Tag Archives: The Senate

Roundup: Mark Holland is optimistic

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New Government House Leader Mark Holland is brimming with optimism that the things that paralyzed the previous session of Parliament will be behind them post-election. It’s a nice idea, but I wonder just how it will actually play out. Yes, the Liberals have broken some of the deadlocks that plagued them (a fact that they didn’t articulate during the election, even when pressed on the subject), and they have a bit of leverage now in that none of the other parties can even contemplate another election anytime soon – the Conservatives are consumed with internal disputes over vaccine mandates and just when they plan to put Erin O’Toole to a leadership review, and the NDP are very broke having spent record amounts of money to gain themselves a single new seat, and the Bloc have no desire to go back to the polls, particularly since their play to be François Legault’s voice in Ottawa didn’t play well for them in the election. This will allow the Liberals to play some hardball and use confidence to their advantage for the time being.

But in spite of this, I would not put it past any of the opposition parties to engage in some of the other shenanigans that got us the election, whether that is tying up the committees in interminable attempts at witch hunts, or drowning in document production requests – and that may yet still happen. The election did end some of that, but much of it could very easily be revived once the committees are back up and running (likely in the New Year).

“There was a very clear message sent to all parties that there’s an expectation that we work together, and I’m operating on the presumption that we will have all heard that message and that we all come ready to work and to collaborate in a constructive and positive way,” Holland told The Canadian Press.

I’m not sure that such a presumption is a good one to make. There was an expectation that all parties should work together during the pandemic, and while they did a bunch of backroom negotiations around emergency legislation – and kept any of the debates off-the-record – they stalled all other bills until the very end, when the NDP and Bloc realized they needed to start playing ball again. I’m not sure what the appetite for playing ball will be on most bills, or whether the political calculus will be to try and stymie the Liberals once again (which could lead to showdowns over confidence). I wish Holland all the luck in the world on this, but I suspect he may start losing the hair he has left because the current state of our parliamentary discourse is pretty toxic, and things like the Liberals’ desire to keep hybrid sittings going will only exacerbate that problem.

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Roundup: Enter the new Whip

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Newly-appointed Chief Government Whip Steve MacKinnon had a conversation with CBC over the weekend, and there are a few interesting bits in there. For one, I didn’t actually realise that the term came from 18th-century hunting slang for “whipper-in, as the rider who keeps hounds from straying from the pack. So it’s not about any kind of literal or metaphorical whipping of MPs to vote a certain way, and now we’ve both learned something new today.

What I did know before is that there is more to the whip’s job than just ensuring MPs vote in certain ways, particularly if there’s a confidence vote upcoming. Rather, the whip and his or her office has a lot of work in juggling assignments – who is on what committee, who can stand in for that MP if they are away, and to an extent, who has House duty. And because the whip is largely the person in charge of MPs’ attendance (even if said attendance is not made public), I have it on very good authority that the Whip spends a lot of time listening to MPs as they unburden themselves, and talk about what is going on in their lives as to why they can’t attend a committee meeting or vote. The whip also becomes responsible for the staff in a riding office if that MP resigns or dies in office. And then comes the discipline part, which is different between each party. Some parties are very strict about it, some have unofficial ways of enforcing discipline – largely through in-group bullying – and some are fairly relaxed over the issue provided it’s not a matter of confidence.

The other thing I would add is that at the advent of the era of “Senate independence,” as Justin Trudeau and others would have you believe, the whip in the Senate was equivalent to in the House of Commons, and they instructed senators how to vote – or else. This was simply not true – the whip in the Senate was always rather illusory, and the Whip’s office was more about doing things like committee assignments, finding alternates for those who were absent, and assigning things like office space or parking to incoming senators who joined the caucus. They had little to no leverage of senators and their voting patterns because of institutional independence, and I heard a former Liberal senate leader once remark that on one occasion when the leader’s office on the Commons side called them up and said they’d really like it if senators could vote for a certain bill, that these senators turned around and voted the other way, just to prove a point around their independence. So there is a lot more to the role than people may expect from the outside, and best of luck to Steve MacKinnon as he takes on this new role.

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Roundup: Clear and concise, to counteract Poilievre

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Earlier this week, to accompany the release of their Monetary Policy Report, the Bank of Canada released a sixty-second clip over social media to explain their assessment of the state of the Canadian economy in plain language. And it was great.

This kind of communication is essential, especially now, for the Bank because of the level of noise and misinformation that is being promulgated, particularly by certain members of Parliament who have made it their mission to politicise the work of the Bank, as they spout facile talking points about the current state of inflation that have zero bearing on the actual causes. And if it’s not Pierre Poilievre, my reply column is full of chuckleheads who think they know better, and inflation truthers (which are the gods damned worst). So yes, this kind of clear, simple-to-digest communication is especially needed by the Bank, much like the Cases in Brief have become an essential form of communication from the Supreme Court of Canada. This is a great initiative from the Bank, and hopefully we’ll see more like it in the future.

