Tag Archives: Reform Act

Roundup: Rejections without significance

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Because it’s a story that refuses to die, we now know that both the Bloc and the NDP have rejected the four main votes in the (garbage) Reform Act, and now we await the Liberals, who will in turn doubtlessly reject it as well whenever they finally have their first official caucus meeting, and of course, we have political scientists trying to derive meaning from these refusals, as they have tried with the Conservatives agreeing to the four votes.

The simple truth, however, are that these votes really don’t matter because the legislation is garbage. The power to elect caucus chairs doesn’t require its adoption, as we’ve seen, and the power over the expulsion of caucus members is largely illusory anyway because it tends to depend on what the leader says either way. I would be hugely surprised if the caucus and the leader ever parted ways on whether or not to boot someone out of the club, as that would create a schism and be a sign that the leader was on the way out. As well, the power of the caucus to pressure a leader to resign is actually better off without the Reform Act because what the Act winds up doing is protecting the leader by setting a high threshold and requiring a public declaration to trigger a vote, which can invite retribution. It has been far more effective to push a leader out with one or two public declarations by brave members that signal the writing on the wall rather than demanding a twenty percent threshold.

In the Hill Times piece, the Act’s author, Michael Chong, pats himself on the back for codifying these sorts of caucus decisions, but codifying them is part of the problem. Our Westminster system tends to work best under conventions that aren’t codified because it affords them flexibility and the ability to adapt, whereas codification is inflexible, leads to testing of the system and the pursuit of loopholes and getting around what has been codified. It’s the same with setting that threshold to push out a leader – it winds up insulating the leader more than empowering the caucus, and we’ve seen leaders resign with far less pressure than what this codified system affords, not to mention that by Chong codifying that party leaders must be selected by membership vote in the actual Parliament of Canada Act as a result of this garbage legislation, he has made it even harder for parties to return to the proper system of caucus selection and removal of leaders as we need to return to. Chong has screwed Parliament for a generation, and it would be great if the talking heads would stop encouraging him.

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Roundup: Singh has a list of demands

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In the wake of his party’s post-election first caucus meeting, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh held a press conference yesterday to do a bit of chest-thumping and pretend that he holds some kind of balance of power in the forthcoming parliament, or that he can play kingmaker. If anything, he undermined his own position with his list of demands, because he doesn’t have any real leverage. His party is substantially weakened after the election, particularly given that they spent all kinds of money and gained a single seat out of it, and they are likely in debt once again and in no shape to go to another campaign anytime soon – especially if they want to figure out what they did wrong and have time to course-correct.

As for his list of demands, we are back to a lot of the usual nonsense where Singh doesn’t seem to grasp implementation – or jurisdiction. To wit:

  • Paid sick leave – that is being expanded to ten days for federally-regulated workers, but that’s only six percent of the workforce. The rest is provincial.
  • Halting clawbacks from GIS for seniors who accessed CERB – the GIS is means-tested and meant for the poorest of seniors, so it’s not surprising that CERB or other benefits could impact the means test.
  • Clean drinking water in Indigenous communities – this is in progress. Willpower won’t make it go faster.
  • A federal vaccine document for internal travel – this cannot happen unless provinces sign on, and until a couple of weeks ago, there were provinces still hostile to the very notion. The federal government cannot unilaterally create such a document because the provinces control vaccination data.
  • Dropping the appeal of the Human Rights Tribunal decision in the First Nations Child and Family Services case – this may yet happen given how completely the Federal Court decision against them last week was, but there were legitimate issues being litigated regardless that compensation is already being negotiated, irrespective of a further appeal.
  • Demanding higher health transfers – the federal government fully plans to negotiate those, but it won’t be without strings, especially as certain provinces sat on the pandemic-related transfers and put them towards their bottom lines rather than spending them on the pandemic.

