Tag Archives: The Senate

Roundup: Concern for Syria without a plan

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John Baird says that there’s mounting evidence of the use of chemical weapons in Syria – not that anyone is actually talking about what kind of response is being warranted. Meanwhile, we should be expecting the first 200 “urgent” Syrian refugee cases to start arriving in the coming months, with 1300 expected by the end of next year.

The NDP have filed a formal request to recall the Industry Committee to hold hearings into the upcoming wireless spectrum auction. Of course, they’ll have to hurry before the official prorogation order happens, at which time the committees pretty much cease to exist and will need to be reconstituted in the next session.

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Roundup: A routine and legitimate prorogation

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While in Whitehorse yesterday, Stephen Harper made it official – Parliament will be prorogued, and come back in October. Not sure when yet in October (though the Hill Times is saying October 21st), at which point they can return with a Speech From the Throne, and a reset of their agenda – which, let’s face it, they badly need by this point as they’ve pretty much exhausted their plans previously. Now, before you start getting angry about prorogation, remember that this is the kind of routine, normal agenda-resetting prorogations that are normal and as indicated, even necessary in the life of a parliament. It’s not being done to avoid a confidence vote, or otherwise thwart the will of the House, so put the placards away. Here, Kady O’Malley has three reasons not to freak out over this prorogation. Are we good? Apparently not, since the opposition parties are now going with the rallying cry that Harper is avoiding accountability for the Senate scandals in Parliament, and so on. Um, okay – I’m not exactly sure how much he could actually answer regarding those Senate spending issues since the Ministry doesn’t control the Senate and can’t actually answer for them under the rubric of ministerial responsibility that governs QP, and they’ve already pretty much hashed out the Wright/Duffy revelations to death, so I’m not exactly sure what “accountability” we’re missing out on. But hey, don’t let the facts spoil a good narrative. Oh, and Harper also said that he has no plans to retire anytime soon and will lead the party in the next election, so there’s that for all the pundits who’ve spent the summer theorising otherwise.

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Roundup: Charlie Angus’ distraction and vilification

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At a press conference in Ottawa Friday morning, NDP MP Charlie Angus declared that he doesn’t think that the Auditor General should look at MPs’ expenses because the Senate is evil and stuff. No, really. If that wasn’t a more clear-cut case of distraction (and vilification), I’m not sure what is. The AG put out a statement outlining a few things about his forthcoming Senate audit – basically, it’s like any other audit, so stop asking him about it. Academics are hoping that this new scrutiny will sweep away the “old boys’ network” in the Senate, never mind that it’s been on its way out slowly for the past number of years as increasingly rigorous new rules have been put into place. Have similar rules been put into place on the Commons side? Well, we don’t know, because they’re not transparent, while the Senate is – not that you’ll hear Charlie Angus or Thomas Mulcair admit that. Meanwhile, it seems that Pamela Wallin was whinging about “media bullying” when they made Freedom of Information requests to Guelph University about her billing them for flights for her duties as chancellor, because you know, she’s the victim in all of this. The CBC looks at what’s next for Wallin, and also provides a fact sheet on Senators’ pay, and the key players in the expenses scandals. Meanwhile a group of psychologists – and Andrew Coyne – say that the Senate itself breeds a sense of entitlement, which doesn’t seem to explain why the problems are confined to a small minority, or why MPs and cabinet ministers fall into the very same kinds of entitled behaviours (if not even worse, because they’re the people’s chosen representatives, and a strategic genius to boot, and are therefore even more entitled).

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Roundup: Digging into Wallin’s expenses

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Now that journalists have had a couple of days to really dig into the Wallin audit, they’re starting to turn up all kinds of things. Like how she billed the Senate for some of her activities as Chancellor of Guelph University, while not charging the University as she ordinarily would have. Or how she charged the Senate to attend a couple of functions in her capacity as a director for Porter Airlines – even though it’s part of the director’s remuneration for the airline to pay those costs. Or that she was supposed to attend a function at a Toronto arts club that allegedly had to do with the Afghan mission and was cancelled at the last minute – and yet the arts club has not record of any of this. Glen McGregor even finds that some of her meetings may have constituted lobbying not registered with the Commissioner of Lobbying, because of loopholes in the rules. And then comes the news that Wallin, Mike Duffy and Patrick Brazeau would all have been told that it was okay to bill some partisan activity to the Senate – so long as it was related to Senate business and not a fundraiser – as part of their two-day “boot camp” upon being appointed. Well then, one supposes that it’ll be a good thing that the Auditor General plans to audit all senators’ expenses, though it will need to be done in phases and an interim report may not even be ready for 18 months. Note that the Commons continues to resist bringing in the AG to look at their own books.

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Pamela Wallin and “activist” senators

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One of the key parts of embattled Senator Pamela Wallin’s defence is that she wanted to be an “activist senator” when she was appointed, and that she’s been making speeches across the country and so on as part of this self-appointed mandate. And apparently she’s not the only one – not even two months ago, it was revealed that newly appointed Conservative Senator Thahn Ngo is charging the Senate to go speak to Vietnamese groups across the country, because as a Vietnamese-Canadian senator, he sees that as part of his duties. All of which raises the question of just what should constitute the duties of a senator, “activist” or otherwise?

