Tag Archives: Trade

Roundup: The inaugural NSICOP report

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The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians tabled their redacted report on the prime minister’s India trip yesterday, and, well, there were a number of redactions. But what wasn’t redacted did paint a picture of an RCMP that bungled security arrangements, and that didn’t have good lines of communication with the prime minister’s security detail, and where they left a voicemail for someone who was on vacation, while someone else in Ottawa decided to not bother trying to reach out until the following day because it was the end of their shift. So yeah, there were a “few issues” that the RCMP fell down on. And because of the redactions (done by security agencies and not PMO, for reasons related to national security or because revelations could be injurious to our international relations), we don’t have any idea if the former national security advisor’s warnings about “rogue elements” of the Indian government were involved was true or not.

https://twitter.com/SkinnerLyle/status/1069736311785951234

The CBC, meanwhile, got documents under Access to Information to show what kind of gong show was touched off with the communications side of things as the government tried to manage the fallout of the revelations of Atwal’s appearance on the trip (and in many senses, it wasn’t until the prime minister gave a very self-deprecating speech on the trip at the Press Gallery Dinner that the narratives started to die down). Because remember, this is a government that can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag.

In order to get some national security expert reaction, here’s Stephanie Carvin and Craig Forcese:

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1069747574435995648

https://twitter.com/cforcese/status/1069718997937995776

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1069708639479451649

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1069708795134308362

It should also be pointed out that the opposition parties are trying to make some hay over the redactions, and are intimating that they’re the product of PMO for partisan reasons. It’s not supposed to work that way, but hey, why deal in facts when you can proffer conspiracy theories, or in Andrew Scheer’s case, shitposts on Twitter?

https://twitter.com/RobynUrback/status/1069786954756173825

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QP: Taking allegations outside

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While the PM took a personal day after his return from the G20, Andrew Scheer was off in Winnipeg to talk guns and gangs. Pierre Poilievre led off concerned about the PM’s supposed “celebrity lifestyle” that referred to the pre-planned tweet around funds for women and girls’ education, before he suddenly pivoted to Bill C-69, demanding it be scrapped. Amarjeet Sohi reminded him that the system the Conservatives put into place that wasn’t working, so they were working to get a one project-one-review process. Poilievre railed that the PM was at the G20 talking about how there were negative consequences when male construction workers went to rural communities,  before returning to the demand to scrap C-69. Sohi reiterate his response, and when Poilievre went for another, more boisterous round of the same, he got much the same answer. Alain Rayes took over to ask about the report in the National Post about a potential investigation on a land deal that might involve Navdeep Bains and Raj Grewal, to which Bains told him the allegations were false and invited him to repeat them outside of the Chamber. Rayes tried to insist on Liberal connections to the situation, to which Bardish Chagger read a statement that functionally repeated Bains’ response. Guy Caron was up next for the NDP, railing about high-protein milk under Supply Management, to which Lawrence MacAulay deployed his usual lines about defending the system. Caron then turned to the Oshawa closure and demanded action by the government, to which Bains read that the sector was strong, that they had the auto innovation fund if GM wanted to use it. Tracey Ramsey demanded action on Oshawa, to which Bains reiterated his previous response. Ramsey then railed that steel and aluminium tariffs were still in place, to which Mélanie Joly read that the NDP celebrated the deal behind closed doors.

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Roundup: Notley mandates a cut

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Alberta premier Rachel Notley decided that she will mandate an 8.7 percent production cut, starting on January 1st, in the hopes that it will help to finally drive the price of oil back up, seeing as this is a supply and demand problem and there is too much supply in the system. But as far as “immediate action” goes, waiting another three weeks doesn’t seem very immediate (though I’m not sure what is involved in scaling back production), and it’s not a solution that makes everyone in the market happy given that some players weren’t taking as big of a hit by the large price differential.

Reaction has been swift, and while Jason Kenney says he supports it, he and Andrew Scheer are quick to blame the federal government for the situation. Natural resources minister Amarjeet Sohi responded with a thread that basically said that they inherited most of these problems – and he’s right about that – but he laid out the supports they’ve given the industry. I’m not sure that in the race to pin blame that anyone is looking at the history of the industry – there was no push to sell oil to overseas markets before recently because America was always seen as an easy import market with an insatiable appetite, because nobody saw the shale revolution coming. That’s no one government’s fault, and it’s difficult to turn an industry around in a mere couple of years. And Kenney and Scheer keep insisting that if Trudeau hadn’t killed Northern Gateway or Energy East, things would be just fine – except of course that it’s just as likely that Gateway would still be tied up in interminable court injunctions because it was the more fraught project to begin with, and Energy East wasn’t economically viable once Keystone XL was back in the picture, but why spoil a narrative with facts?

