Tag Archives: The Senate

Roundup: Affordability truthers

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As expected, talk of the cost of living crept up again online today, with some more hyperbolic nonsense coming from one of our favourite Conservative talking heads. But this time, economist Stephen Gordon stepped in to provide a reality check – only to find more StatsCan “truthers” coming out of the woodwork. Remember, for populists, they don’t like data that contradicts their narratives, so they try to insist that the data is somehow biased or wrong. Gordon sets them straight, and makes the even more salient point that if the Conservatives (and by extension the NDP) are so concerned about cost of living increases that are within the rate of inflation, then perhaps they need to articulate what their monetary policy goals are – which is what the targeted rate of inflation amounts to. Plenty to think about and remember here.

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Roundup: Sticking with the date

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You may recall that last week, the Federal Court granted judicial review to the Conservative candidate looking to change the election date because it clashes with a particular orthodox Jewish holiday, and lo, the Chief Electoral Officer set about to review his decision. Yesterday he announced that he’d reviewed it, and he was still confident that there wasn’t sufficient reason to change it – moving it back a week would put it in conflict with a bunch of PD days in schools that they needed to use for polling stations, and it would collide with municipal elections in Nunavut, and there were still plenty of options, be they advance polls or special ballots, for those affected by the orthodox Jewish holidays. That decision goes to Cabinet, who will make the final call later this week.

But then something curious happened – a couple of Liberal MPs tweet their dismay at the CEO’s decision, which is a little odd because, well, it’s not really his call. He’s making a recommendation, and Cabinet makes the final decision because the dissolution of Parliament for an election is a Crown prerogative, meaning that it depends on the Governor-in-Counsel (i.e. Cabinet advising the governor general) that makes the decision, regardless of our garbage fixed election date legislation. So if they’re tweeting dismay, they should direct their pleas to their own government rather than to harass the CEO.

This having been said, I am forced to wonder if this isn’t part of the fallout from the aforementioned garbage fixed election date. One of the justifications for said garbage legislation is that it’s supposed to help Elections Canada plan, rather than scramble in the event of a snap election call – but it’s starting to feel like perhaps those plans are also getting a bit precious, which is a bad sign for an institution that is supposed to be adaptable in order to accommodate the election call, whenever it may be.

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Roundup: Enumerating promises

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CTV had a two-part look at the government’s record yesterday, both in terms of what they accomplished that changed Canada, and what they did not accomplish as promised. The accomplished list is not quite as interesting – gender balance, more refugee resettlement, restoring the long-form census, legalising cannabis – I’m not sure their “reforms” to the Senate are as much of an accomplishment as people may think given the broader unintended consequences.

The other list, however, strikes me as requiring a bit more nuance than was really offered in some cases. For example, not balancing the budget was in part because there was an oil crash at the beginning of their mandate that affected their figures, and it wasn’t really balanced when the Conservatives lost power (particularly given that they booked a bunch of fictitious savings for things like the Phoenix pay system and Shared Services Canada, which the Liberals had to clean up). That said, they did increase spending once revenues increased, so it is a bit more complex than the piece offered. Electoral reform? It wasn’t one of their biggest campaign promises, but one of a myriad that was simply overblown in many instances, but that aside, it again doesn’t quite capture that the attempt to explore consequences resulted in a hot garbage report that was unworkable at best, and was based on a stupid promise that evidence showed was not feasible (leaving aside that the Liberals stupidly didn’t bother to promote their own preferred system until it was too late). The Indigenous file is still rocky? If anyone thinks that centuries of colonisation can be reversed in four years, well, that’s fantasyland, but it’s not as though there hasn’t been significant progress. The final, more nebulous point about scandals and “doing politics differently” is one of those unicorn promises that lets people’s imaginations run wild. For the most part, he did things differently than Stephen Harper did, but it wasn’t different enough or utopian enough for some people, and it qualifies as a failure, which I’m not sure is fair to anyone.

Speaking of stupid promises, the Ontario government is having to walk back on their promise to end “hallway medicine” in twelve months, and yeah, that’s not going to happen and it’s hey, it’s a complex and intractable problem that not even shovelling money at the problem is likely to solve. But it’s not like people believed anything Ford promised because it was only about their anger at Kathleen Wynne, right? But that’s what you get with populist blowhards – snake oil promises pulled out of their asses with no ability to implement them, but hey, so long as you keep them angry about the other guy/woman, then that’s all that matters, right? And nobody ever seems to learn.

