Tag Archives: The Senate

Roundup: Not appealing, just consulting

Posted on by

First thing yesterday morning, the federal government announced that they were proceeding with restarting consultations with First Nations affected by the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline, and that they had tasked former Supreme Court of Canada justice Franc Iacobucci to oversee the process. Iacobucci has done a great deal of work around the Duty to Consult in recent years, as this report that he wrote with law firm Torys LLP demonstrates, along with work he’s done with Ontario over the underrepresentation of Indigenous people on juries in the province. Indigenous groups in the region have responded with some optimism, but are also warning that these consultations can’t come with a predetermined outcome if they’re to be meaningful (which may be too far to go given that the government has stated that this project will go ahead). Some of those Indigenous communities are also looking at the fact that this process could allow them to talk more amongst themselves.

https://twitter.com/coreyshefman/status/1047512242109997056

https://twitter.com/coreyshefman/status/1047512244303663104

https://twitter.com/coreyshefman/status/1047512246660808704

https://twitter.com/coreyshefman/status/1047512248716087297

Meanwhile, Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney (among others) are bellyaching that the government has opted not to appeal the Federal Court of Appeal decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, and yet not one of them has articulated what the error in law they are looking to contest would actually be, which is kind of a big deal if they think the Court will hear it. It’s also not clear that an appeal would get them any clarity anytime soon, given that the Court usually gives about six months between granting leave and hearing the case in order to provide time for submissions, and then a decision could take another six months at least – possibly more if it’s a contentious issue, like this one is.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Counting on LNG

Posted on by

The federal and BC provincial governments made a big ballyhoo yesterday about the fact that a consortium of companies have come together to make a $40 billion investment in Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) in BC, and it’s a project that not only did Indigenous consultation correctly, but got buy-in from the communities. It’s seen as a study in contrasts for other pipeline projects – but it’s also worth noting that natural gas isn’t bitumen, and you’ve got vastly different environmental consequences to a spill or breach. It’s also a major energy project at a time when the dominant narrative is that we apparently can’t get anything built in this country, or that investment is fleeing (not actually true), and that what we need to do is to end carbon pricing (despite the fact that energy companies have been calling for it), gutting environmental legislation (never mind that the regime Harper put into place created far more problems than it solved), and that Indigenous consultation is just a fleeting goalpost that keeps shifting. This project seems to prove otherwise – even if BC promised breaks on provincial and carbon taxes to sweeten the deal (though one could say that it shows there’s enough flexibility in the system as opposed to the whole system being hopelessly broken). Suffice to say, it makes the Conservatives’ talking points far less tenable (not that the truth has really mattered to them).

One of the more interesting questions in all of this is how it will affect emissions – not only locally, but globally, and that’s really the big question. While the local emissions would be high enough that it appears that BC would likely need to virtually decarbonise their economy otherwise, there is the potential that this LNG would be a major help in reducing emissions in Asian economies that are reliant on coal-fired generation – but that’s only if the LNG displaces coal and not other renewables instead. In all likelihood, LNG would be used alongside renewables as a backup or stopgap, but it may be some time before we see if that’s really what happens. Suffice to say, it has the potential to have a major impact on global emissions, if applied in the right way.

More New NAFTA fallout:

  • Justin Trudeau says that despite that notification clause in the new NAFTA, Canada will still pursue a deeper trading relationship with China.
  • Kim Campbell says it’s a bit cheeky for the Conservatives to suggest that they could have gotten a better deal given the American leadership.
  • In Vancouver, Bill Morneau praised the new NAFTA, but also said that dairy and steel sectors still need help. So, there’s that.
  • The new NAFTA includes a specific clause to insist that Canadians not be able to watch the American broadcast of the Super Bowl. No, seriously.
  • Here’s a deeper dive into the Supply Management issue as it relates to the new NAFTA, including the fears of hormone-laced milk coming in from the US.
  • Here’s a look at the government’s efforts at trade diversification, given that NAFTA is more or less renegotiated.
  • Here’s a look at next steps when it comes to ratification of the new NAFTA.

