Tag Archives: Procurement

Roundup: Honesty in deficits?

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Balanced budgets and deficits continued to be a topic of discussion on the campaign yesterday, and it will continue to be so today as Justin Trudeau is set to unveil his infrastructure plan to boost the economy, which seems set to include some deficit financing for another year or two as the economy appears stagnant. Stephen Harper warns the other parties are looking at “permanent deficits,” but it bears reminding that according to the previous Parliamentary Budget Officer, the only way that Harper killed off is own structural deficit was in changing the health transfer escalator, leaving him with only a cyclical deficit (which persists, no matter how much they shuffle money around on paper to cover over it). The NDP continue to insist they won’t run a deficit, but they also seem to dispute that they would need to continue austerity and they would even do things like restore the health transfer escalator, which starts to boggle the mind. The Liberals seem to be looking to score points for honesty in that a) they don’t know the true state of the books, and b) the global economic situation, but one might also add that our debt-to-GDP ratio is in a good place now (as opposed to the eighties and nineties), so small deficits won’t affect our economic health that much. To that end, Mike Moffatt says it’s important to ask parties how they would manage deficits, because they are inevitable in the current economic climate, while Andrew Coyne says that we should be paying attention to the signals being sent by the leaders when it comes to deficits.

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Roundup: Fill in the blanks

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None of what happened with the Amherst branch of the Royal Canadian Legion announcement yesterday was out of the ordinary or unexpected, but it was one giant confirmation of what we are seeing daily in the debasement of our politics. Conservative MP Scott Armstrong mistakenly sent out a press release that still had all of the track changes, and it showed very clearly that it was a fill-in-the-blanks job. Because gods forbid an announcement was made that wasn’t pabulum. Pretty much all political speech has become this – checklists of talking points that need to be ticked off in whatever the context. Giving a members’ statement? Here are the talking points you need to say – or better yet, here’s the fill-in-the-blanks statement we’ll hand to you. Going on a panel show at 5 o’clock? Here are the lines you can deliver, and the slogans you need to recite. The funny thing is, I’ve met MPs who’ve gotten media training – which they paid for out of their own pockets – and they can do without all of this box-checking, blanks-filled-in pap that they would recite otherwise. But those MPs made the choice to not do what their fellows were doing, and proved they could speak on their own without sounding like a babbling idiot. But most MPs don’t take the time to learn how to speak in public, or in the media, or how to write a speech on their own. It’s mostly just a handful of veteran MPs who can do it these days, and that doesn’t bode well for the future seeing the number of incumbents who aren’t running again. Unless MPs start to do something about their own situation – or better yet, voters demand that they do – we’ll wind up with a parliament of MPs reading more of these scripts like robotic simpletons.

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Roundup: Crossing the line with a golf shirt

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The official date of the new child benefit cheques going out saw the Conservative government at its most ham-handed yesterday, starting with a “leaked” letter to caucus about just how historic this event was as the “single biggest one-time direct payment in Canadian history.” Funny, it seems to me that an actual conservative government would rather just lower taxes across the board rather than bribe people with their own money, but oh, wait – this is a right-flavoured populist government and not a real Conservative one. As ministers and MPs went around the country to tout the benefit, and social media sites were bombarded with blaring ads, some of which were branded as “Christmas in July,” Pierre Poilievre was the most egregious of all, hosting a press event in Halifax that was arranged by his department, and yet featured him wearing a Conservative-branded golf shirt, as though this were a partisan event, or that it was somehow the Conservatives doling out this largesse rather than the Government of Canada. It was utterly crass, and yet the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner decreed that no, it wasn’t actually in contravention of the rules, though one cannot deny that it was in poor taste and poor judgement. Mind you, this bit of vote-buying is going to blow a big hole in the government’s budget, given that growth projections are down and we are pretty much certainly back into a deficit position (not that the budget was actually balanced – simply papered over by raiding the contingency reserve and the EI fund). But then again, the NDP have declared that the child benefit would remain under their plan on top of their plans to have this universal childcare programme (well, years down the road at a great cost to the provinces) and the Liberals planning to revamp the whole system that will also cost at least an extra couple of billion more than this programme does. Watching this play out in the election while each touts fiscal responsibility will be an interesting exercise.

