Tag Archives: Procurement

QP: He was talking about Greece

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Thursday, and wouldn’t you know it, and to my great surprise, Stephen Harper was actually present for a change. Neither Thomas Mulcair nor Justin Trudeau were present to face off against him, however, so make of that what you will. That left Peter Julian to lead off, and wouldn’t you know it, he started off with yet another Mike Duffy question, on the altered audit report. Harper, of course, rejected the premise of the question and noted that Duffy was before the court for his own actions. Julian moved to the pro forma question about Duffy’s residency, and Harper responded with a pro forma response about the NDP satellite offices. Julian moved onto the Senate invoking privilege to keep their internal audit from the court — not actually government business — and Harper responded again with the satellite offices. Niki Ashton was up next, and asked about the lack of response to the First Nations housing fund, and Bernard Valcourt read a statement about significant resources being allocated to meeting housing needs. A second round was much the same. Scott Brison led off for the Liberals, asking about relaxing labour laws that would make it easier to fire Canadians, which Joe Oliver supported. Harper insisted that Oliver was talking about Greece, not Canada, and slammed the Liberal record. Brison pushed on the issue, and Harper read the latest Conservative attack line about how Trudeau apparently wants a new mandatory payroll tax. Marc Garneau closed the round, asking about the same issue in French, and got the same answer about it being a discussion about Greece, and that the Liberals would raise payroll taxes.

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Roundup: Re-starting the CPP debate

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Talk of expanding the Canada Pension Plan was dominating the discussion yesterday, but much of it seemed to be in a bit of a vacuum. To recap, the Conservatives, having largely eschewed any talk of CPP expansion as “job-killing payroll taxes” to date (despite some positive noises having been made by Jim Flaherty at one point), say they’re going to consult on voluntary expansion, but haven’t approached any of the provinces, which they need to do. The Liberals are moving in the direction of making an expansion mandatory, which the NDP have already largely been in favour of. For some context, Maclean’s spoke to a pension expert about the situation, and they reposted an piece from Kevin Milligan about what different expansion models could look like (and it’s also a reminder that none of this is about poor seniors, who are already taken care of by other programmes). The Ottawa Citizen also has a Q&A about the discussion as well. What should also bear mentioning is that voluntary increased contributions, if not done in a certain way, could dramatically increase the administration costs of CPP since it will require individual management of accounts – something that the current system does not currently need. Dramatically increasing costs will make CPP a less efficient vehicle for retirement savings, and may start to look like a commercial pension instead. If the government is insistent on a voluntary expansion as one of a number of options (like TFSAs and pooled registered plans), then this cost factor could be an important determiner in what that could look like.

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Roundup: An arbiter and a process in place

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The Auditor General was making the media rounds yesterday, largely combating the cheap outrage journalism about the supposed spending issues of his office (which wasn’t a story but hey), and confirmed that about 30 senators would be facing some kind of repayment, fewer than 10 serious enough to merit being forwarded to the RCMP – but of course, ten became the headline number when he said it would be fewer, and the number of five to eight has been suggested by other media outlets, which seems more in line with what he claims. The total number of senators examined was 117 current and former, and it certainly sounds like the majority of cases will be fairly minor in terms of repayments. The Senate announced that they are retaining former Supreme Court Justice Ian Binnie as the independent arbiter on expenses, so that they have a process by which to dispute the AG’s findings if they so choose, and that may be necessary considering the complaints emerging about the lack of knowledge on the part of auditors as to parliamentary functions. This raises the question of fairness – is it fair that these senators will have a process in place, whereas Senators Duffy, Brazeau and Wallin did not, and were suspended without any kind of due process? The answer of course is that no, it’s probably not fair, but this was a fairly consuming crisis at the time, and they were sacrificed on the altar of expediency. Politics is messy business, particularly when you were high-profile appointments and had become a political liability. I’m not sure that it should be reason to forgo having a process going forward, but if all three are found guilty on the charges laid by the RCMP, then will it really matter in the end?