As for Singh’s threat to “withhold votes” if he doesn’t get his way, it’s a bit curious what he means. Does he mean he would vote against bills including the budget implementation bill for the fall economic update, which would have plenty of additional pandemic supports or items he supports? Or does he mean he’d simply not vote, which would mean the Liberals wouldn’t need to get Bloc support to pass their measures (which they would likely get as the Bloc also are in no position to go to another election). Because if it’s the latter, then he’s basically made himself irrelevant for the foreseeable future.

Programming note: I am taking the full long weekend off from blogging. See you next week!

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Roundup: A vote devoid of real meaning

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As expected, the Conservative caucus voted for the (garbage) Reform Act proposals that give them the option to demand a leadership review, and as expected, the media fell all over themselves to interpret some kind of significance into this, including the fact that the same thing happened after the last election when Andrew Scheer was still the leader – never mind that the Reform Act had precisely zero to do with Scheer’s demise.

And while everyone was smiling and preaching unity coming out of the meeting, there are still sore MPs, who are concerned about the losses they suffered, and that their promised gains in places like the GTA didn’t materialise. MP Scott Reid is openly decrying that the party is being run like a “petty tyranny” where policy positions like the carbon price was imposed on them without discussion or even notice (as Reid was running to be caucus chair). So clearly they still have some healing to do, but I wouldn’t read any significance into the (garbage) Reform Act vote, because all it will do is insulate Erin O’Toole.

Meanwhile, I am concerned at some of the delusion that seems to have set into the party, as O’Toole went into the meeting telling the assembled reporters that it was the Liberals and People’s Party who spent the campaign misleading people and sowing division. I mean, serial liar Erin O’Toole, who attempted to make the falsehood of a non-existent Liberal plan to tax home equity a campaign issue, says it was the other guys who thrived on misleading people. I’d say it was unbelievable, but it was simply one more lie that O’Toole effortlessly spouts. Later in the day, Michael Chong was on Power & Politics, and when O’Toole’s constantly shifting positions on issues like gun control were raised, he called it a “Liberal trap.” Erm, it’s O’Toole’s shifting position – that’s on him. Chong also declared that it was wrong to make vaccination a wedge issue because anti-vaxxers felt like “hunted prey,” which is…warped. When you have a group of people who are prolonging the pandemic and endangering the lives of others, whether it’s directly with the virus or because they have overwhelmed the healthcare capacity that vaccinated people require, they should be made to feel social stigma. That’s the point. That Chong is going to bat for them demonstrates why his party continues to be tone deaf about the course of this pandemic.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1445387619215552520

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Roundup: Awaiting the (garbage) Reform Act votes

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Today is the Conservatives’ first caucus meeting of the new parliament – in person, no less – and everyone is anxiously awaiting news of whether they plan to vote on the (garbage) Reform Act provisions that would give caucus the ability to call for a leadership review. While I wrote about this for my column, coming out later today, I will make a few additional notes here.

As the column spells out, these provisions don’t actually provide an accountability mechanism, and they will wind up protecting O’Toole more than they will threaten him. So when I see MPs like Tom Kmiec saying that he wants MPs to accept the (garbage) Reform Act powers on a leadership review, citing that it provides a clear process, what he omits is that the 20 percent threshold insulates O’Toole, because those 24 MPs would need to openly sign their names to a letter to the caucus chair, meaning they will be easily identifiable for retribution if O’Toole survives the subsequent vote and/or leadership review, and that retribution can include not signing their nomination papers. That’s not an insignificant threat against them.

Meanwhile, Senator Michael MacDonald, a former Harper-era organizer, is urging a vote on a leadership review, citing O’Toole’s decision to say anything to whoever was in the room as being a threat to the party’s future chances.

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Roundup: Knives out for O’Toole?

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Erin O’Toole’s future is under discussion, as a number of vocal MPs are coming out to support his continued leadership, and former Ontario premier Mike Harris is adding his voice to the call. But this is as other MPs are phoning up journalists, on a not-for-attribution basis, absolutely savaging O’Toole and the fact that he is a lying liar and an opportunist of the highest order, and that ultimately undermined their case during the election. (Threads here and here).

