Tag Archives: The Senate

Roundup: Defining recession

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While I fear this may becoming a quasi-economics blog over the course of the campaign, it’s numbers yet again in the national consciousness as we learn today whether or not we’re in a technical recession, though there’s a bunch of political dispute over what a recession means. Jason Kenney was on Power & Politics on Sunday trying to broaden the definition to say that it would need to be over a number of sectors rather than just the energy sector as we seem to be seeing in Canada, and while that may be a perfectly reasonable explanation if it was anyone else, it was however his own government who put the definition of two quarters of shrinking GDP into their “balanced budget” legislation just a couple of months ago. Oops. To that end, Rosemary Barton writes about deficit and recession politics on the campaign trail, while Mike Moffatt calculates the projected federal deficits for the next few years based on current economic indicators. And Stephen Gordon gives us some food for thought:

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Roundup: The big infrastructure spend

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It all being official that the Liberals are willing to run a small deficit in order to finance infrastructure spending in the hopes of boosting a stalled economy have turned the election into one with some real differences between parties, which incidentally seems to have also energised Harper’s performance at his own stops. The issue for the Liberals would seem to be now not only having to sell the idea of deficits – which they are attempting to do with the line of being the only party that’s being honest about the current state of the nation’s finances – but ensuring that the infrastructure spending they’re doing is going to be actually useful in the longer term. Sure, there is a big infrastructure deficit in this country for which this new funding is but a drop in the bucket, but if he wants to ensure that this is the kind of kick that will grow the economy, it should be in things that will have bigger impact – port infrastructure to get goods to market, ensuring that there is the kind of broadband access in places that need it to grow their business and attract investment, and so on. It shouldn’t be about short-term stimulus, lest the Liberals repeat the mistakes of the Conservatives in 2009-10. Not unsurprisingly, Toronto mayor John Tory and the president of the Canadian Federation of Municipalities both liked the announcement as it means more money for cities. Former PCO Clerk Kevin Lynch talks about the need for fiscal policy rather than just relying on monetary policy to try to grow the economy – and includes infrastructure spending as an example. Kevin Milligan examines the case for infrastructure spending at this time, and finds there is a plausible case for it.

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Roundup: Constitutionally untenable declarations

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One of those tangential sub-plots in the whole ClusterDuff affair reared its head in the testimony of Ben Perrin yesterday, which is the issue of the test of residency for a senator. Given that the issue had blown up during Perrin’s time in PMO, thanks to Stephen Harper’s panic appointments in 2008 where he named senators to provinces where those individuals did not currently reside but rather had originated from, they found themselves in trouble when a certain Senator Duffy was found to have been treating his long-time Ottawa home as a secondary residence that he could claim per diems with while his summer cottage in PEI was being treated as a primary residence, never mind that he rarely spent any time there, none of it in the winter. Perrin’s advice was to come up with several indicators, but that ultimately it would be up to the Senate to come up with those indicators for themselves. Stephen Harper disagreed, and said that as far as he was concerned, they were resident if they owned $4000 in real property in said province – a position Perrin found to be constitutionally and legally untenable. But the constitutionally untenable has become Harper’s stock in trade, particularly where the Senate is concerned, first with his unconstitutional reform bills, to his present policy of not making any appointments in defiance of his constitutional obligation to do so. (And no, Thomas Mulcair is no better with is own promise not to appoint any senators either). And we also know from the Duffy documents that Harper blocked an attempt by the Senate to strike a committee that would deal with the residency issue once and for all – because Harper wanted to protect those improper appointments he made. The rather sad thing is that if hadn’t made those appointments in haste, he could have ensured that they had their ducks in a row before they got appointed, to show that they had enough proof of residency to pass a smell test. He didn’t, constitution be damned – or at least be subverted on bogus “plain reading” arguments that don’t hold water the moment you think critically about them. And yet We The Media aren’t driving this point home to the voters, that the constitution does and should matter. (Aaron Wherry delves more into the residency issue here).

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Roundup: The Economist Party fact-checks

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With the Liberals casting the NDP federal minimum wage proposal as a mirage, and the NDP insisting that they haven’t deceived anyone (never mind that the Huffington Post did a piece asking ordinary people about what they thought of the pledge, only to learn it applies to federally-regulated industries, which won’t affect most people, and lo and behold, the people asked felt deceived. Imagine that!) While the NDP claim it will affect over 100,000 people, the Economist Party crunched the numbers, and found them lacking.

