Tag Archives: Tough on Crime

Roundup: Immigration concern trolls

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Amidst the other disingenuous, fear-based campaigns going on in the political sphere right now – Statistics Canada, and the carbon price, in particular – the issue of immigration is also threatening to get worse, in part because the simmering issue around irregular border crossers is being conflated with the government’s announcement of new immigration targets. And we need to drill this into people from the start – immigration and asylum are two very different things, and shouldn’t be treated or conflated. We don’t accept refugees because we think they’ll fill out our workforce – we accept them for humanitarian reasons, which is why the expectations that they’ll find work right away is also problematic, as usually they’re traumatized upon arrival. That’s why it’s especially problematic when you have partisan actors like Michelle Rempel standing up in Question Period to decry the new immigration targets as having some form of equivalency with the irregular border crossers – they’re not the same thing, and conflating them is using one to demonize the other. Even more problematic is the kind of concern trolling language that we’re seeing from other conservatives – that they “support immigration” but are concerned about the “confidence in the system.” There is a certain dogwhistle quality to those “concerns” because it implies that the “confidence” in the system is undermined by all of those bad newcomers arriving. It’s subtle, but the signals are still there.

To that end, the government decided to launch a pro-immigration ad campaign, which the Conservatives have immediately derided as an attempt to paper over the irregular border-crosser issue, despite the fact that they’re separate issues, and they’re actively undermining confidence in the immigration system that they claim to support by conflating it with the asylum seekers they’re demonizing. And this cycle of conflation and demonization gets worse when the federal minister pushed back against the Ontario minister’s politicizing of the issue and attempt to blame asylum seekers for the city’s housing crisis (and more importantly pushed back against her claims that “40 percent” of shelter residents are now irregular border crossers and that they used to be 11 percent as being fabricated because the shelter system doesn’t track that kind of data). The Ontario minister responded by calling Hussen a “name-calling bully” (he didn’t call her any names), and on it goes. Would that we have grown-ups running things.

Meanwhile, The Canadian Press’ Baloney Meter™ checks the government’s claim that they’ve reduced irregular border crossings by 70 percent (it was one month’s year-over-year data), and Justin Ling gives an appropriately salty fact-check of the political memes decrying the planned increase in immigration figures.

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QP: “Soviet” StatsCan

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With Justin Trudeau off to Churchill and Vancouver, Andrew Scheer also decided to be elsewhere. That left Gérard Deltell to lead off, and he immediately launched into an attack on the Statistics Canada plan to use financial transaction data. François-Philippe Champagne responded with a script about how StatsCan already deals with Canadians’ personal data appropriately, that the Privacy Commissioner was working with them, and that the Conservatives were fear-mongering. Deltell tried again, got the same answer, and when Mark Strahl took over in English, Champagne repeated his spiel in English. Strahl railed about how often there have been personal data beaches by the government, and Champagne responded by reading his points with more vigour. Strahl angrily made a point about consent, and Champagne angrily repeated his own points. Guy Caron was up next for the NDP, and demanded a GHG reduction plan. Dominic LeBlanc responded that hot air about climate change wasn’t coming from his side of the chamber, that they did have a plan that they were implementing. Caron repeated the question in French, and LeBlanc reiterated that they took the issue seriously, unlike the Conservatives. Linda Duncan trolled for support for her motion about tougher GHG targets, but LeBlanc wouldn’t indicate support, but pumped up his own party’s plan instead. Alexandre Boulerice returned Caron’s first question and Quebeckers threatening to take the government to court over climate change, and LeBlanc responded that Quebec has been a leader on climate change.

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Roundup: Proposing a debate commissioner

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Yesterday the government unveiled their plan to establish an election debate commissioner, who would set about coordinating leaders’ debates during the next election, along with proposed around which party leaders could participate – rules that would give Elizabeth May an in, but could exclude Maxime Bernier unless he gets an awful lot of candidates in place, and his polling numbers start to rise. The proposed Commissioner is to be former Governor General, His Excellency the Rt. Hon. David Johnston, who is a choice that nobody is going to want to dispute.

