Boom goes the ClusterDuff yet again, as the RCMP laid 31 charges against Mike Duffy, relating to fraud, breach of trust, and bribery. (RCMP statement here). These charges relate to his housing expenses, his travel claims, the consulting contracts to the tune of $200,000, and the $90,000 cheque from Nigel Wright. Duffy will be in court on September 16th – the day after the House comes back. Duffy’s lawyer says that he’s content, which means that months of innuendo are over and it moves to a fair trial. The opposition reminds us that this is about Harper’s poor judgement. Kate Heartfield gives some questions that voters should be asking in the wake of this including who else benefitted from those payments, but absent from the list is the reminder that under the tenets of Responsible Government, Harper is the one who is accountable for appointing Duffy to the Senator. Don Martin writes about the political fallout of the charges today. Andrew Coyne wonders about Nigel Wright’s motives, and how it is that he wasn’t charged for giving the bribe (which leads one to believe that perhaps it was not so much his idea). Jonathan Gatehouse explores that issue a little more, and notes that Wright didn’t exactly benefit from the cheque, which may shield him from “corruptly” giving the cheque.
Tag Archives: Space
Roundup: Missing the point about parties
In a piece that bothers me immensely, Susan Delacourt puts forward the notion of abolishing political parties, and then applies a bunch of marginal reasons like branding and narrowing voter pools. The problem is that she ignored the whole point of political parties under Responsible Government – to have a group that can maintain the confidence of the Chamber in the formation of government. Which is actually a pretty big deal and why coalition governments don’t really work as well in our system as they might in others. “Oh, but Nunavut doesn’t have parties” or “most municipalities don’t have parties” people – including Delacourt – will cry, but it’s a nonsense argument because they have a small handful of members, and it doesn’t scale up to 308 MPs on any practical basis. You could not adequately run a government or maintain confidence with 308 “loose fish.” Also, the notion that brokerage is “antiquated” is false – otherwise we’d see all kinds of “bridges to nowhere” riders in government bills to get MPs onside to win support – again something that would be endemic with trying to get the support of a chamber of independents. That’s not to say that there aren’t problems with parties right now, because there are, but the solution is to have more people engaging with them so that the power doesn’t remain concentrated – not to simply throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sorry, but Delacourt’s argument has no merit.
Roundup: Momentum or not after the by-elections
I hope that everyone has enjoyed their Dominion Day celebrations. The Liberals and Conservatives certainly have, after their by-election wins, the Liberals not only holding Scarborough–Agincourt and winning Trinity–Spadina, but they made impressive gains in Fort McMurray–Athabasca. Their voter share went up in pretty much every one of the ridings, which probably says something. In fact, the Conservatives took less than 50 percent of the vote in Fort McMurray, which is actually a fairly significant thing, and perhaps not all that surprising given how upset they are with the changes made to the Temporary Foreign Workers Programme, which has a significant impact on their local economies, not to mention the myriad of ways in which the Harper government has ballsed up the Keystone XL file, and made it harder for the Americans to come to an agreement on it. As well, the Green Party scored more votes in Macleod than the NDP, which must also give them some pause as they keep insisting that they are making headway into Alberta. Kady O’Malley notes the increase in Liberal voter share, and the stumbling NDP momentum leading into 2015. Aaron Wherry muses about the meaning of the victories for Trudeau, and whether it really is disaster for Mulcair and that it probably wasn’t the NDP’s Outremont, as many Liberals were trying to suggest. Of course, with the really low voter turnouts (getting the turnout nerd crowd to declare that we need mandatory voting now), Pundit’s Guide looks at that factor, and how these contests may play out in 2015 after redistribution, which could be important once Fort McMurray–Athabasca gets broken up.
Roundup: Tutting and moralizing over the Senate
The National Post has an in-depth look at the issue of senators sitting on corporate boards, and it’s an interesting conversation but I’m not sure the tone of moralising really helps things. I think it needs to be more clearly acknowledged that until recently, most of these were “trophy appointments” on boards to give them prestige, and there was little real work involved. With recent changes in corporate governance, there is more of a due diligence model that is evolving with is becoming more onerous for senators to be involved with. And also with all due respect to Senator Hugh Segal, the work of the Senate is more than 80 or 90 days per year, given that most senators have a lot of committee work that extends beyond the sitting days of the chamber itself, as well as work on other projects that they are championing. I’m not sure that it’s as scandalous that the Senate rules are evolving to reflect these new realities, but we also need to be aware that in relative terms, most Senators don’t make a lot of money from being a Senator. It’s far less than an MP earns, and as has been stated many a time, most Senators take a pay cut upon appointment after an established career. I’m not sure that insisting they live lives of high-minded privation helps anyone. There were also arguments to be had that these kinds of directorships and activities were way by which Senators could still keep their feet in the “real world,” rather than to cloister themselves in the ivory tower that is the Red Chamber. As well, comparisons to the American Senate are not really applicable given the enormous differences between the two institutions, but they’re both called Senates, so it’s easy and lazy to try and cross-compare. So like I said – good conversation to have, but there are far more factors and context at play that should be recognized beyond the scope of this article.
