Stephen, Why Do You Treat Our Veterans Like Political Pawns?

How do you put out a fire?

Simple question, first of all it depends on how big the fire is.  If it is a small fire, like a candle, it’s pretty simple.  You can blow it out, some like to dampen their fingertips and pinch the flame out, or the more elegant might use a candle snuffer.  Basically you can douse it with water (on your fingertips) or starve it for fuel (with the snuffer).

If it’s a larger fire, like a campfire you can toss a bucket of water on it, starve it for fuel and let it burn out on its own.

What if it’s a big fire?  Like a PMO/Senate Scandal?

Well Steve and Co. have tried just about everything you can think of.  They tried to let it burn itself out, no luck.  They threw water on it and tossed people under the bus to no avail.

They even sent their minions with torches at Justin Trudeau, the only problem is that Canadians like Justin Trudeau.  He may not be everyone’s choice for PM, but lots of us grew up with him.  He’s a nice guy.

And the fire the Harperistas started at JT’s feet just drew more people to him to sit by the fire.  Like going camping or enjoying a bonfire.  It just wasn’t working.

So the Harper folk looked for a new place to set a fire.  I mean intentionally.

So they set their torches toward recently retired Lieutenant General Andrew Leslie.  And they got a fire started.

A lot of people are upset that the General’s move to a new home not far from his existing home ran to $72,000.00 or so. 

CTV reported this, Minister Rob Nicholson is telling the DND to look into this.  But the bottom line is that it appears that the only thing that General Leslie did wrong was to join the wrong political party.

He joined the Liberal Party of Canada.

You see, because the Military requires members of the Forces to relocate, there is a provision that helps to take care of the move.  A benefit of serving for 20 or more years in the Military is that the government pays for one last move.  It could be across town or across the country, but the government has a third party company that takes care of packing, storing, and moving the retirees’ property to the new location.  The Integrated Relocation Plan (IRP) also takes care of some of the expenses in selling the old home and buying the new one.  In General Leslie’s case, this was $72,000.00.

General Leslie did not hire anyone, he didn’t do anything other than what a 20+ year veteran would do.  He submitted his information for the move.  The third party took care of the rest.

The IRP has been on the books for decades.  As a matter of fact, the Auditor General submitted a report on the IRP in November 2006 to the Harper government that pointed out a number of problems with the IRP.  The government did nothing about it.  They even repeated problems that the AG pointed out in 2006.

When General Leslie moved in 2011, no alarms went off, no one at the Treasury Board Secretariat (Tony Clement’s department) waved any flags and no one in Rob Nicholson’s National Defence Department raised any issues either.

Actually, the Harper Party was so enamoured with General Leslie that they offered him a job, even hinting that he should run for them in the next election.  No they didn’t get mad at him until after he had signed on to be an advisor to the Liberal Party on International Affairs.

Go figure.

The Harper Party should take care here.  They have already offended the Veterans and the Military with their treatment of our Warriors.  They are adding fuel to that fire by starting up with General Leslie.

You see the danger is that when you start fires, they can become unpredictable… especially when they are big ones. 

It just depends on which way the wind blows. 

Laters BC

Maybe Stever should be happy we don’t live in an emerging Democracy like Egypt… It’s not good to pee on the military there, is it Steve?

Elizabeth May, Fair Elections, and the Bear (Oh, My)

'Mr. Speaker, the crisis in Canadian democracy is not that Canadians are voting more than once but that they are voting less than once. And this bill will... increase cynicism.' Elizabeth May, February 10th in the House of Commons Debate on Bill C-23, the Fair Elections Act

After the last few Federal Elections, I was involved in more than a few conversations about elections and how to increase voter turnout.  We talked about various ideas that we had come across that people thought would increase voter turnout.

These ideas ranged from penalizing people who did not vote, such as they do in Australia to rewarding people who do vote with tax breaks or otherwise.  We discussed the reasons that people don’t vote and tried to think of ways that people could be encouraged to vote.

Bill C-23 does nothing to encourage voting and it does nothing to make voting easier.  It does the contrary.  The Harper Party defenders of this bill keep saying that there are 39 pieces of information that can be used to allow you to vote.  What they don’t tell you is that if you are living with someone else, such as your parents, or if you are elderly, or if you are a student living in a dormitory, you may not have access to most of these pieces of information.

But as Elizabeth May points out, the real issue is that not enough people are making the effort to vote.

But how do you counter people who think their vote doesn’t matter?  It does matter, there are elections decided by a small number of votes every election.

It is your right and it should be your duty to vote in any election that you are allowed to vote in.  There are people fighting and dying for the privilege of voting all over the world.  But that doesn’t mean anything to some people.

