Tag Archives: Tough on Crime

Roundup: Assisted dying heating up

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The issue of doctor-assisted dying is heating up the closer we get to Trudeau and cabinet being sworn in, seeing as there’s a looming February deadline on the horizon. Trudeau signalled that he plans to ask the Supreme Court for an extension to their decision to strike the existing laws down, but that too poses its own challenges. The federal government had initially asked the Court for eighteen months, and they gave them twelve, at which point the government sat on it for several months before creating what looked to be a stacked advisory committee to study the issue. That committee is also in the crosshairs, as advocacy groups say that it should be abolished because of its stacked nature. The chair of said committee said that its members’ former positions against assisted dying are no longer relevant because the Court has ruled and they now have to come up with a system that will work to protect the vulnerable while enabling those Canadians who wish to die with dignity to do so on their own terms. It certainly couldn’t hurt Trudeau to let them report and see what they have to say, and then choose to accept or disregard it at that time. The very fact that he’s now forming government should also be a signal that he expects this consultative process to be something other that the one the government engaged in around the prostitution question, in that he is not expecting them to give one response in particular but to have a more thoughtful result in the end. I guess we’ll see. Meanwhile, advocates of religious communities came out against assisted dying again, insisting instead on more resources for palliative care, as though they were mutually exclusive, never mind that the Supreme Court has also made a clear ruling. (And one would think that if they allowed people who wanted to die on their own terms rather to do so, it would free up those resources that were otherwise needlessly prolonging their suffering that could be applied to palliative care, but maybe I’m wrong on that one).

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Roundup: A potential TPP deal

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While signs that the election could become an ugly question of identity politics continue to circulate, the impending announcement of some resolution or other in the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks could swing the election narrative yet again. While an announcement was supposed to have been made yesterday, it was held over until morning today, and we’ll see what becomes of it. Back in Canada, Harper has been talking up the deal, while Thomas Mulcair has taken to using the TPP as his new wedge. While trying to change the channel from the niqab issue, and his own rapidly softening poll numbers, Mulcair has become the born-again protectionist, declaring that Harper has no mandate to negotiate the deal (despite the fact that there is both precedent and it would still require parliamentary approval for enabling legislation), loudly decrying the impact on dairy farmers and auto parts manufacturers. The curious thing, however, is that two months ago he declared himself an enthusiastic supporter of the potential deal. The Liberals, meanwhile, are saying that they are supportive of free trade but won’t make any comments one way or the other about the TPP until they have more details – for which the NDP are castigating them for not taking a stand. Remember how at the Maclean’s debate, Mulcair was making a big deal about not wanting to take a stand on certain pipeline projects until he had a better environmental assessment? Suddenly waiting for more details is irresponsible. It gives me a headache.

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Roundup: Ramping up the moral panics

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With the end finally nearing in sight with this interminable election, and the logjam still present in the polls, this nasty undercurrent of identity politics has been creeping in. What started out with the niqab ban issue has been growing, all of it with seeds laid in the last parliament. That niqab ban challenge has been inflaming passions, but when Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi called out the xenophobia behind it, Jason Kenney retorted that the mayor “and people like him” are politicizing it. While people could take this as a racist jab, knowing Kenney it is more likely this dismissal of Nenshi as some bleeding-hearted liberal who is too politically correct for his own good. Or as Nenshi responded, “thoughtful people.” Elsewhere, Pierre Poilievre wouldn’t rule out the idea of banning face coverings in the public service period, which start to sound a lot like the PQ “Charter of Quebec Values” proposal. But it’s more than the niqab issue – it’s also this citizenship-stripping process that they’re pushing, and trying to deport people despite the fact that in at least one case, it’s involving a person who was born in Canada and has lived their whole life here – deporting him to Pakistan, where he has never lived or visited but only has a connection there though his parents – it’s a perverse and hugely unconstitutional measure. It’s also a big problem because it no longer becomes a question of dual citizenship, but rather the presumption that this person can get it with another country, so we would insist that they do and then deport them there. Not only does it not make any sense – if you really think that rehabilitation isn’t possible, why does dumping these terrorists into another country that doesn’t have our security services or monitoring regime for recent parolees, then you’re asking for them to join a terror group in that other country. To make it worse, Harper was musing openly on a radio show about extending this to other heinous crimes. But when you boil it all down, this is more security theatre – it looks like it’s keeping us safe, while it’s really just putting on a show and likely making things worse in the long run. But it’s just about looking tough, right? Damn the consequences.

