, does nobody realize the how much fire they’ve playing with by stoking anger and making unrealistic promises?) I’m instead going to leave you with some food for thought from Philippe Lagassé about the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians’ report and the calls for military intelligence to be a subjected to a statutory framework rather than carrying on operating under Crown prerogative, as they currently are. Enjoy.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1117440021689016320

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1117441870907330560

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1117444492477353984

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1117447616806047745

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Roundup: A list of demands

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It was another day full of plot threads in the ongoing Double-Hyphen Affair and its associated fallout, and boy oh boy was there some overwrought rhetoric throughout the day. First up was the release of that memo that the Deputy Minister of Justice apparently wrote for PCO about DPA but was blocked by Wilson-Raybould from being delivered, and it outlined areas where SNC-Lavalin may still be able to bid on federal contracts if they did not get a DPA and was convicted. Wilson-Raybould claims she don’t recall blocking the release, and said that Michael Wernick should have taken her word that she considered it. (Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column adds this to the list of unresolved plot points in this Affair). Following this was the Daughters of the Vote event, where a number of the attendees walked out on Andrew Scheer, and others stood up and turned their backs to Justin Trudeau in solidarity with Wilson-Raybould and Philpott. Trudeau also took a number of questions from the attendees, and many of them were not friendly. Before Question Period, Philpott and Wilson-Raybould scrummed on their way into the House of Commons, Philpott saying that trust was a two-way street, and Wilson-Raybould said that interference in a prosecution was “unconscionable,” echoing Trudeau’s words, and that she made the recording to protect herself from “danger.” And then came QP, which was largely 45-minutes of policing each other’s feminism. Because of course it was.

And then came the inevitable bombshell. It’s starting to feel like this is becoming a daily occurrence, this little game of tit-for-tat, where those anonymous senior Liberals leaked to both the Star and CBC that there had been weeks of negotiations between Trudeau’s office and Wilson-Raybould on what it would take for them to end their rift, and Wilson-Raybould had a list of demands, which included firing Gerald Butts and Michael Wernick (done), an apology of some sort, and assurances that David Lametti would be instructed not to override the Director of Public Prosecutions on the SNC-Lavalin file – and it’s this one that’s pretty problematic, because it sounds an awful lot like she wants the prime minister to interfere in the decision of the Attorney General on an ongoing prosecution. One might say it’s political pressure – especially given the continued media leaks and dribbling of information. If these negotiations are true, it could explain why it took Trudeau so long to come to the decision to oust them, but even then, it all starts to feel like a bit of a bad play where the threat is brand damage, and a calculation that it’s survivable in the face of other options. I guess we’ll see what the rebuttal to this will be. And the subsequent rebuttal. And so on.

Chantal Hébert notes that wherever Wilson-Raybould and Philpott wind up, they would find that most other parties have their own internal divisions as well. Emmett Macfarlane thinks that if the decent people in the PMO and among the Liberal caucus had simply exercised some self-reflection, the expulsions would not have been necessary. Sarmishta Subramanian looks at some of the odd media narratives that have emerged throughout this whole Affair, where some cases see the media doing the spin for the parties without them even bothering to.

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