This is going to start resolving itself at the first caucus meeting, whenever that takes place, because it’s when the party is going to have to vote on which provisions of the (garbage) Reform Act they are going to adopt for the 44th parliament, including the provision about having the caucus hold a vote to start a leadership review process. Why this is important is one of the reasons that makes the Act garbage in the first place – it actually makes it harder for caucus to push out a leader because it establishes a threshold of 20 percent of the caucus needing to demand a vote before it can be held. That exposes his critics at a time when he is deciding on critic portfolios and things like committee chairs for opposition-chaired committees, and he can use that fear-or-favour system to punish his critics if they fail to meet that 20 percent threshold. If they didn’t have this threshold or this framework, we’ve seen leaders read the writing on the wall with far fewer MPs/MLAs going public, and resigning as a result. The (garbage) Reform Act provides protection for those leaders where it’s supposed to be putting the fear of caucus into them, and it’s just such a dark irony that once again, attempts to improve the system only make it worse.

And while there are a bunch of voices (especially over on the CBC) who seem to think that Andrew Scheer was pushed out for his loss, they have all apparently forgotten that he resigned, particularly after his use of party funds came to light. Whether that was an excuse is not really the point – it wasn’t simply because he lost the election.

Programming note: I am taking the weekend off of blogging entirely because I am exhausted from the election and need to catch up on some sleep. See you next week.

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Roundup: The reality of negotiation

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As was ever thus, the Twitter Machine erupted with fury and disingenuous outrage when health minister Patty Hajdu told reporters that she couldn’t guarantee that a national pharmacare programme would be in place at the end of the current parliament (for which we don’t know when that will be, as a hung parliament rarely lasts beyond two years.

“Some of that will be predicted by, predicated by, the responses of the provinces and territories,” said Hajdu, because *mind blown* healthcare is largely the domain of the provinces and any pharmacare system would have to be negotiated with them – in particular, a national formulary, which is going to be extremely complicated to ensure that existing plans don’t get left behind or that the new national plan isn’t worse off than any existing ones that it would replace.

What is especially irritating are all of the voices crying out that this just means the Liberals were lying on the campaign trail, which is false and ridiculous – Trudeau spent the campaign not overpromising on this file, but rather kept saying that it was contingent on negotiation with provinces, which is why their fiscal plan only called for a “down payment” on such a programme rather than the whole thing, but nevertheless, the promise was to go by the principles of the Hoskins Report, which they have bene doing thus far. The NDP, by contrast, insisted that this could be done by 2020, and whenever anyone brought up the fact that the provinces may object, the line was largely that why would anyone say no to federal dollars? It’s absurd, of course, because provinces are rightfully afraid that they would be stuck with an expensive programme to run if the federal government suddenly cut out transfers or funds to it because they suddenly had other priorities (which has happened in the past).

And to that end, we have a bunch of premiers who are balking at it, Quebec and Alberta want to be able to opt-out with compensation, and Ontario is instead insisting that the federal government pay for drugs to treat rare diseases – the most expensive kind, and the ones where costs are rapidly escalating. So of course they want the federal government to pay for them rather than to share the burden. It’s predictable, and for anyone to be shocked and appalled that the Liberals have to deal with this reality is really, really tiresome.

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Roundup: Immutable committee math

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In a move that is possibly quite disappointing, the Liberals got unanimous consent yesterday to suspend the sections of the Standing Orders governing the powers of parliamentary secretaries – which could be an issue if they plan to put them back on committees with voting powers and the ability to move motions and so on. Some of you may recall that when this was the standard practice during the Conservative era, these committees simply became branch plants of the ministers’ offices, and everything was stage-managed within an inch of their lives.

However.

I also have it on good authority that this may not be exactly as it seems. Part of the problem is that there is a shortage of warm bodies in the Liberal ranks to fill the committees, particularly if you have a Cabinet of 37 out of 157 seats, and what looks to be a prospective parliamentary secretary list of at least 46 (given that Economic Development with have separate parliamentary secretaries for each regional economic development agency). Then, subtract the Speaker and the Assistant Deputy Speaker, who can’t sit on committees, and that leaves them with 72 MPs (maybe less – a couple may also remain assigned to NSICOP, which pulled them from other committees in the previous parliament) to distribute across 27 standing and joint committees, where the parliamentary math in the current hung parliament would see four Liberal MPs per committee. Quite simply, they don’t have enough.

