Tag Archives: Tough on Crime

Roundup: A thousand omnibudget amendments

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The next steps in the fight against the omnibus budget bill are heating up. After getting their interns to camp out, the Liberals deposited 503 deletion amendments to be considered. Moments later, the NDP deposited 506 deletion amendments of their own. (I’m informed that the number was just a coincidences and not a juvenile game of one-upmanship). This on top of Elizabeth May’s 200 or so substantive amendments. The Speaker is due to rule on Monday as to what is going to be admissible and how those amendments will be grouped together. Pity his poor staff, who will have to spend their weekend going through all of it.

Court documents are undermining what Dean Del Mastro was claiming yesterday regarding his innocence with those allegedly improper payments that Elections Canada is now investigating.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer is preparing to go to Federal Court to get the information on the budget cuts that he is entitled to get, but that the government is withholding.

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Roundup: A too-predictable sympathetic report

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The NDP have release their “report” on their “consultations” on the omnibus budget bill around the country. Their condemnation comes from having panels stuffed with representatives from sympathetic groups, and by avoiding Alberta or any regions whose economies are dependent on resource extraction. Funny how that happens. Meanwhile, they’re also promising some 200 deletion amendments at report stage of the bill in the Commons, which on top of Elizabeth May’s 50 substantive amendments and the 200 deletion amendments she’s working with the Liberals on means that there could be 30 hours or so of votes, depending on what the Speaker rules to be in order or how he groups them.

It cost $47,000 for Peter MacKay and company to put on the photo op with the mock-up F-35 when the government announced they initially were going to be buying those planes.

The NDP wants to charge the deputy minister of DND with contempt of parliament over his testimony on the F-35s. And while this drama unfolds in the Public Accounts Committee, Liberal MP Gerry Byrne charges that the NDP has been doing a lot of in camera cooperation with the Conservatives in order to try to stick it to the Liberals. Sigh.

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Roundup: Back to work, please?

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Lisa Raitt wants CP Rail employees to voluntarily return to work before the back-to-work legislation passes, seeing as that awful Senate won’t violate all of their own rules in order to bend to her whims. How horrible is it for Parliament to have rules to be follows? Why do Parliament’s rules hate the economy?

It turns out that the severed hand found at the Canada Post depot in Ottawa yesterday was bound for Liberal party headquarters – not that there was any political motive. It looks like the suspect in this case was just a deranged and narcissistic individual, and nothing attracts the crazy like politics. More about the increasingly bizarre and gruesome tale can be found here.

On a lighter note, Jennifer Ditchburn looks at some other odd mail that MPs and Senators get, which include these wooden churches.

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Roundup: Scrutiny versus populist outrage

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The government is backing another private members’ bill, this time about establishing a mandatory minimum sentence on kidnapping a person under 16 – despite the fact that a former Supreme Court justice calls this unnecessary and creating a more patchwork Criminal Code that increasingly is ad hoc and full of loopholes and inconsistencies. It’s like the government were going along with anything that sounded good without giving it proper thought or analysis. Oh, wait –that’s exactly what they’re doing. Who needs proper scrutiny when you’ve got populist outrage on your side?

Thomas Mulcair dismisses the premiers of Alberta, BC and Saskatchewan as “Harper’s messengers” when they go after him about his comments on the oil sands and our supposed “petro dollar.” Erm, okay. Because that makes sense. Paul Wells further dissects that particular line of thinking here.

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QP: Orwell was not a how-to manual

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With the NDP now out to turn public opinion to their side on the omnibus budget bill, one wondered if this was going to lead off QP for the day. And in a sort of tangential sense it did, as Thomas Mulcair asked about Jim Flaherty’s comments that OAS changes could save $10 to $12 billion. Harper insisted there would be no actual pension reductions. Mulcair then turned to Flaherty’s “there are no bad jobs” comments with regards to EI changes – and several times was drowned out by Conservative applause when he repeated Flaherty’s statement. (And yet he kept repeating it and kept getting drowned out). After a warning from the Speaker, Mulcair finished and between that and two follow-up questions about how that also applied to seniors and the disabled, Harper insisted that Canada has a superior job creation record, and hey, they have a disabled member in the cabinet, so there’s nothing that disabled people can’t do. Bob Rae was up next, and brought up George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and how it shouldn’t be a how-to manual for governments, and he related this to the kind of silencing of critics the government has been engaged in, whether it is with the National Round Table on Environment and the Economy, or any other number of NGOs or data-gathering organisations. Harper insisted that they were interested in administrative savings and doing away with duplication where the information these groups provide could be found elsewhere. For his final supplemental, Rae gave a nod to the Auditor General’s return to the Public Accounts committee and his assertion that the government wasn’t giving accurate numbers on the F-35s. Harper turned to his rote talking points about no contracts signed and no purchase having been made, and left it at that.

