Tag Archives: The Senate

Roundup: Occupation over, emergency orders confirmed

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The occupation of Ottawa’s downtown core by far-right extremists, grifters, and conspiracy theorists is at an end. The police action kept up all day Saturday, and by Sunday, they were into mop-up operations. In total, there were 191 arrests, some 400 charges, and 79 vehicles towed, but it will still be some time before barricades start coming down in downtown Ottawa, because they want to ensure that the same group don’t move right back in once the barricades come down. And indeed, while the occupation may be ended, the emergency measures will likely stick around a little longer in order to prevent a resurgence or similar attempts in other locations, particularly given that many of the participants are lying in wait just outside of the city in makeshift encampments on private property. Trudeau said the emergency orders will likely be lifted in a few days, but they’re awaiting advice from law enforcement.

In the meantime, the debate on the emergency measures carried on through the weekend and into Monday, and while I have a column coming out later today on just how bad it was, there is special mention to Conservative MP Mark Strahl for fabricating a constituent named “Briane” who apparently had her accounts frozen for donating to the occupation before it was illegal. Andrew Scheer went ballistic about how this kind of retroactive application of the orders was unconscionable, erm, except that it didn’t happen because Briane doesn’t exist, and if she does, then it’s someone catfishing Strahl, who is too gullible to check into a clearly bogus tale. To date, 76 accounts have been frozen, either from organisers of the occupations, or those who owned trucks on the streets. That’s it. But the Conservatives are trying to push a narrative that Trudeau is authoritarian and punishing dissent, even though none of this actually bears out in the facts or the political reality of someone in a hung parliament. They’re just so cartoonishly bad and transparent in their lies that it’s hard to actually believe they are that inept. And yet they’ll get away with it, because there are credulous media outlets taking it at face value, and even more that are both-sidesing, and trying to get confirmation no matter that the falsehood is obvious on the face of it.

The vote itself was not particularly close, given that the NDP had already signalled that they would support the motion, though that didn’t stop the Conservatives from trying to deride them for supposedly turning their backs on how Tommy Douglas voted against the War Measures Act, even though the Emergencies Act is not the same thing and does not suspend civil liberties. There was later some consternation that Trudeau indicated that this would essentially be a confidence vote, which frankly it should be. If you don’t think the government can handle emergency powers, that’s a pretty solid indication you don’t think they should be in power. After the vote, Candice Bergen was already read with procedural mischief to use the portion of the Act that can call for a motion to lift the orders with the support of 20 MPs, so that will go ahead once the sitting resumes in a week. The Senate still has to vote on the emergency order motion, probably later today, so the government is not in the clear just yet.

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Roundup: A late start isn’t an extra week off

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I’m not sure whether it’s because it’s a very, very slow news season, or if the basic knowledge of how Parliament works is that lacking, but we got a lot of really bad headlines yesterday about how the Senate plans to take an “extra week off.” Which is not actually true, and distorts the situation. And in some cases, it’s being spun this way by certain media suspects completely out of bad faith, because anytime they can badmouth the Senate they’ll grab the opportunity and run.

To clarify: The Senate does not have a fixed sitting schedule the way the House of Commons does, and in no way are they bound to match the sitting schedule, because they do different work, and the timelines are different. The Senate frequently doesn’t convene at the same time as the House of Commons after the winter or summer break because they simply don’t have enough work on their Order Paper to justify it. They passed all of the bills that the Commons sent to them before they adjourned for the break, so coming back at the same time makes no sense—especially when they are competing for IT resources and interpreters with the Commons in the current hybrid context (which has, frankly, screwed the Senate over, but they’ve also allowed it to happen). More to the point, there are many years where the Senate will sit for weeks after the Commons rises for its break, and they will have break weeks out of sync with the Commons every now and again because their workloads are different. But this isn’t communicated effectively, either by the Senate itself, or by the media reporting on it—and it most especially isn’t communicated or even mentioned by the bad faith actors whose only agenda is to paint the Senate in a bad light. It’s disappointing, but not unexpected.

