Tag Archives: Procurement

Roundup: Expulsion isn’t rocket science

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All day, we’ve been told that Senate clerks are “scouring the constitution” to find a “loophole” that will allow them to expel Senator Don Meredith, and even when they get former law clerks on television who’ve said clearly that yes, the Senate can do this, they still try to go “a ha, but they never did with…” name a scandalous former Senator, and in those cases, they resigned before the Senate had a chance to expel them. Suffice to say, a whole lot of reporters are being deliberately obtuse in order to create a false sense of drama around this.

The simple fact of the matter is that Parliament is self-governing, and it has the powers it needs to expel members if need be. Those are parliamentary privileges, and they have been exercised in the past in the Commons, as James Bowden’s research has shown, and those privileges would indeed extend to the Senate. It’s not sexy or rocket science, but people need to calm down and let the process work itself out.

https://twitter.com/jwjbowden/status/841804745123745792

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Adam Dodek says that the Senate needs to move quickly on dealing with Meredith if they hope to regain the public trust. And that may be the case, but we also don’t want to be too hasty, given the ham-fisted and poor manner in which the suspensions of Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau were handled, and the truth of the matter is that the Senate is on March break. The ethics committee is coming back a week early to deal with the matter, so they are moving quickly but they can’t simply act rashly and in the heat of the moment, which I think will be the danger in order to keep from invoking the ire of an impatient public, egged on by a media demanding that the story move ahead quickly before people lose interest.

Meanwhile we’re also seeing a lot of second-guessing about the role that Meredith played within the Independent Senators Group, and how he was described as having a “leadership position” within it. Indeed, Meredith was elected to one of four “coordinating positions” within the nascent quasi-caucus, in its early days after the first round of independent appointments when the group was still getting on its feet and Meredith had more legislative experience than most of the members of the group. That being said, he had very little actual standing within the group and was certainly not viewed as any kind of actual leader by anyone I’ve spoken to. I have sympathy for their position that he was innocent until proven guilty and that it took the Senate Ethics Officer two years to reach her conclusions, but on the other hand, we could still see this train on the tracks. It’s too bad the ISG didn’t insulate themselves a little better from this, but in all, I don’t think the damage looks as bad from out here.

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Roundup: The phantom lobbying menace

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You can already hear the grumblings over social media over the headline: “As senators become more independent, meetings with lobbyists hoping to take advantage tripled in 2016.” And immediately most people go “Ooh, lobbyists are bad, so this sounds like a terrible thing.” It’s not actually true, but it’s something we’re probably going to have to unpack a little better rather than cause some mass panic (once again) about how the newly “empowered” Senate is going to be the death knell for democracy in this country, or some other such nonsense.

For starters, not all lobbying is bad. With strict rules in this country around reporting and gifts, this isn’t like the free-for-all that we’ve seen in places like Washington, where lobbyists were meeting with Congressmen in the steam room of the Capitol Hill gym, or taking them on private plane rides and giving them holidays, or showing up on the floor of the House to watch them cast votes, all while funnelling money into their re-election campaigns. While I believe they tightened some of those rules down south, we simply don’t have that kind of lobbying culture here in Canada, so get that out of your minds first of all. Secondly, Senators in Canada don’t have re-election campaigns to finance, so the influence that lobbyists can try to gain with financial incentives of one variety or another are also non-existent here, so once again, don’t try to map an Americanism onto the process here. Third, lobbying is not all corporate influence. A lot of lobbyists represent charities or non-profits, so best to keep that in mind when you see the numbers grouped together.

Meanwhile, as for what they hope to achieve, well, remember that despite the newfound “independence” of the Senate, its powers are still fairly limited. Those hoping to use this newfound power to amend more bills or delay others will find that when it comes to any amendments, they would still need to be accepted by the House of Commons, and there has been very little acceptance so far of most amendments sent back by the Senate unless it’s a glaring error. And as for delays, if it’s a government bill there are tools like time allocation and closure to force them through the system. Just because Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative” – Senator Peter Harder hasn’t yet availed himself of those tools doesn’t mean he can’t or won’t. So really, your mileage with how effective lobbying efforts will be will certainly vary.

The uptick in lobbying is not unexpected now that the usual central channels for information flow have been disrupted. That’s to be expected, so this increase is hardly nefarious. I’m more concerned with cabinet ministers lobbying individual senators than I am actual lobbyists, to be honest, since those meetings are less open and transparent, and they have a lot more power to grant political favours. So really, let’s stay calm about this headline, but keep an eye on things nevertheless. Trudeau’s plans for a “more independent” Senate are certainly proving the rule around unintended consequences.