On a related note, former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge says that the current governor is on the right track with the economic recovery and where inflation is going, so if you needed an additional vote of confidence that they know what they’re doing, there you have it.

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Roundup: The admiral needs to take the hint

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Things are looking pretty dire for Admiral Art McDonald, the former-ish Chief of Defence Staff, whose little tantrum last week in writing a letter to the general and flag officers to demand his job back (not that they could do anything about it) is looking more and more impolitic. Why? Because the military police are now pushing back to say that he wasn’t “exonerated” as McDonald claimed in his letter, but rather that there was insufficient evidence to lay charges, which is not the same thing as the allegation being unfounded. And McDonald’s accuser is speaking out publicly and pointing to witnesses to the incident, which the military won’t say whether they were interviewed or not as part of their investigation. Nevertheless, the incident makes it even clearer that McDonald doesn’t understand civilian control and doesn’t have the character and temperament necessary to guide the Forces through this particular period of culture change, and it’s better for him – and everyone else – that he get the hint and retire before consequences follow from that letter.

Meanwhile, it seems that the former commandant of the Canadian Forces School of Military Intelligence is serving as a staff officer in Ottawa after being relieved of his command following an investigation into allegations of inappropriate conduct, which signals that there aren’t consequences if people simply get moved around.

Interested observers are wondering what is taking the government so long to take more action on what is going on with the senior ranks in the military, or to formally make General Wayne Eyre the permanent Chief of Defence Staff, formally taking McDonald’s reinstatement off the table (though he should have taken the hint when Eyre got promoted to full general). There is speculation that they are waiting for the Cabinet shuffle, but one would think that they’d want to make changes now, so that a fresh minister won’t have to come in and do the cleaning out on his or her first day rather than letting Sajjan do it now, and let his successor come in fresh. But that might require this minister and this government to have a modicum of self-awareness, and which would be your answer as to why they haven’t.

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Roundup: A delayed return

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We have a date – well, two of them. Justin Trudeau announced yesterday morning that Cabinet would be shuffled on October 26th, and that the House of Commons would return on November 22nd, which is ridiculous. After an election where Trudeau kept punctuating the “urgency” of a number of files, some of them COVID-related, and with a list of priorities to take care of in his first 100 days of the new parliament (apparently that clock doesn’t start ticking until Cabinet is sworn in), the decision to delay the return of Parliament for two months after the election is egregious – especially because this is a hung parliament where the confidence of the Chamber should be tested at its earliest opportunity, and two months later is not that.

I am generally pretty forgiving of the fact that it can take our government longer to get its act together post-election – as compared to the UK, where they have nearly twice as many MPs – but they can get a new government sworn in and a new Parliament started within three weeks of an election. But it should not have taken Trudeau this long to deal with this shuffle as it has, even if one or two Cabinet contenders had to deal with recounts. And yes, the government dispatched the Governor General on her first state visit abroad this week, but that again was his choice, and he could have either delayed that trip, or announced the Cabinet before she left the country.

More to the point, this reduces the fall sitting of the House of Commons to a maximum of four weeks, but you can bet that in practice, it’ll be less than three. Committees won’t really get up and running, and sure, he may introduce a number of priority bills, but they will see precious little debate in that time. What we will get are the Address in Reply to the Speech From the Throne, and probably the Fall Economic Update, plus a number of Estimates votes, which will be rushed through without any actual scrutiny (they may get some modicum of scrutiny on the Senate side), but I’m not sure we’ll even see the Budget Implementation Bill for said economic update making it past second reading unless it is bullied through at all stages under the threat that emergency rent and wage subsidies will expire without passage. It’s undermining democratic norms for the sake of expediency, and that is the last thing we want to be encouraging any government in engaging in, regardless of stripe.

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Roundup: Unvaccinated MPs should stay home without pay

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It has begun – Conservative MPs warning that there will be a privilege fight if they don’t get to come to work in the House of Commons unvaccinated. This time it’s Mark Strahl, who was the party whip in the previous session, and he thinks that they should be allowed to attend if they submit to rapid testing, which is not a prophylactic against COVID. And a privilege fight is nonsense, of course – it’ll be the MPs themselves who set the rules that you need to be vaccinated to be in the Chamber (or possibly in the entire Precinct) – and by then, the rules around needing to be vaccinated to board a plane or train should also be in force. And if Conservatives on the Board of Internal Economy want to protest this rule, they’ll be outvoted, and that’ll be it. And if he brings a privilege motion to the House, the majority there can vote it down as well. There is no winning hand for anti-vaxxer MPs here.

