Tag Archives: Space

Roundup: Island of Unintended Consequences

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Over at Maclean’s, David Moscrop profiled the “new” Senate, and in it was probably the best description of the institution in its present state – the “Island of Unintended Consequences,” as penned by Greg MacEachern of Proof Strategies. And that’s very much true about the state of the Chamber, but unsurprisingly, almost none of those unintended consequences were explored. The bulk of the piece was devoted to the notion that we don’t know how senators will vote anymore and they say they don’t want to defeat bills but who knows *handwavey motion*.

The problem is that it’s not just the uncertainty over how senators will vote – it’s the fact that the people being put in charge in that Chamber don’t really know what they’re doing. The Order Paper is becoming hopelessly behind with bills piling up, and because nobody wants to negotiate and do any of the horse-trading that gets bills passed, it’s getting worse. This has serious implications for the government trying to get their agenda through, but too many senators are busy congratulating themselves on the fact that they’re not whipped that they fail to see the a) that horse-trading is not partisan but rather how things get done; and b) that the pile-up of legislation is going to become a serious problem unless they get their acts together and start getting bills through the system. If you want an unintended consequence, that’s certainly a huge one, and one that Senator Peter Harder seems willing to let happen so that he can get his way with the creation of a “business committee,” which will just fob yet more responsibility off of his desk and onto another small cliques’ plate (but he needs his $1.5 million budget!) and won’t do any of the things he promises when it comes to avoiding the end-of-session legislative pile-up. The fact that the Independents now make up the majority of the chamber, most of them too new to know what they’re doing (and lacking proper mentorship), the Order Paper crisis is happening and they don’t understand that it’s happening. This is a problem, and we need more senators to wake up to it.

Meanwhile, Senator Paula Simons talks about her live-tweeting in the Chamber as a way of de-mystifying its work, thanks to her career as a journalist, and I for one applaud her for it (though I will offer her corrections as she goes along).

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Roundup: An oil conundrum

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There’s an interesting conundrum happening in Alberta, where the premier and industry leaders are talking about production cuts owing to the supply glut and lack of refining capacity in the US being responsible for near-record lows for Canadian exports. The problem of course is whether the premier should use powers that haven’t been exercised since the days of Peter Lougheed, or if oil companies should voluntarily reduce their own production – and if they do, does this constitute price-fixing? There isn’t any easy solution to any of this, and it’s not just build more pipelines – they would only need to be pipelines to tidewater in order to find markets not hampered by the current refining shutdowns in the US, and that are prepared to take heavy oil and diluted bitumen. It’s also a bit on the unfair side to say that it’s simply “regulatory and political” challenges – as we’ve seen from successive court decisions is that attempts to take shortcuts and to weasel out of obligations is what’s causing delays and to have permits revoked. In other words, part of the problem is self-inflicted, and they try to hand-wave around it by crying “national interest” as though that makes it better.

Here’s a lengthy but good explanatory thread from Josh Wingrove, and it’s well worth paying attention to, because there’s a lot of demagoguery floating around about the issue, and it pays to be informed about why prices are low, and why it’s not something you can wave a magic wand to fix.

https://twitter.com/josh_wingrove/status/1062817943812218894

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Roundup: Parting shots after the furore

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As the furore around the transfer of Tori Stafford’s killer dies down now that she has been moved back to another medium-security facility (but not “behind bars” as there aren’t any in women’s institutions in this country), the Conservatives and Conservatives are trying to get parting shots in. While the Conservatives have been demanding apologies from the Liberals because they’re still sore that they were called ambulance chasers, the Liberals’ parting shot was delivered on Friday as Karen McCrimmon, the parliamentary secretary for public safety, let it be known on Power & Politics that other child killers were transferred to healing lodges under the Conservatives. Hold up, said P&P, and while McCrimmon couldn’t give any names, the show went and checked. And lo, since 2011, twenty people convicted of killing a minor have been moved to healing lodges, 14 of them under the Conservatives. Now, we don’t know any of the details of these transfers, and how along they were in their sentences, or anything like that, because the families of the victims didn’t come forward like Stafford’s father did. But it certainly blows the Conservative narrative that this is somehow a Trudeau/Liberal “soft on crime” policy out of the water.