Of course, that hasn’t eliminating the grumbling and complaints. The NDP are complaining that they weren’t consulted before Johnston was nominated (not that they’re complaining it’s him), and the Conservatives are calling this a giant affront to democracy and add this onto their pile of complaints that Justin Trudeau is trying to rig the election in his favour. (Not sure how this does that, and it seems pretty cheeky to make these claims when their own unilateral changes to election rules in the previous parliament were panned by pretty much everyone). And Elizabeth May is overjoyed because the proposed rules would include her. Of course, Johnston still needs to be approved by Parliament, and he will appear before the Procedure and House Affairs Committee, but all of this having been said and done, there remain questions as to why this is all necessary. Gould went around saying that this was because Harper didn’t want to do debates in 2015, except that he did debates – he simply didn’t want to do the same “consortium” debates that are usually done and decided by the TV broadcasters, and he most certainly didn’t want to have anything to do with the CBC. The key point they seem to be making is that the 2015 formats saw far fewer viewers than the consortium debates typically attract, for what it’s worth. Is this a reason to implement a new system, that neither compels leaders to participate or broadcasters to air? Maybe, and people will point to the debate commission in the United States.

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To that end, here’s Chris Selley asking some of those very questions, looking at some of the problematic behaviour from broadcasters in response to the changed formats from the 2015 debates, and offering some suggestions as to how this all could be avoided.

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Roundup: Kenney and Scheer vow to repeat mistakes

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There was a conference in Calgary yesterday called “Energy Relaunch,” during which both Jason Kenney and Andrew Scheer laid out plans for how they propose to get the province’s oil and gas industry “back on track” if they were to form government. The problem is that they seemed to have learned absolutely no lessons from the past few years about where the problems and bottlenecks in the process lie, and what to do about them. Their solutions tended to be to use bigger bulldozers and to gut more legislation, and Kenney more specifically included funding the legal challenges of resource-friendly First Nations communities and targeting “foreign-funded” organisations that opposed development (because it’s all one big conspiracy by the Tides Foundation, and however else makes a convenient scapegoat). But if anyone has paid any attention to the court decisions over the past number of years, especially over Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain, the theme that emerges is that they have been slapped down because successive governments have attempted to cut corners and weasel out of their obligations rather than doing the hard work of proper assessments and consultation with Indigenous communities that would get them the approval they were looking for. The current Liberal government seems to get this fact and is proceeding accordingly when it comes to Trans Mountain, while Scheer and Kenney wail and gnash their teeth about how they didn’t appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada (without articulating what the error in law was), or somehow legislating away the problems (never mind that retroactive legislation will lead to more litigation, and you can’t legislate away your Section 35 duty to consult obligations).

Kenney also promised that if made premier, he would launch a “war room” to counter any critics of the oil sands in real time. The problem is that hasn’t worked to day, and won’t work going forward, but Kenney refuses to grasp that reality.

Energy economist Andrew Leach was also presenting at the event, and has some thoughts as to what he heard as well:

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Roundup: Getting the TPP to the finish line

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The bill to enact the Trans Pacific Partnership has passed the House of Commons and arrived in the Senate, and the race is on for its swift passage, as there is a desire for Canada to be among one of the first six countries to ratify the deal (currently three others have ratified). In the Commons, the NDP were the prime opponents to the deal, but they’re not a force in the Senate. The Conservatives in the Senate are just as keen on its swift passage as their Commons counterparts were – and they tried on more than one occasion to pass the bill at all stages without debate (because hey, who needs to do the job of scrutinising bills and holding government to account?)

While we can expect a bit more scrutiny in the Senate, I have to wonder where any delays will come from. When it comes to the Independents, one of their own are sponsoring the bill, so he will likely lead a push within that caucus in the way of organising briefings and trying to muster votes, so it would largely be an issue of whether any of them want some particular extended study on issues in the bill. The Senate Liberals tend to be free-traders, but they will want to insist on some scrutiny, as is their forte – they can often be counted on to do some of the heavy lifting that MPs are unwilling to do. So while I don’t expect them to hold up the bill, I would expect them to do their due diligence, which means it won’t sail right through, though I wouldn’t expect it to take long.

So where would I expect any delays to happen with this bill? With the Leader of the Government in the Senate’s office, given his reluctance to do any negotiation of timelines for bill passage. If there’s to be any delays, I personally would expect them to come from bottlenecks of other bills that are languishing because they can’t manage to get them passed at a reasonable pace because nobody wants to do the actual negotiation of timelines. Delays will come from incompetence, rather than malice. We’ll have to see how severe it will be, but that seems to be the state of things in the Senate these days.

