Tag Archives: The Senate

Roundup: The problem with sponsoring bills

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News that the “Government Representative” in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder, has been asking unaligned senators to sponsor government bills as they arrive from the Commons has me feeling a bit uneasy, and I’m trying to figure out why. This meant a trip through the Senate Procedure in Practice, and I find my concerns only slightly mollified. I will admit that the government’s plan to move a government bill in the Senate – Bill S-2, which deals with motor vehicle recalls – also has me uneasy because while it is being sponsored under Harder’s name, the fact that Harder is not a cabinet minister remains a troubling procedural issue. Government bills should be introduced by cabinet ministers, whether that minister is the Leader of the Government in the Senate or another minister in the Senate (which happens on occasion), and Harder, while sworn into the Privy Council, is not a minister. That the Conservatives did this with Claude Carignan was not a particularly good precedent to create or follow, since Carignan was essentially a minister without being in cabinet for the only reason that Stephen Harper was having a fit of pique over the ClusterDuff Affair, Carignan also having been sworn into Privy Council and being given access to PCO resources to do his job. But while Carignan was at least a part of the government’s caucus, Peter Harder explicitly is not, which is why this decision to have him sponsor government legislation is troubling. I remain of the view that as much as Harder is trying to present himself as non-partisan and independent, you cannot be independent while also representing the government because it is an inherent conflict of interest. That he is being asked to perform the functions of a cabinet minister while still proclaiming himself to be independent is risible. It is a problem that Justin Trudeau’s particular…naivety around his Senate reform project cannot simply gloss over without eroding the fundamental tenets of our Westminster system. That he wants a more independent Senate is not a bad thing, and the appointment of a critical mass of unaligned senators is a laudable goal, but you cannot expect someone who is not a minister to do the functions of a minister and still call themselves independent. As for Harder asking unaligned senators to sponsor bills, it’s not quite as outré as having Harder sponsor government bills that are initiated in the Senate, but I am still uncomfortable as this is typically something done by a member of the government’s party, given that the sponsor’s job is to defend the bill and advocate for its passage. While I don’t buy that every new appointed unaligned senator is really a crypto-Liberal, as many a Conservative senators would have you believe, the fact that Harder is the one doing the asking is still uncomfortable. It would perhaps be better if he were to call for volunteers to sponsor bills on their way from the Commons and then perform a coordinating role rather than an assigning one, if only for the sake of optics. Harder calling up unaligned senators and asking them to act as sponsors looks too much like he is playing caucus management, and if he continues to insist that it’s not the way that the chamber is operating, then perhaps he needs to be more conscious of the optics of the way he is operating.

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Roundup: Motion 6 regrets

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With a tiny bit of time and distance from the ridiculous events of this week, attention is turning back to the procedural shenanigans that got us to the frayed tempers in the first place. While the Liberals promised an era of fewer procedural tactics when being sworn in, in reality it was a petty dumb promise to make because let’s face it – sometimes it’s tough for a government to get their agenda through a House of Commons that doesn’t like some of their plans, and the opposition isn’t going to go along with them. It’s not their job to, and our system is built to be adversarial in order to keep the government accountable. On the other hand, there is so much hyperbole being applied to what Motion 6 was, and what the Liberals attempted to do with it, that we need to apply a little bit of perspective sauce. For starters, while Peter Julian rants and rails about how “draconian” the motion was, those in the know on the Hill know that he is very difficult to work with as a House Leader. In fact, the word “impossible” has been thrown around if you ask the right people. And sometimes that means using a heavier hand to work around. Rona Ambrose complained that Motion 6 took away “every ability” for the opposition to hold the government to account, but I’m not sure that dilatory motions are actual accountability. They’re protests, certainly, but that’s not necessarily accountability, so points for hyperbole there. And yes, this is a problem of the Liberals’ own making, promising infinite debate on an infinite number of bills, until they ran into a bunch of deadlines that made infinite debate a problem. And we need to remember that time allocation can be a perfectly appropriate tool when used appropriately. Did the Conservatives over-use it? Yes, because Peter Van Loan was an inept House manager, and the NDP refused to let any debate collapse, which made it a regular tool. And every debate does not need to go on forever. There is no genuine reason that there needed to be 84 speakers at second reading for the assisted dying bill. None. Particularly when virtually every one of those interventions was reading a script that said 1) This is a deeply personal issue; 2) What about palliative care?; and 3) Conscience rights, conscience rights, conscience rights. That does not need to be repeated 84 times at the stage of debate where you deciding on the merits of the bill. It’s noble that the Liberals were as accommodating as they were, but in this case, the opposition demands that everyone be heard – and not during extended hours – is actually unreasonable. Likewise, when LeBlanc started the time allocation motions, it was to head off NDP procedural trickery around Bill C-10, which they are perfectly justified in doing. And now that the government has backed off from Motion 6 (which I maintain was likely the nuclear option they were presenting to try and force the opposition parties back to the negotiation table for timetables around bills, and I doubt their tales that they were cooperative given the personalities involved), we’re going to see an increased hue and cry any time a future time allocation motion is brought forward. The Liberals, by combination of a dumb promise of infinite debate combined with their tactical ham-fistedness, have hampered their own future attempts to get bills passed in a timely manner. This will make things even more difficult going forward, as more planks of their ambitious agenda get unveiled.