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Roundup: Unauthorized travel and absurd punishment

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In spite of instructions not to travel outside of the country, Liberal MP Yves Robillard did anyway, and now is facing censure for it. Liberal Whip Steve MacKinnon issued a statement saying that as a result of this non-essential travel, Robillard is being removed from his committee duty (he was a backbencher on the national defence committee, meaning there is no financial penalty for this loss), and that MacKinnon will give him a talking-to later.

This having been said, I find the removal from committees to be an odd sort of punishment, because you’re assigning them less work to do. Maybe the assumption is that they are somehow vain enough to want face time in committees, but that seems like a perverse incentive. You could reassign them to the less glamorous committees, like Scrutiny of Regulations, I suppose, where they are unlikely to get media attention or to any travel, or the like. If I had my druthers, I would not only keep them on their assigned committee, but ensure that every hour not on committee was spent being assigned to House duty in perpetuity (with some additional prohibitions against device use so that they can’t be spending the time playing solitaire on their tablets, or the like), but that may cross the threshold into cruel and unusual punishment.

I will also note that taking away someone’s committee duties is counterproductive because there aren’t enough bodies to go around on committees as it is, so removing someone just means more work for everyone else. It’s especially perverse that this has also been handed down on Senator Denise Batters, who was kicked out of the Conservatives’ national caucus, but she still sits with their senate caucus, but has been denied committee work—which, again, makes more work for everyone because the diminished Conservative ranks in the Senate means not enough of them to go around to fill committee seats (and this gets to be a big problem, much as it was pre-2008 when Stephen Harper was refusing to fill Senate seats and his senators were doing double and triple duty on committees to just try and have enough bodies on them). More to the point, this just gives Batters more time to be on Twitter, picking away at O’Toole. Taking away someone’s committee duties as punishment simply makes no sense at all.

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Roundup: Feeling like March 2020 all over again

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It’s definitely starting to feel like March 2020, as provinces all started increasing restrictions in advance of Christmas—some of them insufficient, and too late, but they are taking some actions nevertheless. (That, and they’re not all honest about what has been happening with rapid tests—looking most especially at the incompetent murderclown Doug Ford). Federally, the border measures are getting even tougher with negative PCR tests being required even for trips that are less than 72 hours in duration (and those PRC tests need to have been done out-of-country), while the travel ban on those ten African countries is now lifted as omicron has already achieved community spread in Canada and such a ban is now useless.

Prime minister Justin Trudeau is trying to offer some reassurances that we have the benefit of knowledge that we didn’t have during the first wave, and that Canadians know enough to do what it takes to curb the spread of the virus. I suspect that may be a bit overly optimistic considering that too many people will do what the government allows them to, so don’t take all of the precautions necessary to actually curb the spread.

Meanwhile, here’s an exploration of some of the psychological reactions that are being seen and felt to the rapid onset of omicron, where fatigue of the “new normal” is starting to overtake compliance to health measures, and the need to start thinking about what the world looks like if we have COVID forever now.

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Roundup: Theatre of the absurd, housing motion edition

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The closer the House of Commons gets to rising for the winter break, the more absurd theatre we see. Yesterday was case in point, with the Conservatives’ second and final Supply Day of the calendar year. The topic was housing, but their motion was a complete dog’s breakfast of nonsense, contradiction and outright unconstitutional demands. Because of course it was.

The point was made that the inclusion of the outright lie about capital gains taxes was a ploy for the Conservatives to say that the Liberals were not ruling it out when this motion as inevitably defeated (as indeed it was). But Liberal Mark Gerretsen though he was being crafty and tried to move a motion after QP to head off those talking points, trying to call for unanimous consent to reaffirm that they wouldn’t tax capital gains. But the motion didn’t pass, so Gerretsen tried to spin that too, and it’s just utterly stupid that I can’t even.