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QP: The broken record of the Norman files

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On cannabis legalisation day, as all the media was focused on line-ups at pot shops, the work of Parliament carried on. Andrew Scheer led off, curiously raising the court case of Vice Admiral Mark Norman and the refusal to turn over secret documents to his defence team. Justin Trudeau said that this was before the courts, and would comment no further. Scheer tried again in English, and Trudeau reiterated his response. Scheer demanded the documents be released, not a comment, and Trudeau repeated his responses, and they went yet again, and again. Guy Caron was up next, and wanted criminal records for pot possession to be expunged rather than pardoned, and Trudeau gave a speech about how prohibition didn’t work and why legalisation and regulation was a better path — but he didn’t answer the question. Caron switched to French to ask the same again, and this time, Trudeau said their plan was for rapid pardons. Matthew Dubé picked up on the same demand for expungements, and Trudeau spelled out that these were different than the LGBT expungements because those laws were an instrument of discrimination. Dubé returned in English by saying the war on drugs is racist, and Trudeau said they recognised that fact, but insisted that the pardons would be free and fast.

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Roundup: A “grand coalition” is a terrible idea

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Over in New Brunswick, where there has been no movement on whether or not there will be a new government, we are being treated to such views as the suggestion that there should be a “grand coalition” between the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives in the province to…rise above partisan interests? Erm, well, leaving aside the fact that there is a lot of bad blood between the leaders and it’s never going to happen, I find the suggestion in and of itself utterly offensive. Why? Because our system depends on there being an opposition to hold the government to account. That’s the whole point of parliament after all – to hold government to account, and while backbenchers are supposed to play that role as well as the opposition, in practice it often doesn’t work that well because the incentives are rarely there when there are Cabinet posts to distribute and the fact that we’ve bastardized our leadership system so as to neuter caucus’ ability to hold their leaders to account. Such a “grand coalition” would mean that the province has an opposition comprised of two three-member parties, which would have to fight over who gets to be the Official Opposition, and would have a hard time doing the job of holding a massive coalition government to account.

Now, I will add that New Brunswick and its peculiar political culture once returned a legislature that was 100 percent Liberal and had zero opposition members, and they managed to make it work. Sort of. But it’s not a situation that anyone should want to repeat, because it’s a Very Bad Thing for democracy and the practice of Responsible Government. Opposition plays an important role, and I know that people don’t like it because the adversarial nature can become both theatrical (witness Question Period), but if members don’t take that theatricality to heart, it can become embittering – especially if there are few avenues for cross-partisan bonding. I don’t know enough about how that part of the political culture works in New Brunswick, but the diminishing avenues for such bonding in Ottawa has created a less collegial parliament than it used to be in years past, and that’s a problem.

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Meanwhile, the lieutenant governor is straying dangerously out of her lane in issuing statements warning the parties to come to a solution because she doesn’t think the province wants a new election, and that means also finding a Speaker. This shouldn’t be public, and I get that some people want transparency, but she shouldn’t be doing this – especially because it gives people the idea that she can boss around the premier, which she can’t actually do unless we want to undo 170 years of Responsible Government in this country. It’s especially bad if the parties are trying to play the LG and trying to force her hand in some way – which is the kind of gutless manoeuvre that we should expect from Canadian politicians who don’t like to be seen to be making unpopular decisions and will try to foist the blame onto someone else. This whole situation is distasteful, and everyone needs to grow up and behave like adults.

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Roundup: Protecting parliament from court interference

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The decision in Mikisew Cree First Nation v. Canada (Governor General in Council) at the Supreme Court of Canada yesterday has been described in some cases as relieving the government of the Duty to Consult Indigenous communities when preparing legislation, but I think some of that misses the very real issue of the separation of powers and parliamentary privilege – particularly when the news channels would immediately trot out Indigenous lawyers to say that this was an infringement on the Duty to Consult, and that it was a “missed opportunity” to get legislation right, and so on. (And lo and behold, here’s Pam Palmater to argue just that, and I find her analysis flawed). In fact, the CBC piece on the decision buried the aspect about separation of powers at the very bottom of the piece, despite the fact that it’s at the heart of the ruling.

To recap, the separation of powers is the doctrine that the executive, legislative, and judicial branches have different roles and you shouldn’t have them meddling in one another’s business, which is exactly what the case was proposing to do – to allow the courts to weigh in on legislation before it’s been passed, or in this case, even been drafted. That’s a huge overreach by the courts, and a giant infringement on parliamentary supremacy. Why that’s especially important is because we’re seeing a growing movement of people who try turning to the courts when they lose at politics, which is very bad for democracy. (In fact, it appears that the Mikisew are engaging in a bit of that very thing here, objecting to the changes to the changes to environmental assessment legislation). If the Mikisew had their way, it would allow for the courts to weigh in on the legislative process at all points, which not only makes legislation impossible, but it means that parliament can no longer govern its own affairs, which is a very bad thing. Of course, there were many differences of opinion between the justices as to how this all shakes out, but they all agreed that the courts have no role in interference in the legislative process, and I don’t think that was highlighted nearly enough.

