Tag Archives: The Monarchy

Roundup: Trans Mountain decision day?

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It looks like today will be the day we get some kind of answer on the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain expansion pipeline, and everything will likely be confirmed in the morning as Cabinet meets earlier than usual. The three options on the table are the previously announced indemnification, as well as the option to either buy the pipeline outright (though I’m not sure if that means just the expansion or the original pipeline itself that the expansion twins) in order to sell it once the expansion completes construction, or temporarily buying it long enough to sell it to someone else who will complete construction. The word from Bloomberg’s sources is that the government is likely to buy it outright, on the likely option of buying it long enough to find someone who can guarantee its completion.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1001288600967827456

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1001294404836085760

As for what this will mean politically, you can bet that there will be no end to the howls of outrage from both opposition parties – from the Conservatives, we’ll hear that this never should have happened, and it’s only because of the federal government’s incompetence that it did. (While one can certainly question their competence in a number of areas, this is one where they had few good options, and no, a court reference or a pipeline bill would not have helped because they already have the necessary jurisdiction they need). The NDP, meanwhile, will howl that this is a betrayal of their promises on the environment and the rights of First Nations, and that it pays billions to “Texas billionaires” rather than Canadians, and so on (though one would imagine that the NDP should be all for nationalizing infrastructure projects). And one can scarcely imagine the invective we’ll hear from Jason Kenney, as helpful as that will be. Suffice to say, the next few days (and weeks) will likely be even more dramatic that they have been. Because this time of year isn’t crazy enough in Parliament without this.

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Roundup: Not the constitutional crisis you were looking for

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After much drama and back-and-forth between the two chambers, the Senate passed the omnibus transport bill yesterday after the Commons rejected their amendments a second time. Once again, we did not get the constitutional crisis that we were promised, and we’ll get a whole new round of back-patting that the Senate did its job, because at least a few of the amendments were accepted (even though the larger problem remains that many of the ones that were rejected saw no debate, nor were reasons for rejecting them provided other than the government “respectfully disagrees,” which is not a reason).

Amidst this, the Conservative Senate leader, Senator Larry Smith, penned a response in Policy Optionsto Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative” Senator Peter Harder’s previous op-ed about the apparent use of a Salisbury Convention in the Canadian Senate (which was false). The problem there, however, is that Smith didn’t really rebut anything about the Salisbury Convention or lack thereof. Rather, he went on about how the prime minister is trying to walk back on his promise of a more independent Senate by means of their rejection of the bulk of the amendments to the transport bill, and the apparent orchestration through Harder of a policy of trying to tell senators how to vote (as in, pass bills even though we say that we don’t want you to be a rubber stamp). And while I sympathise with many of his points, I’m not convinced by his overarching thesis.

Despite the fact that many a Conservative senator keeps trying to promulgate a series of conspiracy theories, from the fact that the new Independent senators are all just crypto-Liberals that are being whipped to vote a certain way, that they are trying to “destroy the opposition” in the Senate, or in this case, that the PM is trying to undermine his own pledge for independence via Harder’s patently unhelpful suggestions. But part of the problem is that on the face of it, none of these really stack up. While we can’t deny that many of the new senators have government sympathies, I wouldn’t consider them partisans in the same sense. The issues of their block-voting has more to do with their anxieties about accidentally voting down government legislation than it is about their being whipped to vote a certain way. And frankly, the biggest reason why I sincerely doubt that Trudeau is conspiring with Harder is the fact that there has been so little competence being demonstrated by Harder and his office when it comes to management of the agenda in the Senate that it seems more than implausible that there is any kind of coordination happening, particularly since I know that there are people in Trudeau’s and Bardish Chagger’s offices who know how the Senate works, and we’re not seeing their input. And the longer that the Conservatives keep pushing these woeful conspiracies, the more they undercut their own position on maintain a level of status quo in the Senate that is probably beneficial in the longer term. But they never seem to learn this lesson, and it may cost them, and the institution, as a result.

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Roundup: A moment for the Queen of Canada

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In light of Victoria Day and the celebration of the official birthday of the Queen of Canada (yes, they’re the same day), here are a few gems about the Queen of Canada, and the monarchy in general.

https://twitter.com/Canadian_Crown/status/998596864311209985

https://twitter.com/Canadian_Crown/status/998572925249867776

Actor Stephen Fry talks about how the monarch keeps politicians in their place, and while it may seem “kind of preposterous” it a system that works. As he says. “If it works, it’s very foolish to get rid of it, even if it’s unreasonable.”

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/998568760003907584

And let’s not forget that Queen Victoria ensured that we have Responsible Government here in Canada.