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Roundup: The PMO’s invisible levers in the Senate

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One of the big things that emerged from the Duffy trial yesterday was a raft of new emails released from Nigel Wright, along with Wright’s testimony. While none of it was particularly damning to the prime minister, a number of pundits and journalists were baying over the Twitterverse and elsewhere that “this proves that the PMO is controlling the Senate! Where’s the independence?” and so on, I’m going to get everyone to take a deep breath and calm down. Yes, the PMO has been playing the Senate leadership – not the Senate itself – like its own private pawn. I’m not going to dispute that fact. But I am going to offer some context. First of all, Stephen Harper broke the Senate with his petulant refusal to make appointments from 2006 to 2008, and then made mass appointments, which damaged the chamber. (Refresher read here). He had a Senate leader who did his bidding without question, which is a problem. Because said Senate leader had so many newbie senators under her wing who did her bidding without question, it set up a power dynamic that allowed the PMO to exercise power levers that don’t actually exist. Wright complained about this lack of levers at times in his correspondence, and we also know that the Senate staff, including committee clerks, were pushing back against this PMO control, even to the point of threatening legal action. (And to that point, this BuzzFeed headline is wrong – they weren’t “rogue staffers,” they were Senate staffers instead of political ones). This makes it a problem of actors instead of institutions. As it is designed, the Senate is already a bastion of institutional independence – appointed Senators have absolutely nothing preventing them from speaking truth to power, because they are protected right up to a retirement age of 75, which in turn protects them from needing to curry favour with the PM to get a post-Senate appointment to a board or tribunal. The system is designed to ensure that they can be fully independent – the problem is that the current crop of Conservative senators has chosen not to be, whether it’s out of ignorance of their role, sentimentality for the prime minister who appointed them, or the fact that they sincerely believe he knows what’s best, so they’ll do what he asks. I can’t think of any way to tinker with the system to prevent that. As a rule, senators get better with age, and when a party leadership changes, they tend to get really independent in a hurry, but until that point, this remains a problem of political actors instead of institutions.

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Roundup: A moratorium courting constitutional crisis

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Without going too deeply into this (something I’ll save for later), Stephen Harper decided that his best way to “differentiate” himself on the Senate was to flout the constitution, and declare a moratorium on any future appointments. There are already 22 vacancies in the Chamber – a full fifth of its complement, and more than any in history. It’s unconscionable, because there are supposed to be 105 senators, and not a maximum of. It’s a complete abrogation of the compromises made by the Fathers of Confederation, and furthermore, it’s also flouting the decision of the Supreme Court who said explicitly that the Senate has a role with sober second thought. That role is already being compromised because they’re having trouble filling committee seats, and this is a very serious problem. On the one hand, this official declaration of a moratorium is a gift to Vancouver lawyer Aniz Alani, who has launched a challenge in Federal Court to get a declaration that the Prime Minister is obligated to make appointments as they happen. It’s also courting problems with federal-provincial relations for a couple of reasons – one is that Harper is now attempting to do through the back door what he won’t do from the front door (again), and he’s using a childish tactic of throwing this problem into the laps of the premiers to come up with some kind of solution without him. It also highlights that there is again a choice for voters in the election – you can vote to keep in a party whose leader flouts the constitution and the Supreme Court; one who promises to do the very same while chasing the pipe dream of Senate abolition; and one who has promised concrete and constitutional measures to reform the appointment process in the same way that Harper did with vice-regal appointments. Oh, and in case you were wondering, if the courts declare that a Prime Minister has a constitutional obligation to make appointments as they happen – and that’s pretty much guaranteed – and the PM still refuses to, we’re into constitutional crisis territory where the Governor General will have the very real need to dismiss said PM. This is what we’re courting here. It’s not a trivial matter.

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Roundup: Bemoaning members’ statements

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Over in the National Post, Tristin Hopper despairs at how much of Hansard is taken up by ridiculous and ultimately meaningless members’ statements, not to mention the plethora of petitions. And while the notion of members’ statements used to be kind of sweet and noble, it’s largely degenerated into a daily dumpster fire in the Commons, with a handful of feel-good statements followed by a number of increasingly nasty partisan attacks. Petitions, however ridiculous many may be, is a measure of political engagement so we shouldn’t discount them just yet – and we’re about to see a whole bunch more of them now that they’re going to all electronic petitions. Hopper suggests we follow the European example and put Members’ Statements at the end of the day. I tweeted some thoughts on that.

Bottom line: Pretty much all of Parliament is terrible right now with speeches because we’re electing a cohort who has largely lost the ability to think for themselves on their feet, whose greatest skill now is reciting the lines that are given to them. (Not all are like this, but most are, and I will note that the Liberals seem to be the least scripted from the leaders’ office these days). While I can sympathise with Hopper, it’s not the rules that are the problem – it’s the fact that we have apparently stopped valuing MPs who can speak or think for themselves in favour of ciphers for the leader.

