The Senate feeding frenzy continues, complete with torqued headlines and inordinate amounts of time being given to the concern trolls in the NDP (who refuse to answer questions on whether they plan to campaign on opening the constitution if they truly believe in abolition). And why not? The Senate is an easy punching bag. More details continue to leak out, despite the fact that the full audit won’t be made public until Tuesday afternoon, which really makes one question who is doing the leaking and what their endgame is. The AG has hinted that it’s not his office doing the leaking, but if I were him, I’d be steaming mad about these leaks which are casting a pall over the report itself, and fuelling this breathless and hysterical coverage that remains to date largely devoid of a great many facts. The concern trolling over the two leaders and the Speaker has been particularly odious, and it’s hard to take these cries of apparent conflict of interest seriously when you look at the facts regarding their actual involvement and what they knew about their spending claims – just because they got requests for additional information, it didn’t mean that they knew they would be in the final report, and none of the three are being accused of any particular criminality. It was also made known that the Prime Minister wouldn’t have known that there were a couple of questioned expenses for Senator Housakos when he was appointed Speaker, but hey, PMO-conspiracy theorists won’t believe it regardless. While Senator Boisvenu stepped down from the Conservative caucus for the investigation, Liberal Senator Colin Kenny put out a release saying his response in the audit will speak for itself. Former Senator Gerry St. Germain disputes that he’s done anything wrong, as did Former Senator Don Oliver, and well, pretty much every one of the nine that were flagged for being egregious. It also bears mentioning that the audit itself cost over $21 million, and found less than a million in questionable spending, and that number is likely to drop dramatically once the arbitration process gets underway and a number of these cases are found to have been value judgements on the part of auditors (and yes, this is an actual problem with the way this was conducted). Some MPs and Senators think that MPs should have their own books looked over, and wouldn’t you know it, there are a whole lot of MPs who resist that notion – particularly the ones who have been so vocal about the Senate allegations. Meanwhile, the lawyers for suspended senators Wallin, Brazeau and Duffy are whinging that it’s not fair that their clients didn’t have access to this arbitration process, but there was a process at the time that they could have availed themselves to. There have been a lot of problems with procedural fairness with the way their cases were handled, and political expediency was the order of the day coming from the government’s side, but that doesn’t actually excuse any of the potential wrongdoing that they are alleged to have done, most of which far exceeds what most of the senators apparently named in the report did.
Tag Archives: Stéphane Dion
Roundup: Economic bluster
The mood of the moment on the Hill is economic bluster in the light of falling oil prices and a delayed budget – not that there wasn’t some bluster around the Iraq mission to go around either. The NDP announced early on that they want an immediate fiscal update, the subject of today’s opposition day motion – along with the demand to create a budget that suits their particular terms, naturally. The government, however, spent the day playing as if nothing is really wrong. Sure, they’ve lost some manoeuvring room, but they insisted that they will a) balance the budget, b) deliver on all of their promises, and c) not make any more cuts, though one presumes that means any more cuts on top of the continued austerity programme that their whole “surplus” was built on. They can’t really explain how this will happen, other than to use the $3 billion contingency fund, to which Oliver has started talking about how it’s there to be spent and it’ll just go on the bottom line (i.e. national debt payments) otherwise. I will make the additional observations that the NDP were trying to roll the Target layoffs into their lamentations of economic doom and demands for a “jobs programme,” the Liberals were more focused on getting the actual figures for the hole in the budget that the drop in oil prices created and pointed out that Oliver has the information and wasn’t sharing it. It was a noticeable distinction.
https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/559804485556781058
https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/559804578800357376
Roundup: $3.1 billion in sloppy record keeping
The Auditor General released a report yesterday, and it was a bit of a doozy, at least with regards to the revelation that some $3.1 billion in anti-terror funding is not properly accounted for. Not that it’s actually been misspent, but the recordkeeping is a bit sloppy, and some of it was victim to a “whole of government approach,” according to Tony Clement. Among other issues the AG cited – that our search and rescue infrastructure is headed for total systems failure, that they need to crack down on EI overpayments, problems with expense claims by the Old Port of Montreal, and that there are problems with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as it is beset by conflict with other federal departments over documents. John Ivison says the report is like ‘manna’ for the NDP, and I can hardly wait for the number of times that Thomas Mulcair gets to say “failure of good public administration” over the next several days.