The real question here is whether the other parties will bow to some sort of accommodation scheme, like letting unvaccinated MPs stay home and attend virtually – something I think should be opposed (the Bloc is already opposing it) because Parliament doesn’t work well in a hybrid setting. We tried it, and it was terrible. And frankly, MPs should also insist that those who refuse vaccination should not only have to stay hope – and not participate virtually – but should lose salary as well.

Parliament is an essential service, and they have a lot of work to do, and catering to a small percentage of conspiracy theorists and malcontents is only going to prolong this pandemic, and continue to overburden our healthcare system and create a lost generation of youth who will have missed out on opportunities. MPs are supposed to set an example – that starts with doing the responsible thing and being vaccinated.

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Roundup: A vote devoid of real meaning

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As expected, the Conservative caucus voted for the (garbage) Reform Act proposals that give them the option to demand a leadership review, and as expected, the media fell all over themselves to interpret some kind of significance into this, including the fact that the same thing happened after the last election when Andrew Scheer was still the leader – never mind that the Reform Act had precisely zero to do with Scheer’s demise.

And while everyone was smiling and preaching unity coming out of the meeting, there are still sore MPs, who are concerned about the losses they suffered, and that their promised gains in places like the GTA didn’t materialise. MP Scott Reid is openly decrying that the party is being run like a “petty tyranny” where policy positions like the carbon price was imposed on them without discussion or even notice (as Reid was running to be caucus chair). So clearly they still have some healing to do, but I wouldn’t read any significance into the (garbage) Reform Act vote, because all it will do is insulate Erin O’Toole.

Meanwhile, I am concerned at some of the delusion that seems to have set into the party, as O’Toole went into the meeting telling the assembled reporters that it was the Liberals and People’s Party who spent the campaign misleading people and sowing division. I mean, serial liar Erin O’Toole, who attempted to make the falsehood of a non-existent Liberal plan to tax home equity a campaign issue, says it was the other guys who thrived on misleading people. I’d say it was unbelievable, but it was simply one more lie that O’Toole effortlessly spouts. Later in the day, Michael Chong was on Power & Politics, and when O’Toole’s constantly shifting positions on issues like gun control were raised, he called it a “Liberal trap.” Erm, it’s O’Toole’s shifting position – that’s on him. Chong also declared that it was wrong to make vaccination a wedge issue because anti-vaxxers felt like “hunted prey,” which is…warped. When you have a group of people who are prolonging the pandemic and endangering the lives of others, whether it’s directly with the virus or because they have overwhelmed the healthcare capacity that vaccinated people require, they should be made to feel social stigma. That’s the point. That Chong is going to bat for them demonstrates why his party continues to be tone deaf about the course of this pandemic.

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1445387619215552520

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Roundup: Kenney announces his next big distraction

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By now you’ve heard that Jason Kenney has announced the referendum questions that Alberta will be voting on in October as part of Kenney’s mass distraction plans. It’s unheard of to have multiple referendum questions – in this case, daylight savings and removing equalisation from the Constitution – on top of an unconstitutional sideshow of Senate “nominee elections,” and yet Kenney is putting these all together with the upcoming municipal elections. This has the bonus for Kenney of muddying the waters of those elections, where more progressive candidates tend to do better, particularly in the cities, and he gets to claim that he saves money by holding them at the same time, but this is a lie. Municipal elections are run by the municipalities themselves, while these referenda and bogus “nominee elections” are held by Elections Alberta, and just because they happen at the same time and can co-locate spaces doesn’t change the fact that it going to cost more.

The thing is, the referendum on equalization won’t actually do anything because even if they sent a message to the rest of Canada and brought everyone to the table to negotiate, the only thing that’s in the Constitution is the principle of equalization – the formula itself is federal legislation, because the programme is paid out of federal general revenues. But Kenney is content to keep lying to the public and pretending that Alberta signs a cheque every year that Quebec cashes and pays for its child care system with (which it doesn’t – they pay for that out of their own taxes, and they reap the direct economic benefits from it as well). As well, the myth that Quebec killed Energy East is being invoked (Quebec had nothing to do with it – the proponent couldn’t fill both Energy East and Keystone XL with their contracts, so Energy East was abandoned as Keystone XL looked like the more likely to reach completion – not to mention that it wouldn’t have actually served the Eastern Canadian market), which is again about stoking a faux sense of grievance. The fact that Kenney is stoking this anti-Quebec sentiment because he thinks it’ll win him points (and hopefully distract the angry mob that is gathering outside his own door) is not lost on Quebeckers when it comes to Kenney’s good friend, Erin O’Toole, looking for votes in the federal election.