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QP: Demanding the inflation target

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With the prime minister virtually attending Biden’s “democracy summit,” and Chrystia Freeland absent, it was promising to be a rockier day in the Commons. Erin O’Toole led off, his script on his mini-lectern, and he brayed about inflation, housing prices, and coming interest rate hikes. Ahmed Hussen reminded him that they were the federal party that restored leadership to the housing file and he praised the National Housing Strategy. O’Toole raised the prospect of predicted food price hikes, and then pretended that Trudeau and Freeland were in the Chamber and not answer, and Randy Boissonnault, in his role as associate finance minster, reminded O’Toole about the Bank of Canada’s inflation target. O’Toole pretended that the prime minster ignored his responses about the Bank’s mandate and worried it would be changed, to which Boissonnault reminded him that the Bank is independent. O’Toole switched to French to misleadingly say that the Liberals planned to abandon the inflation targeting mandate, and Hussen repeated his first response, and called out the nonsense in the Conservatives’ supply day motion. O’Toole returned to braying about inflation in French, and Boissonnault repeated in French about the Bank’s mandate, before reciting some good news talking points.

Alain Therrien led for the Bloc, and he worried that the Auditor General showed that thirty percent of COVID tests were lost or mislabelled, for which Duclos said that he thanked the AG for her work, and said they would examine the results. Therrien worried about the stat that fourteen percent of those tested were never notified, but Duclos gave a bromide about working to prevent omicron.

Jagmeet Singh rose for the NDP, and after citing a report on growing inequality (I would be dubious of that given that the Canadian trajectory has not been the same as the US), and he demanded a tax on the super-wealthy, for which Boissonnault listed measures to help those in need. Singh repeated the question in French, and Boissonnault read measures in the Liberal platform about taxing banks and insurance companies.

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Roundup: Swift passage, but not for the better

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In another surprising move, the Senate passed the bill to ban conversion therapy at all stages yesterday, with no committee study, meaning that it only needs royal assent now, which can happen at any time. But while this is a relief to many, it’s also a tad irresponsible.

The lack of study of the current bill in the House of Commons was a political gambit designed to keep the Conservatives from being trapped by their own social conservative members, and to avoid giving any more media clips about people supposedly overcoming “lesbian activity” and so on. The fact that this version of the bill is different from the one that passed the Commons in the previous parliament is relevant, and there are changes that deserved some actual scrutiny because there were live constitutional questions around them (and yes, I asked the minister about it during the press conference, and I asked other questions about the bill during the not-for-attribution technical briefing, but those are not on the parliamentary record). And yes, this matters because the Senate should have done the work that MPs opted not to do out of political expediency. That’s one of the reasons why the Senate is the chamber of “sober second though”—because they don’t have to deal with the political repercussions and ramifications when the politics wins out in the Commons.

Unfortunately, politics also won out in the Senate (which should be an indictment of its supposed more “independent” existence these days). Acting Conservative leader in the Senate, Senator Leo Housakos, in his speech to give the bill swift passage, said that this issue shouldn’t be made into a political wedge like the Liberals were doing. Which is ironic because it wasn’t the Liberals who were holding up the bill previously by slow-walking it, refusing to let debate collapse, and by putting up speaker after speaker to offer the same concern trolling. That wasn’t the Liberals being political—it was 100 percent on the Conservatives for that, and now they’re trying to shift that blame. Yes, passing this bill at all stages was the expedient thing to do, but from a process and a parliamentary perspective, it was not the right thing to do, and it’s going to make the courts’ jobs that much harder when this inevitably gets challenged and they have little on the record to go by.

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Roundup: A century of women in the House

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The CBC has a look back at 100 years since the first woman was elected to Parliament, and as with the present-day discourse, it’s largely about how other women’s voice were excluded, be they Indigenous, racialized, or otherwise. Yes, early feminists and women who were elected to public office were problematic—the Famous Five were very racist and proponents of eugenics. (So was the founder of the NDP, Tommy Douglas, for that matter, but he is rarely called out as being problematic as early white women in officer were, but that’s a whole other topic altogether).