Meanwhile, New Brunswick’s new premier is hoping to revive Energy East, under the belief that it was just regulatory problems that killed it rather than the economics, particularly because the proponent didn’t have enough supply contracts to fill both it and Keystone XL. Also, the proponents who think this will displace foreign oil know that unless they shell out to retool the existing refineries, it won’t actually serve their markets, and that they would also be demanding that Alberta swallow a $10/barrel discount, right?

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Roundup: Grewal gives some answers

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Just when the drip-drip-drip of new information and the grasping of straws around the Raj Grewal drama was reaching its expiration date, it all blew up anew last night on two fronts. One was the report that the RCMP had been asked to investigate a Brampton infrastructure project where questions are being raised about a land deal and that information had been passed along to both Grewal and Navdeep Bains (and in QP yesterday, Bardish Chagger called the reports false and warned that if allegations were repeated out of the House, they would be met by Bains’ lawyer); the other was that Grewal released an eleven-minute video, releasing it both to the Globe and Mail and to his Facebook page.

In the video, Grewal methodically went through not only his gambling habits, but also the loans (all of which were done by “transparently” cheque and since repaid), and then went through all of the allegations around property ownership, loans, his wife’s finances, the aforementioned Brampton infrastructure project, and even the questions he was asking in the finance committee study on money laundering and terrorist financing. A lot of the information puts to rest speculation and shows how grasping at disparate information and forming a sinister narrative can be when there are fairly simple explanations – explanations that Grewal probably should have been making over the past week as this was coming out, and answering media questions when they called (though one probably has a bit of sympathy for the feeling overwhelmed by it all). What is news out of this, however, is that Grewal said that while he’s leaving the Liberal caucus and taking a leave of absence for his treatment, his announced intention to resign may have been premature, and he’s going to be considering it over the next few weeks – but would have a definitive answer before the House resumes in January. (So maybe Jagmeet Singh made the right call after all in not immediately jumping back to Brampton in anticipation of that seat opening up). I’m not sure this will stop the hyterial questions – particularly the risible notion that he was some kind of national security threat – but it does seem like a lot more questions are now answered than not.

Meanwhile, further to yesterday’s discussion about why MPs shouldn’t be subject to the same kinds of background checks as ministers, here is some more discussion about why it’s a Very Bad Idea.

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1068485192149389312

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1068486410464686080

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1068489389062254592

https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1068491118122160128

https://twitter.com/cforcese/status/1068480047793618944

https://twitter.com/cforcese/status/1068481863348449283

https://twitter.com/cforcese/status/1068483537110614016

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Roundup: Ginning up the Grewal resignation

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As the stories on Raj Grewal’s gambling debts and intended resignation continue to trickle through, a number of them have taken on a vaguely conspiratorial tone. A lot of facts that shouldn’t be out of the ordinary are treated as suspicious for absolutely no reason at all. For example, people keep wondering why he was reassigned from the finance committee in September “with no warning.” Gee, what else happened in September that would have affected committee memberships? Could it have been the fact that the parliamentary secretaries all got shuffled, so committee assignments need to be rejigged? Maybe? And whoa, he asked questions on catching money launderers to law officials and FINTRAC agents during a study on – wait for it – “Confronting Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing: Moving Canada Forward.” Such an amazing coincidence that is totally suspicious. And the latest “revelation” is that Senator Jean-Guy Dagenais says that a retired Mountie told him a year ago that he heard Raj Grewal was under investigation, and he therefore thinks PMO should have known then. Erm, except that neither the OPP nor the RCMP tell the PMO what they’re investigating because they operate at arm’s length, and more to the fact, Grewal was a backbench MP, which I cannot stress enough.

To that end, Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column looks at the issue of parties policing MPs’ off-hours, considering the Clement and Grewal situations, while Susan Delacourt cites those same two cases, and wonders if we need to do a better job of screening backbenchers. And I’m pretty dubious because backbenchers are not ministers. They don’t have access to secret materials (Clement, I remind you, is a former minister and thus a member of the Privy Council, and his activities on NSICOP are outside of the usual activities of a backbencher), nor are they public office holders. Their job is to hold government to account – they are not part of the government, and it doesn’t matter what committees they’re on. Treating them as the same thing is not only a gross overreach, but frankly it will give MPs a wrongheaded sense of their place in the system, which is already suffering because of civic illiteracy.

Are Grewal’s debts concerning? Yup. Is it a crisis that he was mentioned in passing as part of an investigation into other suspicious characters? Maybe, but we don’t know enough to say whether it is or not, and the baseless speculation and ginned up allegations aren’t helping. Should Trudeau and the PMO have been more candid from the start about the reasons Grewal was resigning? Probably, and given this government’s inability to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, their approach once again blew up in their faces. But treating this affair with clickbait headlines and spinning random facts out of context in order to make them seem sinister is bad reporting.

