Tag Archives: Supreme Court

Roundup: Ambrose rules out a return

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It was a day of a lot of movement within the Conservative leadership race, with big repercussions to come. Early in the day, we got word that two more names were added to the Conservative race – rookie backbencher Derek Sloan, and failed leadership candidate (and aspiring narcissist) Rick Peterson. Sloan has already come out and said that he’s open to having a debate over abortion, and he’s putting forward this absurd notion that they need to stop being apologetic about being Conservative – which would be great if the party actually put forward conservative ideas like market-based solutions to problems rather than just populist pandering. Shocking. Peterson, meanwhile, is continuing his schtick that his business success is going to translate to political success, even though he did abysmally in the last election and couldn’t secure a nomination to run in the election, which shows you just how profound his organizational skills are. Nevertheless, expect him to position himself as the “Western” candidate in the race.

And then the big bombshell – Rona Ambrose announced that she is officially out of the race. It wasn’t a surprise really, especially as word has been circulating in Conservative circles that she hasn’t made any phone calls or secured any kind of organization while she considered her options. Nevertheless, it now opens the race wide open because a lot of people who had been holding their breath and waiting for Ambrose to make a move can now make their own moves. It also means that currently, Marilyn Gladu is the only woman in the race, which can’t be healthy for the party either. (It also makes me wonder who the Red Tory in this race is going to be, because it’s not actually Peter MacKay).

And just minutes after Ambrose made her announcement, another would-be candidate, former staffer Richard Décarie went on Power Play to expound on his social conservative views. It went as well as can be expected.

While most of the other candidates quickly came out to condemn these comments, there are a few things to note here – Décarie is worth following because he has attracted some organizational heft, particularly from those who were behind Tanya Granic Allen in Ontario, and it’s not insignificant, and when you recall that Brad Trost did come in fourth the last time around. There is a particularly strong social conservative organization within the party, and they do a lot of fundraising and organizing, and that can’t be overlooked when it comes to a leadership race, where those to factors are going to count for a lot more.

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Roundup: When lower carbon is not lower carbon

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As the various interests trying to promote the continued development of Alberta’s energy sector amidst changing global markets and the need to move to a carbon-constrained future, one is bound to find a number of arguments that are inherently self-serving and containing falsehoods (such as the fiction that Andrew Scheer and Jason Kenney keep trying to promote that somehow Alberta energy can reduce the environmental footprint in China and India, and that we can take their emissions credits for it). Energy economist Andrew Leach found another one promulgated by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (which I will remind you is an organization that has gone so far to the one side that major players like Royal Dutch Shell have withdrawn from the group, because they understand the need for mechanisms like carbon pricing).

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Roundup: Congeniality by way of TV

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Maclean’s has a profile of the TVO series Political Blind Date, which pits politicians from rival parties – sometimes from the same level of government, sometimes from different provinces – in situations that help them understand each other’s viewpoints and helps to break down the partisanship barriers. And this is great – but what it was missing was any particular context as to why partisanship has grown to such toxic levels in the first place, and that has a lot to do with parliaments and legislatures rejigging their rules to be more “family friendly.”

Until the early 1990s, parliament used to hold evening sittings three nights a week. At six o’clock, the House would adjourn, and everyone would head upstairs to the Parliamentary Restaurant (aided by the fact that there was a dearth of restaurant options in the area, and liquor laws were such that you bought a bottle of booze that was kept behind the bar in the restaurant with your name on it). MPs would eat together, drink together, get to know one another across party lines, and it developed a sense of congeniality, and at eight o’clock, they’d head back to the Chamber and debate for a couple of more hours. The arrival of the Reform Party and the move to end evening sittings to be “family friendly” ended the congeniality and cross-party opportunities to just be parliamentarians together. With no impetus to break bread together, caucuses grew insular, and it became easier to treat other parties as the enemy rather than just having opposing points of view. Now, it’s rare that cross-party friendships occur unless there is committee travel that helps MPs bond, but that’s not very often. It’s disappointing that we are now relying on a TV show to build these relationships which used to be part and parcel of being an MP.

