It’s not the least bit surprising, but it should remain shocking every time it happens. Jim Flaherty announced yesterday that the fall economic update will be released next week, when the House is not sitting, and will be read in Edmonton and not the House of Commons. In other words, one more slap in the face to Parliament by a government that does its level best to devalue it at every opportunity. Because why not go for the cheap optics of a controlled message and release, instead of ensuring the dignity and sanctity of parliament are upheld.
Tag Archives: Refugees
Roundup: Even the base doesn’t like the unfairness
The motions in the Senate around the suspension without pay of the three embattled senators remains unresolved, and the Senate will be sitting today – a rarity – in order to try to reach a resolution. As this happens, more cracks are forming within the Conservative Senate caucus, as Senator Don Plett – a former party president and not of the Red Tory wing – came out against the suspensions as being against due process and basic fairness. Oh, and if anyone says it’s about trying to please the party base, well, he is that base. Down the hall in the Commons, MP Peter Goldring also encouraged Conservative Senators to vote down the suspensions and wants the Governor General to step in if necessary. As the debate wore on, it not only touched on due process, the lack of guidelines for why this suspension was taking place, and even the definitions of what constitutes “Senate business,” which is something the Auditor General gets to grapple with. It is all raising some fundamental questions about the institution that it never really had to deal with before, and one hopes will help create a much clearer path for the Chamber going forward.
QP: Harper hits back — at the Liberals
It’s Thomas Mulcair’s birthday, not that he was really going to get any answers out of Harper as a gift for the occasion. Mulcair began by asking a rather lengthy question around the stonewalling around what Nigel Wright knew, but Harper insisted that Wright kept the whole affair to himself. Mulcair brought up Ray Novak and Marjory LeBreton’s alleged call to Mike Duffy telling him that the deal was off. Harper responded that Mulcair was buying into the story that Duffy was the victim rather than the fact of the misspending that got him booted from caucus. When Mulcair tried to clarify whether or not Harper had singled out Duffy at the caucus meeting in February, Harper said that the spending of the three senators was brought up in caucus and he made his emphatic statement then. When Mulcair asked when Harper did threaten to expel Duffy from the Senate, Harper reiterated that rule-breakers had no place in caucus. Leading for the Liberals was Dominic LeBlanc, as Justin Trudeau was speaking away speaking in Washington DC. LeBlanc asked why one former PMO staffer who was involved was promoted despite potentially criminal behaviour. Harper responded by calling out Liberal senators for holding up the suspension without pay of those three senators. LeBlanc pushed, bringing up or their questionable hires by the PMO, but Harper kept insisting that the Liberal senators were keeping those misbehaving from being punished (which is of course false, as they are simply looking to put it to committee to give it due process).
Roundup: Overhauling military procurement?
The CBC’s sources are telling them that a complete reorganisation of the military procurement system will be a highlight of the upcoming Throne speech. Whether that reorganisation is to put it in a new agency under the direction of a single minister, or as a permanent secretariat comprised of bureaucrats (and presumably outside consultants) remains to be seen, but hopefully there will be a system where there is some accountability, and a single responsible authority rather than the murky mess that is the current system where everyone is involved but nobody is responsible or accountable.
Roundup: Victory for the Media Party
Toronto Centre Liberals and New Democrats have spoken, and the Media Party has won out! Journalists Linda McQuaig and Chrystia Freeland have won their respective nominations for the NDP and Liberals respectively. As both have written about income inequality, and both want to muscle in on the debate over the “plight” of the middle class (which may not really exist, if the economic data is to be believed, but shh, don’t tell anyone because you’re trying to win those votes), but it will set up for an interesting by-election once it is finally called, and it will make for even more of an interesting 2015 when Toronto Centre gets split into two, and their challengers can try to claim one of the other nominations in the redistribution. Pundit’s Guide looks when those by-elections might be called, especially now that the Conservatives have set themselves up for acclaimed candidates in up to three of the ridings up for grabs.