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Roundup: Dire warnings about MPs’ jobs

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Another day, another apocalyptic warning that the workload and schedules of MPs are going to wind up killing somebody someday, and I just cannot even. This isn’t even the first time this particular argument has been made by MPs, but it boggles me even more that journalists aren’t pushing back more, and at least giving an “Oh, come on,” and it leaves the impression that there is an expectation that parliamentarians go in thinking it’s a nine-to-five job. And it gets even more ludicrous when you realise that MPs are not only sitting fewer days than they used to, but we already eliminated evening sittings three days a week in order to make the days more “family friendly” (which, as it happens, made congeniality worse because they stopped eating dinner together three nights a week).

https://twitter.com/garry_keller/status/1150587736736317441

Part of what has triggered this wave of pearl-clutching are the number of voting marathons that we saw in this current parliament, but we need to pour a bit of perspective sauce on the situation here. First of all, the opposition needs to have some tools to apply pressure to the government when they feel it’s necessary, and eliminating those tools would be a major problem. That said, I’m not sure that these particular marathons were appropriate uses for those tools, particularly as they were pegged to issues that were fairly minor on the scope of things, if not outright ridiculous, and yet the Conservatives made a big song and dance about these vote-a-thons, which wound up coming across as a temper tantrum. It became routine that estimates votes were coming up, so they were going to force a vote-a-thon to express their outrage of the day, and then blame the government for “forcing it” to happen. That’s…not how this works. And if MPs are opposed to those tactics, well, they can let their party leadership know that they’re opposed and do something about it internally. Otherwise, I’m not sure what their suggestions are for making life easier for MPs, because the alternatives – such as time allocating all business by means of programming motions and the like – is not healthy for democracy either. Perhaps they need to think about that as they complain about the jobs they chose.

Speaking of workloads, there was some angry debating over Twitter over the weekend about the Senate not sitting later to pass the bill that would add CBSA to the new civilian oversight body created for the RCMP (the accusation that they wanted to go on vacation). While I have my doubts about that bill (I think the earlier Senate bill to create an Inspector General for CBSA held a lot of promise, but the government refused to debate it), it’s pretty unfair to lay the blame on the Senate as a whole. Rather, it’s the government’s fault – both in introducing the bill so late, and sending it to the Senate at the very last minute, and in their Leader in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, who controls the agenda. He could have ensured that the Senate sat long enough to pass it, but we’ve seen over the past three-and-a-half years that Harder has been absolutely allergic to staying later than the Commons does, even though the Senate is actually scheduled to sit for an extra week at the end of each sitting, like they always do. Harder, however, has steadfastly refused, and the Independent senators haven’t pushed back. If you want someone to blame, start there.

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Roundup: Frivolously calling in CSIS

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Because there is nothing that the current strategic geniuses in the Conservative leader’s office won’t do to turn an issue into some kind of cartoonish conspiracy or a theatrical production, they decided yesterday to write an open letter to CSIS to demand that they open an investigation into John McCallum, citing that he was trying to direct the Chinese into interfering in the Canadian election. No, seriously.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1149729121230045185

To not put too fine of a point on this, calling in national security agencies over a partisan issue is not only highly unserious, it’s dangerous because it not only politicises CSIS, but it also fuels the current rage by those on engaging in illiberal populism of accusing those who engage in legitimate political disagreement of being treasonous. And while Lisa Raitt would take to Twitter to try and defend this with overly cute legalistic justifications, the broader point stands. Leave CSIS out of your political theatre. This should be a no-brainer. And yet…

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1149745283825315840

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https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1149819454878035968

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Roundup: Proving the SCC’s point

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It was only a matter of time after Alberta premier Jason Kenney announced that he was reviving his province’s sham Senate “election” laws that the two so-called “elected” senators from the province started chiming in, and lo, Senator Tannas did just that on the Alberta Primetime politics show on Alberta’s CTV affiliates this week. During the hugely uncritical interview, Tannas proclaimed that getting an “endorsement” from the public gives him the right to speak up “more forcefully,” and that he and fellow “elected” Senator Black are “listened to differently” because they of their special status.

Let me remind you what the Supreme Court of Canada said when it comes to consultative elections – that it would give the Senate a popular mandate, which would change the constitutional architecture of the institution, and you can’t do that without a formal constitutional amendment. In other words, Tannas is proving the Supreme Court’s point – that his “election” (which was a sham, let’s be clear) confers upon him some kind of special authority, which is whole point. Now, Tannas did try to couch some of his criticisms for his nominally appointed colleagues from Alberta because he has to work with them, but amidst the myths about Bills C-48 and C-69 and the complete self-aggrandisement, there was virtually no pushback at Tannas about what the Supreme Court said, or the fact that the process that got him “elected” was a sham worthy of a People’s Republic.