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QP: Confirming ideological cuts?

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Without a weekly edition of Monday Morning Sanctimony to set the tone, we waited anxiously to see just how the Official Opposition were going to be holding the government to account. And when the appointed hour came, Thomas Mulcair stood up to denounce the omnibus budget bill and wondered what happened to those principles that Harper once espoused about these kinds of things. John Baird, acting as Back-up PM du jour responded that they were “focused like a laser” on jobs and growth, while the NDP was busy playing procedural games. (Could we please ban “focused like a laser”? It’s not cool or clever). When Mulcair asked about the environmental and EI provisions in the bill that gave the ministers an inordinate amount of power, Baird reminded him of Peter Julian’s 11-hour filibuster on the original budget. Peggy Nash was up next to wonder about the savings that the OAS changes will deliver, but Diane Finely was ready with her talking points about future sustainability. Bob Rae got up and listed off the number of organisations being slashed in the omnibus budget – the Inspector General of CSIS, Rights and Democracy, the National Round Table on Environment and Environment, the First Nations institute, the National Council of Welfare, and so on. Baird insisted that if they didn’t make these changes then the country would become the “Welfare capital of the world,” as Ontario was under Rae’s leadership. Not only that, but NRTEE advocated instituting a carbon tax, which the Liberals obviously were in favour of, which is why they wanted NRTEE kept intact. No, really, he said that. When Rae called him on that, Baird repeated it. Remember that the original reason why NRTEE was being cut was because it was from an era when there weren’t other such research organisations, but there are apparently plenty of them out there now. Now Baird seems to be indicating that the reason they were being cut was over a policy disagreement. Uh oh. (In the scrums after QP, Baird started combining both reasons, for the record). For Rae’s final question, he asked about the growing number of bungled military procurement contracts and wondered if we weren’t headed for a “Decade of Doofus.” Baird returned to an old talking point about how the Liberals oversaw a “decade of darkness.”

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Roundup: Cutting legislative corners

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Concerns have been raised that private members’ bills are creating laws with less rigorous scrutiny, and that the government is using this to cut corners. Which is pretty much a big “well, yeah – obviously.” Private members’ bills are not drafted with the assistance of the Department of Justice, but rather by some underpaid clerks in the Library of Parliament, and the time allotted for debate is really limited – two hours per stage in the Commons, and maybe two committee meetings. And yes, the government has been taking advantage of this fact, but for a number of reasons. Sometimes that advantage is tactical – if it’s a PMB and not a government bill, it’s open for a free vote so you can get some opposition MPs onside as they (normally) won’t be whipped on it. If those free votes can sow some division, as with the long-gun registry bill in the previous parliament, so much the better. Sometimes it is genuinely an idea from the backbenches that the government likes, which I suspect the masked rioter bill was after it tapped into some good old-fashioned populist outrage after incidents like the Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver. But this having been said, I doubt that it’s often being done for the sake of less oversight and debate considering the speed with which these bills proceed, and no, not every bill or motion from a government backbencher is a backdoor attempt by the government to do something (like the Woodworth abortion motion, so stop insisting that it is. Seriously – just stop). A large part of the problem, however, stems from the fact that MPs are conflating their own roles, and they like to think of themselves as American-style lawmakers, and certain opposition parties – like the NDP in particular – like to use their private members’ business to advance party goals rather than the personal policy hobbyhorses of their MPs, like PMBs are intended to do. We need to be mindful that MPs are not there make laws, but are rather to hold those who do to account, and that has been eroded. PMBs are supposed to be limited in scope and effect because it’s not an MP’s job to make laws.  When this role becomes conflated, problems like this one start creeping into the system.