Roundup: Pamela Wallin’s questionable claims
So, that was the audit report into Senator Pamela Wallin’s expenses – that she had a pattern of claims that were questionable even though she said that she was told they were acceptable (such as for attending functions at Guelph University, where she served as chancellor), that she had retroactively tried to change her calendar – supposedly on the advice of Senator Tkachuk, which he denied – and her belief that they applied rules retroactively is bunk. In fact, it’s addressed directly in the report that they didn’t, and there are even handy charts as to what rules were in place at what point, where they overlap, and so on. (That hasn’t stopped her few defenders, including Senator Hugh Segal, from trying to repeat this fiction in the hopes that it will become a truism). Oh, and Wallin spends most of her time in Toronto, for what it’s worth. It was enough that the Internal Economy committee has decided to forward this to the RCMP to let them sort out the discrepancies to see if there was anything untoward or deliberate, which now makes it all four embattled senators under RCMP scrutiny. Other Senators are taking exception to Wallin describing herself as a “different kind of Senator” who’s more “activist,” which let’s face it, is pretty self-aggrandising, given that most of them are active in their communities and in promoting causes. (I muse more about that here). PostMedia offers a primer on Senate expenses. And while some critics are (finally) pointing to the fact that this should affect the credibility of the Prime Minister given that three of the four are his appointees, it has been sadly pointed out that the focus remains on the Chamber itself and not the PM, which is a problem, as he is person who is supposed to be held to account.
Roundup: The unfair treatment of Pamela Wallin
Oh dear – Senator Pamela Wallin may have to end up paying back between $120K and $140K in questionable expenses, but she’s not happy about it, and calls the process unfair. And she’s right to a point – that the auditors applied the post-2012 rules to the pre-2012 period, but Wallin seems to forget that the Internal Economy Committee can also decide what seems to be “reasonable” in terms of the expenses claimed, or what should have been her better judgement. There were also concerns that Wallin and her staff retroactively changed her calendar in order to remove riding association events, though Wallin claims that she was just removing personal details, and that the auditors already had calendar copies as well as access to her hand-written diary, and that Senator Tkachuk told her to, because the process was already bogged down and taking too long. Nevertheless, she plans to pay back the expenses with interest while she challenges the rules. Here’s a look at how Wallin’s audit results may affect other Senators who travel to do studies or promote causes that aren’t immediately the subject of committee duties. This of course brings me to the point of the pundit class and various talking heads – including Marjory LeBreton – going on about how this is some signal that the Senate has to “change or die.” Um, change how? This isn’t an issue about the Senate as it operates, it’s about financial management issues, which is largely with in the financial controls of the Senate’s administration. Do those rules need to be tightened? Sure – and they realised that and have been doing that over the past couple of years. Could they be more transparent? Absolutely – and they’re already far more transparent than MPs are, for that matter. But none of this has to do with the structure of the Senate itself, so somehow trying to make the inappropriate expenses of a small handful of Senators into an indictment of the Chamber as a whole is, quite frankly, intellectually dishonest. More to the point, whenever someone says “reform,” the immediate response is “reform how? To what end?” Chances are, they won’t have an intelligible answer for you, which is telling about the problem with the level of debate, where “reform” is treated like some kind of magical incantation, as though it will somehow make everything better without any kind of plan.
Roundup: The PBO and parliamentary fixes
In this week’s Maclean’s, Aaron Wherry talks to Kevin Page about his new job at the University of Ottawa. In a separate but related piece, he talks to parliamentary scholar Donald Savoie about the PBO, and Savoie says some very cogent things about the office – that it is unnecessary because it allows MPs to fob off their homework onto someone else who can be seen as more “pure,” but it simply creates a new unaccountable personality that caters to the media rather than forcing parties to do the serious work of scrutiny and policy that they should be doing. Savoie’s solution is that parliament work to fix its own mess around the estimates process than work to fix the Parliamentary Budget Office, and it’s a position that I think is eminently more sensible if we want responsible government or the Westminster system to mean anything.
Roundup: Double-bunking in solitary
The Correctional Investigator is sounding the alarm as the number of isolation cases in prisons continues to rise, with solitary being used in cases that are increasingly inappropriate, and more mind-bogglingly, there are cases where they are double-bunking people in solitary. You know, the opposite of “solitary.” But hey, Vic Toews kept assuring us that there was no population crisis in prisons, and that all of the fears of a population explosion post-mandatory minimum sentence bill passing were all overblown. Somehow the numbers don’t seem to be showing that to be the case.
Thanks to government stonewalling, the Parliamentary Budget Office is now filing Access to Information requests in order to get information that they need, and paying for those requests out of their already meagre budgets. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund is giving former PBO Kevin Page high marks for his work while he was on the job.
Roundup: Recall the committee
Olivia Chow has garnered enough support to recall the Commons transport committee on Tuesday to hold emergency meetings on rail safety, although I’m still not sure what they’ll accomplish other than the feeling that they’re seen to be doing something, even though there are still very few facts on the table as to what actually happened in Lac-Mégantic. Meanwhile, the Transportation Safety Board tabled their annual report to Parliament, and lamented the lack of expediency by which Transport Canada implements their regulations, something Lisa Raitt is now calling on the department to do.