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QP: Grewal and false border numbers

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While Justin Trudeau was off to Argentina for the G20, Andrew Scheer was elsewhr, as was Guy Caron, more unusually. Mark Strahl led off, worrying about new revelations about investigations that Raj Grewal may have been swept up into, to which Bardish Chagger responded that last week he made them aware of his serious challenges and treatment, and they hoped he got the help he needed. Strahl didn’t believe her, but Chagger reiterated the response. Strahl got even more incredulous, but Chagger’s response varied only by saying the RCMP operates independently. Luc Berthold tried again in French, and got the same answer in French, and then they went yet another round of the same. Ruth Ellen Brosseau led for the NDP, demanding that the government take action. Patty Hajdu said that it was troubling, but this was a global decision affecting plants in the US and elsewhere, so they were going to help workers where they could. Brosseau then demanded the government not sign the New NAFTA until an oversight clause around milk classes was removed, to which Lawrence MacAulay deployed his well-worn points about defending Supply Management. Tracey Ramsey was worried that we didn’t know what was in the deal and demanded that it not be signed, to which Mélanie Joly stood up to assure her it was a good deal for Canada. Brian Masse, whose rant about the auto sector didn’t reach the question before he got cut off, and Hajdu recited some talking points about their support for the industry through the auto innovation fund.

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Roundup: Island of Unintended Consequences

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Over at Maclean’s, David Moscrop profiled the “new” Senate, and in it was probably the best description of the institution in its present state – the “Island of Unintended Consequences,” as penned by Greg MacEachern of Proof Strategies. And that’s very much true about the state of the Chamber, but unsurprisingly, almost none of those unintended consequences were explored. The bulk of the piece was devoted to the notion that we don’t know how senators will vote anymore and they say they don’t want to defeat bills but who knows *handwavey motion*.

The problem is that it’s not just the uncertainty over how senators will vote – it’s the fact that the people being put in charge in that Chamber don’t really know what they’re doing. The Order Paper is becoming hopelessly behind with bills piling up, and because nobody wants to negotiate and do any of the horse-trading that gets bills passed, it’s getting worse. This has serious implications for the government trying to get their agenda through, but too many senators are busy congratulating themselves on the fact that they’re not whipped that they fail to see the a) that horse-trading is not partisan but rather how things get done; and b) that the pile-up of legislation is going to become a serious problem unless they get their acts together and start getting bills through the system. If you want an unintended consequence, that’s certainly a huge one, and one that Senator Peter Harder seems willing to let happen so that he can get his way with the creation of a “business committee,” which will just fob yet more responsibility off of his desk and onto another small cliques’ plate (but he needs his $1.5 million budget!) and won’t do any of the things he promises when it comes to avoiding the end-of-session legislative pile-up. The fact that the Independents now make up the majority of the chamber, most of them too new to know what they’re doing (and lacking proper mentorship), the Order Paper crisis is happening and they don’t understand that it’s happening. This is a problem, and we need more senators to wake up to it.

Meanwhile, Senator Paula Simons talks about her live-tweeting in the Chamber as a way of de-mystifying its work, thanks to her career as a journalist, and I for one applaud her for it (though I will offer her corrections as she goes along).

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Roundup: A noble bill with problems below the surface

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It’s not often that I’ll go out of my way to comment on poor reporting (as opposed to columns), but in this particular case, I’m going to make an exception. The story is the fact that Rona Ambrose’s bill on mandatory sexual assault training for judges has been stalled in the Senate. Ambrose appeared on Power & Politics to express her shock and dismay, but there was very little research done in terms of the concerns that have been raised with the bill to date, and the fact that its passage through the House of Commons was problematic in and of itself (most especially the fact that it was referred to the Status of Women committee instead of the Justice Committee in order to ensure swift passage, with a committee that was sympathetic and didn’t have the expertise on the matter). The written story on the CBC website was simply a recap of Ambrose’s interview with no comment from anyone else, or recounting any of the concerns or pushback from the debates on the bill.

So I decided to take twenty minutes and skim over the Second Reading debates in the Senate on the bill, and lo, there are some pretty important concerns being raised. Senator Jaffer, who is a lawyer who has done judicial training, pointed to the fact that the bill mandating written rulings in all sexual assault cases not only takes away from the fact that there are procedures for clear oral rulings that can be appealed, but that it will cause other delays. The training also disadvantages rural lawyers, and can tip the hand of a lawyer in a firm that they are applying to be a judge.