What’s particularly sad is that this kind of thing is now infecting the Senate, which used to be a far less partisan place than the House of Commons, and for which many senators have formed close and long-lasting friendships across the aisle. They still have more of the convivial culture that the Commons did, but that too is fading as the new Independents, eager to burn things down and declare anyone with partisan affiliation to be tainted and in some cases the enemy (particularly the Conservatives), it is polarizing the Chamber, and souring the mood therein. For a move that was supposed to lessen partisanship, Trudeau’s brilliant attempt to reform the Senate is doing the opposite – just one more unintended consequence that nobody bothered to consider, and all Canadians suffer as a result.

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Roundup: Testing names in the field

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Over the weekend, I got a call from a public opinion research company who was doing a survey on the Conservative leadership race. While many of the questions were fairly loaded or leading when it came to things like carbon pricing, and there were a lot of questions relating to just how progressive one thinks a future Conservative leader should be, I was most fascinated by the testing about potential candidates. There was an open-ended opportunity to provide a name that one might think could entice voters to switch to the Conservative party, followed by a list of names where one was invited to rank how much it would make you switch your vote for the Conservatives. That list: Gerard Deltell, former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, Doug Ford, Jason Kenney, Jean Charest, Peter MacKay, Rona Ambrose, Lisa Raitt, Pierre Poilievre, Erin O’Toole, and Christy Clark. The inclusion of Carney is a head-scratcher considering that there was a Big Deal a few years ago about his apparently sniffing around the Liberals about a possible future leadership bid, while the fact that Michael Chong was left out despite his previous leadership run and the fact that he has stated he is seriously considering another go of it. So anyway, make of the list what you will, but those are the names that someone is testing.

Meanwhile, the first “official” declared candidate is Bryan Brulotte, a one-time Progressive Conservative staffer and failed candidate, who is pitching a negative income tax and “luxury tax” in lieu of a carbon price. Pierre Poilievre is also planning to announce his candidacy today, with John Baird chairing his campaign – though one wonders if that will conflict with his post-mortem report on how the party botched the election.

On that note, here’s Jess Morgan’s argument why he would be the absolute worst thing, while Paul Wells sizes up what we know of the race to date, and what kinds of choices the party faces in the process.

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Roundup: Building the Teck narrative

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While some of Jason Kenney’s usual mouthpieces and apologists start agitating for the Teck Frontier oilsands mine, it seems we need yet more reality checks about the project – particularly the economics. Because we have seen on more than one occasion where a project that wasn’t economically viable still achieves mythology status because certain people who think the idea of it is great will lie about its fate in order to suit their narratives *cough*Energy East*cough*. Anyway, here’s Andrew Leach with more.

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Roundup: Enter the QP scolds

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With the return of Parliament comes the inevitable return of the sanctimonious commentary around the behaviour of MPs in the House of Commons. Already we had Scott Gilmore insisting that MPs “not be assholes,” and this eyeroll-inducing plea from Tamara Miller that goes on about grade eight students. What Miller seems to forget is that the House of Commons is not a classroom. Question Period is not a lecture or a seminar course where all sides discuss this week’s assigned reading. It’s political theatre, and it’s an exercise in holding government to account, and that isn’t always done with dry recitations of scripts and polite golf claps.

The other thing that I keep needing to drill into people is that Question Period is not the totality of what happens in the Commons. The rest of the day you are more likely to be in danger of narcolepsy than you are of hearing heckling or other boorish behaviour. Committees are generally fairly well behaved, but if there’s a contentious issue then parties will send in their ringers to put on a show when they know people are watching. It’s political theatre. Is it always pleasant? No. But most of the hours of the day aren’t anywhere near what happens in QP, and that’s fine. There is also nothing wrong with heckling per se – some of it is very legitimate, whether it’s cross-talk when ministers are saying things that aren’t true, or when they’re not answering the question but rather just reading non sequitur talking points – as happens too often. I don’t think that MPs should just sit on their hands and be silent when they’re being spun or insulted to their faces by some of what governments – regardless of stripe – pull. Does this mean that all behaviour is acceptable? No – there is a lot of behaviour that is more akin to jeering, hooting baboons than to parliamentarians, and yes, some of it is sexist and bullying, but not all of it, but it should be incumbent upon parties and the Speaker to police the excesses, but the constant tut-tutting about any heckling is frankly gag-inducing.

This having been said, should MPs behave better in QP? Sure. The clapping ban the Liberals instituted helps tremendously (when it’s obeyed – it had pretty much broken down toward the end of the last parliament), and frankly, it makes Scheer and Singh look terribly insecure by comparison if they require ovations every time they stand up to speak when Trudeau doesn’t. But honestly, I can’t think of anything worse than the way that these scolds imagine that QP should be.