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This being said, they did affirm that the Duty to Consult is still necessary – just that it didn’t need to be mandatory before drafting legislation. Smart governments who take the Duty seriously would do so in the planning stages of legislation, and there are opportunities to engage in consultation during the legislative process, particularly at committees, when amendments can be proposed that would assist with accommodation. Emmett Macfarlane also suspects that we could see the Senate take a more active role in ensuring proper consultation as it weighs in on bills as well, which could be an interesting evolution in the Senate’s activities as we move forward with its “new” characteristics.

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Meanwhile, Philippe Lagassé digs into Justice Brown’s reasoning around the Crown’s distinct capacities. Here is a thread from Emmett Macfarlane on his thoughts on the decision. And here’s University of Ottawa law school vice dean Carissima Mathen to explain the decision.

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Roundup: Carbon tax opportunism

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The latest round of carbon tax drama has the Conservatives drunk with glee, as Manitoba premier Brian Pallister’s decision to scrap his own carbon tax plans has them thinking that they now have a national momentum against carbon taxes. It’s not likely to be that simple – and they may find out that it may blow up in their faces. Pallister says he changed his mind about it after meeting with Trudeau, and found Trudeau intransigent on letting Manitoba keep their tax at a flat $25/tonne when everyone’s else was ramping up to $50/tonne, which sounds like a no-brainer – you want a consistent carbon price across the country to prevent leakage and to keep a level playing field. (Pallister also claims that their plan was so comprehensive, but in interviews would point to things like remediating mines and recycling programmes, which are not about addressing climate change, and his deliberate misinformation should be called out as such). But it also smacks of opportunism, given that small-c conservatives across the country are taking the election of Doug Ford in Ontario as some sign that there is an uprising against carbon taxes when that was very likely not the cause of his election, but rather it was the impetus for change from the province’s tired Liberal government. Overreading Ford’s “mandate,” if we’re going to use that word, is dangerous for them to do. Meanwhile, Ford was yukking it up with Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe in their insulting the federal carbon tax, each believing their mutual court challenges are going to go somewhere (they’re likely not), and Ford would say things like a carbon tax is the worst thing in the world and will do nothing for the environment – complete falsehoods, and all he has to do is look at BC to show the complete opposite.

The federal government, meanwhile, hasn’t been terribly eloquent in their response, on the one hand decrying Pallister’s “flip flop” and worrying that conservatives want pollution to be free, while also pointing out that when the federal backstop comes in, people will be getting cheques in the mail. And that’s going to be the Achilles heel of the federal Conservatives’ belief that the country is going to rise up against carbon taxes. They keep pushing the narrative that it’s a tax grab to feed the Liberals’ “out of control spending” when it’s in the enabling legislation for the carbon tax that the funds will be rebated. But the government hasn’t been eloquent – and has been barely competent – when it comes to any kind of messaging on this file, and that’s the part that will probably hurt them the most, and it’ll be a self-inflicted wound, which makes you just shake your head watching it all go down.

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QP: Turning Canada to a vassal state

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It being the Thursday before a constituency week, the benches were getting a bit thinner, and none of the leaders (save Elizabeth May) were present. That left Alain Rayes to lead off, reading concerns about the Americans being able to weigh in on a potential trade deal with China, and wondered what Canada got in response. Marc Garneau got up to read that the ability to withdraw from an agreement was normal. Rayes railed about all of the various concessions made, and Garneau was “mystified” that the Conservatives didn’t applaud them for getting a deal. Michael Chong was up next, and raised our sacrifices in World War I before complaining that the Article 32 in the new NAFTA makes Canada a vassal state. Garneau insisted there was no loss of sovereignty, and that any party could leave the agreement with six months’ notice. Candice Bergen was up next, and she whinged that Trudeau acted like a bully and called them names on the issue of Tori Stafford’s killer. Jean-Yves Duclos got up to read that politicians can’t make determinations about the sentencing of individual prisoners. Bergen proposed a broad policy of preventing child killers from going to healing lodges, but Duclos repeated his script. Karine Trudel led off for the NDP, worrying about the steel and aluminium tariffs still being in place. Garneau got up to read that the tariffs weren’t justified, which was Canada was retaliating. On a second go-around, Garneau gave the same response, this time without script, before Tracey Ramsey repeated the question in English, with a bit of added condemnation. Garneau reiterated the response in English, and for her final question, Ramsey demanded a task force to help small businesses affected by the tariffs, and this time, Garneau took a few shots a the NDP’s dislike of trade agreements.

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