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Roundup: A court challenge goes ahead

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It’s a court challenge that is probably understated in its importance and its longer-term implications, but the attempt to challenge Stephen Harper’s refusal to appoint new senators got a boost as the Federal Court rejected the government’s attempt to have it struck down before being heard. That means that the challenge can go ahead, and we’ll get a ruling from the Federal Court (which may possibly even make its way up to the Supreme Court) as to the constitutional requirement that a Prime Minister has to advise the Governor General on Senate appointments. The common retort about the obligation is that the constitution doesn’t specify when appointments need to be made – simply “from time to time,” but the plain reading of that text is that because there are no fixed dates as to when seats become vacant, there can be no fixed times as to when they are to be filled. That vacancies are allowed to pile up also goes against the representative nature of the Senate – those regions are entitled to their representation, and it should be as unconscionable that those seats are left vacant as it would be if they were seats in the Commons. This argument is being made in the challenge, “When shall a vacancy be filled? When it happens, not at the pleasure of the Prime Minister.” While the courts may make a declaration as to the constitutionality, it is unlikely they will be able to make a declaratory order that it be enforced, however, because it is in relation to a constitutional convention as opposed to a statute, but it still matters. Why this is important is not only for the obligation that Harper has made his decision not to appoint any more senators known (at least not in the current political climate), the NDP have also declared that they wouldn’t make any appointments either were they ever to form government, but good luck getting the unanimous consent of the provinces to make that constitutional amendment. They too would be bound by a positive declaration by the courts – that they are obligated to make the appointments. That Harper and Mulcair are on the same side of an issue, even if it’s for different reasons, is a curious state of affairs, and it’s very telling that the government tried to get it thrown out of court.

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Roundup: On official birthdays

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It should not be unexpected that on Victoria Day, you would get some usual trite releases by the Prime Minister and the Governor General about the importance of Canada’s relationship with the monarchy, and so on. We got them. What we also got was a bunch of ignorant backlash.

Immediately a bunch of geniuses started to tweet back that it was celebrating Queen Victoria’s birthday, not Queen Elizabeth’s, and that Harper was an idiot, and so on. Err, except that those people were the ones in the wrong because since 1957, it was decided that the Official Birthday of the Canadian Sovereign would be Victoria Day, not the April birthday of the current Queen of Canada, Elizabeth II, nor the same official birthday as the Queen of the United Kingdom, which is in June. It’s like we have our own monarchy or something! Also, it has to do with the distinction between the legal person of the Queen of the Canada, and her natural person.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/600350515633979393

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/600350878269313025

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/600354856294047744

Suffice to say, it’s a pretty sad statement as to the current state of civic literacy in Canada that this basic celebration of our Head of State has been completely lost to your average person. Granted, the PM’s tweet could have been better phrased, such as “official birthday” instead of “officially celebrate,” but still, the point stands. It’s time to take this basic education more seriously, Canada. Yesterday was pretty embarrassing.

https://twitter.com/lopinformation/status/600334009944645633

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Roundup: A surprise visit

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Stephen Harper took everyone (and most especially assignment editors across the country) off-guard by taking a surprise trip to Iraq while headed to V-E commemoration ceremonies in the Netherlands. While in Iraq, he met with that country’s prime minister and announced $167 million in aid and security equipment promises ($139 million of which is actually for the region, including Lebanon and Jordan). Politically, he also gained the advantage of being in theatre, getting photos and video of him being near the front lines, and talking tough about terrorism and national security, which he sees as vote-getters and poll-movers after weeks where his messaging has been thrown off track by both the distraction that is the Duffy trial, and the pushback to the budget, which was only balanced by raiding the contingency reserve and EI fund. In other words, he needs to remind people why they should vote for him, and looking prominent in a place where we’ve sent troops is one way to do it. While there, it was also said that the investigation into the friendly fire death of Sgt. Doiron is complete, and was likely due to fatigue among Peshmerga fighters. That report is supposed to be released publicly back in Canada within a month.

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Roundup: Hiding behind the top brass

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It has not gone unnoticed that the government has not been putting themselves out in front of the release of the Deschamps Report into sexual misconduct in the military, and the opposition is rightly pointing out that there is such a thing as ministerial responsibility, which means that the minister needs to be out in front of this – but he’s not. He’s instead left it up to his parliamentary secretary to deliver some talking points that aren’t actually demonstrating responsibility, and worse yet, they’re almost self-congratulatory as the lines being delivered about how the Chief of Defence Staff ordered the report. Err, so what? The CDS is already pushing back on some of the recommendations by agreeing with eight of the ten “in principle” only, and there is still some level of denial at the top, where they describe that the endemic sexualised culture in the report as simply being the perception of those that Justice Deschamps interviewed. In other words, there needs to be more leadership at the top saying that no, you can’t just shrug this off and do a few things for show – you actually need to push and work at this until there is a genuine culture change. CBC Radio interviewed Major-General Christine Whitecross, who is heading up the response to the report, and she echoed some of that same reluctance, but she did relent on the point that the independent centres for reporting incidents was probably the way to go, but they want to study it some more, both in terms of what our allies have put into place in their own countries, and what resources are available here in Canada, and she is not dismissing it outright, which is at least something.