Roundup: Blocking the Auditor General
The House of Commons (as its own entity rather than its occupants) is taking the Auditor General to Federal Court to block an Access to Information request around his correspondence for his committee appearances. The House says this is about parliamentary privilege, and the AG says that privilege doesn’t extend to his office. Kady O’Malley delves further into this, but it does seem unlikely that the Courts could even weigh in on this, and there is also that wee little fact that Parliament is a court in and of itself. Both the PMO and the Liberals say that they’re willing to waive privilege in this case. It was later revealed that the NDP were the originators of said ATIP request, which just makes this all the more curious.
Iran has responded to our embassy closures, and calls it “unwise, uncivilised, and hostile.” Brian Stewart looks at some of the possible intelligence that may have prompted the pullout, and wonders if it wasn’t threats on Canadian soil that they were more concerned with. The ousted Iranian charé d’affairs insists that they did nothing wrong. Meanwhile, Thomas Mulcair seems to be distancing himself from some of Paul Dewar’s comments regarding the embassy closures.
Roundup: Pipeline review deadline set
The federal government has imposed a December 2013 deadline on the environmental panel review of the Northern Gateway pipeline. Which is all well and good, provided that the proponent – Enbridge – has their files together and doesn’t delay their own paperwork so that other respondents can get their reviews done in time, as has happened with other panels. In fact, the government should stipulate that Enbridge should face a penalty if it engages in such behaviour, for what it’s worth.
Rumours of Katimavik’s demise may be exaggerated. It seems that with the starvation of federal funds, they are picking up sponsorship from elsewhere for programming that they offer, and may be able to carry on in some capacity after all.
Conservative MP Brent Rathgeber continues to do his job as a backbench MP and hold the government to account, this time on the policy of Supply Management. More backbench MPs should follow his lead.
Bernier can’t identify our Head of State
Our nation’s lack of civic literacy truly has reached crisis proportions when ministers of the Crown can’t even identify the very basic parts of our system of government. I’ve written before about the public’s general lack of understanding of the Canadian monarchy, and our need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the monarchy is somehow “foreign” because the Queen doesn’t live in the country full-time. It’s an issue of education and awareness. I get it.
But when a minister of the Crown can’t even make this distinction, there is a problem. And a really big one at that.
Roundup: Omnibudget off to committee
The omnibus budget bill has passed Second Reading without any procedural trickery, and is off to committee for study, while it also begins pre-study in a number of different Senate committees. The NDP, however, are promising “novel” ways to engage the public on the issue. My question is why it’s taken them two weeks to start engaging the public.
The reaction to John Baird’s outburst in QP yesterday that they were shutting down the National Round Table on Environment and the Economy because they didn’t like their recommendations has largely been “told you so.” (Said outburst included a slip where he said a carbon tax would “kill Canadians” when he obviously meant “kill jobs.”) While some people say that everything Baird says is calculated, I’m not so sure – this had a bit more of a tone of mocking and an attempt to goad the Liberals that may have backfired, and I suspect that he may have been given a stern talking to by PMO, and will be reading his responses during his next turn as back-up PM.
Wishful thinking and unrealistic expectations – Dion’s proposed electoral reform
Last weekend, Stéphane Dion took to the pages of the National Post to suggest that Canada needs a new voting system. It’s not the first time such suggestions have been made, and it certainly won’t be the last, but that doesn’t make each new suggestion any better than the last, and Dion’s suggestion is certainly problematic.
Dion proposes that Canada adopt what he calls a “P3” voting system – proportional-preferential-personal. The theory is that there would be the same number of ridings, but super-sized to have three to five MPs per riding, which voters would select party preferences by means of preferential ballot, while at the same time choosing one of the candidates put forward by each party. The proposed method of counting is that first seats are apportioned according to the preferential ballot, and those seats are assigned by highest-ranking candidates for those parties.