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Roundup: The unfair treatment of Pamela Wallin

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Oh dear – Senator Pamela Wallin may have to end up paying back between $120K and $140K in questionable expenses, but she’s not happy about it, and calls the process unfair. And she’s right to a point – that the auditors applied the post-2012 rules to the pre-2012 period, but Wallin seems to forget that the Internal Economy Committee can also decide what seems to be “reasonable” in terms of the expenses claimed, or what should have been her better judgement. There were also concerns that Wallin and her staff retroactively changed her calendar in order to remove riding association events, though Wallin claims that she was just removing personal details, and that the auditors already had calendar copies as well as access to her hand-written diary, and that Senator Tkachuk told her to, because the process was already bogged down and taking too long. Nevertheless, she plans to pay back the expenses with interest while she challenges the rules. Here’s a look at how Wallin’s audit results may affect other Senators who travel to do studies or promote causes that aren’t immediately the subject of committee duties. This of course brings me to the point of the pundit class and various talking heads – including Marjory LeBreton – going on about how this is some signal that the Senate has to “change or die.” Um, change how? This isn’t an issue about the Senate as it operates, it’s about financial management issues, which is largely with in the financial controls of the Senate’s administration. Do those rules need to be tightened? Sure – and they realised that and have been doing that over the past couple of years. Could they be more transparent? Absolutely – and they’re already far more transparent than MPs are, for that matter. But none of this has to do with the structure of the Senate itself, so somehow trying to make the inappropriate expenses of a small handful of Senators into an indictment of the Chamber as a whole is, quite frankly, intellectually dishonest. More to the point, whenever someone says “reform,” the immediate response is “reform how? To what end?” Chances are, they won’t have an intelligible answer for you, which is telling about the problem with the level of debate, where “reform” is treated like some kind of magical incantation, as though it will somehow make everything better without any kind of plan.

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Roundup: The PBO and parliamentary fixes

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In this week’s Maclean’s, Aaron Wherry talks to Kevin Page about his new job at the University of Ottawa. In a separate but related piece, he talks to parliamentary scholar Donald Savoie about the PBO, and Savoie says some very cogent things about the office – that it is unnecessary because it allows MPs to fob off their homework onto someone else who can be seen as more “pure,” but it simply creates a new unaccountable personality that caters to the media rather than forcing parties to do the serious work of scrutiny and policy that they should be doing. Savoie’s solution is that parliament work to fix its own mess around the estimates process than work to fix the Parliamentary Budget Office, and it’s a position that I think is eminently more sensible if we want responsible government or the Westminster system to mean anything.

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Roundup: Ken Dryden’s leadership debt to himself

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In what is likely going to be an optics nightmare for the Liberals, former leadership candidate Ken Dryden said that he has no plans to repay his 2006 leadership debt, because it’s all loans he gave to himself. When the Conservatives and NDP changed the law mid-campaign to restrict donations (for the sole purpose of screwing over the Liberals), Dryden’s ability to secure the necessary donations could no longer happen. Given that Elections Canada can’t enforce the laws around those repayments (thanks again to the dog’s breakfast that the Conservatives and NDP made of the law in their rush to screw over the Liberals), he apparently no longer sees the point in getting strangers to repay his loans to himself. There are plans to make political loans to oneself illegal, but that legislation is stalled, and there are some serious concerns that it would give financial institutions too much power to determine who can and can’t run if they are to be given sole authority to grant loans. So while Dryden’s abandoning his quest to pay back his loans (to himself) looks bad, it would seem that the Conservatives and the NDP have only themselves to blame, and anyone complaining that this whole thing is anti-democratic should also ask themselves how “democratic” it was for two parties to collude to screw over another one. No one walks away from this one looking pure.

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Roundup: Double-bunking in solitary

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The Correctional Investigator is sounding the alarm as the number of isolation cases in prisons continues to rise, with solitary being used in cases that are increasingly inappropriate, and more mind-bogglingly, there are cases where they are double-bunking people in solitary. You know, the opposite of “solitary.” But hey, Vic Toews kept assuring us that there was no population crisis in prisons, and that all of the fears of a population explosion post-mandatory minimum sentence bill passing were all overblown. Somehow the numbers don’t seem to be showing that to be the case.

Thanks to government stonewalling, the Parliamentary Budget Office is now filing Access to Information requests in order to get information that they need, and paying for those requests out of their already meagre budgets. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund is giving former PBO Kevin Page high marks for his work while he was on the job.

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Roundup: The premiers take exception

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What’s that? Several premiers are taking exception to the federal factum on Senate reform that says that the government can make changes without provincial consent? You don’t say! It’s almost like we’re a federation and that the provinces have as much say in things relating to the constitution as the federal government does. What a novel concept that is!

Access to Information documents show that the government listened primarily to industry stakeholders when it made changes to the Fisheries Act around the protection of fish habitats – not that this should come as any great surprise.

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