Senator Joyal, a formidable constitutional lawyer who had a career fighting for minority rights (and who helped write the Charter of Rights and Freedoms) expressed some serious concerns about the powers given to a federal commissioner to determine what qualifies for training. He raised the very real point that the bill stipulates that training must be done by sexual assault survivors and organisations that support them, which automatically biases the training and the presumption of innocence (and others have raised the point that these trainers are often called as expert witnesses, which creates further biases). Joyal also noted the constitutional implications of the bill given that judicial independence includes the ability to maintain control over their education.

Senator Pratte, while not a lawyer, raised the salient logistical issue that for every 500 judicial applicants, maybe 50 make it through, meaning that if everyone needs training before they can be appointed, it delays assessment of applicants and has the potential to create problems with the quality if the training. He also raised the notion that if sexual assault survivors are needed for this training, how long will it be before other victims’ groups demand to be heard for other judicial training?

Senator Fraser, whose objections were briefly noted in the CBC piece, also made points about the inappropriateness of the bill mandating that reports on the number of judges who have taken the training be tabled in Parliament because judges report to Chief Justices in their regions, not to the minister. As well, because the majority of these cases are actually heard in provincial courts, this could qualify as interference in provincial jurisdiction.

The story also went onto state that Senator Joyal, who chairs the Legal and Constitutional Affairs committee, wouldn’t give a date for when the bill will be studied, but it didn’t mention that government bills always take precedence at committee, and as you can see from the committee’s schedule, they have a pretty full slate for the coming weeks, possibly months.

Frankly, I’m more than a little dismayed at the lazy reporting on this bill. While it may look like a slam-dunk issue on the surface, there’s a lot beneath the surface that’s not being reported on, which is actually fairly irresponsible. Would that political reporters at the CBC take twenty minutes to do some actual research on their stories than simply transcribe an interview.

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QP: Fighting for Oshawa

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While Justin Trudeau was in town but meeting with the head of Unifor, Andrew Scheer decided to show up for the first time in almost two weeks. Scheer led off, mini-lectern on desk, and he read that he met with workers at the GM plant in Oshawa earlier that morning, before he concern trolled around “massive deficits,” before wondering if the support for workers was factored into the fall economic update (obviously it wouldn’t have been), or if it meant higher deficits. Navdeep Bains responded by saying that they stand up for workers, and touted their innovation fund. Scheer demanded they cancel the carbon tax to protect jobs, to which Bains praised the business environment and the auto sector in Canada. Scheer demanded a second time, and Bains noted new investment in the sector. Gérard Deltell took over to reiterate the demand in French, to which Bains read his bland assurances in French. Deltell listed the various other job losses in other sectors, to which Bains retorted in English about the good economic news that countered those individual challenges. Guy Caron was up next for the NDP, and he worried about the Oshawa news, and got the usual reply from Bains. When Caron demanded that GM repay any funds that the government provided them, Bains assured him that all options were being explored to protect workers. Peter Julian was up next to reiterate the question in English, and Bains took exception to his characterisation of events before listing the economic figures. Julian insisted that the fall economic update was a giveaway to corporations, but Bains again pushed back against the rhetoric and proclaimed about their plans to invest created growth.

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Roundup: Refusing to learn their lessons

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A former PQ minister wants to run for leadership of the Bloc, and I just cannot. Can. Not. The challenger this time is Yves-François Blanchet, who served in Pauline Marois’ short-lived Cabinet, and has since taken on a political pundit career since being defeated in 2014. He apparently met with the caucus yesterday, and the majority of them – including their past and current interim leaders – all seem to like him, but I keep having to circle back to this simple question: did you learn nothing from your last disastrous leader?

I can’t emphasise this enough. Since their demise in 2011, the Bloc have had a succession of seatless leaders, including Mario Beaulieu (who now has a seat, incidentally, and is the current interim leader), and while he stepped aside so that Gilles Duceppe could return (unsuccessfully), they keep going for leaders who aren’t in caucus, and time after time, it goes poorly for them. Every single time, I have to wonder why they don’t simply do as our system was built to do, and select a member from caucus. Constantly bringing in an outsider does nothing for their profile (ask Jagmeet Singh how that’s going), and their leaders keep being divorced from the realities of parliament. And time and again, they keep choosing another outsider. Why do you keep doing this to yourselves? Why do you refuse to learn the lessons that experience has to teach you?

There is one current MP who is considering a run, Michel Boudrias, and if the Bloc was smart, they would choose him by virtue of the fact that he’s in the caucus, he’s in the Commons, and he knows how Parliament works. Of course, if they interested in ensuring he’s accountable (especially given just how big of a gong show their last leader was), then it would be the caucus that selects him so that the caucus can then fire him if he becomes a problem (again, if history is anything to go by). But that would take some actual political courage by the party, and given their apparent reluctance to learn the lessons from their mistakes, that may be too much to ask for.

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