Tag Archives: The Senate

Roundup: From ombudsman to officer?

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The current military ombudsman is trying to pitch the notion that the government doesn’t need to create a new independent body to investigate complaints about sexual misconduct – rather, he is pitching that his office can do it, if only parliament would loosen his shackles and let him report to them directly rather than to the reporting to the minister of defence. I am dubious, and a little alarmed.

For starters, I am not certain that he is actually the best-placed person to field those complaints, rather than a centre that specializes in it, that is properly trauma-informed and so on. There is a reason why the Deschamps Report called for an independent body to do this kind of work, and I’m not sure that the military ombudsman is independent enough (especially as many of those who fill the role have military backgrounds, and are just as likely to be inured to the highly sexualized culture in the Forces that is part of what needs to be changed). It also detracts from other work that the ombudsman should be doing around other aspects of military life than just this particular aspect of it.

The bigger part I am reticent about, however, is because the very last thing we need is yet another unaccountable Officer of Parliament, as we already have far too many, and some of them are problems. Look no further than the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who is turning himself into a media darling and who is going far beyond his legislative mandate, but because he is accountable to no one – and because he is being encouraged to keep going beyond his mandate by the media – he is really pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable. As for a military ombudsman, you don’t have to go too far in history to see others who held the role who were also becoming problematic – one of whom was also becoming a media darling, and who got increasingly erratic as time went on (especially once he was no longer in the job). It’s not the kind of person who should be in a role that has no accountability, and if it’s happened once, it’s likely to happen again, particularly in the current environment. I’m not unconvinced that the current reporting mechanism of the ombudsman’s office isn’t a problem, but there needs to be another solution than creating another Officer of Parliament.

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Roundup: Refusing to enforce quarantine orders

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There were a couple of notes around the border and quarantines yesterday that I thought bear some additional note, particularly in light of the rhetoric we’re hearing. The first is that it looks like as many of a third of air travellers are able to avoid hotel quarantine and the Public Health Agency of Canada won’t provide a breakdown of figures as to why. There is a fairly obvious answer to this, which is that as part of the hotel quarantine programme, the government also allowed for a metre-long list of exemptions that are applicable to these travellers, because remember that there is ostensibly very little non-essential travel happening right now – I heard a figure that travel volumes are about five percent of what they were pre-COVID. Given how many of these hotel quarantine exemptions have to do with certain essential travel reasons, it should not be a surprise that as many as a third of these travellers are able to bypass that system. The fact that there are as many exemptions as there are should be up for debate, however, because it does undermine the whole point of quarantine, but it’s hard to have that discussion when every time you turn around, someone else is demanding another exemption – and it really doesn’t help when the party in the Commons howling that the border is too lax is at the very same time trying to get an exemption for returning snowbirds.

And then there is the question of enforcing the Quarantine Act, and we find that Alberta hasn’t signed onto the Contraventions Act, which makes it easy for their police to do the enforcement, and to issue fines for those who break it. (Saskatchewan also hasn’t signed onto the Act, but there are no airports currently open to international travel in that province). And this is completely baffling, because you would think that the provincial government would want to empower their peace officers to do the enforcement work if they are so concerned about variants coming in over the borders that they would want to ensure that they are actually enforcing quarantine orders in the province, but apparently not. This makes it all the more difficult to swallow Jason Kenney’s insistence that the federal government hasn’t done enough about the border – they have clamped down as much as they are really able to under the constitution, and they have empowered the provinces to enforce quarantines, but oh, Alberta refuses to take responsibility for doing so, while they complain.

I will also note that the fact that Ontario has signed onto the Contraventions Act means that their own complaints about quarantines and lax borders are all the more hollow. They have all the tools they need to enforce the orders, and they are also largely refusing and blaming the federal government. And worse, nobody is holding them to account for their failures to exercise their own powers in their own areas of jurisdiction to do so – especially not the media. This is a problem, but hey, keep writing stories about “finger-pointing.” That’ll help.

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Roundup: Accusing your opponents of encouraging mass deaths

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My patience for the current round of blame-shifting in the handling of this pandemic has pretty much reached its breaking point, and Alberta’s justice minister has crossed a line. Recall that a week ago, NDP MP Heather McPherson accused the prime minister of rather watching Alberta burn than help Jason Kenney – a statement that borders on psychotic and ignores the billions of dollars in federal aid that has been extended that Kenney has either sat on or declined. Of course, McPherson, like her leader Jagmeet Singh, seems to think that the federal government should be invoking the Emergencies Act and swooping in to take over the province, which is nothing more than a recipe for a constitutional crisis the likes we have never seen in this country. (Can you imagine the reaction in the province if Trudeau did this?)