But what is hard to defend is when an elected Member of the House of Commons cannot rise to speak to this bill simply because they are a Member of the House.  Because of the imposition of time allocation, only the three main parties were allowed to speak to the bill.  The only reason that Elizabeth May, MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands, Leader of the Green Party (a recognized federal political party) was able to speak was that the Liberal Party gave some of their allotted time to Ms. May.

How do you encourage people to vote when the people that they elect are not allowed to speak in the House of Commons?

You can’t. 

And that is a huge part of the problem.  Even if you do vote, your Member of Parliament will likely not be able to represent your interests anyway.  They vote the Party Line and unless they are selected to be a Minister or a Critic in the House, they don’t get much of a chance to say anything at all.  When the government decides to impose “Time Allocation” which is a polite way of saying “Closure” on a bill, your MP gets shoved even further back into the corner… even if they are the Leader of the Green Party.

This is why I keep hammering at the fact that “Democracy” is not limited to the day we cast our ballots, nor is it limited to the 30 days prior to that.

Democracy is the whole ball of wax.  Voting is part of it.  Debate and discourse is part of it.  The Media should be part of it, that is if the government will answer their questions.  And the House of Commons is supposed to be part of it too.

Every Member who wishes to speak in debate on a bill must have the right to speak, even if they are not the Official Critic or Minister or Party Leader. 

They are hired to be our voices in the House of Commons.  Any steps to stop them from speaking are decidedly UNdemocratic.  Time Allocation and Closure do have their place in the House of Commons, but only if it is a dire situation where we need to have legislation passed quickly.  Budget bills and C-23 don’t fall into this category.

If we want people to vote, maybe we should allow our Members to speak, all of them, to any bill that affects their constituents.  If people see this, they might be more inclined to pick one, instead of letting people like me vote for them.

Elizabeth May gets this.  It’s too bad the Harper Party does not.

*Random Thought*

When news came out that the Liberals had given some of their valuable time to Elizabeth May to speak on Bill C-23, some in the media were surprised.  I wasn’t.  Elizabeth May is a very smart person and a very effective speaker.  She doesn’t smother us or the House with bafflegab, the favourite of some in the House.  She speaks clearly to the issue in ways that most of us can understand, unless we wear Blue Sweater Vests I guess.

*Random Thought 2*

While Ms. May and I may not see eye to eye in all things, we are on the same page when it comes to Democracy.  Of all the people who sit on the Hill, she is one of the few that I wouldn’t mind having coffee with.

That’s meant to be a compliment, I hope you take it that way Ms. May.

BC

Election Reform, The Railroad Job.

I had a bit of a funny pass through my Facebook News Feed today. 

It was a cartoon of a bunch of people in a room, and the caption was something like… Quick, Canadians are all watching the Olympics, let’s talk about election reform.

I snickered not just because it was funny, and I thought it was funny, but because it was true.  The sad part is the joke is being played on us.

I have some qualms about some of the items in the 247 page bill that Pierre Poilievre dropped on the House just the other day, but there is some good in there as well.  My biggest issue is in the way this bill was presented and the “debate” that has followed it in the House of Commons.

Some of the members in the House have said that traditionally, a bill of this importance would have been discussed by all the Parties in meetings or committees and that each Party would have the opportunity to have their input and hear the reasoning behind what the government was proposing be in there.  There would probably have been invitations to people involved like the Head of Elections Canada and others who are knowledgeable about our electoral system.  None of this happened.

Poilievre says that he had a meeting with Marc Mayrand, the Head of Elections Canada to which Mr. Mayrand and Elections Canada said never happened.  Apparently they did meet, but that was some time ago and it sounds like that meeting was not considered a discussion of what should be in this bill, according to Mr. Mayrand, but rather a more general discussion about how elections should be run and possible changes.

Think about it.

The bill was introduced by Poilievre on February 5^th at 3:30 pm and the ensuing debate lasted until about 5:30 pm.

By 1:10 pm On February 6^th, the very next day, Peter Van Loan rose to move that Time Allocation be applied to the bill and by 6:15 pm on the 10^th, the bill passed Second Reading and went to committee.  The government wants the bill back in the House by March 1^st.

It doesn’t seem very Democratic to me.

The Harper Party is telling us that Democracy is only 30 days long and happens every 4 years or so during the election period.  They have it wrong.

The vote is not Democracy. 

The Election is not Democracy.

The campaign is not Democracy.

These are all parts of it, but no one thing is Democracy.