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Roundup: An unnecessary proposal to cover for abdicated responsibility

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When Parliament resumes next week, and the final push of legislation before the summer break starts, I can pretty much guarantee that there will be some gnashing and wailing of teeth in the Senate about the crush of bills headed their way, and the fact that there isn’t a plan to manage it. And from Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative,” Senator Peter Harder, we’ll get a reminder that he’s proposed a business committee to do said managing of the Order Paper. And lo, in Policy Options yesterday, we got an endorsement of the notion of a business committee from a former political science professor, Paul G. Thomas, which read a lot like it was could have been commissioned by Harder’s office.

To wit: One of the reasons why I object to the creation of a business committee is because it will create a powerful clique that will determine the legislative agenda of the chamber in a manner that has the very real possibility of trampling on the rights of individual senators in the name of expediency. Currently the rules allow for any senator to speak to any item on the Order Paper on any day – something Thomas notes has the potential to delay business, but under most circumstances, this can be managed through negotiation, and if abused, a vote can be used to clear that obstruction. But what Thomas’ glowing endorsement of the notion of a committee ignores is the fact that sometimes, it can take time for a senator who sees a problem with legislation to rally other senators to the cause. We have seen examples of that in the current parliament, with bills like S-3, which wound up getting majority support from senators to fix the flaws in the bill, or even with the amendments to the omnibus transportation bill last week, where Senator Griffin’s speech convinced enough senators that there was a real problem that the amendment was meant to correct. Having a business committee strictly lay out timelines will stifle the ability for the Senate to do its work when sometimes it needs time to do the work properly.

One of the reason why this kind of committee should be unnecessary is because the Senate has operated for 151 years on the basis of the caucuses negotiating the timelines they need at daily “scroll meetings,” but it requires actual negotiation for it to happen, and since Harder took on the role of Government Leader, he has eschewed his responsibilities to do so, believing that any horse-trading is partisan. Several of the new Independent senators follow a similar mindset, which is a problem. And while Thomas acts as Harder’s apologist in trying to downplay the criticism that a business committee will simply allow Harder to stage manage the legislative process – and it is a possibility that he could, but only in a situation where there are no party caucuses any longer, and that the Senate is 105 loose fish that he could co-opt as needed – my more immediate concern is that he would use the committee to avoid his actual responsibilities of negotiation and shepherding the government’s agenda, more so than he already has. We already don’t know what he’s doing with this $1.5 million budget and expansive staff, so if he is able to fob off even more responsibility onto this clique, what else does that leave him to do with his budget and staff? It’s a question we still don’t have any answers to, and yet another reason why the creation of such a committee is likely to lead to more problems than it does solutions that aren’t actually necessary if he did his job.

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Roundup: On the state of federal disarray

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Yesterday, Manitoba premier Brian Pallister took to the airwaves to declare that the Canadian federation is in a state of disarray, much like Alberta’s wannabe premier Jason Kenney declared that “Canada is broken” earlier in the week. And on the face of it, one could point to places where things don’t appear to be working, where you have a nation of fiefdoms of provinces who make their own rules and who don’t talk to one another – why we don’t have proper interprovincial free trade – and all of the petty bits of provincial protectionism that still exist, 150 years later (thanks in large part to the Judicial Council of the Privy Council, which was the final court of appeal in the early days of confederation, who undermined the Founding Fathers’ goal of a more robust federal government).

But this all aside, I have to look at Pallister, Kenney, and the rest, and point out to them that they’re absolute hypocrites for saying that the country isn’t working when they’re ones who make and continue to make contradictory demands about what is and is not federal jurisdiction. In the very same breath, they’ll demand that the federal government exert its constitutional authority to get a pipeline built, while simultaneously decrying that the federal government’s imposition of a carbon price is unconstitutional – never mind the fact that the carbon price is part of the political deal that is aimed at getting that pipeline approved. In other words, exert your authority only on things that I like, but not the things I don’t. It’s so self-serving and gross, but they play too cute by half about it. Every single one of them, handily handing off responsibility to the federal government when it suits them, and using the courts as a political tool to engage in political theatre – which, by the way, is abusing the courts.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/989987469197131776

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/989988567962152960

To that end, Alberta premier Rachel Notley is offering up a very real warning – that using the courts in these ways could open up much bigger problems that would cause interprovincial gridlock, all because BC premier John Horgan is looking to protect his minority government’s confidence deal with the Green Party. And as far as reasons go for trying to further exacerbate the state of the federation, it’s not a very good or noble one, no matter how much one wraps themselves in the cause of the environment or First Nations.

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Roundup: Carbon tax figures in context

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The Parliamentary Budget Officer released his latest economic and fiscal outlook yesterday, which included some not unexpected things like warnings that the deficit might be larger than anticipated, or that debt servicing charges might start to increase, or that some government programmes may wind up costing more than stated in the budget. All fair game. But it was his analysis of the federal carbon price that really go the Conservatives (and their mouthpieces) excited – and as usual, it was an exercise in cherry-picked numbers that ignored the context of what was actually said.