Well, yesterday Alberta’s justice minister declared that the provincial NDP opposition, the federal government, and the media, were all cheering on a COVID disaster in the province, which is absolutely boggling. To think that your opponents literally wish death upon Albertans is some brain worm-level thinking, and yet here we are – and no, the minister would not apologise, citing that his opponents were trying to exploit the pandemic for political purposes. This is nothing short of insane, and yet this kind of thinking is clearly rearing its head as the provincial government flails, under attack by all sides, and frankly, reaping the unhinged anger that it has been sowing for years and thinking they were too clever to get caught by.

But in the midst of this, there was a column in Maclean’s yesterday which declared that it was “partisans” that were the cause of this blame-shifting, and then proceeded to pathologically both-sides the issues until my head very nearly exploded. It’s not “partisans” – it’s political actors who are to blame, and trying to pin this solely on people who vote for them is ridiculous. I will say that a chunk of the blame does rest on media, for whom they downplay actual questions of jurisdiction as “squabbling” and “finger-pointing,” thus allowing premiers in particular to get away with the blame-shifting and hand-waving away their responsibilities, and it’s allowed this obsessive fantasy about invoking the Emergencies Act to keep playing itself out – especially because most of these media outlets have been cheerleading such a declaration (so that they can fulfil the goal of comparing this to Trudeau’s father invoking the War Measures Act during the October Crisis). If media did a better job of actually holding the premiers to account rather than encouraging their narratives that everything can be pinned on the federal government (for whom they have some of their own issues they should be better held to account for), there may have been actual pressure on some of them to shape up long before now, and yet that doesn’t happen. Absolutely nobody has covered themselves in glory here, and it’s just making this intolerable situation all that much worse.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1391949740896657410

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Roundup: The good and the bad of Star Wars Day tweets

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It was Star Wars Day yesterday (May the Fourth be with you…), and as happens every year, various government departments put out Star Wars-themed tweets, and some of them are good, and some of them are…not so good. For example:

Some really missed the mark.

As you can imagine, I am a pedant over social media about naming Grogu.

Some of the better ones were these:

As for party leaders, Erin O’Toole’s was…bad. Not quite as bad as last year’s shoddily-animated Grogu video (for which the person who was in charge of it needs to have their ass removed), but still bad, especially because it’s not done in good fun, but is trying to spin the notion that the government is trying to turn the CRTC into a personal Twitter censorship bureau. (There are issues with Bill C-10 – this is not one of them).

Jagmeet Singh’s was painfully earnest.

Justin Trudeau, being a true fan, hit a pitch-perfect note.

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Roundup: The importance of our distinctions

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There has been no shortage of columns on the future of the Canadian monarchy over the past few days – I’ve even contributed my own – and they are all over the map between “Our current system works” and “Barbados is going republican so why can’t we?” But one of the fundamental problems with many of these pieces is a fundamental lack of basic civics. Like, the most basic, which then gets even more compounded with wrong-headed expectations about what our other political actors should be doing. A huge example is the importance of keeping the ceremonial head of state functions away from the head of government functions, but this is failing to find as much traction these days, and that’s a problem.

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1372200793546366976

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1372202091712819200

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1372203588466978820

https://twitter.com/LagassePhilippe/status/1372205703843225607

I would dispute with Philippe a bit here in that people would get fussed about honours being handed out by prime ministers or ministers, particularly if it’s a PM that they disagree with. That’s one of the primary reasons why honours should be with the Queen via the Governor Genera/Lieutenant Governors, because it keeps it out of the hands of politicians and the whims of the government of the day. When you start turning honours over to politicians, bad things happen – recall the gong show that was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medals, where MPs and senators were given a number to hand out apiece, and some of them went to certain individuals that would never have been eligible for any other honours in this country.

But of course, as Dan Gardner points out, so much of this stems not only from our poor civics education, but the fact that we are so saturated with American pop culture and politics that so many in this country believe that we are analogous in so many ways. Hell, we have political parties in this country who simply swallow the positions of American politicos and just divide by 10, thinking that’s all it takes, like we’re not separate countries or anything. It’s a huge problem and not enough of us are pushing back against it. The Crown is a big part of what keeps us distinct, and we need to better appreciate that. I can say from personal experience that one of the comments I’ve received most about my book is that people read the chapter on the Crown and say that it finally makes sense to them because they’ve never learned it properly before. We have a problem and we need to solve it before more people think that the solution is to become Americans.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/1372205403782676486

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Roundup: Final debate on the amendments

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While the Commons is not sitting this week, the Senate is, with several bills now on their Order Paper for consideration, most especially the assisted dying bill, which is under a court-imposed deadline (that has already been extended thrice). At issue are the amendments that the government accepted, rejected, and otherwise modified from what the Senate sent back to the Commons a few weeks ago (where the Conservatives then held it up).