Roundup: Ignoring previous suggestions
Our Officers of Parliament are saying that Mark Adler’s “witch-hunt” bill to ensure that they don’t have partisan pasts rings hollow considering that they jointly sent suggestions to the Commons about making their offices more transparent in the wake of the Christiane Ouimet affair, and nobody followed up on that. Of course they didn’t, as there wasn’t any partisan advantage to it.
Roundup: A new hope for leadership debts
One of the aspects of the new electoral reform bill that I was always wondering about – leadership fundraising – is being changed. Once it comes into force, contributions to leadership campaigns can be annual instead of lifetime, so that means that some of those former leadership candidates can start to fundraise from the same donors again. The bill doesn’t change the enforcement of those old debts, which was basically unenforceable. Meanwhile, Jason Kenney has said that the government would consider amending the bill at committee to include a ban on veiled voting, after a question by the Bloc about this. While David Christopherson may warn that it’s a dangerous game to find a wedge issue like this, he seems to forget that his party was also in favour of banning veiled voting when it was an issue in the Commons a couple of years ago. Stephen Maher points to the various flaws in the bill that require correcting – and all party support to make the whole endeavour legitimate. Andrew Coyne wonders just what problems the bill was intending to solve, because the provisions in the bill seem to be reflecting problems that aren’t actually there.
Roundup: A lost learning moment
It was an unusual scene, where the Speaker of the Senate arranged a media event inside the Senate chamber. His purpose was two-fold – to give a bit of a lesson to journalists about the history and role of the institution, as he was alarmed that the kinds of misinformation that he’d seen in the media over the past several months; he also wanted to try and answer as many questions as he could at once. Unfortunately, much of the former goal as a “learning moment” seemed lost on many of my media colleagues as they started asking him questions as though he were the person in charge, as opposed to the presiding officer, and as such, it’s not up to him if they end up calling Michael Runia or Senator Gerstein before committee, but rather, it has to be a decision of the Senate. What they did find out was that the Senate is cooperating on getting those emails requested by the RCMP, and that parliamentary privilege cannot shield senators from an investigation.
Roundup: A mess of Harper’s own creation
All eyes will be on the Supreme Court this week as the Senate reference goes ahead. The fact that there will only be two sitting Quebec justices is a major bone of contention, and highlights the mess that the government made of the whole appointment process. A mess, it needs to be said again, they didn’t need to make. On the subject of the reference question, this piece looking at the abolition of Quebec’s Legislative Council is a neat bit of history, but actually has almost no use in terms of abolishing the Senate because the provinces aren’t federations. I’m not sure why this is such a difficult concept for people to grasp, and yet they keep pointing to places like Nebraska, New Zealand and Sweden as places that don’t have upper chambers – never mind that they’re either unitary states or sub-national governments, and don’t have the same dual federalism concerns that Canada as a whole does, which is why we need a bicameral legislature.
Roundup: In no hurry to fill vacant seats
Stephen Harper says that he’s currently in no hurry to fill the five vacancies currently in the Senate. Which is all well and good, but he can’t let this reluctance to fill seats go on too long before he finds himself in breach of Section 24 of the Constitution. The appointment of Senators is an obligation – not an option.
In advance of the Liberal caucus retreat in PEI, which starts tomorrow, here’s a look at how the whole Trudeau pot admission is a calculated strategy to present him as a different kind of political leader compared to the others, and that this will hopefully outweigh the attacks about his perceived lack of judgement.
Roundup: A question of speaking fees
The desire to try and tarnish Justin Trudeau’s reputation took a somewhat bizarre twist yesterday as a New Brunswick charity decided to demand that Trudeau repay them for a speech they paid him for a year ago after the event they held flopped and they lost money. Odd that they asked nine months later, and that they are the party that wants to renege on a contract that they signed with the speaker’s bureau that Trudeau operates from, and that they seem to fail to understand that their failure to sell enough tickets to their event isn’t their own fault, but there you have it. (Also, as Scott Brison pointed out, they seemed thrilled by the event at the time). And never mind that this is all above board, that several other MPs and Senators also give speeches through the speaker’s bureau and that this has all been vetted by the Ethics Commissioner, and never mind the fact that Trudeau himself has been entirely above board and given an extremely high level of disclosure and transparency. These facts apparently don’t matter as the Conservatives have decided to characterise this as “millionaire” Trudeau “ripping-off charities.” And to make things all the more bizarre, Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall decided to join the pile-on and both demanded that Trudeau return the same fee he was paid to speak at a literacy conference in Saskatchewan, and then insinuated that he used the funds to bankroll his leadership campaign (to which his office demanded an apology, citing that all of his campaign expenses were above board and cleared by Elections Canada – and Wall offered a non-apology in return). Funnily enough, that same literacy conference didn’t demand the money back and thought that Trudeau was worth every penny.