There seems to be almost nobody pushing back against Kenney and his unconstitutional legislation and the sham that these “elections” really are. Why, here’s Don Braid with a lazy garbage take that lauds the farce that Kenney puts on because he’s swallowed the rhetoric about those bills whole, along with the fairytale nonsense about a “Triple E” senate and what it purports to do (never mind that the only thing it would do is create 105 new backbenchers with an overinflated sense of self). Repeat after me: Kenney is only doing this to invent a future grievance, while he lies about those two bills. It would be great if someone could be bothered to call him out on it.

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Roundup: Sensation over nuance

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The big headline over CBC yesterday was that five of the six most recent federal judicial appointments in the province of New Brunswick all had some kind of ties to Dominic LeBlanc – never mind how tenuous those ties were. This of course led a bunch of Conservative apologists to compare this with the Dean French/Doug Ford situation in Ontario, which is absurd given that judicial appointments have a more rigorous merit-based system around them (more rigorous than it was under the Conservative era), and many of the French/Ford appointments had to do with whether someone was connected to French by family or lacrosse, many with no obvious competences in the roles they were appointed to. The Conservatives also declared that this was somehow related to both Loblaws winning a competition around fridge refits (no, seriously), and that this was reminiscent of the Arctic surf clam contract that LeBlanc was involved in wherein the definition of “family” used by the Ethics Commissioner differed from that in other statutes. (Not mentioned was the time when the Conservatives appointed most of Peter MacKay’s wedding party to the bench in Nova Scotia).

Reading deeper into this story, I found that some of the connections that were being highlighted were a bit dubious. The most dubious was the fact that one of the judges named was not actually someone that was recently named, but rather promoted to the Chief Justice of province’s Court of Appeal by Trudeau, though she was originally a Conservative donor and had been first named to the Bench by Harper. The fact that she bought a property from LeBlanc next to his summer cottage was deemed to be curious in this. Likewise the fact that two of them were part of a group that paid off LeBlanc’s leadership campaign debts a decade ago (each would have donated a few hundred dollars) is a pretty dubious link between them. The only one that might raise eyebrows is the fact that one of the five is married to LeBlanc’s brother-in-law…but even then, at what point do we start disqualifying someone whose relation is by marriage twice-removed?

The other bit of nuance that we can’t forget here is that New Brunswick is a very small province with a very small population, and legal circles in a province like that would be very tight – especially when you consider that the provincial political culture is far more nepotistic than the federal culture is. While the CBC piece cites a paper that says that people with political connections get judicial appointments at a rate double that in other parts of the country, but one has to remember that it can be harder to avoid, which is why fighting nepotism in those places can be much harder. And this is the point where people will bring up the fact that Jody Wilson-Raybould objected to the fact that names that were short-listed needed to be sent to PMO for vetting by the Liberals’ database, but again, it needs to be stressed that they need to go through all sources to check for red flags because the prime minister is politically accountable for those appointments. It’s called Responsible Government. Does that mean that these five appointments didn’t have some influence from LeBlanc tapping the justice minister and saying he wanted them appointed? Anything is possible, but it’s unlikely given the vetting process and the fact that most of these connections are tenuous at best. But it’s also regrettable that this kind of journalism strives for sensationalism and an attempt at being gotcha than it is with nuance.

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Roundup: Federal Government 2, Provinces 0

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It was not a surprise that the Ontario Court of Appeal told Doug Ford to go pound sand with regard to its objections to the federal carbon price, which is exactly what they did in a 4-1 decision, affirming the Saskatchewan decision that the price is not a tax but a regulatory charge, and that it’s not unconstitutional. Ford, predictably, vowed to take this to the Supreme Court of Canada, and given that they agreed to hear the Saskatchewan case, it’s likely these two will be heard together, where you can pretty much bet that the majority of the judges there will tell Moe, Ford, and the likes, to similarly go pound sand. As for the dissenting judge on the Ontario panel, well, he has a pretty interesting history of his legal philosophy, and was unusually appointed directly to the Court of Appeal from his being a law professor.