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Roundup: The elbowing

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I can scarcely express just how stupid things got yesterday because everyone needed to rush to score points. But here we are. Starting back at the beginning, the government decided to put a motion on the Notice Paper that was basically the nuclear option of time allocation measures – essentially suspending all avenues by which the opposition could propose dilatory motions until the Commons rises for the summer, so that they can get C-14 and a few other timely pieces of legislation passed. And the opposition freaked out.

Nobody is quite sure why the Liberals resorted to such tactics, but my working theory is that the closed-door House Leaders’ meetings have degenerated to being unworkable (not an unlikely theory considering that my sources told me in the previous parliament that Peter Julian was impossible to work with), and Monday’s surprise vote after the NDP lied about the motions they were moving that day broke the trust of the Liberals, who had been attempting to work amiably with them. It’s also possible that putting this motion on the Notice Paper was as the nuclear option – the threat to hold over their heads in order to try and force them to come to the table with reasonable requests for timelines on debates. Dominic LeBlanc went so far as to suggest that rather than constraining debate, they were trying to allow for more under this motion, not that the opposition believed him. Temperatures got raised, and QP was one of the most heated of the current session.

After QP and the Komagata Maru apology, the procedural games started up again, including a privilege motion from Julian about how terribly draconian these tactics were. Fast forward a couple of hours to the time allocation vote on C-14, and the NDP apparently decided to play the childish tactic of physically blocking the Conservative whip from being able to walk down the aisle. The NDP claimed they were just “milling about,” but people milling about don’t all stand facing the same direction, and both Elizabeth May and Andrew Leslie have confirmed that there were shenanigans being played. And it would seem that Justin Trudeau had lost his patience by this point, possibly because Christy Clark was waiting in his office for a meeting he was already late for, and he still had a Komagata Maru apology reception to speak at, also late for. And so he did something completely boneheaded – he got up, went to the NDP blockade, and reached through to grab the Conservative whip and pull him through (which he apparently didn’t appreciate either), and in the course of that, accidentally elbowed Ruth Ellen Brosseau. Moments later, he went back to apologise to her as she fled the chamber – apparently flustered and unable to cope – when Thomas Mulcair began screaming at Trudeau and jabbing in his direction, when suddenly MPs from both sides of the aisle went to pull them apart before things got physical. It was all over in seconds, and Trudeau apologised for his actions.

Not well enough, apparently, as he did it again later when Brosseau reappeared in the chamber, but it doesn’t seem to matter because opposition MPs were now in point-scoring mode. Niki Ashton immediately got to her feet to decry that Trudeau had violated the “safe space” of the Chamber and NDP MPs started likening the incident to domestic violence, bullying and physical intimidation, and Julian talked about how his aunt was beaten to death. No, seriously. The Conservatives soon after began piling on, smelling blood in the water, and it devolved from there. Outside the chamber, Scheer and Julian took to the microphones to ramp up the spin, Julian deciding to drop the hints that there were “rumours” to the fact that Trudeau has some kind of history of violence, because there were points to be scored. And the faux outrage dominated the Twitter Machine as “fearful” MPs registered their shock and horror at what they’d witnessed. And it was just so stupid that I can’t even. Suffice to say, this looks like it’s going to boil down into privilege hearings in the Procedure and House Affairs committee, and we’re going to be subjected to weeks of un-clever “sunny ways” references, and suggestions that Trudeau is apparently unfit for office. It’s a good thing that next week is a constituency week, but I fear for what the final stretch of sitting weeks is going to be like if tempers are this frayed this early. I suspect it’s going to get really ugly from here.