So, a couple of observations: The Conservatives keep insisting that they weren’t the ones who politicised the issue, and yet they are simultaneously patting themselves on the back for “forcing” the government to act, when the government ordered a review within a couple of days of this transfer going public. That sounds an awful lot like politicising it. Their talking heads have also been going onto the talk shows to insist that the Liberals were the ones who started the “name calling” and “insults” first, when it was only after a day of sustained questions that got increasingly graphic and overwrought that Trudeau accused them of ambulance-chasing politics. In other words, they are trying to play victim. There is also a certain amount of utter shamelessness when they insist that things that happened under their watch (the aforementioned killer being transferred from maximum to medium security, or now these other child-killer transfers) are somehow different because we’re talking about the here and now. I get that this is politics, but at some point, one has to wonder why there is a lack of shame around any of what goes on.

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Roundup: Looking for a domestic MS-13

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Over the past week, Andrew Scheer has been touting his latest pre-election policy plank, which promises to tackle the problem of gang violence – except it really won’t. His proposals are largely unconstitutional and fall into the same pattern of “tough on crime” measures that are largely performative that do nothing substantive about the underlying issues with violent crime, but that shouldn’t be unexpected. The measures go hand-in-hand with their talking point that the government’s current gun control legislation “doesn’t include the word ‘gangs’ even once,” and how they’re just punishing law-abiding gun owners. And while I will agree with the notion that you can’t really do much more to restrict handgun ownership without outright banning them, it needs to be pointed out that the point about the lack of mention of gangs in the bill is predicated on a lie – the Criminal Code doesn’t talk about “gangs” because it uses the language of “criminal organisations,” to which gangs apply (not to mention that you don’t talk about gangs in gun control legislation – they’re separate legal regimes, which they know but are deliberately trying to confuse the issue over.

I have to wonder if the recent focus on gangs as the current problem in gun crime is that they need a convenient scapegoat that’s easy to point a finger at – especially if you ignore the racial overtones of the discussion. Someone pointed out to me that they’re looking for their own MS-13 that they can demonise in the public eye – not for lack of trying, since they focus-tested some MS-13 talking points in Question Period last year at the height of the irregular border-crossing issue when they were concern-trolling that MS-13 was allegedly sending terrorists across our borders among these asylum seekers. The talking points didn’t last beyond a week or two, but you know that they’re looking to try and score some cheap points with it.

With that in mind, here is defence lawyer Michael Spratt explaining why Scheer’s latest proposal is a house of lies:

Or as another criminal defence lawyer, Dean Embry, puts it, if you’re going to make stuff up on this issue, then why not go all the way?

https://twitter.com/DeanEmbry/status/1062102941123907590

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Roundup: Hung legislatures vs basic civics

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New Brunswick had an election on Monday night, and it resulted in a 22-21-3-3 hung legislature, and wouldn’t you just know it, there’s been some really awful reporting about it, because apparently people who report on politics in this country can’t be arsed to learn the basics of how Responsible Government works. Hence, we got reporters saying that people “don’t know who the premier is” – which is wrong, because it remains Brian Gallant as he hasn’t resigned – or that he would “get first crack to try and form a government” – he already has a government, but rather he will try to test the confidence of the Chamber – or another heinous offender was framing his meeting with the lieutenant governor as getting “permission” to test confidence, which is again wrong because the LG doesn’t grant permission. I’m also not crazy about framing the election as “inefficient votes” for the provincial Liberals because that implies that the popular vote is a real thing, when it’s a logical fallacy – it was not one election, but rather 49 separate elections that happened at the same time. This is basic civics, and yet our media is failing Canadians, so well done everyone.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1044537682427170817

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1044539629687328768

What makes this particular election result interesting is the fact that there are two “third-parties,” each with three seats – the Green Party, and an anti-bilingualism populist party – that will have to prop up either the incumbent Liberals or the PCs, who won one more seat (so far as we know – there are several recounts now underway). That means that the election of a Speaker will be crucial, and word has it that the government is making offers to PC winners to try and get one of them to take up the post. Of course, one particular quirk of New Brunswick is that, well, their Speakers tend to be fairly partisan. So that could make things doubly interesting for the way things will play out in the weeks and months to come.

https://twitter.com/SkinnerLyle/status/1044762695554269184

Meanwhile, Paul Wells accurately describes the dynamics of the post-election period and how the LG will discharge her role, which is not to give permission. Susan Delacourt tries to tease out the effect of populism on this election, but along the way grossly mischaracterises the LG as having “waded into” the results and giving Gallant “the right” to stay on as premier, when that’s not how it works, and it’s disappointing that these myths keep getting traction.