The Government Leader in the Senate, Senator Marc Gold, is taking the line that this is a “historic example” of collaboration between the two Chambers that has resulted in better legislation, but I’m not sure just how historic that is, and by “better legislation,” it’s a fairly marginal case because the government reduced the attempt to render this legislation fully compliant with the constitution with one of its famous half-measures that means that people’s suffering will be prolonged as a result, and yet more others will need to embark on yet more court challenges in order to fully access what should be guaranteed rights.

Ultimately it does look like this will pass without sending it back to the Commons again, as most senators are taking the line that the House has had their say, and because they’re democratically elected, it can go ahead now (though there have been instances where the Senate made a second insistence on certain bills in order to make a point – though I’m not sure that will be the case here), and that it could pass and get royal assent before the court deadline. Nevertheless, the amount of time this has taken for something that had court-imposed timelines is a sense of just how vulnerable the parliamentary calendar really is when you had determined opposition to bills, and it’s not over yet because the proposed changes in this legislation will impose a two-year timeline for more consultations on aspects of the law that currently remain prohibited (where that prohibition remains unconstitutional), but that the government is dragging its feet for the sake of politics. Ultimately, nobody comes out of this exercise looking particularly good.

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Roundup: Misinformation in service of the Narrative

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Every now and again, coverage of a story gets me so riled up that I absolutely cannot even, and this happened last night on Power & Politics where once again, former Conservative interim leader Rona Ambrose was trotted out to complain that her bill on training judges in sexual assault law hasn’t passed. This is the fourth or fifth time that the show has had her on to complain, and every single time, they mischaracterise the legislative process, and absolutely ignore that her original bill was blatantly unconstitutional and was completely unworkable in a real-world scenario, and it needed to be rewritten entirely.

Every. Single. Time.

Part of the framing last night was that the bill is “stalled” in the Senate – except that isn’t true at all. It was sent to the Senate at the beginning of December, at a time when they were preoccupied with the assisted dying bill (which is under a court deadline), and it just got sent to committee now that the Senate is back from the winter break (which was longer than the Commons’ because they have so few bills on their Order Paper). In no way is the bill “stalled,” but this is the narrative that the show chose to run with, and facts be damned, that was how they were going to play it. The CBC’s flagship politics show was actively misinforming its viewers as to what was going on with this bill, which makes me really question its ethics, and those of the producers.

Aside from the misinformation about the process, over subsequent appearances, Ambrose has repeatedly maligned the Senate as holding up the bill because of the “old boys club,” which is patently absurd because the Senate is at essentially gender parity (unlike the Commons), she has also dismissed the concerns of judges as “arrogance.” But that’s in contrast to the concerns that judges themselves actually raised (and lo, I actually spoke to them in this piece I wrote about the original version of her bill). And yet there was zero pushback to these assertions, nor was there any mention of the first bill – or even mention that this version of the bill is basically just for show because it’s now useless (because that was the only way to actually make it constitutional).

There has been so much journalistic malpractice on this particular bill over the past several years, and it very much seems that there is a consensus Narrative about this bill that every media outlet has decided to service rather than actually challenge, and that’s a problem. The way this has been handled has been a complete disservice to Canadians, and I wish there was far more critical thinking among the media about this, rather than simply blindly servicing the Narrative.

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Roundup: Taking a culture change seriously?

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So much of the discourse yesterday – aside from the AstraZeneca vaccine – was around Admiral Art McDonald stepping aside while he is the subject of an investigation into sexual misconduct dating back to 2010. In particular, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and defence minister Harjit Sajjan were asked repeatedly whether they knew anything about this investigation or the allegations behind it before they appointed McDonald to the post of Chief of Defence Staff. (For the record, both Trudeau and Sajjan say they weren’t aware until it was reported in the media).

Trudeau says that it’s a good sign that McDonald stepped aside because it shows how serious this is being taken, and wants those who have experienced said misconduct to know that they will be heard and listened to. Erin O’Toole says that there should be a freeze on all promotions and salary increases for senior leadership in the military until an independent investigation can look into how the Forces have handled the problem of sexual misconduct.