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Roundup: Process matters during reform

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The Senate is the centre of so much talk these days – government bills on their way that are likely to face amendments, blame for the trans bill dying there last parliament (despite the fact that the committees were overloaded with the government’s “tough on crime” bills and there was no way to prioritise private members’ legislation), the ongoing fascination with Mike Duffy’s return to work, and of course the ongoing internal reform project. Another snag in said reforms was unveiled yesterday in that it turns out that the Senate’s committee on Ethics and Conflicts of Interests for Senators can’t actually be legally constituted because under the Rules of the Senate, there need to be government senators on the committee. Well, there are technically no longer any government senators, and thus, they can’t be recommended to said committee. It’s a reminder of why process matters when it comes to doing reforms, because boldly forging ahead without a plan, and without the necessary rule changes in place means this happens. And yes, rule changes need to happen on a variety of issues, not the least of which are the ways in which it spells out who can constitute a caucus – necessary for independents to be able to organise themselves around logistical issues. As for Peter Harder, the Internal Economy committee has decided not to grant his additional budget requests for staff. He got half of his initial ask, but that was enough as far as they are concerned, and I can’t say that I’m unsympathetic to the committee because I still can’t fathom why Harder needed all of that staff considering that he has no caucus to manage. His excuse that it’s what his predecessor had in terms of budget and staffing seems to me to be a clearly bureaucratic reflex from his previous career in the civil service – ensuring that you have budgets that get spent and lest they be cut, and he wants to ensure that he gets that same budget as before, even though, as I said, there’s no reason why he needs so many people.

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Roundup: Whose vanity project was bigger?

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Day after day in Question Period, we are being subjected to this constant narrative by the Conservative questions that the government – and more specifically Justin Trudeau – is just one big vanity project. Apparently there isn’t a day that goes by that Trudeau or one of his ministers isn’t trying to burnish their own profile, apparently, and the facts aren’t going to dissuade them from this narrative. The State Dinner in Washington? Apparently the president inviting Trudeau’s mother and in-laws was vanity. Trudeau stopping by that boxing gym in New York while already there on business, and seeing disadvantaged youth there? Vanity. Chrystia Freeland’s appearance on Bill Maher’s show while in LA to talk trade with local officials? Vanity. And now it’s the Destination Canada video that Trudeau appears in (never mind that it’s not about him)? Vanity. You can see where this is going. And the new word that Candice Bergen has been dropping to complete this narrative? That all of this supposed self-promotion proves that Trudeau is like a Kardashian. Oh, it’s not an insult, she suggests disingenuously, because the Kardashians work hard at promoting their brand, so obviously that’s what Trudeau is trying to do. So the obvious question to the Conservatives is that if Trudeau is simply busy with all manner of vanity projects, then what the hell was Stephen Harper’s web show 24/Seven? How is that not his own personal reality show à la Keeping Up With the Kardashians? While Trudeau has a personal photographer (Harper had at least two), he isn’t filming his exploits to promote himself under the guise of “a day in the life of a prime minister” or using taxpayer dollars to do it. But the Conservatives haven’t gotten past this notion that because Trudeau is photogenic and charismatic – something that Stephen Harper was not – it must mean that he’s not a Very Serious Person™. The problem is that the electorate didn’t buy that narrative during the election, and Trudeau has proven that he’s got the chops to do the heavy lifting for the job, he’s in the House of Commons more than Stephen Harper ever was when he was PM, he’s taking questions from the media, he’s made himself available, he’s answering questions, and I daresay he’s been more focused on the Canadian brand than his own personal one, but hey – it’s all self-promotion and “vanity.” It’s completely tiresome. That’s not to say that there isn’t a problem with the way Trudeau is using his popularity within his own party to turn it into a cult of personality, and there is a very big problem brewing as he is looking to reshape his party’s constitution to solidify that. That’s a huge problem. But it’s not something that the Conservatives can go after him in QP, and rather than try and find something of substance that they can hammer him on, we are subjected to this inanity instead.

