Tag Archives: The Senate

Roundup: Mulcair losing steam and support

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The wheels are starting to come off Thomas Mulcair’s continued leadership of the NDP, as more and more voices are starting to come out to question the direction of the party under his leadership – not that many of them will say that directly, but the implication is certainly there, considering that the whole point of Mulcair’s leadership was in large part for them to occupy more of the centre of the spectrum in their haste in believing that the Liberals were a spent force whose days were numbered. And it’s more than just the fringe socialist wing of the party that’s calling for his head. Yesterday, some thirty-seven NDP members from Quebec, including three former MPs, published an open letter calling for the party to renew itself, and one of those MPs was one of Mulcair’s biggest boosters during the leadership. Most damning was when he went on Power & Politics yesterday to say, and I quote, “I haven’t really heard a compelling reason for him to stay on.” During a press conference, Niki Ashton was asked repeatedly whether she supported Mulcair’s leadership, and she evaded every time, insisting instead on talking about the “team” rather than the individual. Given how much importance that the NDP place on solidarity and showing a united front, and how they treat any kind of public dissent as being unseemly (and sometimes even subject to punishment), Ashton’s silence was actually quite deafening. These new calls from the grassroots that the open letter was showcasing is showing the cracks in Mulcair’s mea culpa, and in the outreach efforts he’s made so far. The message is that he’s still not listening, and that could cost him. And on top of the questions we already had about his continued leadership – in no small part whether he can still be part of the generational change taking place in this country’s political ranks – it seems like the party also has to ask itself if they can really ask Mulcair to be a leopard who can change its spots. They brought Mulcair into the party for a reason, and gave him the leadership for a reason, and those reasons are no longer reflected on the political landscape, particularly if the Liberals keep outflanking them. People ask who are in the wings, and despite Nathan Cullen’s grand protests that he doesn’t want the job, I’m pretty sure he does, and I’m sure there are a few people who are still interested, even if they didn’t win their seats in the last election. Leadership hopefuls will emerge – that’s not the question. The question is whether the party’s grassroots will decide to give Mulcair one more chance, or if they’ve decided that he’s run out of chances.

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Roundup: Bruised feelings helping nobody

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In yet another write-up of the creation of the new Independent Working-Group in the Senate, we’re seeing a repetition of certain themes, and an omission of some other, more fundamental issues at play such as privilege and Independent senators running their own affairs, in part because you have a group of journalists who aren’t quite sure what to look for and what questions to ask – and it’s not helped by some of the senators at the centre of the issue feeding into those narratives instead of talking about the other issues at play. The narratives, of course, have to do with partisanship in the institution. Those senators who have left caucuses are quick to talk about the blind partisanship eroding the credibility of the Senate, and media observers who are unfamiliar with the Senate outside of the salaciousness of the ClusterDuff affair glom onto this kind of talk because it confirms all kinds of notions that they’ve held without much in the way of actual challenge. Meanwhile, senators who are still proud party members are proving particularly thin-skinned about the whole thing.

Sen. Dagenais told The Hill Times that after reading the six Senators’ press release, he was “upset” and “disappointed” that they questioned the “credibility” of the parliamentary work of Conservative and Liberal Senators because they’re affiliated with political parties.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t accept this,” said Sen. Dagenais.

I won’t deny that there has been a certain tone of moral superiority by some of those senators who have left their caucuses, and it can feel like a bit of a slap in the face to others. At the same time, I think that some of the counter-protestations, that senators who leave their caucuses should resign (per Senator Tkachuk) or that that the notions of a non-partisan Senate are an inherent breach of privilege and would render the Chamber non-functional (per some of the arguments of Senator Housakos, among others) are also way beyond the pale. And yes, some of this has been fed by Justin Trudeau’s talk about how wonderful a non-partisan Senate would be, as though it’s partisanship that’s the problem rather than a question of degrees. No, partisanship is not a bad thing – in fact, it’s fairly healthy in a democracy, and the Senate reflecting that diversity of political opinion is a good thing. What has been a problem are the degrees to which senators, particularly new ones, have taken their partisanship, and it cannot be understated that nearly all of the Conservative senators took it a little too far in demonstrating their loyalty and commitment to putting forward Stephen Harper’s agenda, but they were also very poorly trained upon appointment, and they took the wrong lessons to heart. That is not the fault of partisanship – it’s the fault of a party leadership that was trying to exercise levers of power that didn’t exist in the Senate, and they tried to create some using sentiment and a sense of personal loyalty to the man who appointed them. Now, things are swinging violently in the other direction and babies are being thrown out with bathwater. Partisanship doesn’t make the chamber a bad place, nor does a group of senators looking to try a new way of doing things make their efforts illegitimate. This is a bold new era, and both sides need to stop this constant state of upsetting each other. There is room in our parliament for parties and independents, and the sooner they stop this game of offending one another, the faster we can proceed with a credible modernisation process.