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Roundup: Estimates still a mess

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The Main Estimates were released yesterday in advance of the budget, and if you don’t know why this is a bad thing that keeps happening, then you need a better understanding of why this is such a big deal in our parliamentary system. The Estimates are the way in which parliament authorizes the government to spend money, and they should be there for MPs to scrutinize before the money goes out the door. The problem is that we’ve divorced the estimates from the budget cycle, which means that they are now documents that reflect the status quo of the previous year rather than any new measures, and we have to wait for the Supplementary Estimates to be tabled later in the year. With the Main Estimates reduced to a formality, it’s reduced any study of the Supplementary Estimates to a kind of shrug and quick vote to pass, leaving the Senate to do any actual scrutiny, which is a problem. Why? It’s the job of MPs to hold government to account by controlling the public purse – hence the Estimates – and if they can’t do that, they can’t do their jobs. To make this worse, successive governments have allowed the accounting of the Estimates to become virtually unreadable, and when the Public Accounts are released a year later – which shows how that money was spent – they’re reported in a different accounting system, so you can’t really track if money was properly spent or not. It’s an abomination to how parliament is supposed to work (and yes, this is one of those things I talk about in The Unbroken Machine).

To their credit, the Liberals have vowed to fix this, and Scott Brison seems to be at least showing a bit of contrition and frustration that fixing this is taking so long. Part of this is bureaucratic, with departments not speeding up their processes. Part of this is political, where the Commons hasn’t amended the Standing Orders to allow the Estimates to be tabled by May 1st instead of March 1st so that it can follow the budget. But seriously – this is actually the most important job of MPs, and they have shown a complete disregard for this for years now. Their most fundamental duty is to control the public purse and the Estimates are the heart of that process, and they can’t be arsed to take them seriously. Watching them speed through Estimates votes without proper scrutiny happens more often than not, and we saw last year a case where they voted through a flawed version of the bill that the Senate caught and had to send back. It’s a disgrace, and while I applaud Brison for trying to make changes, the fact that the rest of the Commons can’t get on board is utterly shameful.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg has a good look at the country’s fiscal picture in the lead up to the budget, while Paul Wells gets more hints about the budget, which looks to be a lot more wait-and-see given the unfolding Trumpocalypse south of the border.

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Roundup: Asylum conundrum

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The debate over illegal refugee crossings into Canada is at a bit of a roadblock given the impossibility of the situation from a great many perspectives. Without any kind of physical barrier at the border – say, a fence or a wall – there’s not a lot that we can do to stop them from coming over because, well, that’s American territory and our border guards and RCMP aren’t going to cross the border to prevent crossings, nor can they anticipate every crossing point and physically prevent them from crossing into Canada, despite the tautology that Tony Clement seems to be clinging to.

Ralph Goodale has been quite lucid in answering questions on the subject and saying that additional resources will be deployed as needed, but again points to the physical impossibility of keeping them out, so we have to simply follow our processes once they’re here. And for as much as people talk about dissuading these migrants from making a crossing, we can’t exactly buy up American ad space telling them not to come because they’re already freaked out by the Trumpocalypse and I’m not sure that many of them are acting rationally, which makes “dissuading” them a difficult prospect, particularly given our international obligations.

One tool that the government is not in any hurry to implement is a 2012 law around designating irregular arrivals in order to take additional detention measures and would prevent them from sponsoring other family for five years, but again, I’m sure that many would rather be in immigration detention in Canada for a few weeks as opposed to facing the prospect of immigration crackdowns and travel bans in the United States. This law was drafted largely in response to the arrival of boatloads of Tamils seeking asylum, but it also needs to be pointed out that the number of those claimants were small, and I remember more than a few columns around the time that it happened where people were saying that these people willing to brave a crossing and survive on a diet spiders during the crossing were the kinds of resilient people that we want in this country. But the previous government was also one that was trying to solve the refugee backlog “crisis” that they created by not filling IRB positions for an extended period, and when they did accept refugees, tried to prioritize groups they felt they could get some political advantage out of (such as Christians from Iraq). I would also add that stepping up detention and other punitive measures would go against the brand that the current government is trying to sell to the world, which would make their reluctance all the more apparent, but one supposes that we’ll have to wait and see if there is a bigger spike in claims once the weather gets warmer.

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne grapples with the difficult conundrum of what to do with those asylum seekers, while Scott Gilmore says that while we can’t stop them from arriving, we can do better once they’re here, starting with more staff at Citizenship and Immigration and making more of an effort to make them feel welcome because we need them.