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Roundup: Delay for the sake of delay

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With Parliament now risen for the summer, The Canadian Press decided to take a look back at the rise in obstruction tactics by the opposition in the last couple of months, and some of it is blatant obstruction for the sake of obstruction. And while a number of the usual pundits decried the piece, I think there are a few things to drill into here – not because I don’t think that there are legitimate uses for opposition obstruction and filibusters (because there certainly are), but what it says about the tone of this current parliament.

There are a few examples cited in the piece about opposition tactics that don’t make sense – the insistence on running out the clock on a six-hour marathon of speeches over the Senate public bill about Latin American Heritage Month that all parties supported (though I’m unsure how, procedurally, a Senate public bill got that many hours of debate because it should have really gotten two under private members’ business), the vote-a-thon tantrum that was cynically designed to simply kill Friday hours rather than make any meaningful points about the Estimates that were being voted upon, or the hours of concurrence debates on committee reports that all parties agreed upon. The piece makes the point that there are concerns that these tactics were designed to force the government to bring in time allocation on more bills in order to get them through, so that they could turn around and accuse them of acting in bad faith after they came in promising not to use time allocation (despite the fact that it’s a defensible tactic under most circumstances).

To a certain extent, this is the government’s fault for coming in trying to play nice and operating under the rubric that all parties can be reasonable and agree to debate timetables. That hasn’t always proved true, and when Bardish Chagger’s proposals around scheduling motions like they use in the UK got shot down (legitimately – it’s not something I would have really supported because it means automatic time allocation of all bills), she warned that time allocation would be used more frequently, and it certainly appears that the opposition parties have dared her to do so with their tactics. But I do find it frustrating as a parliamentary observer that good faith attempts and allowing more debate gets abused in order to try and embarrass the government rather than making parliament work better, and then they can complain when the government has to play hard(er) ball. We already know that the rules in which we structure debate here are broken and need to be overhauled to ensure that our MPs are actually debating rather than simply reciting speeches into the void, and that they in fact can encourage this kind of dilatory behaviour. The measures that Chagger proposed to make Parliament work better wouldn’t have actually done so, but I don’t think it’s illegitimate to shine a light on delay for the sake of delay because it does highlight that there are problems with the rules at present. But we need to get over the kneejerk reactions that calls to do so are about partisan purposes rather than about the health of our democracy.

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Roundup: Provocation theatre

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I have been giving a good deal of thought to this whole situation with Rachael Harder and the Status of Women committee, and it wasn’t until Andrew Scheer went on CTV’s Your Morning yesterday to decry the “intolerance” of Liberal MPs for a “strong, competent, dynamic young woman” that it started to click. “The Liberals are trying to politicize this. I actually find it disgusting that the Liberals would treat a young, female Member of Parliament in this way, and it just shows the intolerance of the Liberal party,” Scheer went on to say, which is hilarious because he’s the one who made the very political move of putting his critic into the role of committee chair, which is supposed to be a neutral arbiter of the rules and to facilitate discussion, and who isn’t supposed to vote other than to break a tie.

It was then that I finally understood what was going on. Andrew Scheer is trying to be a Dollarama knock-off Ann Coulter/Milo Yiannopoulos provocateur.

The signs were all there, from his preoccupation with free speech on campus, to his appropriation of the kinds of alt-right language being used to weaponize free speech across North America, and this move with Harder fits that bill entirely. I’m pretty sure that Scheer knew exactly what he was doing when he put someone who was avowedly pro-life into the Status of Women portfolio as a poke in the eye to the Liberals (for whom there are still some unhealed wounds over Trudeau’s dictate that the party is a pro-choice, full-stop), and it was an even bigger deliberate provocation to try and put her into the chair position of that committee, no matter how inappropriate it was to put a critic into that role. Of course, this is Scheer, so his timing has been inept enough that he created his own distraction from the tax proposal issue that he has been all sound and fury over (then tried to blame the Liberals for creating the distraction). It was also his way of provoking another round of discussion about the abortion issue without his having to deliberately raise it – he just ensured that the Liberals and NDP would do it for him, and he could stand back and accuse them of “politicizing” the issue, and then getting Harder to play victim.

Of course, some of the pundit class is trying to brand this as the Liberals being “in contempt of Parliament” (which is a specific Thing, and this is not it – and when you point that out, the correction is “having contempt for Parliament.”) Which is ridiculous. Walking out on votes is as much a parliamentary tradition as filibusters and any other procedural protest. And when it’s being done because someone wants to play provocateur in order to virtue signal to a portion of their base that they want to solidify, it’s all the more eye-roll inducing.