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Roundup: The call is coming from inside the caucus room

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The hits just keep coming for Andrew Scheer, as one of his MPs came out vocally against his leadership yesterday. In the wake of the fairly low-key announcement of his Shadow Cabinet, it was quickly noticed that Ed Fast was not on said list, and Fast himself said that he was asked to be part of it and he declined, saying that Scheer should be surrounded by people loyal to his leadership, while Fast has concerns about it. Up until this moment, Scheer’s loyalists were dismissing those vocally and publicly calling for Scheer to step down as being Toronto elites and sore losers that go back to leadership rivals. Fast’s public denouncement puts a lie to this narrative.

Let’s face it – public dissent in caucus is rare because we have virtually eliminated all of the incentives for it. Our bastardized leadership selection process has leaders claiming a “democratic legitimacy” that they use to intimidate MPs into not challenging them, because it goes against the “will of the grassroots” (and to hell with that MP’s voters, apparently). We gave party leaders the power to sign off on nomination forms with the purest of intentions and it quickly got perverted into a tool of blackmail and iron-fisted discipline. Pretty much the only time MPs will speak out is if they have nothing to lose, and Fast is in that position – he could retire tomorrow and be all the better for it. And it’s when the dissent goes public that leaders really need to worry because that means that it’s happening by those inside the caucus room who aren’t saying anything out loud. Provincially, we’ve seen instances of it taking only one or two MLAs coming out publicly for leaders to see the writing on the wall and resign. The caucus may be bigger in Ottawa, but the sentiment is increasingly out in the open – that can’t be sustainable.

Scheer later went to the annual UCP convention in Calgary, where he was predictably given a fairly warm welcome– but he shouldn’t rest on this applause because he doesn’t need to win Alberta – he already has their votes, and they’re not enough to carry the country, no matter how much they increase their vote share. He needs seats in Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada, and he is having a hard time cracking those areas, in particular because of his social conservatism and the UCP convention isn’t going to be the place to go to get honest feedback about that problem. It’s a bubble, and a trap that becomes too easy to feel that there is nothing wrong if he stays in it too long.

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Roundup: Middle Class™ is a state of mind

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I don’t really want to engage in a pile-on, but the fact that the new Minister of Middle Class™ Prosperity® was doing the media rounds and imploding on trying to offer a definition of just what is Middle Class™ was not a good start to her ministerial career – not to mention an indictment of the comms geniuses in the PMO who sent her out there unprepared. You would think that actually having a working definition of what is “middle class” would be an important thing to equip a minister with when you give her the portfolio – particularly when you wrap up an otherwise sober role of Associate Minister of Finance with this ridiculous title. And there are a couple of very serious points to make here – if you can’t actually define what “middle class” means, then you have no actual way of measuring your success in dealing with the perceived issues of income disparity – which this government has been using Middle Class™ as a code for without trying to sound like they’re engaging in class warfare. But as a branding exercise, when you rely on the fact that everyone thinks they’re “middle class” or about to be – particularly people who are well over what is actually middle class in this country – it’s one of those things that tends to flatter people, but becomes meaningless – essentially that Middle Class™ is a state of mind. Mona Fortier did, over the course of the day, transition from “it involves your kids being in hockey” to “there’s no one definition” because of regional variations and disparities, but it was a bit of a trial by fire, and hopefully a lesson that she – and the comms geniuses in PMO – will take to heart.

All of this talk of being Middle Class™ does bring me back to this scene from the early noughties UK sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme, where being Middle Class was a Thing.

Meanwhile, Chris Selley makes the very salient point that this government has moved the needle on poverty in this country, but the problems we’re facing aren’t with the Middle Class™, and perhaps they should put a focus on those areas instead.