What I’ve been told by my sources is that what they may wind up doing is allowing parliamentary secretaries to sit as regular committee members on committees that aren’t those aligned with their minister, so that they would essentially be pulling double (or possibly triple) duty, especially if they remain on the committees aligned with their minister in a non-voting capacity. It’s not pretty, but it may be what winds up being necessary if they intend to live up to their promise to keep parliamentary secretaries from being voting members of their interested committees. (Are we ready to start having a discussion about having a more reasonable number of MPs for a country of our size? Because seriously, not having enough bodies is an actual problem that has consequences for the efficacy of the institution).

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Roundup: Scheer’s risible demands

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Even before the day’s meetings got started, Justin Trudeau offered up a pre-emptive strike against Andrew Scheer’s demands by announcing that Parliament would be summoned on December 5th – immediately after his return from the NATO summit – where they would hold both the Speaker election and the Speech from the Throne on the same day (rather unusually, as they tend to be on subsequent days). When Scheer did meet with Trudeau, he came armed with seven demands, and immediately following that, Trudeau met with Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe, who also moaned that his own demands weren’t being capitulated to.

https://twitter.com/rachaiello/status/1194313181990129665

As for Scheer’s demands, a good many of them are simple non-starters, and others are simply laughable, but let’s walk through them, shall we?

  1. Keep Canada united and strong by launching a task force to study the establishment of a national energy corridor, which could bring Ontario and Quebec hydroelectricity to new markets, open up opportunities for Western Canadian oil and gas, and connect rural communities in Atlantic Canada and the North.
  2. Help Canadians get ahead by offering broad-based tax relief, providing a date for balancing the budget, and proceeding with fair tax-free maternity benefits.
  3. Restore ethics and accountability to government by introducing stronger penalties in the Conflict of Interest Act.
  4. Get the energy sector back to work by tabling a detailed plan, with concrete deadlines, to build the Trans Mountain expansion and repealing Bills C-48 and C-69.
  5. Take real action on the environment by drawing on policies from our Real Plan to Protect the Environment, such as the Green Patent Credit, the Canadian Clean brand, the Green Home Renovation Tax Credit, and ending raw sewage dumps.
  6. Immediately fund regional transit expansion in the GTA, starting with the Ontario Line and Yonge Extension.
  7. Reduce the paperwork burden on Quebecers by adopting a single tax return.

To start with, I’m puzzled as to how Scheer believes that his “national energy corridor” scheme is a national unity project. I mean, I get that he keeps insisting it’s “a win-win,” but if you stop and think about it for thirty seconds, they’re demanding that decades be spent on land negotiations and expropriations involving First Nations and provinces that may not be keen on them, for another decade to be spent building a pipeline that, by the time it’s completed, will be in the middle of massive global decarbonization. That’s some forward thinking. The broad-based tax relief that was in the Liberal platform was better targeted to low-income Canadians than in the Conservatives’, as was their proposal for tax-free maternity benefits; the date for a balanced budget is also somewhat mired in mid-nineties thinking, while the government has chosen a different fiscal anchor that allows them to take advantage of the low-interest rate environment to make investments in Canadians. The demand for a detailed plan with concrete deadlines for the TMX construction is farcical because any delays would be contingent upon the Federal Court’s hearing the concerns of those Indigenous groups who are challenging the most recent consultations, and that’s not something the government has any control over, but never mind that there is pipe going in the ground right now. The repeal of C-69 and C-48 are non-starters, and would do absolutely nothing to benefit the energy sector because the problem is the low world price of oil. Demanding that the government adopt the Conservative non-plan for the environment? Hilarious. Immediately funding the GTA transit expansions? How is it responsible to sign a blank cheque when there is no concrete plan on the table? Seriously, you claim to be the fiscally responsible party. And having Quebec adopt a single tax return? Yeah, if Quebec wants that, they can adopt the federal one. They made the choice for the current system. Is rudimentary critical thinking dead in politics?