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Roundup: Totally not buying votes

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With those new child benefit cheques starting to flow, a couple of bits of analysis were done over the past few days. One was to use census data to look at the demographics of ridings where people stood to gain the most from the new cheques, and wouldn’t you know it, of the 338 ridings, most were either Conservative or had a good chance of leaning that way in the next election. The other piece did some detective work into Pierre Poilievre’s big hunt for families who had not signed up for the benefit, and how he was able to derive numbers of how many families in certain regions had not done so. Why target regions? Why, electioneering, of course. There were also some pretty artificial deadlines being floated for getting people to sign up to the programme, so that cheques would handily flow just as the election is kicking off. Because that’s not trying to buy votes with people’s own money either, apparently. Among the places Poilievre visited on his “ finding families” tour were, you guessed it, Conservative ridings, while First Nations communities, who were less likely to be signed up, didn’t merit visits at all as they were unlikely to vote Conservative. So in case you really did think that these child benefit cheques were really about helping families and not about trying to buy votes, well, the analysis doesn’t support that kind of altruistic viewpoint.

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Roundup: Cheques doing double duty

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While former Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page says that if we go into a technically recession, it should be contained as there is still growth in other sectors beyond oil and gas, Pierre Poilievre has been out spinning yet another tale over the weekend. Not content to show that the universal childcare benefit cheques due in the mail this month are nakedly partisan attempts at vote buying (and those of us of a certain age will remember when Ralph Klein would send out cheques to help Albertans pay for the cost of natural gas conveniently as elections were around the corner), Poilievre has ensured that the cheques get a second political purpose – they are now to also count as economic stimulus. Which of course they would be – but not very much, according to Don Drummond. As well, the government keeps saying they’re making all of these infrastructure investments, but the vast majority of them are still years down the road, and their Canada 150 infrastructure programme is going to be very small-time, and is also unlikely to have much in the way of lasting economic benefit. So we can expect these kinds of talking points to be repeated ad nauseum for the next few weeks as the campaign heats up, and until we get the numbers from StatsCan on September 1st as to whether we’re in a recession or not.

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Roundup: Abusing the Senate for partisan ends

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The parade of people looking aghast at that Senate committee interim report continued yesterday, much of it with the usual cartoonish depictions of the Senate as a whole, never mind that this was a small group of Conservatives that made the recommendations in an interim report, and the Liberals on the committee explicitly dissented from it. Yes, the proposal is problematic and no doubt there are many in the Muslim community who are sceptical because it’s not a monolithic religion. Even those who are supportive in theory, because of the problem of foreign-trained imams that are more likely to come from radicalised schools, are wary of the current government and its mechanisms for dealing with it, though it has also been noted that the government already issues work permits for these imams, so perhaps that is a tool they could better use now. The report did mention what happens in Europe, but the language is vague, and what does happen in many European countries is providing funding for imam-training schools, with the intention of helping them learn about the language and culture of the country they’re heading to. Could this be what they mean? Maybe, but it’s still an interim report, so we won’t know until maybe December, assuming that the next parliament is actually constituted by then. So what to make of it? John Ivison posits that the report reads like a Conservative election platform, and I don’t think he’s wrong. This government has not been above abusing the Senate for its own ends before, and it looks like they’re doing it again. And yes, you’re going to look aghast at the suggestion that the Senate is partisan, never mind that it is and always has been – it’s usually just less partisan because Senators don’t need to campaign for re-election. It’s also in a difficult period right now because the majority of the Conservatives in the Senate were appointed in a manner that stressed the Chamber’s ability to absorb them, and that in turn led the Conservative leadership therein to further abuse the chamber by going heavy on the whip. It is a problem that may not be solved until Harper is no longer the party leader and this group no longer feels beholden to him. Until then, we should be critical, but let’s keep said criticism in perspective. The institution itself is not to be faulted because it currently has some problematic appointments and a Prime Minister that is keen to abuse it.

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Senate QP: Sole-sourcing shipyard contracts

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With all government business taken care of, a showdown was brewing in the Senate over Bill C-377, a “union busting” bill the government wants passed, but Liberals and a few Conservatives are doing their best to filibuster it into the ground. Things got started with the usual statements by senators (Canada Day in Quebec, the situation in Burundi, the good work of the Senate, the Terry Fox Run), and Routine Proceedings.