But as economist Trevor Tombe keeps saying, Alberta doesn’t need equalization in the same way that Bill Gates doesn’t need social assistance – Alberta is still making way more money than any other province, even with their harder times economically. The province’s deficit is not a result of equalization or money supposedly being siphoned east (again, equalization comes out of federal taxes) – it’s a result of a province that refuses to implement sales taxes or other stable revenue generation, and expecting everyone else to subsidize that choice (while also cutting corporate taxes under the illusion that it would create jobs, but didn’t). This is just Kenney handwaving and shouting “look over there!” because he knows he’s in trouble, and he needs to keep everyone focused on a different enemy. He shouldn’t be rewarded by people falling for it.

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Roundup: The “failure of negotiations” is nonsense

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It appears that the lack of seriousness around getting Bill C-6, which would ostensibly ban conversion therapy in Canada, through the Senate has reached its peak, as the Government Leader in the Senate, Senator Marc Gold, claims that negotiations have collapsed and he can’t bring the Senate back to deal with it. Which is nonsense. He has the power to petition the Speaker to recall the Chamber, and that request would almost certainly be granted. They can sit as long as necessary to pass the bill, and if they can’t get unanimous consent for hybrid sittings, well, by now most if not all Senators should be double-vaxxed and can attend in person. There are no actual impediments to them actually doing this.

Part of the problem is Gold himself – he doesn’t seem to grasp how the Senate works procedurally, and that he has a lot more power than he claims to. He also, for no good reason, proposed a date for the Senate to rise at the end of June when he could have kept it sitting into July with no actual problem. He also seems to be enamoured with the idea of agreeing on a timeline to pass the bill, which he doesn’t need, but ever since the Senate agreed to timelines around some major pieces of legislation in the previous parliament, there is a romance with doing this all the time in the Senate, which is unnecessary and in some cases counter-productive.

The other part of the problem is Justin Trudeau. And while it has been suggested that he has ordered Gold to let the bill die so that he can use it as a wedge in the election – frankly, the dynamics in the Senate don’t really support this line of reasoning – it’s more that Trudeau has a case of not-so-benign neglect when it comes to the Senate. By cutting it loose, so to speak, he gives it no mind rather than making it part of his strategy. There’s no reason why Gold is not a Cabinet minister who can answer for the government in the Chamber, rather than his current half-pregnant quasi-governmental role while still claiming independence, which doesn’t work in theory or practice. He clearly needs the support of PCO because he’s not able to do a reasonable enough job as it stands with what support he does get, and there frankly needs to be an actual government (meaning Cabinet) voice in the Chamber. But in insisting on “Senate independence,” Trudeau simply expects things to go through the Chamber and he can forget about it, which is a mistake.

Gold needs to fix this situation, and fast. If that means recalling the Senate in person, so be it. But claiming negotiations “collapsed” and he can’t do it is both untrue and against procedure. This is on him.

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Roundup: The bravery of a hollow stand

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Over the weekend, The Canadian Press had an interview with out gay Conservative MP Eric Duncan, talking about his fight against the blood donation deferral period for men who have sex with men, while at the same time members of his own party have been fighting the bill to ban conversion therapy. And while it’s great that the Conservatives finally have an out gay MP (previously, their only out member was Senator Nancy Ruth, though they had ministers like John Baird were out in their private lives, but simply refused to acknowledge it in the media), and that their new leader professes to want to be more inclusive (apparently in spite of his own members), there is nevertheless something a bit off with the way this has all played out.

The thing about Duncan’s apparent “bravery” with talking about the blood donor policy as a result of his own history with being rejected is that this is not something the government can actually do anything about because Canadian Blood Services and Héma Québec are arm’s length, and Health Canada’s regulatory role is outside of the minister’s purview. Yes, we can ask questions as to why the Liberals promised to end the ban if they couldn’t actually fulfil their promise, but for Duncan (and for that matter, the NDP) to try and hold the government to account for something that they can’t actually do is a problem. Likewise, they too would be making promises that either they can’t keep, or they are proposing a massive and troubling overreach where the government would wind up asserting jurisdiction, bigfooting those arm’s-length agencies, and setting precedents for bigfooting other arm’s-length bodies in the future, which is a very bad thing that we should be very concerned about.

As for the conversion therapy bill, there were no “common sense amendments” that would make it acceptable to the Conservatives without gutting the bill. The bill would not criminalize conversations between parents and children, or with pastors, and this constant fear that social conservatives have had for decades as LGBT+ rights have progressed has never come true, and yet they will keep banging on that drum. As for the refrain that certain senators are pushing that “the government had six years to do this” is disingenuous. There is only so much time in parliament and only so much capacity in government to get everything accomplished, and it’s not like we didn’t have anything else happening over these past six years (such as a crash in oil prices, the Donald Trump years, getting climate legislation passed, advancing the cause of Indigenous reconciliation, of when it comes to LGBT+ issues, getting trans rights enshrined in law – again to these same social conservative fears of criminalization). Governments can’t do everything at once, and these people know that. Don’t fall for the rhetoric.

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