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Roundup: Crossing the line with a golf shirt

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The official date of the new child benefit cheques going out saw the Conservative government at its most ham-handed yesterday, starting with a “leaked” letter to caucus about just how historic this event was as the “single biggest one-time direct payment in Canadian history.” Funny, it seems to me that an actual conservative government would rather just lower taxes across the board rather than bribe people with their own money, but oh, wait – this is a right-flavoured populist government and not a real Conservative one. As ministers and MPs went around the country to tout the benefit, and social media sites were bombarded with blaring ads, some of which were branded as “Christmas in July,” Pierre Poilievre was the most egregious of all, hosting a press event in Halifax that was arranged by his department, and yet featured him wearing a Conservative-branded golf shirt, as though this were a partisan event, or that it was somehow the Conservatives doling out this largesse rather than the Government of Canada. It was utterly crass, and yet the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner decreed that no, it wasn’t actually in contravention of the rules, though one cannot deny that it was in poor taste and poor judgement. Mind you, this bit of vote-buying is going to blow a big hole in the government’s budget, given that growth projections are down and we are pretty much certainly back into a deficit position (not that the budget was actually balanced – simply papered over by raiding the contingency reserve and the EI fund). But then again, the NDP have declared that the child benefit would remain under their plan on top of their plans to have this universal childcare programme (well, years down the road at a great cost to the provinces) and the Liberals planning to revamp the whole system that will also cost at least an extra couple of billion more than this programme does. Watching this play out in the election while each touts fiscal responsibility will be an interesting exercise.

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Roundup: Wai Young, Conservative fabulist

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Yesterday it was revealed that Conservative MP Wai Young spoke at a church congregation to tell them that Harper was doing things in the same vein as Jesus, and used Bill C-51 as an example. Because Jesus was really concerned about giving inordinate powers to intelligence agencies without any kind of oversight, and about preventing terrorist attacks – oh, wait. No he wasn’t. While Young’s terrible theology sparked the usual ridicule over the Twitter Machine, it was her other statement that was perhaps most alarming, which was her claim that CSIS knew there was a bomb on the Air India flight 30 years ago, but were forbidden from sharing that information with the RCMP, and 400 people died as a result. Except no, none of that is true, they didn’t know and they could share information. Oops. Young later claimed that she “misspoke,” but that seems to be code amongst Conservative MPs for making stuff up. You know, like when that other Conservative backbencher apologised to the House for “misspeaking” when he claimed that he has directly witnessed people taking voter identification cards out of the recycling bin with the intention of casting fraudulent ballots. Turns out that one wasn’t true either. But hey, political fabulism is apparently okay so long as you apologise for “misspeaking” when you get caught. Truth and debating on the strength of your ideas doesn’t matter – no, you can just invent things out of whole cloth, repeat complete fabrications against your opponents (income splitting for seniors, anyone?) and say it often enough in the hopes that people will start believing it’s true (Hello, 2011 election). Why wouldn’t a backbencher like Young think it’s okay if this is the behaviour that she’s watching get rewarded by everyone else around her? It’s a sad indictment of the state of our political discourse.

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Roundup: Abusing the Senate for partisan ends

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The parade of people looking aghast at that Senate committee interim report continued yesterday, much of it with the usual cartoonish depictions of the Senate as a whole, never mind that this was a small group of Conservatives that made the recommendations in an interim report, and the Liberals on the committee explicitly dissented from it. Yes, the proposal is problematic and no doubt there are many in the Muslim community who are sceptical because it’s not a monolithic religion. Even those who are supportive in theory, because of the problem of foreign-trained imams that are more likely to come from radicalised schools, are wary of the current government and its mechanisms for dealing with it, though it has also been noted that the government already issues work permits for these imams, so perhaps that is a tool they could better use now. The report did mention what happens in Europe, but the language is vague, and what does happen in many European countries is providing funding for imam-training schools, with the intention of helping them learn about the language and culture of the country they’re heading to. Could this be what they mean? Maybe, but it’s still an interim report, so we won’t know until maybe December, assuming that the next parliament is actually constituted by then. So what to make of it? John Ivison posits that the report reads like a Conservative election platform, and I don’t think he’s wrong. This government has not been above abusing the Senate for its own ends before, and it looks like they’re doing it again. And yes, you’re going to look aghast at the suggestion that the Senate is partisan, never mind that it is and always has been – it’s usually just less partisan because Senators don’t need to campaign for re-election. It’s also in a difficult period right now because the majority of the Conservatives in the Senate were appointed in a manner that stressed the Chamber’s ability to absorb them, and that in turn led the Conservative leadership therein to further abuse the chamber by going heavy on the whip. It is a problem that may not be solved until Harper is no longer the party leader and this group no longer feels beholden to him. Until then, we should be critical, but let’s keep said criticism in perspective. The institution itself is not to be faulted because it currently has some problematic appointments and a Prime Minister that is keen to abuse it.

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