In this particular case, the headline number was that by 2022, when the full $50/tonne price is implemented, the price could – and one has to stress could– cost the economy 0.5 percent of GDP, or $10 billion. And this had the Conservatives, and Pierre Polievere in particular, whooping at the government about how this was going to kill the economy. The problem is that the report goes on to say that if provincial governments actually recycle those revenues through reducing corporate or personal income taxes, for example, it would nullify that effect. Not that things like context or nuance, or even truth will dissuade a political talking point. University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe explains more here:

Tombe also found this bit of the report overlooked by other media reports:

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Roundup: A return to “bold” policy

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The federal NDP had their biannual policy convention over the weekend, and Jagmeet Singh’s leadership was “reaffirmed” when some 90 percent of delegates voted not to have a leadership review. So they’ll keep giving him a chance despite his intransigence in not running for a seat, apparently. And while they got a new party executive, and talked about how they need to do better when it comes to dealing with the harassment allegations in their own ranks that went ignored (particularly around Peter Stoffer), they also decided it was time to return to “bold” policy ideas after a fairly timid electoral platform the last time around. Not so bold, mind you, as to embrace the Leap Manifesto, which went unspoken during the convention despite rumours that it would rear its head once again, but rather, they went for things like universal pharmacare, dental care, and free tuition – you know, things that are the ambit of the provinces. Oh, and re-opening the constitution, as though that’s not going to be any small hurdle. (The free tuition debate, meanwhile, took over Economist Twitter over the weekend because the NDP’s adherents have a hard time understanding how a universal programme actually disproportionately benefits the wealthy rather than applying targeted benefits that would benefit those who are less well-off).

https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/965304844369125376

Chantal Hébert, meanwhile, finds the same core message of the NDP unchanged despite the changing slogans. There is some disagreement about that.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/965588988487610368

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Roundup: The emancipation of Lynn Beyak

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Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, along with his Senate caucus leader, Senator Larry Smith, announced last night that troublesome Senator Lynn Beyak had been kicked out of caucus after she refused to remove blatantly racist “letters of support” from her website. In true Scheer form, he not only didn’t effectively manage the situation, but waited until there was a media storm before he backed down, just as he did with deciding not to give any more interviews to Rebel Media post-Charlottesville, or having to back down somewhat on his campus free-speech zealotry in the wake of another incident (though he did get back on that bandwagon again after the whole Lindsay Sheppard incident).

https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/949106288289435649

While this move was met with a number of people saying “better late than never,” I’m not so sure. In fact, I think that he’s just created a monster now that Beyak no longer has any kind of adult supervision. Indeed, I suspect that he’s just made a martyr out of Beyak, who can now claim that she’s a victim of “political correctness run amok,” and she will quickly attract a group of odious racists and free speech absolutists, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that she’ll be yet another Jordan Peterson-like figure (though likely without the need for the Patreon account, given her Senate tenure).

But that Senate tenure is exactly why this situation should have been better managed, and why expelling her from caucus was possibly the wrong thing to do. At least inside of caucus, she could have been managed, and if they had been on the ball, they should have had a better handle on what she was posting to her website and had it locked down long before now, using whatever means of coercion are available to party and Senate caucus leadership. After all, taking her off of committees didn’t seem to do the trick, but I’m not sure what kinds of measures they were using to manage her once that happened, if any. And that’s key, because as someone who has institutional independence and can’t be fired, managing her was the best possible thing that they could have done rather than letting her continue to court racists. (This being said, the fact that she was viewed as a Pollyanna figure by some of her fellows was probably why they didn’t think they needed to manage her as closely, and look what happened as a result).

Beyak is likely to continue to sit as a non-affiliated Senator, as we can be assured that the Independent Senators Group will want nothing to do with her, especially as they have a new rule that means that they need to have a two-thirds vote to admit her into their caucus. While people will howl for her to resign, I sincerely doubt that she will, given that she’ll have a new crowd of adherents that will flock to her now. She can’t be expelled from the Senate unless she’s convicted of a serious crime or is found to be in violation of Senate ethics rules, and there’s nothing to suggest that she would be (not to mention that there will be great reluctance to push her out for what she’s said, no matter how odious it may be, because free speech is greatly valued in the Senate). Trying to have her charged with hate crimes isn’t likey to work as I doubt she meets the bar for that, and dragging her before the Human Rights Tribunal will make her an even bigger martyr with the free speech absolutists. And so now we’ll be stuck with her until February 2024, because the party leadership couldn’t figure out how to properly manage a problem like her. Well done, guys.

