With MPs having gone home for the summer to start the campaign in earnest (well, not including the one in six who aren’t running again), the Senate is still hard at work to get through the last of the government’s agenda before they rise. Included in this are three bills that were passed at all stages in the dying days. Now, none of these are controversial so far as we can see, but the fact that they were all rammed through on a voice vote with zero debate is not exactly an encouraging trend. More to the point, it forces the actual due diligence onto the Senate, which is their job, but once again, it seems that they’re doing the work that MPs can’t be bothered to do because they’re too busy doing things like holding concurrence debates on nine-month old Health committee reports on the dangers of marijuana (never mind that said report was a sham rammed through the committee thanks to the government’s majority, and that it ignored the bulk of witness testimony) in order to try and hammer the Liberals on their pot policy. Because that’s an effective use of time. It’s also extremely ironic that the NDP insists the Senate does no valuable work ad should be abolished – and yet they once again fobbed off their work to the Senate to deal with because they couldn’t be bothered. There is no such thing as unflawed legislation, and it’s the job of MPs to scrutinise it in order to hold the government to account. But for a party who believes so strongly in the infallibility of the House of Commons that they don’t want an upper chamber, they gave bills a free pass with zero debate. Wow. Way to go there, guys. Really showing that you’re taking your jobs seriously, and that you’re doing the job of accountability like the official opposition is supposed to. Kind of like how they’ve taken to fobbing off their homework to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. It’s behaviour like that that undermines the NDP’s whole argument for Senate abolition – not that I mind. But MPs should be embarrassed when they pass any legislation with zero scrutiny. You’re just making the case for your own growing irrelevance, which serves nobody’s interests.
Tag Archives: Tough on Crime
Roundup: Last-minute legislation
With less than three sitting weeks left, the government has announced that they will introduce yet another bill, this time to give the Minister of Transport enhanced powers when it comes to ordering vehicle recalls. The bill won’t be tabled until later in the week, and there’s no timeline for its passage, but Lisa Raitt is confident she’ll get all-party support for the bill to expedite it. Of course, it’s not guaranteed, and in the light of the recent Takata airbag recall, it does start to smack a little bit of desperation, that the government is doing one last push to show that they’re on top of things, even though they knew this deadline was coming, and this recall issue has been going on for weeks now. As well, they have nearly twenty more bills that they want to pass before the Commons rises, and as it stands, it looks like some of their showcase bills, like the “life means life” parole bill, aren’t going to make it, and Peter MacKay is admitting as much. This speaks to a couple of different issues – one is that there are doubtlessly bills that they’re going to allow to die so that they can campaign on them, both as unfinished business and under the falsehood that the opposition held them up (which really, they can’t do given that this government has the time allocation hammer and aren’t afraid to use it) so they need another majority in order to get these kinds of measures through. Of course, it also showcases that this government – and Peter Van Loan as House Leader – has been spectacularly terrible when it comes to the basic management of getting bills through (not that it’s all Van Loan’s fault – the NDP haven’t exactly played ball when it comes to any routine House management either, and it has been said several times that Peter Julian has managed to make Van Loan look downright reasonable). Suffice to say, good luck to Raitt, because she’s probably going to need it if she wants to get this bill through.
Roundup: Breaking the debates
The Conservatives have decided that they’re going to opt out of the major broadcasters when it comes to election debates this fall, and will instead entertain the option of independents who don’t have the same kind of widespread broadcast capabilities, by accepting the invitations of Maclean’s/Rogers, and TVA in French. In a way, it’s more of this attempt to portray themselves as poor, put upon underdogs that the “big media elites” are trying to control – as though being in power for the past ten years doesn’t make them elites. There has been this particular undercurrent in pre-election conversation that they want plenty of debates because apparently it’ll be how they can trip up Justin Trudeau (ignoring both the fact that he cleaned up in his party leadership debates, and the fact that the more debates, the more chance that any gaffes will be minimised). It’s also a curious strategy that they would forgo the broadest audience that the major broadcasters’ consortium could provide – and a bit tone deaf as to the reality of the media landscape that they think that it’s just a matter of some university hosting an event and everyone brings their cameras. What it does is twofold – firstly, it’s a power game by the Conservatives to unilaterally pull out of the consortium negotiation process and throw everyone into disarray, and secondly, it’s an attempt to control those debates by creating a proliferation of independent offers that they can then cherry pick when it comes to things like format and hosting choices. It has also been pointed out how hypocritical their position is considering that they very rarely allow their candidates to even attend local debates, so for them to be concern trolling over the state of the leaders’ debates is a bit rich. Suffice to say, it’s throwing a lot of added confusion out there and is setting up a power play that will further break our system more than it already is.