Of course, the bigger problem is likely military culture and the structure of leadership, and there are concerns that Operation Honour is failing because it hasn’t tried to understand why sexual misconduct happens in the first place, and that it’s the broader military culture that needs to be changed. There are also particular calls for a fully independent oversight body to deal with the culture – and one that has actual teeth to it – but even though this was a recommendation in the Deschamps Report, the government didn’t go ahead with it. It remains a question whether the government will get over itself and finally create that independent oversight to finally deal with the problem, but they’ve been dragging their heels on other long-overdue independent oversight, especially over bodies like the CBSA, which has no oversight at all. But the fact that two Chiefs of Defence Staff in a row are under investigation should be a wake-up call as to the broader problems with the Forces, and maybe this government should finally take it more seriously than the half-measures they have taken to date.

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Roundup: Pandora’s Box is open

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With the agreement of all House Leaders in the Commons, MPs have finally done it and wrenched open the lid of Pandora’s Box (which is actually a jar) and have let loose evil into the world. That evil is their remote voting app, and Parliament will forever suffer for it.

Am I being a drama queen about this? Hardly. Because we’re already seeing the demands to make these hybrid sittings permanent. The Parliamentary Budget Officer was asked to report on “savings” of this set-up, and in spite of the increased IT and staff costs (and almost no mention of the human costs of the interpreters burning out and suffering cognitive injuries at a horrific rate), he figured that it would save about $6.2 million a year, mostly in travel costs, as well as some 2,972 metric tonnes of CO2 emissions. And the senator who commissioned the PBO report was so enthralled with the result that she wants to make hybrid sittings permanent, with the “bonus” that parliamentarians can spend more time in their “ridings” (erm, except senators don’t have ridings because they represent the whole province, Quebec’s senatorial districts notwithstanding).

What I have been warning about this whole time is that MPs would use the pandemic to normalise hybrid sittings and remote voting, because some of them – the Liberals especially – have been pushing for this for years with little success, and with the pandemic, they are not letting a good crisis go to waste. They know that once it’s over, they will contrive excuses to keep these “temporary” measures permanent, starting with the excuse that it’ll be beneficial for MPs on parental leave, and then it’ll be for those with work-life balance issues, and finally it will because they just have so many things going on in their ridings that they couldn’t possibly be in Ottawa – and now they have the added justification of cost savings and reduced GHG from flights. Parliament is facing de-population, and it will become like a homeroom that everyone attends once or twice a year, and that’s it.

The problem is that Parliament is a face-to-face institution. Some of the most important work that happens is actually on the margins of committee rooms, in the lobbies behind the Chambers, or in the corridors. Ministers can be button-holed by MPs in the Chamber waiting for votes, which is incredibly valuable. Relationships are built with stakeholders and witnesses who appear at committee, and that happens face-to-face. And more importantly, MPs need to actually be in the same room for collegiality to happen. When MPs stopped having dinner together in the Parliamentary Restaurant three nights a week after they ended evening sittings, collegiality plummeted and has never recovered. If MPs aren’t even in Ottawa with one another, they will be fully ensconced in partisan bubbles that make it easy to treat one another as the enemy rather than as fellow MPs who can play outraged in the Chamber and go for a drink together afterward (which is becoming rare enough as it is). This is antithetical to what Parliament is. And not enough of them are getting it, so they’re allowing this to go ahead full-steam ahead, and boasting about “modernisation,” and so on. It will kill Parliament, and not enough people will actually care, which is the worst part.

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Roundup: More alike than unalike

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The NDP decided that the bilateral meeting between Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden was the perfect time to take to shitposting about it, in the form of a juvenile mock-up of the agenda items, and making their remarks on them. Because this is where we’re at in this country – our two main opposition parties have decided that the online tactics of shitposting are definitely the way to win the hearts and minds of Canadian voters.

In the NDP’s case, this is not only about trolling Trudeau, but also Biden, because they have made a concerted effort to appeal to the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Bernie Sanders fanbase – consistent with their lifting their policy ideas wholesale, no matter whether or not they have any relevance in the Canadian context. This tends to involve a certain amount of trying to “win the Internet,” whether it’s with Jagmeet Singh adopting TikTok memes, or the culmination of this attempt to co-opt American Democrat cred when Singh and Ocasio-Cortez played Among Us over Twitch as part of a fundraiser. As a more centrist, compromise candidate, Biden is seen as a betrayal of the progressive wing of the Democrats, and you can bet that the Canadian New Democrats trying to appeal to them is going to cash in on that as much as possible.

None of this should be too surprising, however – the NDP have long-since abandoned any real sense of ideology for the sake of being left-flavoured populists, running after flavours of the week and pursuing policies that don’t actually make sense for their own purported principles (like their demand to cut the HST off of home heating, which would only disproportionately reward the wealthy). In this way, they have been more like the Conservatives than unalike for a while now, but with this full-on embrace of shitposting (as opposed to simply the mendacious omission of jurisdictional boundaries in their demands) just drives that point home.

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