So while we have a lot more diverse women in Parliament these days, we absolutely do need to do better, and much of that relies on the parties themselves. I would normally say that the grassroots riding associations should have a big role to play in recruiting more diverse women to run for them, but my enthusiasm for grassroots politics is currently being held in check by the fact that overly powerful leaders’ offices have been essentially bigfooting those processes, and so many nominations are being run centrally, if not using outright appointments over the past few cycles, after there was a big push toward “open nominations” for one or two election cycles. And the worst part is that some of this is explicitly about nominating more women to run for office, but in an effort to say that they have more women running, most of the parties will simply run them in unwinnable ridings so that they can say they had them running, but not jeopardise their chances in that riding by running someone who doesn’t fit the popular conception, which perpetuates the problem. And before you say “But the NDP!” I have watched them time and again monkey with their own rules around nominations to run a straight white male in ridings with hugely diverse populations if they think they can win. (Think Robert Chisholm or Joe Cressy). The parties have a big role to play in getting more diverse women to run, and the Liberals were really good about this for an election cycle or two with a sound recruitment strategy, but I’m not sure it’s carried forward as well in the last election cycle.

Meanwhile, I also find myself frustrated by the notion that hybrid sittings are some kind of panacea to women running for office, because it’s based on a few bad assumptions. One of those is the fact that hybrid sittings are demonstrably bad – they are more toxic, and they have a human cost on the interpreters, and using the excuse that this allows more women to run for office should not be contingent upon interpreters needing to injure themselves in order to make it happen. The other is that it simply perpetuates the notion that women must be the primary childcare providers. There are a lot of accommodations for MPs who have small children, and they can develop more as time goes by (and seriously, they need to get over this notion that they can’t hire nannies), but some accommodations—like hybrid sittings—exact a cost that is too high for the benefit. There have to be better ways.

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Roundup: Blockbuster jobs numbers—mostly

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Statistics Canada released the Labour Force Survey numbers yesterday, and they were very good—four times as many jobs were created as had been forecast by economists. All of the jobs lost during the pandemic have been recovered and more, and unemployment is very nearly as low as it was before the pandemic began (at which point we were at record lows, around statistical “full employment”), and it was even noted that “core-aged” women had their highest ever employment levels. Things are turning around. Mostly.

There are still a lot of vacancies and there is a mismatch between jobs available and the skills that unemployed workers possess, and while the government is pouring money into training, that takes time. And labour shortages mean wages are likely to continue to increase (and if anyone says they’re stagnant, they are either lying or haven’t read the data). As well, productivity has taken a dive over the last quarter, so that will matter as well. Conservatives are claiming that the increase in jobs is as a result of the majority of pandemic benefits ending, but I’m not sure there is a direct comparison that can be made given the skills mismatches that are in the economy (and which pre-date the pandemic, which was one of the reasons why the Bank of Canada, among others, was making a concerted effort to call for inclusive growth). There is work still to do, but the government is feeling pretty good about the data.

Meanwhile, here are some economists’ takes to consider:

https://twitter.com/stephen_tapp/status/1466766974365622275

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1466771813594140675

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Roundup: A newer, worse compromise

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The Speaker engaged in a bit of procedural housekeeping after Question Period yesterday, and ruled that the Board of Internal Economy’s vote on a vaccine mandate for MPs in the House of Commons was in fact a violation of MPs’ privileges—which most of us expected, because that’s pretty much what it was. It’s a moot point, however, because the motion passed that re-authorized hybrid sittings included the vaccine mandate for the Chamber, so there remains a vaccine mandate regardless of this outcome. It sounds like the Conservatives are satisfied with this ruling in that it doesn’t create a precedent for expanding the BoIE’s powers, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing in all.

At the same time, the government house leader proposed a compromise for the Winnipeg Lab documents, which had been floated before dissolution but is back on the table now—which is procedurally dumb because the committee that requested those documents is non-existent, as is the order to produce those documents. If said committee were reinstated and they vote on a new motion to produce documents, then the government should have floated this compromise then, but no, they’re going ahead with it unbidden, which is silly. This compromise would see the creation of a new committee that would be advised by a panel of three former senior judges who would vet materials—but again, this is stupid.

The compromise was the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians. That was the point. It was the right venue for these documents to go to, and that’s where those documents were sent, before the Conservatives decided that theatre was more important (and the other two parties decided that embarrassing the government was also the point). All this is doing is muddying the waters even further, duplicating efforts, and making MPs even less trustworthy to Canadian security and intelligence services. Because our MPs are not interested in actual oversight or accountability—they are only interested in theatre, and that diminishes our Parliament for everyone.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1466554090452762626

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