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QP: No responsible path forward

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After the prime minister spent his morning hearing from youth about their issues (and, interesting enough, electoral reform was not brought up), he was in QP, ready for the grand inquest of the nation. Rona Ambrose led off, bringing up the Globe and Mail investigation on “unfounded” sexual assault complaints in the country, and about ensuring that the RCMP have sufficient training to deal with it. Trudeau said that they were working to address gender-based violence and sexual assault and making changes at the institutional level. Ambrose changed topics to fears that jobs would end sent south for lower taxes and slashed regulations, to which Trudeau pointed out their record of tax cuts and enhanced child benefits. Ambrose pressed the topic on trade issues, and Trudeau pointed out how many American jobs depended on trade with Canada. Denis Lebel went for another round in French, got the same answer, and for his last question, Lebel worried about softwood lumber. Trudeau noted that he has talked about it with the Americans constantly, and that they remain engaged on the topic. Nathan Cullen led off for the NDP, wailing about proportional representation. Trudeau reminded him that there was no consensus and no responsible path forward. Cullen railed about broken promises, and Trudeau pointed about other progress on the democracy file before reiterating that there was no consensus. Alexander Boulerice picked up to give the angry denunciations in French, and Trudeau hit back by talking about working in the best interests of the country. He then tried to insinuate that the PM was lying and got cautioned by the Speaker for it, not that Trudeau’s response changed.

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Roundup: O’Leary’s debate debut

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Saturday night was another Conservative leadership “debate,” and again I use the term loosely because there was very little debating going on. Yes, this particular event did offer more chances for rebuttal, but given that it was staged and structured like the most boring academic conference ever (all it was missing was a line-up at the floor mic for people to give fifteen minute speeches in the guise of asking questions to the panel), we still didn’t get a lot of candidates challenging one another. Not that it didn’t happen – it did, but most of the candidates spent their time taking shots at either Kevin O’Leary (particularly deriding him as not being a Conservative), and Maxime Bernier (most especially around his ideas about equalisation, which, to be fair, are a bit daft).

Going after Bernier may not seem like the think you would expect, but he has been leading the race in terms of fundraising, which is not an insignificant thing. One does have to wonder, however, if there are enough self-described libertarians in the Conservative Party to give him the edge he needed. Bernier, incidentally, says he was being attacked because his opponents are afraid of his position on equalisation. And to be fair, he’s probably right, but not for the reason he thinks, but rather because it has the potential to severely damage the party in the more “have not” provinces of the country, most especially in Atlantic Canada, where they already have zero seats.

As for O’Leary, this was his first real event on the campaign, and he didn’t exactly sparkle, but he did stand out from his competitors a few times, both when he refused to criticise the country’s justice system, pointing to his experience abroad, and in the kinds of shots he took at the current government, which were of a more brash tone than other candidates were taking. He also played his ethnic cards, saying he would consider it a personal failure if Lebanese Canadians didn’t all take out party memberships and declaring that he “owns the Irish vote.” Okay then. Will his brashness that help him? Maybe, considering how very milquetoast most of his competition has been, and the crowd who laps up this populist demagoguery seems to love people who “tell it like it is.” O’Leary, meanwhile, shrugged off the attacks and kept his cool, and didn’t take the bait and made a point of directing his attacks to Trudeau (and premiers Wynne and MacNeil) instead of his fellow candidates.

And the rest? Lisa Raitt had her best night ever, possibly bolstered by the fact that it was a bit of a hometown crowd for her, and she seems to be making her working-class roots that much more of her narrative, but I’m still having a hard time seeing what kind of direction she proposes to lead the party in other than “I’m everything Trudeau is not.” Also, props for bringing up that Globe and Mail piece on “unfounded” sexual assault rates and challenging the government to do something about it. Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux were laughable, Chris Alexander seemed to be doing a lot of “me too” to the points of other candidates – most especially Raitt – but had nothing really new to say. Andrew Scheer made a point of being parochial, Michael Chong remains the grown-up at the table which probably dooms his campaign, and for as middle-of-the-road as he is, everyone was quoting Erin O’Toole’s big line of the night saying “We don’t beat the celebrity-in-chief with another celebrity-in-chief.” The problem is that nobody quoted the second half of his statement where he brought up Robert Stanfield as the model to follow. Remember Stanfield? Who never beat the celebrity PM of his day (being Pierre Elliott Trudeau) and who never became prime minister? Yeah, not sure that was the wisest analogy. Also, O’Toole kept making Silence of the Lambs references, but completely wrong ones. He thought he was being funny by calling all 32 Atlantic Canadian Liberal MPs “lambs” who were “silent,” when Silence of the Lambs is about a cannibal and a serial killer. Not sure that was appropriate. Oh, and about eight or nine candidates need to drop out by oh, yesterday, because at this point, they’re going to start doing more damage than good.