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Roundup: Two senators are not enough

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After Thomas Mulcair indicated that he’d been approached by a couple of Senators who would be willing to help him pass his agenda, we now get a couple of names – Liberal Senator Larry Campbell, and Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth, though the latter isn’t talking about it (and personally I wonder why she would volunteer considering how shoddily she’s been treated by the NDP after she made that joke about camembert, and yes, it was a joke). But it’s not quite as cut-and-dried as Mulcair seemed to make it out to be. Campbell, in an interview with CBC, said he’d be willing to ensure that bills get due credit, but that’s not exactly putting oneself in the position of shepherding through an entire NDP agenda. I also have my doubts when Campbell says that the Senate doesn’t need a leader of the government and a leader of the opposition, largely because it clashes with our system of Responsible Government. The current framework allows for Senators to hold the government to account in the way that MPs can, by asking questions of a member of cabinet – nominally the leader of the government in the Senate, never mind the fact that Harper’s current leader is not in cabinet because he churlishly is trying to distance himself from the Senate. And one of the most underrated ways in which Senators perform this accountability is in the leader’s ability to take questions on notice and provide written responses. Losing this ability would be a blow to the Senate’s accountability function, which is a vital part of their role of Sober Second Thought. You need answers from government if you are to properly consider their legislative agenda, and losing that conduit is going to hamper that ability. Campbell and Senate Liberal whip Jim Munson also mused about making the Senate Speaker elected by the chamber, but I’m not sure how easily this can be accomplished considering that the Senate Speaker has duties beyond what the Commons Speaker does in terms of protocol and diplomatic duties, which is one of the reasons it’s a Governor-in-Council appointment. He or she is the “Queen’s man” (or woman as the case may be) for a reason, and there may be a lot of hoops to jump through in order to make that change. I’m not saying it’s not doable, but it may not be easily doable – particularly if you have an NDP prime minister who has no interest in doing anything for the Senate. Suffice to say, it’s not enough for Mulcair to use these couple of senators as an excuse to ignore his constitutional obligations.

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Roundup: Niqab politics taking over

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The politics of the niqab have slowly starting taking up a lot of oxygen on the election campaign, on a number of fronts. While people over the Twitter Machine tried to skew Harper’s “old stock Canadians” remark as some kind of racist or dog whistle politics (I’m not sure that interpretation makes sense given the context of what he was saying), the government has decided to crank their petulance around the attempted niqab ban up to eleven by declaring that they will ask the courts for a stay of the Federal Court of Appeal ruling on the niqab-at-citizenship-ceremonies case, essentially to deny the woman in question the right to vote. It’s going to be tough for them to convince the courts that there is some imminent danger if they allow her to take the oath before October 19th, much less convince the Supreme Court of Canada to hear the case (and they almost certainly won’t, seeing as this is a fairly open-and-shut case of administrative law, where the minister overreached is authority to implement the ban). But while this pettiness digs in, the panic over the niqab has already begun to spread, with the Bloc launching an attack ad to warn that the NDP will mean pipelines and niqabs in Quebec, while an NDP candidate has stated that while Thomas Mulcair reopens the constitution to try and abolish the Senate (never going to happen), that he deal with the menace of niqabs at the same time. No, seriously. He added that he’s sure the party supports him on that, and as of posting time, the party has not repudiated the statement (much as they did not really repudiate it when Alexandre Boulerice made similar statements about banning niqabs earlier). Justin Trudeau, for his part, said he wouldn’t try to appeal the ban to the Supreme Court. So there’s that. Meanwhile, Tabatha Southey takes on the government’s attempted niqab ban, with her usual acid wit.

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Roundup: Trying to politicize the RCMP – again

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Trying to cash in on the Duffy trial, the NDP decided to send an open letter to the RCMP Commissioner yesterday, essentially demanding that the case against Nigel Wright be re-opened and expanded to include current chief of staff Ray Novak, for some unknown reason. Oh, and they want a “clear response” as to why there are no charges. There are a few problems with this approach, so let’s list them, shall we?

  1. The RCMP don’t have to answer to the NDP. Sorry, but they don’t. They don’t have to explain why they didn’t press charges for someone else’s partisan gain.
  2. We’ve pretty much determined that in order for a bribery charge to be even feasible, they would have to establish the mens rea – the intent – that the $90,000 cheque was intending to buy influence. It wasn’t, and we have Wright’s testimony under oath to that effect. Are there no lawyers in the party that can explain this?
  3. And this is the big one – the NDP are explicitly trying to politicise the RCMP by making them part of their campaign against the Conservatives in the campaign.

Whoever in the NDP brain trust decided it was a good idea to drag the RCMP into the election should give their heads a shake because it’s kind of gross. The NDP brought them into a previous election – you’ll remember the December 2005 letter from the RCMP that the NDP used against the Liberals in that election, and when Harper won the election, how there were plenty of curious appearances of ties with the then-RCMP commissioner and Harper. (An investigation, it should be noted, that amounted to nothing). One would think that the RCMP would have learnt their lessons, and that they’ll be more circumspect. I guess we’ll see if they are, but suffice to say, the NDP trying to repeat that particular cheap stunt is not particularly endearing, and they should rethink trying to drag nominally non-political actors into the fray. No good can come of it.

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Roundup: Fobbing off your work to the Senate

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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.

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Roundup: Last-minute legislation

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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.

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Roundup: Breaking the debates

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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.

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Roundup: Harper’s permanent underclass

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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.

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