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Roundup: Ham-fisting a simple request

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The signs of the current government’s incompetence at handling the big files are numerous, but recent revelations about their anti-terrorism legislation just may take the cake. Documents obtained by The Canadian Press show that last year, Canadian intelligence services said that they were looking for “significant improvements” to information sharing between the various agencies – but they wanted them within the existing legislative framework. They didn’t need all kinds of new powers or expanded mandates, and yet, the government turn around and brought in C-51, which did just that. Because this government, after almost a decade in office, apparently doesn’t know what they’re doing, gave the intelligence services a ham-fisted, overly broad new suite of powers that they didn’t need – or even want, if these documents are to be believed – because they had managed to terrify themselves thanks to a couple of lone-wolf attacks on home soil. They drafted a bill that was so sloppy and terrible that every expert on the subject could hardly believe it. And their inept communications strategy around the bill managed to get every civil society group up in arms over it, creating a second sweep of paranoia (despite the fact that no, the bill had nothing to do with trying to expand surveillance to civil society groups or use terrorists as cover for trying to bring the hammer down on First Nations – a simple look at the fact that the government has underfunded CSIS and the RCMP will tell you pretty much everything you need to know about their intentions). It looks to be just one more example of where this government once again rejected expert advice in order to make themselves look like they were getting tough on terrorism – as effectively as they’ve gotten “tough on crime” – and they managed to balls things up for themselves and everyone else in the process. Would that we could have some grown-ups leading this country for a change.

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Roundup: No, they’re not new powers

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I’ll admit that there has been some terribly naïve punditry about Michael Chong’s Reform Act, and a lot of touchy-feely optimism about the fuzzy notion of “reform,” but perhaps one of the most gallingly maladroit to date has come from Campbell Clark, who wonders if MPs will actually get the will to confront party leaders with their “new powers.” Yes, that was the sound of me sighing deeply. “New powers.” For those of you keeping score, Chong’s bill did not give MPs any new powers. MPs had all the power in the world thanks to the way our system of government is designed – elected as an individual MP under the first-past-the-post system, they are empowered to give or withdraw confidence, whether it is to their party leaders, or to the government of the day in the Commons. That’s an incredible amount of power because confidence is how our system runs. The problem is that they stopped empowering themselves to exercise their power, deferring first to leaders who were no longer accountable to them after we broke our leadership selection system to make it “more democratic” by taking away that power from MPs and giving it to the party membership (a convention which Chong’s bill now cements into law), and later to leaders who gained the power to sign off on their nomination forms (a measure designed to prevent spoofing on ballots and hijacked nomination races). Sure, MPs still had power and they could exercise it – but it generally meant that enough of them had to defy the leader all at once to ensure that the spectre of group punishment didn’t draw further questions, and few MPs had the intestinal fortitude to risk their necks. They still, however, had that power. For Chong to claim that his bill grants “new” powers is bogus. As I’ve stated before, it actually takes power away because it did not actually do away with the nomination sign-off power in a meaningful way, and it raised the bar by which MPs can openly challenge a leader so it can no longer be a small group who has the gonads to go forward, but will now see the media demanding the 20 percent headcount. So will MPs have the will to use these “new” powers? Probably not, because the bar has been set higher. But in the meantime, we’ll have the pundit class praising Chong for his efforts and his “courage,” rewarding him for the campaign of bullying and attempting to disenfranchise an entire body of parliament along the way.

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Roundup: The Reform Act makes everything worse

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On a vote of 38 to 14, with four abstentions, Michael Chong’s Reform Act passed third reading in the Senate last night, despite a couple of late attempts at amendments that were designed to essentially kill the bill. MPs who bullied senators into passing the bill – Chong included, never mind that he wants them to kill a different bill he doesn’t agree with – were jubilant over social media, but they all seem oblivious to the fact that they’ve just undermined their own stated goals in passing this bill. I’ve written on the subject numerous times – here, here, here, here and here, and long story short is that it won’t actually remove the power of the leader to veto nominations because it doesn’t stop the leader from just giving his chief-of-staff that power, and instead of giving caucus the power to remove a problematic leader, it insulates that leader by creating a high enough bar that any MP who grows enough of a spine to go public will face a media that demands the names of the twenty percent of other rebellious MPs, and any opposition will crumble. Oh, and our current broken system of unaccountable presidentialised leadership selections are now being codified into legislation because we really want to make sure that we really break our system of Westminster democracy well and truly while patting ourselves on the back for “modest reforms.” It’s not reform, and I can guarantee that we will live to regret it, like we have every other “reform” attempt that has inevitably made our system worse off. Congratulations, 41st Parliament – you’ve done an ace job in making things worse. Slow clap.

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