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Meanwhile, Peter MacKay says that Leitch’s immigration policy is going to damage the party, while Michelle Rempel lists the things she’s looking for in making a decision about a leadership candidate (and spoiler: Kevin O’Leary wouldn’t make the cut).

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Roundup: The measure of a political promise

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There’s been a lot of hay made, ink spilled and electrons converted into pixels over the last 36 hours or so about the value of political promises, and how terrible it is when politicians break them. It makes people so cynical, and it’s no wonder that people hate politicians, and so on. We had Liberal MPs Nate Erskine-Smith and Adam Vaughan prostrating themselves about how sorry they are that the promise was broken, voter reform groups wailing about how terribly they’ve been betrayed, and columnists pontificated on broken promises (though do read Selley’s piece because he offers some great advice, not the least of which is telling PR advocates to tone down the crazy. Because seriously).

But in the midst of this, we had Conservative leadership candidates laying out a bunch of promises of what they would do if they a) won the leadership, and b) won the next general election, and some of those promises were hilariously terrible. For example, Maxime Bernier thinks it’s cool to freeze equalization payments so that the federal government can tell provinces how they should be managing their own fiscal houses, or Andrew Scheer saying that he would enshrine property rights by using a novel approach to amending the constitution through the back door, as though the Supreme Court of Canada would actually let that pass.

And while everyone was tearing their hair out over Trudeau’s “betrayal” and “lies,” what were these two other, equally implausible promises as Trudeau’s on electoral reform, met with? A few pundits tweeted “good luck with that” to Scheer. And that was about it. So forgive me while I try to calibrate my outrage meter on political promises here, as to which ones we should take seriously and which ones we know are bad or wholly improbable but can safely laugh off.

To be clear – I’m not looking to give Trudeau a free pass on this one, and I’ve written elsewhere that I think he needs to own up to the fact that it was a bad promise made when he was a third-place party who were blue-skying a number of things. And I think that it should give parties and candidates pause so as to caution them against being overly ambitious in what they promise (preferably, though, without draining all ambition out of politics). But come on. Let’s have a sense of proportion to what just happened here.

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Roundup: Losing crucial regional perspectives

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As the hollowing out of the Press Gallery continues, we lost a fairly unique voice yesterday, being Peter O’Neil, who was writing for the Vancouver Sun. While he is but yet one more journalist who has been let go in this period of bloodletting, his was a fairly unique position of being the only “regional” voice left in a major chain paper. Yes, we still have the Winnipeg Free Press and the Halifax Chronicle Herald sending journalists to the Hill rather than just buying wire copy (which they still do, mind you), but those independent papers, and that does make a difference.

Once upon a time, each local paper for the major chains sent someone to Ottawa to cover stories here from the local perspective rather than rely solely on national reporters to feed stories to them. It allowed for local concerns to be brought to MPs here, and for the MPs to better engage with their local papers from Ottawa – especially as they had someone who knew their home ridings here to keep them honest. That’s all gone now. And part of why this is a problem is that there has been a proven correlation between the loss of regional reporters in the Press Gallery and a decline voter turnout in those communities where they suffered that loss. (There are academic studies on this, but my GoogleFu is failing me on this one, but yes, this was a subject frequently discussed during my master’s programme). And now, with even fewer national reporters there to do the daily reporting plus trying to get any kind of perspective, we no longer have reporters doing the same kinds of accountability on MPs themselves rather than just of the government. Peter was the last of the regional voices from the big chains, and because Vancouver has a particular unique political culture of its own, that was an important perspective to have. In fact, it’s one of the reasons why he wound up writing the biography of former Senator Gerry St. Germain – because St. Germain knew that O’Neil knew West Coast politics, he could trust him enough to tell his story. That’s not an insignificant thing in a country with big regional differences like Canada has. And this becomes a growing problem as we lose more and more journalists and positions here in Ottawa, which we need to figure out how to reverse, one way or another, before things deteriorate to the point of no return.