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Roundup: Big numbers for hate clicks

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I’m not a big fan of pieces that construct data in a way to give the worst possible reading, with the intention of making readers angry, because it’s not only bad journalism but it’s irresponsible because our job should be about providing context – not weaponizing it for hate-clicks. And yet, here is a shoddy piece from the National Post designed entirely for the purpose of stoking the fires of the supposed anger in Western Canada right now, by producing a piece which purports to show how Alberta is basically funding Quebec. Oh, they’ll say – this is all Statistics Canada data! But as with any statistical data, it is dependent upon how it is contextualized and presented, and in this case, it’s in terms of “net fiscal transfers” without breaking out what that entails, nor does it actually explain equalization in any way. The most nuanced the piece gets is citing economist Trevor Tombe who reminds people that Albertans pay more in taxes because they have the highest incomes in the country – but it doesn’t then explain that those taxes go to federal general revenues, which then get distributed in programs, which can include equalization. There is no talk about equalization being about the fiscal capacity of a province and ensuring that they can have an equal level of service compared to other provinces, and how that is impacted by their provincial tax rates, or the fact that Alberta has chosen to keep its provincial taxes artificially low and making up the shortfalls with the revenues from their non-renewable resources. The favourite figure is how much Quebec gets in equalization payments, ignoring that on a per capita share, Quebec’s equalization is actually below most other provinces. These are all figures and context that matters – simply throwing big figures around is only designed to make people angry. It’s shite journalism, and yet here we are, yet again.

And speaking of fiscal transfers, here’s a look at how the $1.6 billion that the federal government has been using to bail out Alberta after their last oil crash has nearly fully been paid out, while the province keeps insisting that Ottawa has been “indifferent” to their situation.

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Roundup: Judicial review and missing nuance

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There was a development regarding a First Nations court challenge, which I’ll discuss in a moment, but first up, the campaign news. Jagmeet Singh was in Saskatoon to essentially re-announce his plans to “immediately” implement dental care – again, omitting that it’s provincial jurisdiction and he has no way of forcing provinces to do the heavy lifting – before he headed to Thunder Bay.

Justin Trudeau didn’t announce anything but met with voters at a restaurant in Quebec City, followed by a media availability where he assured everyone that his views have evolved from when, in 2011, he said he was personally against abortion but was pro-choice. He says he’s now totally pro-choice because his previous stance didn’t really make any sense – something he probably felt he needed to make clear when it was remarked that his position and Scheer’s were very similar in personally opposing abortion. Later on, he was at a tree planting with a candidate in Saint-Anaclet, Quebec, where he addressed the lawsuit issue (and again, more on that in a moment).

Andrew Scheer was in Etobicoke, where he re-announced the party’s platform as regards gun control and gangs – and much like his foreign aid announcement, this one was also based on a series of lies about bail and sentencing. More to the point, Scheer pledged more mandatory minimum sentences – which the courts keep striking down – and pledging to fight for them in court tooth and nail, so he wants to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to fight for unconstitutional laws for the sake of symbolism, apparently. But this was overshowed by yet more questions about his dual-citizenship, including his need to file US taxes, and being registered for “selective service,” meaning the draft.

But back to the court challenge, which was news that the government had applied to the Federal Court for judicial review of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decision that would award compensation to every First Nations child who had been apprehended by child and family services. Immediately there was a hue and cry, and plenty of outrage (some of it performative), and a lot of hot takes from journalists who failed to understand the nuances in legal stories. And while I’m not a lawyer, I have been on the law beat for several years now, and I can say that oftentimes, these kinds of appeals are made on technical grounds because in the law, precise wording matters, particularly when one is concerned about the precedents it sets. Both Seamus O’Regan and Trudeau did address this in the media saying that they agree that the government failed these children and that they are owed compensation, but they need time to determine how to do it right, but they can’t do that during a writ period (which is appropriate, given the Caretaker convention, especially as this is worth billions of dollars). Ah, but these clever reporters said, the documents say that they are opposed to the compensation award. Now, I haven’t had a chance to read the application because it’s not online, but the CBC describes it thusly:

The application says Canada acknowledges the finding of systematic discrimination and does not oppose the general principle of compensating First Nations individuals affected by a discriminatory funding model — but it argues awarding compensation to individuals in this claim is inconsistent with the nature of the complaint, the evidence, past jurisprudence and the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Now, there are clues in here as to what the government is arguing, primarily that the Tribunal exceeded its authority to make this kind of compensation order based on the kind of human rights complaint that was brought before it, including exceeding their statutory authority. So that’s not a small thing if that’s the case. And it’s a hell of a lot of nuance in the story that deserves to be explained. Any government is going to be concerned if a Tribunal exceeds its authority to make these kinds of orders, because that will impact future cases with future governments – no matter that they feel this case is deserving of compensation. But this very important detail has been completely glossed over in the search for outrage takes, which means that the reporting is doing a disservice to all parties involved.

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