Continue reading →

Senate QP: Duclos versus petulant questions

Posted on by

It’s rare that there is drama around ministers appearing at Senate Question Period, but it happened today. While senators had initially been promised an appearance by finance minister Bill Morneau, he ended up jetting off to Vancouver with the prime minister for the LNG announcement. Apparently Senators were apprised at 11 AM that he wouldn’t be appearing due to “obligations related to NAFTA negotiations,” and the Conservatives got a bit miffed by the last-minute switch to minister Jean-Yves Duclos. Senator Larry Smith led off, noting that they expected Minister Morneau and would ask some questions to the government leader instead, and he launched into a broadside over the trade deal and he lack of action on steel and aluminium tariffs. Senator Harder said that the matter was subject to a stream that was different from the NAFTA agreement, and that the government was still negotiating on them.

Senator Eaton also asked about the clause in the new agreement about “non-market countries” and what it meant for trade with China. Harder responded that all agreements have clauses the termination of the agreement, and it wasn’t surprising and that this particular clause references the opportunity of all sides to review the agreements that any of the three partners might enter into with third parties and that the signatories to NAFTA aren’t disadvantaged.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A new NAFTA

Posted on by

Apparently, we have a NAFTA deal. Or “USMCA,” as Trump wants to call it, because that’s so much better. After a weekend of negotiations and a 10 PM emergency Cabinet meeting last night, everything was The “senior sources” are saying that dairy access will be around what was negotiated for the original TPP (or maybe a little more) along with eliminating the “Class 7” pricing, but we managed to keep the cultural exemptions and dispute resolution mechanisms, so that’s something. What we apparently didn’t get were any new guarantees around those steel and aluminium tariffs, so that’s less of a good thing. More details are due to be announced this morning, for what it’s worth.

And now for the Conservative shitposts to begin, and Michelle Rempel has offered us a taste of what’s to come. Because remember, they’re the “grown-ups” in the room.

https://twitter.com/MichelleRempel/status/1046611767185440768

Continue reading →

Roundup: Harder’s charm offensive

Posted on by

There’s a charm offensive in the works, led by the Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative,” Senator Peter Harder, and his staff, to try and showcase how they’re transforming the Senate. In a profile piece of the “Government Representative Office” for the Hill Times, the three members of the office gave lovely little explanations of their duties, and how they’re doing things differently, like Senator Mitchell talking about how he doesn’t have a caucus to whip, so he’s focused on counting votes for upcoming bills, and arranging briefings and such. Bless.

What didn’t get answered in the piece is just why Harder needs his $1.5 million budget, since he isn’t managing a caucus, he isn’t doing his job of negotiating with other caucus groups for the passage of bills, he isn’t doing any heavy lifting in terms of sponsoring bills on behalf of the government, and as we saw during one of his melodramatic moments in the spring, doesn’t appear to be counting votes either. So why he needs that big of a budget, and that many staff, remains a mystery that has gone unsolved. Harder also remained evasive as to just how often he meets with Cabinet, which continues to be problematic because he’s supposed to be the link between the Chamber and the Cabinet, where Senators can find accountability for the actions of the government (which is why he’s supposed to be a full-blown Cabinet minister and not just a member of Privy Council). They did say that he wasn’t at the recent Cabinet retreat, which raises yet more questions, especially when it comes to how he plans to get their priorities through the Chamber as the Order Paper in the Senate is full, and he’s been in no mood to negotiate timelines (which I know for a fact that other caucus groups are willing to do).

Part of the problem with this charm offensive is that it’s preying on the lack of knowledge that members of the media have with how the Senate works, so they don’t know how things have and have not changed – and for the most part, the only thing that has changed are the fact that Harder and company insist on renaming everything and not doing the jobs they’re supposed to be doing, shifting that burden to the other players in Senate leadership. My other worry is that this is the first stage in the push to start making changes like the demand for a business committee, which would have a hugely detrimental effect on the Chamber and its operations. And I would caution any journalists reading to beware of what Harder plans to propose, and how he plans to charm other journalists into writing feel-good stories about his planned rule changes without understanding how they will damage the Senate.