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Roundup: A bad term-limit promise

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Senator John Wallace announced yesterday that he’s keeping his pledge to Stephen Harper and resigning after eight years in the chamber despite the fact that he won’t have reached the mandatory age of 75. Of the other cohort of Senators that Harper appointed in late 2008, only Pamela Wallin has indicated that she plans to also end her term after 8 years – but not including the time she was suspended, so she’s got a couple of years left to go. Other senators from that cohort have either said that their pledge was conditional on Harper’s reform plans, which went down in flames after the Supreme Court of Canada shot them down spectacularly, or that they still have things left to accomplish, which is fair. But you know there is a whole crowd of people waiting for them to fail to live up to this “promise.”

Here’s the thing – it was a bad promise that Harper never should have extracted because short term limits are antithetical to the design of our senate, and that a mandatory retirement age of 75 is actually part of its structural guarantees. By having security of tenure, senators are able to exercise institutional independence, and by ensuring that they have employment until age 75, there is not the temptation for them to try to curry favour with the government in order to try and win some kind of post-Senate appointment (be it a diplomatic posting, or heading and administrative tribunal or commission). The lack of term limits like Harper was proposing were part of what is supposed to keep senators more independent and less beholden to the party leaders than MPs are. But it’s not like Harper was trying to undermine the Senate’s ability to be independent – oh, wait. He spent his nine years in power doing exactly that. So no, I will not be joining in the chorus demanding these senators resign, and in fact, I think Wallace is making a mistake in doing so.

Meanwhile, the Senate has grave concerns about bill S-3 on gender inequities in registering First Nations identity with the government, which the minister herself has acknowledged has problems but she wants them to pass it anyway because there’s a court deadline which she said they couldn’t extend, but now it looks like they’re going to. Also, this was a government bill introduced in the Senate so you can’t even claim that it goes against the will of the Commons. Once again, the Senate is doing its job, and oh, look – Andrew Coyne is furiously clutching his pearls over it, while National Post reporter’s description of the current state of the Senate is that they’re moving away from rubber-stamping bills which was never their role in the first place. Honestly, my head is about to explode about this. Again.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/808862320478875651

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Roundup: A catalogue of ineptitude

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Over in the weekend Ottawa Citizen, our good friend Kady O’Malley has a comprehensive breakdown of everything that went wrong with the electoral reform committee, and it’s pretty stunning once it’s all laid out before you. It starts with the Liberals’ relenting to allow the makeup of the committee to be more *cough* “proportional” than the traditional make-up of a parliamentary committee (which was not actually proportional, but merely gamed by the NDP to give the appearance of proportionality, and the Liberals relented for what I’m guessing was good faith). From there, it moves to the Liberals putting all newbies on the committee (with the exception of the chair) who didn’t have a clue what they were doing, and their lack of experience, combined with the fact that they no longer had a majority (despite having a parliamentary majority) meant that the opposition party gamed the witness selection in such a way that it meant they were able to self-select witnesses to get the outcome they wanted – namely 88 percent of witnesses preferring proportional systems, and furthermore, because they had motivated followings for their public consultations, it allowed them to self-select their famed 87 percent in favour of proportional systems and a further 90 percent in favour of a referendum. And almost nary was there a voice for ranked ballots. (Also a nitpick: ranked ballots have little to do with the proportionality that people keep trying to force the system into, nor are they about gaming the system in favour of centrist parties like the Liberals. Rather, ranked ballots are designed to eliminate strategic voting, ensure that there is a “clear winner” with a simple majority once you redistribute votes, and to make campaigning “nicer” because you are also looking for second-place votes. Experience from Australia shows that it has not favoured centrist governments).

In other words, this whole exercise was flawed from the start, in large part because the Liberal government was so inept at handling it. In fact, this cannot be understated, and they are continuing to be completely inept at handling the fallout of the broken process that they allowed themselves to be bullied into (lest they face charges of trying to game the system – thus allowing the other parties to game it for them), and rather than either admitting that this went off the rails (because it did) and that it was a stupid promise to have made in the first place (because it was) and trying to either be honest about cutting their losses, they’re dragging it out in order to find a more legitimate way to either punt this into the future, or declare that no consensus can be found (which there won’t be) and trying to kill it that way. But in the meantime, the daily howls out outrage of the opposition because of the way that they have completely bungled not only the committee response (and let’s face it – the report’s recommendations were hot garbage) and the further rollout of their MyDemocracy survey without adequately explaining it has meant that this continues to turn into an outrageous farce. I’m not necessarily going to lay this all at the feet of the minister, or call for her resignation, but this is one particular file where the government has been so clueless and amateurish that the need to pull out of the tailspin that they find themselves in, take their lumps, and then smother this in the crib. Enough is enough.

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