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Roundup: End of round one

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The first round of NAFTA talks has ended without any firm conclusions in one way or another, which is to be expected. It is also noted that they were free from any public drama, but it’s still early days, so we’ll see how long that lasts, especically considering that we’re dealing with an Uncertainty Engine for a president in the United States. While the US is signalling that Buy America is a non-negotiable in NAFTA talks, the PMO has assembled a crack unit to deal with the fallout of a US walkout on talks, seeing as Trump already played his walkout card months ago so it gave them time to prepare.

Meanwhile, trouble with NAFTA talks could mean an economic slowdown, as there have already been some signs of slowdown in the manufacturing sector, and expectations that GDP growth could start to slow for the remainder of the year. That having been said, there’s also talk that if the Trump administration tries to simply tear up NAFTA, there are recourses that Congress has at its disposal that would essentially work to keep the existing agreement up and running by backdoor means, but it’s messy and complicated (and you can see Alex Panetta talking about that starting at 10:51 on this Sunday Scrum segment).

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Roundup: Rural nomination angst

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In yesterday’s Hill Times, a few would-be Liberal candidates in rural ridings are talking about how they want nominations to start sooner than later, citing the challenges of rural life when it comes to door-knocking – owing to the difficulties of travel in the winter, the best time for them to meet constituents is in the summer and autumn. Hence, they want the nomination process to be over before summer 2018, so that they have a long lead-time to do the campaigning in large rural ridings – something that is less of an issue in urban ridings.

As far as suggestions go, it’s not a terrible one. I think that parties should have a fairly long lead-up with a nominated candidate, particularly in unheld ridings, so that they can do the work of grassroots engagement and get people involved in the process. This also being said, in a riding that has an incumbent, you also don’t want to run the nomination too early because an open nomination is also a way to hold that incumbent to account by their grassroots members, so if you hold the nomination too early, you don’t get as much of their tenure to judge them by. I know that some Liberals are agitating to have their nominations protected, while Conservatives have a threshold system in place to protect their nominations (which I am less keen on because it can short-circuit accountability), but I also know that the Liberals haven’t made up their minds how they’re dealing with nominations for 2019, which boggles the mind. Of course, this is part of the fallout of their wholesale party constitution rewrite (which, I will remind you, centralised even more power in the leader’s office at the expense of the grassroots), so we’ll see how they decide to deal with this, and how much lip-service they pay to the grassroots while still keeping their newly acquired centralized power. Suffice to say, nominations remain the most important part of our democratic process, so watching a party flail about it is never a good thing.

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Roundup: MPs shouldn’t become social convenors

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Sometimes when former politicians opine on their former profession, it can be insightful, and sometimes inspiring, but sometimes it can be gobsmackingly terrible. Former Ontario MPP and cabinet minister John Milloy ventures into the latter category with a piece in Policy Options on the “future of work” when it comes to parliamentarians. After Milloy correctly asserts that most parliamentarians don’t know their own job descriptions and that leaves them vulnerable to the machinations of unelected political staff, he veers off about how nobody trusts politicians anyway so their actual roles are becoming obsolete and hey, government is too slow to deal with policy in the modern world, so let’s turn our parliamentarians into social convenors.

No, seriously.

Apparently, the real drivers of change and action are service clubs, community groups and church organizations, so what parliamentarians should be doing is trying to bring those groups together to do stuff because they’re not community leaders anymore, so hey, they can be referees or coaches instead!

Head. Desk.

One would think that someone who used to be in elected politics like Milloy was would understand that the whole point of grassroots riding associations is to gather those kinds of voices around policy concerns, where they could help develop those into concrete proposals to bring to the party, or to communicate their concerns to the caucus (whether or not theirs is the elected MP in the riding). A properly run riding association has the hallmarks of service clubs or community groups because they provide both the social aspect around shared values, and work toward the care and feeding of political parties from the ground-up, the way that they’re supposed to. This is the kind of thing that we need to be encouraging if we want a properly functioning political system in this country. Instead, Milloy would see us let that atrophy and let outsiders shout from the side lines while the political staffers continue to consolidate power in the leaders’ offices. No, that’s not how politics are supposed to work. We can’t keep washing out hands of this and dismissing political organizations. Joining parties and getting involved is the way to make change happen, and as for MPs, we can’t just let this trend of self-made obsolesce go unchallenged. The “future of work” shouldn’t be irrelevance – it should be re-engaging with the system and actually doing their jobs. And shame on Milloy for abandoning his former profession to the wolves.

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