Roundup: Harper’s permanent underclass
During a visit by the president of the Philippines yesterday, Stephen Harper took a question from a Filipino reporter about the Temporary Foreign Workers Programme – something that affects a great many Filipinos who come to work in Canada, and how there has been an exodus of those workers whose four-year permits have expired. Harper responded that he doesn’t want to see a “permanent underclass” of workers who don’t have the same rights as Canadians, and that they can become immigrants like everyone else. While that answer sounds pretty high-minded on the surface, the problem with it is that it ignores the changes that his own government put into place and perpetuates. Under Harper’s watch, the numbers of permanent residencies has declined in favour of more temporary work permits, and the other problem is that the current immigration program ignores the fact that there is a need for low-skilled immigrants in this country who can’t get in the door now because we are only looking for highly skilled or educated individuals and their families. That kind of system ignores the long-term investment in the country that low-skilled immigration brings, and has brought to this country when it was a big part of the way our system operated. In other words, Harper’s own government policies are perpetuating a system that will allow these temporary workers for four years, but won’t allow them to become permanent residents, and yet he admonishes them for not using the regular immigration routes. But hey, rhetoric while a foreign leader is present makes everything sound better.
Roundup: An implicit repudiation
It was Auditor General day yesterday, and as usual, there were some stories that didn’t get a lot of attention, like CBSA’s computer systems, and some which are somewhat alarming, like the fact that twenty years later, Health Canada still doesn’t have a real plan to deal with superbugs, that there are some serious deficiencies when it comes to nursing stations with remote First Nations, or that the Royal Canadian Mint and the Office of the Canadian Forces Ombudsman had some spending issues. But the most interesting bits were in two chapters – one on tax expenditures, the other on the release of male offenders from corrections. In essence, both are repudiations of the way that this government has been managing things. Tax expenditures has a lot to do with the mass proliferation of those boutique tax credits that this government likes to throw around in order to target voters, but as the AG points out, it’s done with little scrutiny, and not enough information on them gets back to Parliamentarians to hold that spending to account. (Couple this with the report on Monday about the growth in tax complexity, and it should be a big red flag). As for offenders, too many low-risk offenders are not getting parole when they are eligible, and that makes reintegration harder, and recidivism more likely because they don’t get the monitoring that comes with parole. Add to that, the squeeze on programming resources within prisons and the removal of incentives to do the programming means that too many offenders are being released without having completed their rehabilitation programmes, which is also alarming. It’s also the direct fault of this government and their tough-on-crime policies what have made a virtue of trying to keep people in prisons longer, and then justifying it by saying that they won’t be on the streets to re-offend (never mind that in the vast majority of cases, keeping them in prison longer does more harm than good). And as the AG pointed out, it’s more costly to keep them in prison longer and without gradual release and programming, they get released with a higher chance to re-offend. In other words, we’re paying more to get poorer results because it’s easier to try and get votes by appealing to the sense of retribution rather than rehabilitation. Well done, guys. Slow clap.
The Auditor General is here, and he doesn't look impressed. #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/xNLz029D1z
— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) April 28, 2015
Roundup: The Privacy Commissioner finally has his say
Bill C-51 is now getting its review in the Senate, hearing from someone that the Commons didn’t – the Privacy Commissioner. What they got was an earful – there are some big problems with the information sharing provisions in the bill that would allow large amounts of personal information to be collected and shared between departments with little justification, and that his office would be swamped with work because of it. He’s also calling for oversight – like everyone else – and for the ability for different watchdogs to communicate with one another and coordinate their investigations in order to get a better picture of what these organisations are doing as they work together but their oversight remains siloed. Those other oversight bodies – SIRC and the CSE Commissioner – had much the same concerns when it comes to the ability to work together, and just keeping pace with the increasing scope and scale of operations. But will any of this have an effect? Maybe, as there are some Conservative senators who are concerned about these kinds of things and who may push back. But the government may bully through, and said senators may decide that this isn’t the hill they want to die on (which does happen), and they’ll let it go through. Suffice to say, the issue has not gone away.
Roundup: Of gaffes and grandchildren
I think by this point we can pretty much acknowledge that Joe Oliver is not anyone’s best choice to communicate a message – he wasn’t as Natural Resources minister, with his “foreign-funded radicals” warnings about environmentalists, and certainly not as finance minister given his Tuesday night gaffe with CBC’s Amanda Lang. There, he said that any problems with raising the TFSA limit might not happen until 2080, and that he’d leave it for “Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s granddaughter to solve that problem.” Not only did he admit that there was a problem with it, but he decided it’s best to leave it to the next generation – not to mention his prediction that the Harper family will become some kind of dynastic rules of Canada – because we’ve seen so many of those. When opposition parties made hay of it, Harper came out to defend Oliver’s comments, but we have heard this warning before, from the PBO who drafted a report looking at the hole in future budgets that this kind of measure would create, and it’s not inconsiderable, so no, the question being put to Oliver by Lang was more than reasonable, and it would have been irresponsible for her not to ask it. In other post-budget news, here are the opposition positions on many of the pieces therein. There was mention in the budget about “expanding and modernising” the Honours system, but there are almost no details about what that means other than a new website. Pierre Poilievre said the money being given to the Ottawa police is for “fighting jihadis” – except it’s not, but rather for things like demonstrations or visits by foreign dignitaries. Oops. Mike Moffatt looks at the very optimistic budget projections on the price of oil. The budget nearly doubles what it gives to SIRC, but we’ll see if they’ll be expected to do more with it, given that they are already under-resourced. Paul Wells puts absolutely everybody to shame and writes about the budget as political document, and it’s so on point I want to weep.