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Roundup: Failed negotiations and procedural delays

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The news that the Conservatives were going to bend ever so slightly and make some very minor amendments to their still massively problematic refugee reform bill yesterday may have buoyed NDP spirits that the government was going to agree to split up the omnibus budget bill – but to no avail. The government decided that no, even if they split it up, the NDP would simply delay seven bills instead of one, so they said no. Nathan Cullen responded by saying they were “afraid” of the debate, and that he would be consulting with his critics about their next steps, but one had to wonder why they didn’t already have that in place considering they were fresh out of a caucus meeting. (Marc Garneau, incidentally, described the NDP as having been slapped in the face by the Conservatives, and that perhaps they had been a bit naïve in believing this government would actually negotiate). So what did the NDP decide to do? Procedural delays, forcing votes in the Commons until time for government orders expired, with no actual debate taking place on said bill for the day. That’s fine, Peter Van Loan said – we’ll simply move your opposition day (scheduled for today) until next Wednesday, after the vote. The Liberals, meanwhile, criticised the NDP tactics as “too cute by half,” since they were only denying debate and not actually changing the voting date considering time allocation (though they fought over that bit of procedure). I guess we’ll see how this plays out over the course of today, because it’s going to mean a lot of procedural tactics if they want to try and delay a full day’s worth of debate, or if they’ll try some other kinds of tactics to prove their point.

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Questions about Toews’ latest prisoner “reforms”

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Earlier this morning, Public Safety minister Vic Toews announced that they were going to start making even more restrictions on inmates in federal penitentiaries, including things like charging more for room and board, limiting the kinds of work that inmates can get, and charging more for things like phone calls.

Memorial University criminologist Justin Piché, who has been studying the politics of this government’s crime agenda, took to the Twitter Machine shortly thereafter to ask a series of questions about what these changes will mean (edited for formatting): Continue reading →

Roundup: The Environment Commissioner’s warnings

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The Environment Commissioner released his report yesterday, and it’s not good news for the government. It seems that the continued delay in handing down promised regulations to industry means that there won’t be enough time for those affected industries to implement them in time for the 2020 reduction targets to be met. (You would think that industry would start looking for ways to reduce their emissions given that they know regulations will happen eventually, but I digress). He also found that the government hasn’t done any kind of long-term costing to the regulations – or lack thereof – and that they are still underfunding the efforts to clean up contaminated sites around the country. But oh, he’s relying on old data and this government takes the environment seriously, they reply. Only he’s not, and their talking points are going to start sounding pretty hollow.

Critics of the F-35 procurement, including University of Ottawa defence analyst Philippe Lagassé remain unconvinced that the F-35 is the only option for Canada, because DND hasn’t actually made a proper case.

“Pierre Poutine’s” trail has grown cold at a proxy server in Saskatchewan, as the records Elections Canada was looking for were no longer in existence. Not that this means the end of the investigation, but it just takes a different form. Meanwhile, Terry Milewski takes a look at the mounting questions surrounding Elections Canada’s “clerical errors” in the last election that are the subject of those ongoing court challenges.

A Conservative private members’ bill that would ban people from wearing masks during riots went before committee yesterday, and was denounced as being unnecessary. Colin Horgan tried to get answers on the bill from its author, and seemed to be proving the very same points about its futility.

Here is a look at yesterday’s release of the Mental Health Commission’s report.

Vic Toews is lashing out at provinces like Ontario insisting that point-of-sale data on long guns be collected – even though it’s a practice that pre-dates the long-gun registry that has immense value as an investigative tool, and the fact that it falls under provincial jurisdiction.

Thomas Mulcair is bristling at the suggestion that he’s muzzling his Quebec MPs on the tuition question, and says that they have a coherent policy of more federal government support for education. Err, except they also have their Sherbrooke Declaration that says that they shouldn’t tell provinces how to run their affairs. I’m still waiting for that particular reconciliation.

And the Manitoba Conservatives are suggesting that an NDP intern in that province also accessed Vic Toews’ divorce files, for what it’s worth.