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Roundup: An historic apology

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As promised, Justin Trudeau delivered a long-awaited apology for those LGBT Canadians who had been persecuted and hounded out of jobs in the civil service, military and police forces as a result of government policies, and to go along with this apology will be some compensation. (The speech and video are posted here). As well, a bill was tabled that will expunge the records of anyone caught up in these processes, but as Ralph Goodale explained on Power Play, the bill requires an application as opposed to the government doing a blanket action, and won’t cover some of the other charges such as being a found-in during a bathhouse raid. That could set up for an interesting future legal challenge, for the record.

So who does this apology affect? Some examples heard yesterday include Diane Doiron, who spoke to Chatelaine about her experiences, or former sailor Simon Thwaites, who was on Power Play.

While some may dismiss the rash of apologies from the Trudeau government as “virtue signalling” or being soft, history shows that official apologies tend to come more from conservative sources than liberal ones. Aaron Wherry, meanwhile, notes that while the Conservatives did participate in yesterday’s apology, they have been making a lot of political hay of late trying to show themselves in opposition to those who would “denigrate” the history of Canada, or who constantly find fault with it rather than praising it uncritically. And yes, it is an interesting little dichotomy.

Those who say that the apology doesn’t go far enough, pointing to the ongoing blood donation ban facing gay men who have had sex in the past year (note: this is a change from the previous lifetime ban) still hasn’t been lifted as promised, the government did put in research dollars to ensure that the proper scientific evidence is there to lift it permanently. While critics say that this remains discriminatory, I remind you that previous governments had to pay dearly for the tainted blood scandals of the past, which is doubtlessly why the current government wants to ensure that all of their bases are covered and untouchable legally in the event that any future lawsuits from this change in policy ensue.

Regarding those Conservative absences during the apology:

During the apology speeches in the Commons, I and several others noted that there were a number of conspicuous Conservative absences – some 15-plus vacant desks, all clustered in the centre of their ranks, which looked pretty obvious from above (and this matters when you’ve got the galleries full of people who have come to hear the apology). I remarked on this over Twitter, and it created a firestorm, especially when I highlighted the vacant area on the seating chart. Some of these absences are legitimate – some MPs were away on committee business, and I got flack from some of them for that afterward, feeling that it was a cheap shot, and if that’s the case, then I do apologize. It wasn’t intended to be, but it was pointing out that the giant hole in their ranks was conspicuous, especially as this was not the case during QP, which immediately preceded said apology. I will also note that none of the Conservative staffers who monitor my Twitter feed (and I know that they do, because they constantly chirp at me by claiming I’m too partisan in my QP-tweeting), offered up a correction or explanation until hours later, which I would have gladly retweeted if provided one. They did not. I can only work with what I can see in front of me at the time, and if some of those MPs who were there during QP went to fill the camera shots on the front benches, that’s still a poor excuse for leaving a giant hole in the middle of their ranks that the full galleries can plainly see.

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Roundup: The coming Senate legislative crunch

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While the legalized cannabis bill passed the House of Commons last night and is off to the Senate, questions about the kind of reception it will find there are sure to be buzzing about in the days to come. While the bill’s Senate sponsor wants a process akin to the medical assistance in dying bill to take place (something I find overzealous and ignores the context of what happened then), it’s unlikely to happen that way, and we may see the Conservatives in the Senate trying to dig their heels in. But it’s still early days, so we’ll see.

With this in mind, I wanted to turn to Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column yesterday, where she looked at how the Senate could gum up the government’s end-of-season legislative plan, as they try to push through a number of bills before the Commons rises in just under three weeks. The Senate is already seeing a growing backlog of bills on its Order Paper (a function I’m told has to do largely with the Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative” and his unwillingness to negotiate with the caucuses in there on timelines), and will likely sit up to the 22nd to try and get most of them passed. But what O’Malley described in the refusal by the Senate to engage in pre-study of the budget implementation bill as being a sign that of uncertainty, I will note that the circumstances around this demand for pre-study were unusual from a procedural standpoint. As he outlined in his speech against the pre-study motion, Senate Liberal leader Joseph Day pointed out that the point of pre-study is for the Senate to do a parallel committee process and send recommendations to the Commons before they complete their own study so that they have the chance to make amendments that the Senate proposes at that time. The problem is that this particular bill had already reached Report Stage in the Commons before the motion to pre-study was moved in the Senate by Senator Harder, meaning that the opportunity to offer amendments had already passed, and there was no actual cause for pre-study, and what Harder was looking to do was short-circuit Senate procedure for his own scheduling purposes, and well, the Liberals were having none of it. And in the end, neither were the Conservatives and several of the Independents.

And this is one of the things that I think O’Malley missed in her column – that part of the problem in the Senate right now is that the leadership (meaning Senator Harder) is not exactly doing the government any favours with his inability to manage the legislative agenda in that chamber, especially when he tries to do an end-run around the rules to suit his purposes. It will be a problem if he keeps this up, because the veterans in that chamber won’t stand for it.

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