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Roundup: Real problems with Monsef’s committee

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After a day of Twitter fights about the announcement on the electoral reform committee, let me say a couple of things. First of all, the moment anyone says they want to “make every vote count,” they immediately have lost the argument, and this includes the Prime Minister and minister saying this. Why? Because every vote already counts. No, it doesn’t mean that the person you voted for is going to win every time, but they’re not supposed to. If you believe otherwise, then you’re a sore loser. Whenever anyone brings up that the popular vote doesn’t match the proportion of the seats in the Commons, they are relying on a logical fallacy. The popular vote is not a real number because a general election is not a single event. It’s 338 separate but simultaneous events to elect members to fill each of the 338 seats, and together they form a parliament which determines who will form the government. We do not elect governments. If someone says we do, smack them. If someone gives a plaintive wail that the system isn’t fair, then they’re a sore loser trying to play on emotion, which isn’t actually how we should be making decisions. The fact that Maryam Monsef’s “five principles” for choosing a new system doesn’t mention accountability once is a giant problem, because that’s one of the key features of the current system – that we can punish incumbents and vote them out. Other systems can’t say the same, and we have European countries where parties just shuffle coalition partners and stay in power for decades. This is a problem. That the minister doesn’t seem to recognise that while she deals in emotion-laden words and saccharine emotion appeals is a problem. And it’s a problem that media outlets, in talking about other electoral systems, say nothing about the current system of its strengths. And after all of today’s Twitter fights, and appallingly ignorant statements made by the minister and other MPs on this issue, I’m going to reiterate a very important point that nobody is addressing – that the problem we’re facing is not that the current system doesn’t work, it’s that we have a crisis of civic literacy in Canada and people don’t know how the system works so they assume it’s broken because they buy into emotional arguments and sore loserism. That’s the problem that the minister should be tackling, not trying to upend a system that actually does work very well.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/730463384735514629

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Senate QP: About that bridge toll…

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Time once again for another episode of Ministerial Senate Question Period, with special guest star Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi. Sohi took his place next to Senator Harder, and things got underway with relatively poor attendance, somewhat unusually, but many senators were at the legal and constitutional affairs committee for the pre-study of the assisted dying legislation. Senator Carignan led off, talking about a major infrastructure project in Montreal, and whether Sohi had met with the provincial minister and if they planned to participate. Sohi first thanked the Senate for the special opportunity to be there, and then launched into a discussion about the meetings he was having around the project and how important it was to engage with pension funds like the causes de depot as this project was.

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Roundup: Talking out the clock needlessly

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As you may have heard, Conservative MPs refused to let debate collapse on Mauril Bélanger’s national anthem bill yesterday, not allowing it to come up for a vote as had been hoped in order to fast-track the bill through the process owing to Bélanger’s condition. While this has been described as a “filibuster,” it’s not quite, but it was dickish behaviour, make no mistake – particularly the fact that all of the Conservative MPs were making the same points over and over again rather than offering any new criticism of the bill (with such novel excuses that it would be a slippery slope – references to God would be next in line, and woe be the age of political correctness, and so on). As a quick explanation, private members’ business cannot be filibustered because it is all automatically time allocated. Under the standing orders, each private members’ bill or motion gets two hours of debate – each hour separated by the precedence list of 30 items, meaning about six sitting weeks – before it goes to a vote. If bills pass the second reading vote, they go to committee for a couple of hours of study before they get another two hours of debate at report stage and third reading (again, separated by the precedence list of 30 items), and then they head to the Senate, where there is no time allocation and they will often get more scrutiny – particularly at committee – but government business taking priority means that they can sometimes languish there for months. In this particular case, there was a hope that debate could collapse and there would be no need for a second hour of debate, but they also requested that they could go straight into the second hour, but the Conservatives denied consent to do so. After all, they had planes to catch back to their ridings. If Bélanger’s health deteriorates further and he is forced to resign his seat – and he did come to the debate directly from the hospital – then it would be possible for another MP to take on the bill in his stead, but that tends to require unanimous consent, and if the Conservatives continue to want to be dickish about this, then they can deny it and the bill will die without its sponsor present. And because this is a private members’ bill, no other MP can launch a similar bill in this parliament, since there are rules around debating the same bill twice. The danger for those Conservatives, however, is that the Liberals can turn around and put it into a government bill and put it through the process that way, which gives them all manner of other tools to use to push it through – particularly on the Senate side. And while nobody is arguing that the bill should pass just because of Bélanger’s health, the argument is that it should have come to a vote so that it could pass or fail at second reading. While Conservatives argue that they have a right to talk out the clock, the fact that they kept repeating themselves is a sign that this was a dilatory tactic and designed to be dickish, which is what has enraged a number of Bélanger’s supporters. And really, it’s unnecessary because it looks like they’re bullying a dying man, and no good can come of it. We’ll see if anyone is willing to trade their upcoming slot in the Order of Precedence to move Bélanger’s second hour of debate up so the vote can be accelerated, but it shouldn’t have been necessary.