Roundup: Legalism and homework monitors
Another day, another dissection of the rules of the Senate, this time with the revelation that nobody in Senate administration ensured that work got done when they paid out contractors that senators drew up. The defence maintained the legalistic hammering, to the point that lawyer Donald Bayne omitted one key phrase from the guidelines for Senators expenses: “Likewise, individual Senators must be conscious of the requirement to expend public monies prudently.” And really, that’s what’s at the heart of this trial – even if the rules themselves were loose, it doesn’t mean that it’s permission to go well beyond their intended use and purpose. It makes me wonder who should be checking in on the work of senators when they contract out services – should it be Senate Administration checking that speeches were written, and that research was conducted? Do they become the babysitters and homework monitors of the Senate? It’s a hard question to ask because you can only infantilise them so far before you start getting into problems. It’s even more problematic when senators’ policy work can take a wide variety of forms. This isn’t to say that there shouldn’t be some form of oversight to ensure that there isn’t abuse, but we need to keep in mind that these aren’t civil servants or functionaries. They’re parliamentarians, with all of the attendant privileges that comes with that, and that means something. It’s also one of the reasons why pundits opining that this is really a “trial about the Senate” bothers me, and that these “entitled” senators have “free reign to spend public money,” which is obviously not true. Questions were raised, particularly about Wallin but also Duffy, and things were coming to light, though it there may have been the intent to take care of it more quietly. None of it excuses what Duffy did, and the fact that he appears to have deliberately misled Senate Administration with the contracts he drew up, as he certainly appears to have done with his various and sundry claims. Is it the Senate’s fault, or do we blame them to absolve him of the personal responsibility? That should be kept top of mind as the pundit class makes their pronouncements. The Senate didn’t make Duffy do anything – he made all of his choices himself. Meanwhile, the daily behind-the-scenes look notes Duffy’s exit strategy, and here’s a profile of the courtroom sketch artist.
Roundup: The end of acting honourably
At the end of the first week of the Duffy trial, the Crown regained some of the ground that it was appearing to lose – it wasn’t just that the rules were loose, or that there was no definition around residency, but there was an expectation that senators behave honourably, and thanks to the actions of the likes of Duffy, Wallin, and others, that expectation is now being buried under new legalistic guidelines. There was also pushback to the notion that because the Prime Minister appointed Duffy a Senator from PEI, his residency was assumed to be genuine – there are limits, and as I’ve discussed on this blog previously, not only did the PMO not ensure that their ducks were in a row on that front before Duffy was appointed (as previous governments who took appointments seriously and didn’t make them in a panic had done), but they almost practically encouraged the alleged abuses of Duffy and Wallin in particular by that very act of not ensuring residence upon appointment. Duffy himself kept trying to get reassurance as to the residency issue – as his own diaries show – but apparently only enough to ensure that he didn’t need to make the effort of actually ensuring that he was properly moved to the Island as his principle residence. What should be addressed – but isn’t in the trial because it is beyond the ambit – is the fact that when the Queen or GG makes the appointment on the basis of the PM’s advice, it is assume that the advice is sound because of Responsible Government. In the case of Duffy, we can be reasonably assured that the advice was likely not sound – that Duffy was not qualified to be a senator from PEI, or Wallin a Senator from Saskatchewan. What that also means is that under Responsible Government, we get to hold that government to account, and there is an election coming up. Perhaps we need to remind people of that fact. Maclean’s also has commissioned comic strips of the week’s events, while Scott Reid gives us his take on the Duffy Diaries, and the defence to date.
Roundup: A desperate lawsuit
If you thought that the NDP’s sudden demand that the government refer the satellite offices case to the Supreme Court to rule on its justiciability immediately wasn’t a sign of desperation, the fact that those MPs being ordered to repay are now suing the Board of Internal Economy in Federal Court is even more so. Can one even sue a parliamentary board that one is a part of? In fact, it smacks of the kind of desperate tactic where you throw absolutely everything at the wall, no matter how implausible, and hope that something sticks. The suit demands that the $2.7 million in demanded repayments be set aside, calling the decision “unreasonable, arbitrary and incorrect.” Except it wasn’t the Board that made the findings – it was the Clerk of the Commons, and she has the paperwork to prove that the NDP misled her when they set up the scheme in the first place. It’s also curious that the NDP would go for this kind of process when discovery is going to be very difficult for them as they have to turn over all manner of documents as part of the process. Still, with time running out before their MPs start having their salaries garnisheed, I have to wonder how many more tactics we’ll see employed to try and delay things, at least until the election and then beyond.