Monday in the House, and the benches slowly filled up before QP was about to get started, but Elizabeth May was the only leader present. As well, it was Deputy Speaker Joe Comartin in the Chair, and the Wooden Mace on the table. That left it up to Megan Leslie to lead off for the NDP, wondering about Julian Fantino’s union-bashing rather than supporting veterans. Parm Gill, Fantino’s parliamentary secretary, insisted that veterans would be better off with the new system as there would be more home delivery of service. Leslie moved onto the topic of CSE using airport Wifi to track travellers, to which Rob Nicholson repeated the talking point that the CSE Commissioner found their activities to be within the law. Jack Harris repeated the same again in English, not that he got a different answer. For the Liberals, Wayne Easter carried on with the questions of CSE’s activities, but Nicholson’s answers didn’t change. When Easter brought up the Commissioner’s report in which he stated that some of the activities may have been directed at Canadians in contravention of the law, Nicholson’s answers didn’t budge from their script. Marc Garneau have one last attempt at the question in French, but Nicholson insisted that CSE was in the business of protecting Canadians, and that should have the support of the Liberals.
Tag Archives: Trade
Roundup: Rail safety recommendations released
The Transportation Safety Board released their recommendations following the Lac-Mégantic disaster, which not only includes phasing out the DOT-111 tanker cars (though there is no mandated timeline), but also choosing the safest routes, better emergency measures along those routes, and limiting train speeds along the routes that carry dangerous goods. Routes should also be inspected twice a year. The government accepts the recommendations, but because things are complicated and the systems integrated across North America, talks continue between governments.
Roundup: Trudeau’s power of positivity
Justin Trudeau says that positivity is driving his party’s increased donations, which could very well exceed the Conservatives yet again in terms of number of donors, though it remains to be seen if they will top them in dollars. Among Trudeau’s examples of “positivity” are things like not piling on James Moore’s “hungry kids” gaffe, in part because it was Christmas. For what it’s worth, anyway.
Government spending on professional services – outside consultants for the most part – was down last year, yet employment in the sector remains high.
Roundup: Politics played with political documents
The partisan frothing at the mouth over Justin Trudeau’s hope and fear comments continues to roll along, with the NDP lashing out for its use – never mind that Jack Layton’s final letter was itself a political document and that the NDP have used it to make political hay. They also point to “Angry Mulcair” flyers that were sent out in Toronto Centre, though I’m not exactly sure that those quite added up to some of the same attacks that the NDP were using in both Toronto Centre and Bourassa – that Chrystia Freeland was not from there and shouldn’t be allowed to run (despite a caucus full of Quebec MPs who had never set foot in their ridings before being elected), or that Dubourg collected a severance allowance that Mulcair himself collected when he resigned as an MNA, not to mention the flyers with Dubourg, who is black, surrounded by bling, which one American expat commenter said would be considered a racist slur in the States. Make of this what you will. Pundit’s Guide considers the remarks a strategic over-reach that damages any prospect of cooperation between the two parties anytime soon.
QP: Gerstein down the memory hole
It was caucus day, and the Liberals and Conservatives met their new MPs elected in Monday’s by-elections, not that any of them will be sworn in for a couple more weeks. Outside the Chamber, the NDP continued to froth about comments that Justin Trudeau made around hope and fear. When QP got started, Thomas Mulcair asked about the written agreement in the Duffy documents about the Prime Minister publicly declaring his fitness to be a PEI senator. Harper assured him that while some MPs and senators have a secondary residence, it was inappropriate to make some expense claims on some of them. Mulcair wondered if that inclusion in the deal was a coincidence, but Harper said that those who are appointed to the Senate are expected to live up to their expectations and Duffy did not. Mulcair wondered if this declaration was part of the “good to go,” and Harper said that residency was not the issue. Mulcair pressed about what the approval was supposed to be about, but Harper insisted that the documents are clear that it was understood that Duffy would pay his own expenses. Justin Trudeau was up next for the Liberals, and asked about Senator Gerstein’s interference in the Deloitte audit, and once again asked why Gerstein enjoyed Harper’s confidence. Harper avoided the question, and insisted that this was only about Wright and Duffy. Trudeau pressed on the issue, but Harper just repeated his non-answer.
Roundup: By-election action!