Meanwhile, here’s some analysis, with threads by Andrew Leach, plus Lindsay Tedds on the whole tax/regulatory charge difference.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1144686800348340226

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1144687790367674368

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/1144706969493749761

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/1144708330037874692

Meanwhile, the BC government’s lawyers were in Alberta court on Friday to argue for an injunction against the province’s blatantly unconstitutional “turn off the taps” legislation now that it’s been proclaimed, likening it to a loaded gun that they don’t want to go off accidentally. The hitch, of course, is the question of whether BC has standing to go to Alberta court over the case, so we’ll see what the judge decides there.

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Roundup: Nepotism versus Responsible Government

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As the nepotism scandal in Ontario picks up steam, with revelations that there were appointments made to lacrosse players and an MPP’s father, and more demands that there be a more independent review of the appointments that have been made, I think it’s time for a bit of a civics and history lesson about patronage appointments. In many ways, patronage appointments are how we wound up with Responsible Government in the colonies that became Canada in the first place – the local assemblies wanted control over who was being appointed to these positions rather than them going to people from the UK who would then come over to carry them out, and eventually we won that right as part of Responsible Government. It was also understood at the time that it was fine if the party in power put their friends into patronage positions because when fortunes turned and their rivals formed government, they would be able to do the same with their friends. That particular view we have, fortunately, evolved from.

Regardless of this evolution, the core fact remains – that under Responsible Government, it is the first minister and Cabinet who makes these decisions as they are the ones who advise the Governor General/lieutenant governor to make said appointment. It also means that they are accountable to the legislature for that advice, which is where the current nepotism scandal now hangs. There are going to be all kinds of Doug Ford apologists who say that this was all Dean French, that Ford didn’t know what was going on – even though he signed off on it. And that’s the thing. It doesn’t matter if this was French hoodwinking Ford because Ford is the one who advises the LG about the appointments, and Ford is responsible to the legislature for making those appointments (and for hiring French, when you think about it). And if his party gets too embarrassed by this particular scandal, well, there could be a loss of confidence in the offing (likely from within party ranks than the legislature, but stranger things have happened).

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1143639086231633920

On that note of accountability, we should also point out that with the appointment of yet more ministers and “parliamentary assistants,” there are a mere 27 MPPs left in the back benches who don’t have a role, which means that they will see themselves as one screw-up away from a promotion (and this is more salient in the provinces, where regional balances are less of an outright concern, and this government in particular seems less interested in other diversity balances). That does erode the exercise of accountability by backbenchers. So does, incidentally, a chief of staff who would berate MPs for not clapping long enough, but maybe they’ll grow a backbone now that French is gone. Maybe.

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Roundup: Solidifying the “new” Senate

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Another day, another badly executed wrap-up article on the Senate, this time courtesy of the CBC, which again, has a badly misleading lede in which it claims that “Legislative changes that would have made it harder for a future prime minister to reverse Senate reforms have fallen through.” This is wrong – any changes to the Parliament of Canada Act that the government was contemplating would have had zero effect on the selection process for future senators. Why? Because that’s not governed by that Act, or indeed any piece of legislation – it’s part of the constitution, and clearly spelled out as a prerogative of the Governor-in-Council, meaning the prime minister and Cabinet will advise the Governor General as to who gets appointed. There is nothing that Trudeau could do to bind that advice legislatively – recall the Senate reform reference to the Supreme Court of Canada – that would require a constitutional amendment requiring seven provinces with fifty percent of the population to do.

What would changes to the Parliament of Canada Act regarding the Senate do? The actual proposals were to ensure that leaders of any parliamentary group in the Senate would get commensurate salary increases and resources to put them on par with the what is nominally the government and official opposition in the Senate, and the ISG has been pushing for this pretty hard, but they also were demanding to be part of consideration for vote bells, though I’m not sure why it would matter (particularly given that they have demonstrated time and again that they’re not reliable negotiating partners). But I also suspect that part of the reason why these changes didn’t get proposed was because there is some legal opinion that it would require some kind of buy-in from provinces to make this kind of change, so there was likely little time for the government to add this ball to all of the other ones they were juggling that late in the parliamentary calendar (despite the cries of the ISG). Of course, this hasn’t stopped the media from falsely framing these changes as affecting the selection process, as this has been cited by more than one reporter from more than one outlet, and it’s false.

The rest of the story is again more of the same voices opining on how great the “new” Senate is working, but we fortunately got a bit of pushback from Liberal Senator Lillian Dyck, who did point out that the lack of organisation among the Independents has held up bills and slowed down the process – and she’s right. But nobody wants to talk about that as they’re busy patting themselves on the back for “not being whipped.” There’s more to the Senate than that, and they need to get off this self-congratulation because things aren’t working as well as they like to claim.

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