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Roundup: A rare apology

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A trio of Justin Trudeau-related items in the news today, which makes me want to look at them together. The first incident of note was actually last in chronological order, but to me it seemed most significant, which is the fact that during Question Period yesterday, Trudeau stood up and apologised for having told reporters on Wednesday that opposition party obstruction was to blame for why a committee on electoral reform was not yet up and running, and pledged that he was still serious about the topic. I’m not sure that we ever saw Stephen Harper apologise, nor would we ever see it because that was a man who was not only determined to always be seen to be right, but he also had a particularly obstinate streak that made him dig his heels in rather than be proven to be wrong. Most often this was around the inappropriate behaviours of cabinet ministers, and rather than have them step down over wrongdoing, Harper would keep them in position well past the time that the heat was on them, and only shuffle them once the attention was elsewhere so it didn’t look like he was capitulating to demands of the reporters. Trudeau on the other hand owned up to what he had said, apologised, promised to do better, and even applauded when the MP who called him out made a slightly clever dig about it in his follow-up question. It was a show of humility and accountability that we are unused to seeing here. The second incident of note was after his speech on Fort McMurray at the start of the day, during Statements by Ministers (a practice in Routine Proceedings that the Conservatives had virtually allowed to fall into complete disuse). Rona Ambrose rose to give remarks in reply, and got emotional during it, and once she finished speaking, Trudeau was quick to cross the aisle to give her a quick hug – again, something that cold fish Harper was loathe to do, and only once gave awkward hugs around speeches related to either an MP’s passing or the attack on Parliament Hill (I forget which and tried to find a reference but couldn’t – forgive me). Trudeau remains a master of the humanizing gesture that helps to civilise politics in a way that we have become unused to after a decade of angry sound and fury. The third item of note had to do with a point of order raised after QP, when Blake Richards accused Trudeau of sticking his tongue out during a question raised by Diane Watts about P3 projects. Nobody but Richards seems to have witnessed this, but we do know that Trudeau does occasionally possess an irreverent side. Did he stick his tongue out? Maybe. Is it the end of the world if he did? Hardly, and in the theatrics of QP, it’s a bit tiresome but does raise the spectre of the “fuddle duddle” incident, if only less profane.

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Roundup: A pointless procedural dust-up

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The shine has come off around the medical assistance in dying bill, as the government decided that enough was enough, and it was time to send it to committee. So they invoked time allocation, and not surprisingly, there was all manner of outcry about how terrible this was, and Conservatives like Jason Kenney equivocating, insisting that they never employed time allocation on such sensitive life and death matters as this (ignoring things like safe injection sites or laws around prostitution as also being life and death matters for those that it affects). Kenney’s later assertions about what this bill will do were also…fanciful to say the least.

https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/727954797190479872

I will say that I have little sympathy for MPs who railed about the government cutting off debate, after two nights of midnight sittings and over 84 MPs having spoken to the bill. This is second reading debate, which is the principle of the bill. And I’ve listened to enough speeches to know that they all basically say “this is a very personal issue,” and “What about palliative care?” with minor variations throughout. The concern trolling about the conscience rights of doctors is also in there, never mind that this is a bill dealing with the criminal code and that issue is one for the provinces who deliver healthcare and the provincial certification bodies for physicians. There remains committee stage debate – which is the real meat of the bill – report stage once it comes back, and third reading debate. If MPs still have things to say, there remain plenty of opportunities, and the government also pointed out that some MPs had been up to speak several times on the bill, meaning that there couldn’t possibly be that many more MPs who needed to speak. And if you’ll forgive my particular cynicism, how many more times do we need to hear MPs read those same sentiments in the record over and over again? The government was already generous in the amount of time it gave to debate second reading – accusing them of somehow stifling debate or invoking closure were both patently wrong and false. And so, once all of the procedural wrangling and grousing was done, it passed second reading by a wide margin. Liberal MP Robbie Falcon-Outlette was the sole member of that party to vote against, and he went on Power & Politics to make a bunch of patently false equivalences between this bill and the suicide crisis in places like Attawapiskat, with a host of intellectually dishonest arguments strewn along the way. The bill also began pre-study in the Senate, where I expect it will get a much tougher ride, and there remains a very real chance that even if the bill passes the Commons unscathed that it will not do so in the Senate, and that it may not pass by deadline.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/727990740576403456

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