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Roundup: Exeunt Glover and Paradis

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Another two are down, and one wonders how many more are still contemplating the plunge. It was announced on Friday that both Shelly Glover and Christian Paradis, middling cabinet ministers such as they are, weren’t going to run again. Glover indicated she was going to return to her policing career, while Paradis cited “personal reasons.” Both, as it happens, have had a number of brushes with the Ethics Commissioner, and it does make one wonder if that really was a common denominator in their rather abrupt decisions – that all of the attention being paid to the Duffy trial is forcing some of the players with in Conservative Party headquarters to try and scrub away as many of the potentially embarrassing messes as they can before the election happens, so that it can’t be used against them in the race to be purer than pure. The late date of these announcements is also a bit of a puzzle, given the ultimatums that Harper had previously given, so that he had an election-ready cabinet in place, and we saw a number of ministers make their departures then. Baird later dropped out entirely, but Glover and Paradis plan to finish out their terms, and thus the question remains as to whether or not their announcements mean yet another mini-shuffle, with just eight sitting weeks left? It also makes one wonder if there are any other ministers considering their futures now, and wondering if the time isn’t right to get out while the going is good – or if they are seeing writing on the wall, and would rather leave on their own terms rather than face defeat in what could be a brutal slog of an election. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

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Roundup: Lunney and his martyrdom

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Surprising news on Parliament Hill yesterday was that Conservative MP James Lunney decided he’s going to quit caucus and sit as an independent because his freedom of religion is being suppressed at the senior levels, citing the group of Christian “leaders” who held a press conference on Parliament Hill last week to decry that they are being denied professional and economic opportunity in law, medicine and academia. What that tends to be code for is the fact that they don’t like the that Law Societies around the country don’t want to accredit Trinity Western University’s law school for its homophobic code of conduct, that doctors have to refer people for birth control, and one presumes with academia it’s about things like creationism or “intelligent design.” Lunney went so far in his press release to bemoan the social media firestorm when he defended an Ontario PC MPP who felt that schools should teach creationism. Lunney himself has questioned the science of climate change and given credence to discredited theories like vaccines being linked to autism. And while he has already announced that he won’t run again, what I find most disconcerting is that Lunney is martyring himself for this supposed cause of religious freedom when it’s not that at all. While the Ottawa Citizen editorial put it best, that religious freedom is about not having the state tell you what to believe, it also makes the point that it doesn’t mean your beliefs can’t be questioned or even mocked or satirized. What is most problematic is that this false notion of religious freedom that Lunney and the Charles McVety crowd was moaning about last week is the very same justification for those blatantly anti-gay laws being passed in places like Indiana, where “freedom of religion” is being used as the statutory means to discriminate against gays and lesbians. And in fact, it’s insulting to those who are actually suffering from religious prosecution. I’m not saying they have the numbers here to try and agitate for those kinds of laws, and it would never pass the Charter test regardless, but that mentality remains alarming.

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Roundup: $3 billion or else

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Rarely does a day go by that the government doesn’t like to rub the Liberals’ noses in their past on defence spending, and that line “decade of darkness” is uttered. Never mind, of course, that it was Paul Martin that started the major recapitalisation of the Forces – no, the Conservatives like to take ownership of it. The problem is that all the money they poured into the Forces was almost immediately clawed back as their own spending restraints kicked in, most of the capital projects have been for naught thanks to botched procurement process after botched procurement process, and now, they’re facing the real killer – inflation. While sure, they may have poured in a high dollar amount of money at one point, those funds are being eaten away at by inflation as it goes unspent on said aforementioned capital projects, and it buys fewer and fewer ships and planes than it might have when it was supposed to go forward. Now, the Parliamentary Budget Officer is warning that the current spending is unsustainable, and unless the government can pour at least another $3 billion every year into the Forces, that they’re going to have to start cutting capabilities within three years. It must be pretty sobering, but even when these kinds of figures have been presented in the past, the government’s response is always “DECADE OF DARKNESS! MOST MONEY INTO THE FORCES EVER!” without those figures ever really bearing out. But hey, so long as they look like the only party to care about the armed forces, right?

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