The Harper Party side seems to believe that once the votes are counted, that the winning side no longer has any responsibility to act Democratically.  What they don’t get is that the people that we elected are our representatives and it is their duty to ask questions that are pertinent on our behalf.  The shortened timeframe made it almost impossible for any of us to digest what is in the bill and to let our Parliamentarians know our feelings and to have our input considered in the House.  And heaven forbid that your MP is a Harper Party member, unless you side with him or her all you’ll get is lip service if you’re that lucky.

The way our Democracy is supposed to work is that a Prime Minister selects people who will make up his Cabinet.  That group is called “the government”.  Everyone else is a Private Member.  The government’s job is to produce legislation and the Members debate the bills.  They are supposed to hold the government accountable.

It is not supposed to be Blue Team, Orange Team, Red Team, and so on.  It is supposed to be People making the government prove its case that a bill is a good one.

I almost laughed when I scanned the “debate” on the Election Reform bill and saw none other than Ted Opitz stand up to laud the actions of the government to end vouching.  You may remember Ted took his case to the Supreme Court to avoid losing his seat after a court threw out a number of votes, enough votes to call the outcome of the election into question… not because there were “vouched for” votes but because the paperwork wasn’t properly filled out. 

Didn’t we send Ted to the Ukraine to oversee the elections there too? *sigh*

This isn’t a case of passing legislation.  It’s a Blessed railroad job.

We don’t know who thought up these proposed changes other than Poilievre brought it to the House.  Most of us have no inkling of what these changes really mean, and that includes the people sitting in the House voting on it.

Most of us know that when things get rushed they tend to get messed up.  That goes for baking a cake or bringing in laws. 

Poilievre had 18 months to talk with the Opposition, with elections experts, with everyday people… but he chose not to.  Instead he has chosen to ram who knows who’s ideas of what the reforms should be through the House using the same tools they foist on us every time (it seems) they want something passed.

If I make it sound like this is pretty much a done deal, I think it is.  We’ve seen in the past when the Harper Party has rushed bills through the House.  When they get to Committee any attempts at amendments are shot down without any real debate.  That and the enormous amount of time these Committees spend in camera… behind closed doors.

Yes we’ve seen this, even to the point where the Harper Party realized that a proposed amendment that they killed was necessary and order the Senate to amend the bill for them.  Rush jobs.

I’m reminded of a sign I saw in a computer shop.  “You can have it fast.  You can have it cheap.  You can have it right.  Choose any Two.”

Looks like the cutbacks have hit this sign too.  The only thing we’re going to get is fast.  Until the lawyers get hold of it, and it certainly won’t be cheap.

And guess who gets to pay the tab.

Think about it. BC

Dammit Justin, Quit Reading My Mind

With all the tom foolery going on in Ottawa lately, my pet project of Senate Reform kept getting pushed back.  One of the cornerstones of my Senate changes was to distance the Senate from the House of Commons.  I really don’t care if Senators align themselves with one party or another, I just don’t want them taking their marching orders from the Leader… or worse yet, the PMO.

When the PMO/Senate Scandal was in full swing and we were privy to the email barrage that was flying around the PMO, we saw the PMO staffers bemoaning the fact that the Senators weren’t using the talking points that these enlightened, unelected, unaccountable PMO staffers were sending them.

We saw the smack down they laid on Marge LeBreton for having the temerity to actually THINK!

Marge was slapped around, chastised, and finally gave up her spot as the Government Leader in the Senate for her troubles.  Ol’ Steve Harper don’t go for them women folk thinkin’ for themselves I guess… or maybe it’s just Senators.

But then again, she wasn’t his puppet… just a loyal follower.

You know, back in the day Young Steve Harper railed against party politics in the Senate.  He railed against political bagmen, failed candidates, and ex-journalists being appointed by the Prime Minister.

Remember that guy?  He’s the one that said he would not appoint any unelected Senator to the Red Chamber.  He pointed to Alberta as the way and told the other provinces to start electing Senators right away.

And the provinces did… nothing.  They yawned and went back to doing Provincial things.

So Ol’ Steve did the unthinkable.  He abandoned his Reform root and appointed a few Senators.

Now the Harper Echo Boxes will tell you that he had to.  The Liberal dominated Senate was blocking bills and being mean and petty to good Ol’ Steve.  Ummm, nope.  They didn’t block a thing.

So anyhow, Ol’ Steve appointed a few failed candidates and it felt so darn good he appointed a few more.  It felt so wonderful that he let Senators quit to run in elections and lose so that he could appoint them again.   

By now Ol’ Steve has appointed a number of failed candidates, political bagman Irv Gerstein, some party hacks (well at least one that was transferred from the PMO) and a couple of ex-journalists.  The last ones worked out so darn well, didn’t they Steve?