Continue reading →

Senate QP: Jody Wilson-Raybould is still so proud

Posted on by

After the day’s repetitive QP in the Other Place, the justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould headed down the hall for Senate Question Period. Senator Larry Smith was up first, asking about the decision-making process to approve only one THC testing device, which many police forces are opting not to buy. Wilson-Raybould replied that they had expertise from the Canadian Society of Forensic Scientists, and that while it was the first device approved, it was not the only tool that law enforcement officers have, which was why they invested in field training for drug detection. Smith asked if there were other devices on the way, and Wilson-Raybould offered the backgrounder on the one approved device and said that she was open to approving others as they are tested.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A quixotic UN quest

Posted on by

It’s time for the United Nations General Assembly, and while prime minister Justin Trudeau won’t be making an address at the Assembly this year, he did give a speech yesterday about Nelson Mandela, and how other should follow his legacy, and later in the day, announced a $20 million contribution to a global infrastructure hub.

The other thing that everyone is talking about is Canada’s (possibly quixotic) quest for that temporary Security Council seat in 2020, which means a lot of schmoozing and diplomatic niceties during the General Assembly – and it’s going to be an uphill battle, for which Canada has so far…deployed a logo. Add to that, the government hasn’t really articulated why exactly this is important to our foreign policy other than to stick it to the Harper years when they decided that they wouldn’t bother going for the seat again in a fit of pique.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1044218706937696257

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1044218710519623685

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1044218714202214400

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1044284604310478848

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1044287893554946048

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1044288949806481408

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1044291455454404608

Meanwhile, this session of the General Assembly will see the adoption of the Global Compact on Refugees, which Canada had a hand in crafting.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Her Excellency’s many issues

Posted on by

The floodgates have opened, and stories about the difficult first year that Her Excellency Julie Payette has been having as Governor General have been fast and furious. From concerns that she’s still living at Rideau Gate rather than Rideau Hall despite there being renovated living quarters now available, to concerns about her not telling her security detail where she’s at, the concerns on the ground that she’s breaking convention by not visiting every province in her first year, were all warm-ups for this wide-ranging piece in the National Post that compiles a lot of the things we’ve been hearing unofficially in Ottawa, about what a struggle the year has been. While some of it is growing pains, and some of it are potentially unfair comparisons to having previously appointed Governors General who were superhuman in their ability to take on a volume of work (and in the case of someone like Adrienne Clarkson, write all of her own speeches for 500+ engagements in a year), I was particularly disturbed by the fact that the Liberal Research Bureau was doing the background checks and vetting for the appointment when Trudeau should have kept the Vice-Regal Appointments Committee in operation (and the only reason anyone can think as to why he disbanded it was that it was Harper’s creation and it was simply an act of pettiness). The fact that they didn’t properly prepare her for the role is also a big red flag as to the seriousness with which they undertook the process and the decision. I hope that these are just growing pains and that they’ll sort themselves out, but given how badly this government has managed its appointment processes so far, it really leaves one questioning some of the competence of the senior ranks of this government.

If there’s a silver lining to all of this, I would say that I hope it means that it might encourage some of these charities and organisations that the GG used to be the patron of might look instead to members of the royal family. This could very well be a golden opportunity to start re-forging some links with our monarchy, and getting more royals on our shores to have a lot more face-time and remining both royals and Canadians that we have bonds that need to be strengthened, lest they atrophy. It’s also a particularly good time given the addition of Megan, Duchess of Sussex, to the family, and the fact that she spent that much time in Toronto gives her that connection already, and we should be capitalising on it (not to mention the fact that Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, has Canadian ancestors including a pre-Confederation Prime Ministers, and we should be milking that connection for all it’s worth too).

Meanwhile, here’s a look at Payette finally getting to Humbolt, Saskatchewan, six months later, and the fact that she’s been reluctant to visit other sites of tragedies, like Fredericton after the recent shootings there.

Special note: If you’re concerned about the tornado that hit this area, they were to the west of Ottawa, and across the river in Gatineau, and nowhere near the Parliamentary precinct. I wasn’t affected, and my power didn’t go out (hence why you’re getting this morning’s roundup).