And we have by-election results! The two easy races were Provencher, where the Conservatives held, and Bourassa, where the Liberals held, but things were tighter in Toronto Centre, where Liberal Chrystia Freeland ultimately won out. Brandon-Souris, however, was the biggest surprise, where the Liberals an Conservatives were neck-and-neck for most of the night, but ultimately, it was a victory for Conservative Larry Maguire, squeaking it out at the end by a couple of hundred votes. Pundits, start spinning your victories and losses now, but one thing that does seem pretty clear is that the Liberals do seem to be competitive again nationally, as they very nearly took Brandon-Souris and they even gained considerable ground in true-blue Conservative Provencher. Also, the nomination shenanigans clearly hurt the Conservatives in Brandon-Souris, while the current cloud of scandal around Harper probably didn’t help any. Anne Kingston gave some vignettes from Toronto Centre over the morning as ballots were cast. CBC posted four storylines from the by-elections to watch going in, while Laura Payton explains why the narrative of the Middle Class has dominated the race (hint: 93 percent of Canadians identify as “middle class”).
Roundup: Taking aim before the by-elections
One almost suspects that the Conservatives are worried about the Trudeau phenomenon in the upcoming by-elections as they continue to mount increasing attacks against him, whose relevance to reality slips further and further away. Today it was Peter MacKay suggesting that Justin Trudeau told schoolchildren that recreational drug use was okay and hay for legalising pot. Um, except that’s not what happened, but rather that at a school event he was asked about it, and Trudeau said that not only should children not use pot because their brains are still developing, but that right now the government’s approach was ineffective. Well done Conservative attack machine operating under MacKay’s name. Meanwhile in Toronto Centre, the NDP put out releases that decried how awful it was that Chrystia Freeland laid off all those journalists when she was at Reuters, but conveniently omitted the line from the story where the Reuters spokesperson specifically said the layoffs were not Freeland’s decision. Added to that, the NDP somehow intimated that they would protect media jobs by rewarding job creation with tax breaks. Erm, corporate taxes are not the woe that is facing the haemorrhaging media industry, and unless they plan to shut down the Internet and start subsidizing newspaper subscriptions, I’m not sure how exactly they’ll protect media jobs.
Roundup: Harper’s need for ambiguity
At a business school event, the Prime Minister said that they don’t want foreign takeover rules that are too clear because the government wants room to manoeuvre in the event that some takeover bids aren’t good for the country and need to be blocked. He also said that the free trade deals that they are negotiating with China, India and South Korea aren’t going to be the same as the EU trade deal just agreed to, as they won’t be of the same depth or comprehensiveness.
Roundup: Harper’s restive senators
There is unrest in the Conservative Senate caucus, as they feel increasingly sandbagged and abandoned by their own party in the wake of the spending scandals of those four embattled Senators, three of which are Harper’s appointees. And while they may feel like there should at least be some mention to the Senate made in the Throne Speech – such a promise for new accountability measures or promises for reform measures in line with what the Supreme Court rules after their reference case – it’s unlikely to happen since the government has deliberately put distance between itself and the Senate as a whole. It’s not the wisest move ever made either, considering that their decision to keep the Leader of the Government in the Senate out of cabinet will come back to haunt them the moment they want to introduce a government bill in the Senate, as they are wont to do, only to find that there is no minister to shepherd it through. Oops. But it doesn’t help that Conservative senators are hearing tales about how when Claude Carignan was sworn into the Privy Council as part of his new job as Senate leader, that Harper simply told him “Good luck with that.” And Harper may soon find that there could be nothing more dangerous to his own government and agenda than a Senate caucus who that is tired of being pushed around and ignored, and indeed being dumped upon by their own party and the public at large, and they may decide to start flexing their muscles, to show that they do have a job to do – as with the “union transparency” bill that they gutted and sent back to the Commons.
Roundup: Evidence for Ambrose
On Power & Politics on Friday, Rona Ambrose asserted that there was “no evidence” that heroin-based therapy is effective for those heroin addicts for whom other treatments have proven ineffective. She repeated this several times. She was wrong, and Aaron Wherry points out why.
Thomas Mulcair went out of his way to repeat that he would not raise personal income taxes on the wealthy as part of his next campaign, despite that being one of the things that his star candidate, Linda McQuaig, continues to espouse. Because apparently people don’t pay for corporate tax increases either. Mulcair is also planning to unveil a new pan-Canadian energy policy sometime later in the fall.