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Roundup: A “third party” option

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Six senators have taken the first steps to forming their own quasi-caucus with the Upper Chamber, as a means of trying to better sort out how to deal with life as independent senators. The list includes former Conservatives, Liberals and Independent Progressive Conservative Elaine McCoy, and they are calling themselves a “working group” as opposed to a caucus or party. Their aim is to get “third party” status that will allow them to better control their own destiny. Currently, party whips in the Senate control not only committee assignment duties, but also office allocations, parking spaces, trips for inter-parliamentary delegations, and all of those other administrative details that independents currently don’t have access to. Rather than turn over those kinds of details to Senate administration, they are looking to come up with a means to start controlling it themselves, which is important because it protects their privilege as Senators, which is important in how they govern themselves and are responsible for their own affairs. This is a very important consideration, and as the Chamber continues its process of forced evolution and change with the advent of decreasing partisanship and a greater number of independents on the way, because it has the potential to find a way through some of those process hurdles that are currently tripping them up. We’ll see how many other independent senators join this working group – after all, official party status in the Senate requires five members, which they have for the moment but at least one of their number is soon to hit the mandatory retirement age, and it would be incumbent upon them to keep their membership numbers up in order to carry on carrying on with their own affairs. This will hopefully help have systems in place for when the new senators start arriving, some of whom may opt to stay independent (others of course free to join a caucus if they wish), and allow these senators to assign one of their own as a kind of “whip” to deal with the administrative duties, and hopefully get more resources for their offices when it comes to things like research dollars. Overall, though, it will hopefully give them some organisational clout so that they are better able to answer stand up to the current oligarchy of the party structure in the Senate. Elsewhere, Senator Patterson has tabled a bill to amend the constitution and remove the property requirements for Senate eligibility (which I previous wrote about their relative harmlessness).

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QP: Still going while eyes on DC

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While Trudeau and several ministers were in Washington, things were still happening in Ottawa. Plenty of things. Rona Ambrose led off QP, asking that the government not approve any environmental measures that the Americans won’t implement themselves. Jim Carr noted that they were restoring credibility to the process. Ambrose then worried about the deficit spending which some economists claimed would have no benefit. Bill Morneau responded that they were making investments in long-term productivity at a time when borrowing is cheap. Ambrose switched to French to ask about the size of the deficit, to which Morneau trotted out his lines about growing the economy. Denis Lebel picked up, repeating the question about the lack of stimulus from the deficit, and he got the same response that Ambrose did. For his final question, Lebel asked the bog standard question of which taxes the government would raise to pay off said deficit, but Morneau stuck to his line of growth for the future. Leading off for the NDP was Peter Julian, demanded action on softwood lumber. David Lemetti stated that Trudeau and Obama signalled that they were interested in having an agreement. Julian railed about Canadian jobs, to which Lemetti finished his previous answer a commitment to report back in 100 days. Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet asked a pair of questions about the levels of Indigenous people in prisons, to which Michel Picard promised work to improve the situation.

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Senate QP: Meandering around the issue

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After the moving day at the beginning of Commons QP, it was time to head down the hall for Senate QP, with special guest star Jim Carr, minister of natural resources. Once he arrived, a little behind schedule thanks to a vote in the Commons, things got started. Senator Carignan led off, asking about the softwood lumber agreement expiring. Carr began with the traditional thanks and his expression about his admiration for the chamber, and after a couple of technical mic fixes (again), he said that he would be greatly surprised if the agreement did not come up in conversation during the PM’s trip to Washington.