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Roundup: Frank dialogue and tone-deaf pronouncements

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The Conservatives had their big post-election caucus meeting, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, they voted not to enact the provisions of the (garbage) Reform Act that would give caucus the ability to turf their leader and force a new leadership contest – predictably under the rubric of empowering the “grassroots,” which as was explained in yesterday’s post, does the complete opposite. As this is going on, Angus Reid had a poll of Conservative voters that showed them particularly split on whether they want Scheer to stay or go (42 percent go, 41 percent stay, 17 percent undecided), so that could be an indication that their own base is leaning toward dumping him at their leadership review in April – especially as the convention will be in Toronto, an area where the party was shut out, and they may be more motivated to punish him for it.

As for Scheer, he arrived at his planned press conference three hours late because the meeting kept going, and it makes one wonder if the “frank discussion” going on inside were to blame – it’s possible there was an airing of the grievances happening, particularly for those who lost their seats. It didn’t seem to daunt Scheer, however, because when he arrived at the microphones, he essentially repeated his stump speech from the campaign. Sure, he said that “no one was more disappointed than me,” but he offered no signs of humility in defeat. When asked about the failure of his climate plan, Scheer said that they simply didn’t communicate it clearly enough rather than admit that it transparently wasn’t an actual climate plan (and his own senators have publicly clocked him on this fact). When asked if he thinks homosexuality is a sin, he prevaricated – again – and forcefully stated that he will defend people’s rights, which shows that he hasn’t learned anything from the campaign about his evasiveness.

Meanwhile, Matt Gurney makes the point that the party isn’t listening to what people in the GTA have been trying to tell them about what will and won’t fly there if they want to win seats there ever again, and are being told to “calm down” in response – which could spell trouble for Scheer.

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Roundup: The knives and the Reform Act

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The Conservatives are having their first post-election caucus meeting today, and there is talk that the discontent may be more serious than the public picture they’re letting on in public – not that that’s surprising. But all of the talk of forcing an early “leadership review” of Scheer rests – whether from the talk of the disaffected Conservatives, or in the public musings of Andrew Coyne and Stephen Maher to name a couple – haven’t made a very careful study of the Reform Act beyond its stated good intentions when the bill is actually garbage.

In fact, I think that relying on the Reform Act could insulate Scheer more readily than it could push him out, given that it has a relatively high threshold to trigger the caucus vote to ouster a leader, and that high threshold can be used to intimidate any would-be usurpers or those who would use the ability to hold their leader to account for his or her sins – in this case, a bad campaign based on lies, a platform that didn’t appeal to any of the target demographics or ridings that they needed to win, and the inability of said leader to articulate positions on socially conservative issues that would offer any kind of reassurance to those target demographics and regions. (And did I mention the campaign of lies?) That intimidation can make it harder for the caucus to make a clean break and get on with choosing a new leader.

This having been said, I want to push back on something that Conservative MP Chris Warkentin said on Power & Politics last night as it pertains to this Reform Act business, wherein he said that he didn’t agree with giving caucus that power because it somehow “disempowered” the grassroots (followed by the ritual motions of insisting that they are a “grassroots party” as though that were actually true). For a century now, political parties in Canada have flattered their grassroots members by pretending that letting them choose the leader is “democratic,” when all it does is obliterate accountability. It means that the leader can claim a false democratic legitimacy and centralize their power by marginalizing both the MPs in his or her caucus, and eventually marginalizing the grassroots because that power has been centralized and those grassroots become an increasingly irrelevant means of pretending to get policy advice. It’s simply become an exercise in the grassroots willingly turning over their agency and power to the very person who will undermine them, but hey, it’s “democratic.” This is the root of the problems that have developed in our system, and we can’t just keep pretending that they don’t exist because “grassroots parties” no longer resemble that.

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