Continue reading →

Roundup: Bernier’s dog whistles

Posted on by

While we’re on the topic of bozo eruptions, we got another one from Maxime Bernier over Twitter on Sunday evening, railing about Justin Trudeau’s declaration that diversity is our strength. While I won’t reproduce all of Bernier’s feed, some of the commentary around it has been interesting, and in particular, just what kinds of dog whistles and language that Bernier employs in his language – and likely not a coincidence that this happened on a day of counter-protests to white supremacists in the United States. Also worth noting that his tweets were in rapid succession and in both official languages, which indicates that they were premeditated and not spur of the moment, and that does mean something as well.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1028812175673094146

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1028834166849368064

I might be willing to suspend enough disbelief around Bernier to suppose that he’s really not all that bright and that he really doesn’t know what he’s doing when he tweets stuff like this, but the people who surrounded him in his leadership campaign absolutely knew what they were doing when they tweeted things like red pill memes, and one presumes that they’re still in Bernier’s orbit. But Bernier has consistently demonstrated that he doesn’t have particularly adept political sensibilities (witness his ejection from shadow cabinet), and the fact that he went from going to Pride parades during his leadership campaign to insist that his libertarian values meant that he valued freedom over social conservatism, to becoming a Jordan Peterson convert who was paranoid about “enforced speech” and the bogus fears about being jailed for mis-gendering someone. But as is pointed out below, we are two weeks away from the Conservative policy convention, and it’s possible that this dog whistling is also about Bernier trying to gather support to oppose Scheer in some capacity or other.

Michelle Rempel also put out a tweet thread in response (which again, I’m not going to repeat), and some of the points she made seemed to be refuting Bernier, but at the same time, she makes her own coded appeals about planned migration and the language of pitting groups of newcomers against each other, in very Jason Kenney-esque ways.

Ultimately, however, we are back to the notion of where the adult supervision is with this party, and we recall the reasons why Harper put the party into communications lockdown – before they won in 2006, they went into lockdown because the 2004 election saw them lose because of precisely these kinds of bozo eruptions from the likes of Cheryl Gallant and others. And the strict message discipline seemed to work, but it causes as many problems as it solves (not to mention it’s terrible for democracy). But with this kind of tire fire over the past couple of weeks, you have to imagine that Scheer, whose own Twitter strategy is a lot of lies, obfuscation, narrative building and populist memes, is all for this kind of air war that he thinks will rile the base in ways that appear to have worked for both Trump and Ford. Maybe this kind of “shitposting” (as it is colloquially known) is the message discipline, in which case, we’re probably all doomed.

https://twitter.com/aradwanski/status/1028816033610575872

https://twitter.com/aradwanski/status/1028816045262307328

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1028416748331126785

Continue reading →

Roundup: Moe’s carbon bafflegab

Posted on by

Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe (or his staff) penned an op-ed in the National Post yesterday, to explain why he thinks Canadians are opposed to the federal government’s planned carbon tax. The reasons, however, are…not convincing. Nor are his counter-claims about what the alternatives are. And to be fair, almost nobody likes taxes, which is why leaders like Moe have been casting any kind of carbon price in as negative a light as possible in order to turn public sentiment against them. And we can’t ignore that most Canadians want to fight climate change like they want a pony – they say they want to do it, but don’t actually want to undertake any of the responsibility that goes with it.

As for Moe’s arguments, he decries the carbon price as a “one-size-fits-all” approach, which is bogus off the start. The price does not indicate the mechanism by which it’s implemented, whether that’s cap-and-trade or a tax, and how those systems are set up and administered can vary greatly, particularly in how the revenues are recycled. That’s why the federal government gave provinces the space to design a system that fits their particular circumstances best. So right off the start, Moe is being intellectually dishonest in his argument. And as for the stated goal of reducing emissions, a carbon price is not only about reducing emissions – it’s about giving a market signal so that major emitters can drive innovation to reduce their emissions and avoid paying it (you know, something a fiscal conservative would recognise, were Moe actually one and not a populist goof), and it ensures that everyday consumers make choices to reduce their emissions. If you see people lining up at gas stations when the price drops a few cents, imagine what price indicators mean when it comes to other behaviours.

Moe keeps pointing to his province’s investment in carbon capture and storage, which has not yet proven itself cost-effective as a technology, but ironically would be more cost-effective if there was a carbon price that would help to better monetize its value. He talks about designing an offset system that would recognise carbon sinks in agriculture, but again, having a price allows this recognition to be better tracked and monetized, which again, provides incentives. You’d think this would be elementary stuff to someone who purports to be a fiscal conservative that believes in the free market. But that’s not what Moe is (nor is Doug Ford or Andrew Scheer for that matter), and they need to justify how they’re rejecting actual fiscal conservative measures.

Continue reading →