Basically he did the same darn thing he was wailing and moaning and gnashing his teeth over just a few years ago.  Go figure.

So along comes Young Justin, fresh faced with new ideas and about the same age as Young Steve was when he took the helm of the Reform Party.

Young Justin calls his Liberal Senators in for a meeting (I’ll be He was on time) and tells the Senators “You guys are swell, but you can’t be in the caucus anymore.”

And Old Bear Cat looks up from the red dot named Fantino he was chasing and yells “Crud!  I just got scooped!”

Young Justin has started his own Senate Reform while Ol’ Steve dithers and spends our tax dollars on Supreme Court cases to figure out what to do and Tom Mulcair just goes on with his pipedream of quietly shutting down the Senate.

Sorry Tom, it can’t be done without opening up the Constitution.  You need a joint session to have a Throne Speech and you cannot enact a law, any law, without the Senate approval.  It’s in there.

Now keep in mind that the ideas that I am floating are not an end product or a final answer, just some ideas to start the ball rolling.

The first item on my list was to distance the Senate from the House of Commons.  The Senate is supposed to be a “Chamber of Sober Second Thought” but in reality and Harperily it has become a true rubber stamp that Young Steve railed against so mightily back in the day.  You can reference the PMO approved talking points that those darn Senators on the Harper side didn’t bother to follow, but they voted as a bloc in favour of anything Harper sent up… except for that one thing… and Ol’ Steve just about blew a gasket over that… remember?

So I thought that it would be a good idea to distance the Senate from the House but I was willing to allow for a token Senator to sit in the caucus to allow for communications between the two groups.  It would happen anyway. 

So I was going to allow for the Parties to exist in the Senate, but not to allow one to dictate to the other. 

The other reason that I would allow for a token Senator to join the caucus is that in the past, governments have had Senators sitting in the Cabinet.  We have an unwritten rule that all regions of the country should be represented in Cabinet and if no viable candidate was available for a given region, a Senator would be selected instead.

Young Justin out foxed me there, I guess.

Anyway, about the regions (My second point).  When the Senate was first brought into being, there was a great deal of concern that the Anglo majority would overwhelm the Franco minority.  The idea of balanced representation in the Senate was to try and keep one part of Canada from dominating the others.  The final decision was to balance the Senate by using the regions to determine representation.  The Maritimes, Quebec, and Ontario would each have the same number of Senators so that a more populous province, which would have the lion’s share of the seats in the House would be counter balanced in the Senate.

The idea of the regions being used to offset the power of more populous areas intrigues me. 

In Ontario, we have a situation where a party can gain a majority in the Provincial Legislature by winning elections in a rather small area.  Toronto and the surrounding area (the GTA) now have almost 50% of the seats for Ontario.  That’s an awful lot of voting power in a fairly small area.  Put it this way, Toronto and GTA have more seats in Ottawa that most of the provinces.  (This is why non-GTA Ontarians wince every time someone mentions using tax dollars to help pay for TO’s subways.  We help pay for it, but we’ll probably never got to ride it.)

Quebec however is an oddity in the Senate.  In Quebec, a number of the Senate Seats represent regions of the province.  The power in the Senate is balanced in Quebec, unlike the other provinces where the bulk of the Senators are more likely to have come from the major metropolitan areas.

My thought is that each of the provinces should be divided into regions that are roughly the same size.  Now some might complain about his type of thing not being fair to the big cities, and they are right… But it is fair to the more rural areas that do not get the same type of representation in the House that the big cities do.

Ontario isn’t special in this respect, each province has the same issue.  The big cities get bigger and they gain more seats in the House.  My thinking is that this could create non-political caucuses in the Senate.  Senators in primarily rural ridings may have more to discuss with their counterparts in other provinces on small town or agricultural issues and big city issues would be more for those coming from the big cities.  Take for an example a discussion of mass transit policies in urban areas.  The Senator from Sudbury may not have much to add to the discussion but the Senators from Toronto and Calgary and Vancouver would have more of an interest.

It’s worth thinking about isn’t it?

This brings us to my third thought.  How do we select Senators?

I know a lot of people think that elections are the way to go.  I’m not a fan but I’ll hear the argument.

As it stands right now, the Senate Elections in Alberta are something of a joke.  Sorry Albertans, but that’s how I see it.  You vote on a slate of candidates and the winner gets the next available Senate Seat.