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Roundup: The slow trickle out of caucus

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Two more Conservative senators have left the fold to sit as independents, which is showing some of the strain on the caucus in that chamber. Senators Michel Rivard and Diane Bellemare both opted to leave the caucus, but we’ll see if they’re the last ones to do so, particularly as the Senate becomes more used to more independence on all fronts. In Rivard’s case, it was in part because of growing frustrations that were particularly felt after the last election where those senators were shunted aside, and not allowed to participate – Harper’s preferred tactic to dealing with the expenses scandals that largely happened under his watch with people that he appointed. For some of these senators, who were long-time members of the party and organizers, that sidelining hurt (and yes, there are still bruised feelings on the Liberal side of the Senate after they were kicked out of national caucus). As for Bellemare, she was already charting an independent course before the last election, and she was one of the senators who rebelled and broke ranks over those labour bills, and she carried on a very principled opposition from within her own party’s ranks, even as PMO leaned on the Senate to pass them (and when they didn’t pass C-377 the first time around and that caucus nearly revolted after then-Senate Leader Marjory LeBreton threatened and cajoled them, she subsequently resigned). As part of her resignation from caucus, Bellemare said she is looking to explore the creation of a quasi-third party in the Senate, a way for the independent senators to pool resources and one imagines give themselves leverage for things like more committee assignments and the like. The Senate is already looking at ways to reform their committee assignment processes, and the growing numbers of independent senators will likely make the work all the more urgent – particularly once the new appointees start rolling in. And while I’m not yet ready to declare the demise of parties within the Senate, it is starting to look like the Conservatives may have to make some changes in the way their Senate caucus operates lest they start losing yet more members.

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Roundup: Pipeline drama queens

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It really doesn’t take much to set Brad Wall off these days, and in ways that are both a bit unseemly and frankly nonsensical, and really, really unhelpful in the long run. Yesterday is was Quebec’s environment minister filing a court injunction related to Energy East, but unlike what everyone was up in arms about, it wasn’t to block the pipeline – he made several assurances that he had no opinion on it. Rather, he wanted TransCanada to submit paperwork with the Quebec government for their own environmental process, and TransCanada has thus far said no. It remains to be seen if Quebec’s position holds legal water (there was a precedent in BC that may or may not apply), but from the apoplexy coming from the likes of Brad Wall or Brian Jean in Alberta, you’d think Quebec had declared the project dead on arrival. Except they didn’t. Rachel Notley kept a level head saying she knows it’s not a veto, so she’s keeping her guns holstered. Justin Trudeau said he understands the province’s desire to get social license for the project, but listening to conservatives, both federal and provincial, you would have thought that those terrible lefties had put a stake in the heart of the oil industry. In fact, it’s the opposite of helpful when they are quick to declare a crisis of national unity when really, it’s Brad Wall fighting an election, and the Federal Conservatives and Wildrose party in Alberta trying to assert themselves into the debate in the most divisive way possible (and seriously, guys – that’s not how equalization works, so stop using it as a talking point). Suffice to say, everyone is acting like a bunch of petulant drama queens, demanding approvals to pipeline projects without actually going through the proper process, claiming that Trudeau politicized the process (err, except it was the Conservatives who changed the law so that Cabinet was given final sign-off on these projects, completely politicizing the process), and that if he doesn’t do things their way that he’s destroying the country. That’s a mature way to handle things, guys. Slow clap.

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Roundup: Looking beyond mediocrity

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It’s Manning Networking Conference time again, and with a leadership contest in the offing, you can bet that some possible leadership hopefuls are starting to lay out a few markers (even if Nigel Wright wants them to focus more on policy). Jason Kenney is again “contemplating” a run after apparently recovering from burnout after the election (and it does bear noting that he’s only just started showing up to QP again). Peter MacKay thinks that the Conservatives can beat Trudeau of they’re smart about it, while others like Michael Chong and Diane Watts think the party needs to do better on issues like the environment. But all eyes, of course, were on Kevin O’Leary, who said a few outrageous things as he is wont to – that he wants a national referendum on pipelines, that he thinks it should be the law that a prime minister has to have run a business before they can lead the country, or that he thinks the party system is becoming doomed in the wake of a mass populist movement where people wants politicians to solve their problems regardless of political brand or label. Of the many things he did say, one that I thought merited a little more attention was his calling out the Conservatives for having become a party of mediocrity, and I do think that’s true, as it built itself around the personal brand of Stephen Harper post merger. Despite the NDP using phrases like “Bay Street buddies” in their references to the Conservatives over the past decade, there was really very little of that kind of branding to the party. It wasn’t about wealth (despite their policies actually benefitting the wealthy) or aspiration, or even markets once you really broke it down, but rather about this attempt to appeal to the suburban nuclear family in all of its messaging and the way it built programmes (but again, while they appeared to be for these suburban masses, the benefits disproportionately went to the top). Harper himself cultivated the image of being some minivan driving hockey dad, despite the fact that he was both a career politician, and it soon became clear that his kids weren’t much into hockey either (though his son was apparently quite the volleyball player, for what it’s worth). For O’Leary, whose brand is about greed being good, and a certain conspicuousness to his wealth, it’s pretty much anathema to the suburban image that Harper was crafting, and that his ministers followed suit in embodying. The closest they got to any Bay Street types was Joe Oliver, but he again was less about materialism or consumerism than he was about parroting approved Harper talking points. It is interesting that this is something that O’Leary has picked up on and would certainly be pushing back on should he decide to go ahead and pursue a leadership bid, because that would certainly be a radical shake-up for the party.