That part I get.  What I don’t get is that the first runner up gets a seat too if another one comes available.  So the loser gets to win too?  If a third spot opens up, then the third place “winner” gets that one.  You see where this is going…

In Ontario we have 24 Seats in the Red Chamber.  There is a possibility that the 24^th place candidate could end up in the Senate.  Yeah, I know, not likely but you get my drift.

This is where I come back to the Regions.  I’ll get a slate of candidates for my region.  One winner per region.  It’s how we do it in the other place, isn’t it?  (Sorry, I’m not going to deal with Proportional Representation here)

Now there are other options on how to select Senators or potential Senators as well.

Basically what we have now is that the winner of the contest gets to pick the Senators to replace the ones that are retiring.  Even with Ol’ Steve’s new rules He would have the final say, all he’d have to do is consider the elected or otherwise chosen Senate candidates.  Not real Democratic, is it?

It’s kind of like saying that the Chicago Blackhawks get to name the officials to replace the ones that retire from the NHL.  Now the Blackhawks may be honourable people and they might select only the best candidates, but the opportunity is there for abuse.  For example, they could name people who would call games in their favour.  Now a one time winner might not be a big problem, even if they selected a couple of less than stellar refs, but if they go on to be a dynasty it could adversely affect the reputation of the league.

And that is what we are looking at in the Senate.  So far, Ol’ Steve has appointed in the neighbourhood of 56 Senators.  There may be some good ones there, but he sure picked a few stinkers as well.

Maybe we should have candidates selected by the communities that they would represent?  This could be an election, or just a screening process by community leaders or local Council members who would forward their lists to the final selection people.  If we don’t go regional this could be handled through our Provincial Legislatures.  Each Legislature having a committee of the whole to select the short list that moves on up to the next level, or possibly select the candidates themselves.

An added plus to this is that Senators would more likely be from the region that they are to represent than say a certain Senator “from” PEI.  Yes, he’s from PEI originally, but that was a long time before he became a Senator.

Hey I’d even consider a committee of the whole in Ottawa to look at potential candidates and whittle them down to the short list that is handed to the PM.  Or they could select the Senator and just hand that name to the PM.

This is about as far as I got before I got bogged down.  How long should a Senator sit?  Should it be a permanent position or should they just serve terms?  And if we go with terms, how long should they be?

Ol’ Steve says 12 years (I think, it changes periodically) or maybe it’s 9, but only one term to a customer.  Next please!

Ol’ Steve says this would make them accountable.  I think otherwise.  If we go with terms, then accountability comes from having to face your selectors and prove that you have done a good job for them.  That’s why we have elections every now and then isn’t it?

The thing is, after a few years, some Senators realise that they don’t have to do what the Boss tells them.  They have a guaranteed job and the worst thing that can happen is that they get tossed out of caucus.  They’re still a Senator, so Ol’ Steve doesn’t want them in there for a long time.  As a matter of fact, it only took hours before his Echo Boxes were out saying that a) the no longer Liberal Senators would still be Liberal Senators, and b) that if they were really out of the caucus they would vote how they decided the best way to vote would be and that was WRONG.  Senators must vote the way their Leader wants them to vote.

I really wonder if anyone in the Harper Party has a clue about the Senate.  Do they think that the Fathers of Confederation looked back to the UK and said “Oh, they have a Senate, we should have one too.” and that was that?

There was a lot of debate back then on how government should work.  I’ve already mentioned the regionalisation of the Senate to counterbalance the representation by population in the House, but they looked at other things too.

They debated whether Senators should be elected.  Some thought that they would be more accountable.  But the decision was made in the end to appoint Senators because elected Senators would argue that they were equal to the elected Members of the House and could use this to block bills or to try and impose their will on the House.

It was also decided at the time that a Senate appointment would be a life time position.  The think was that if there was no threat of expulsion that they would be able to consider bills with more latitude and hopefully come to better decisions on whether or not a bill should proceed or be sent back to the House.

But Ol’ Steve thinks that Senators, much like his MPs should represent the Party, not their constituencies.  He wants them to truly be a rubber stamp.

You know, if I was one of his Senators I’d be offended.  Ol’ Steve is basically telling them and everyone else that his Senators are not capable of thinking for themselves… So much for Sober Second Thought, eh?

***

I think most of us agree that the Senate as it sits is in trouble.  The Senate was at one time more collegial, their debates were more open, but the hyper partisanship of the House of Commons has spilled over to the Senate.  The Senate needs to be different from the House, it needs to be able to decide on its own what is or is not a good piece of legislation.

As I said earlier, this is not a list of thing that must be done or even should be done to “fix” the Senate.  It’s just some ideas that have been rolling around in my head.  If you have any thoughts or ideas to improve the Senate, leave them in the comments.

Your thoughts?  BC