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Roundup: Coming up with a new organizational model

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There’s the Senate bat-signal, and there are a couple of articles out there about how the Senate organizes itself that need to be discussed. Global has an exclusive piece about how the Senate agreed to change its organisational funding model in light of their new post-government caucus reality, but *gasp!* it’s all closed-door negotiations about your taxpayer dollars! Oh, I’m sorry, did I yawn there? Senate caucus funding used to be allocated along government and opposition lines, but with there being no governing party in the Senate any longer, Senate Liberals were at risk of losing their operational funding, and yes, this is an issue because it costs money to run things and the Senate is an integral part of our democratic system. The compromise that they came up with, allocating funds on a proportional basis of seats, is actually pretty novel. Yes, it’s more money than they got before, but remember that the Senate Liberals can no longer draw from the caucus resources of their Commons counterparts either, particularly for things like research dollars, so not giving them some kind of additional resources would be punishing them again for Trudeau’s unilateral decision to kick them out of caucus. Let’s not forget that democracy costs money, and one of the most egregious forms of cheap outrage journalism is pretending that a parliamentary body can be run for pennies when it absolutely cannot, particularly if we want them to do the heavy lifting of parliament, as they are increasingly doing. Meanwhile, there is some consternation that the government won’t be appointing a whip when they appoint their “government representative” in lieu of a Leader of the Government in the Senate, but mostly because there has been a defined role in terms of the government whip for doing some of those organisational tasks like allocating offices and parking spaces, not to mention organising committee assignments when there are only so many spaces to go around and lots of senators want on some committees and fewer on others. After all, the whip’s job is more than just telling people how to vote – that role has been far less prevalent in the Senate, and well before Trudeau’s edict, Liberal Senators were not being given instruction by their Commons counterparts and exercised a great deal of independence. (As for the Conservatives, we saw in the Duffy trial that Nigel Wright was trying to encourage Harper to exercise levers of power that didn’t actually exist within the Senate, to the institution’s detriment, and while many Conservative senators don’t see anything wrong with the way they’ve been doing things, well, they haven’t known any differently and that’s part of the problem). Of course, with no government caucus, there is less of a need for that role, but what I suspect is going to end up happening is that the Senate’s internal bureaucracy is going to wind up taking on more responsibilities to deal with this lack of the traditional structures and growing number of independent senators. Again, there are organisational duties that need to be performed, and it would behove the institution to figure out who’s going to do them.

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Roundup: Giorno joins the brigade

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Proponents of proportional representation are getting a bit of a boost across party lines as former Harper advisor Guy Giorno is adding his name to the so-called “Every Voter Counts Alliance” to push the government to adopt such a measure. (Note that the name of this group is hugely problematic because every vote already counts, and suggesting otherwise is tantamount to voter suppression). Giorno says the Conservatives shouldn’t be afraid that changing the system will mean that they will be permanently shut out of power (as is one of the arguments that proponents tout as a feature of the change), before launching into the usual talking points of “fairer” and “more democratic” which are a) complete bunk, and b) at a direct cost to the system of accountability that the existing First-Past-The-Post system is really good at achieving. Also, it’s a bit rich to hear the hyper-partisan Giorno talk about how wonderful it would be for PR-elected legislatures to require more co-operation, collegiality, working together” – all of which is ridiculous, since it simply changes the power calculus in order to keep coalitions cobbled together and giving smaller and more radical parties outsized influence to keep those coalitions together, while parties at the centre of governments can go for decades without being tossed out as they shuffle coalition partners around instead (again, a feature of our current system being the ability to throw the bums out, which PR does not do very well). Suffice to say, Giorno’s voice in the debate doesn’t actually change that the arguments are based on emotion and logical fallacies, and while he has different partisan credentials, it’s still a system that that nobody should be rushing into on the basis of emotion. Meanwhile, here’s Colby Cosh to demolish some of the arguments.

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