LP_468x60
ontario news watch
on-the-record-468x60-white
and-another-thing-468x60

As we close in on the general election, we now have all opposition parties coming out in favour of electoral reform of one form or another.  With Justin Trudeau's 32-point "real change" proposal for enhanced transparency and accountability, he included a promise that this election would be the last under the current First-Past-the-Post system, which is extremely disheartening.  If he wanted a real reinvigoration of our parliamentary system, it would come with a proper re-engagement with our current system, not to replace it with something that will come with its own set of problems.

It's not like this hasn't been attempted before in a number of provinces.  PEI and Ontario both held referenda on proportional representation systems that were defeated, while BC held two on adopting a Single-Transferable Vote system the first one failing to achieve the required 60 percent to succeed, the second vote finding even less support than the first time around, dropping to 39 percent.  In other words, Canadians have yet to be convinced.

As we get drawn into yet another debate on electoral reform, there a few things that stand out for me, the first being that there is an assumption that reform is both necessary and desirable, or that the current system is "antiquated" and therefore somehow illegitimate.  The problem of course is that over time, the actual merits and mechanics of our current system have been lost under the waves of sentimentality and false statistics that tend to dominate the discussion.  We are treated to wrongheaded accusations of "false majority governments," and people shake their fists at the notion that their votes have been "wasted" if the party they prefer didn't get into office.  Because apparently a vote is only legitimate if you get your way.

You wouldn't know it from the vast majority of the commentary out there, but FPTP has a lot going for it, because more than any other system being proposed, it has a focus on accountability.  Quite simply there is a straight line of accountability between the MP and the electorate each seat is elected simply with a single vote, determined by plurality.  There is no list to which would-be MPs must suck up to party leaderships in order to get a seat.  The paper ballots, each with a single X on them, give a traceability that ensures that you can count and recount as necessary.  Ranked ballots (one possible reform method posited by Trudeau) would require some kind of computerised counting, which loses both its straight forward accountability, also creates an artificial means of achieving a false 50-percent-plus-one required to get to the seat, distorting the result and the mandate received by that MP.  Vote counts and spreads matter currently, and MP who can see that he or she won by a small vote spread knows to pay close attention to their electorate.  That direct line of accountability also empowers an MP directly there is no way the votes have been mediated by either fancy maths or party lists.  They wield the power that the seat affords them something that most MPs these days have completely forgotten.

There is a perverse logic to those who think that changing the electoral system will somehow make for better MPs.  Instead of empowering them, most forms of proportional representation empower the party more than they do the individual MP.  Fair Vote Canada probably the country's largest voter suppression agency (who else goes around telling people that their votes don't count?) likes to use ads with old white guys on them with the notion that changing the electoral system gives you more representative MPs, and sure, while you may get more women and minorities appointed from lists, they aren't actually responsible to the electorate.  They serve the party.  That's not an empowered MP.  And because PR systems are likely to return minority parliaments, recent experience in Canada has shown that it made the parties rely far more heavily on the whip, lest a confidence vote be lost, and coalition building is no guarantee of better government either.  Rather, experience in other countries has shown that they can be dominated by a single party that can shuffle around their coalition partners, and that it gives inordinate influence to smaller single-issue parties, which would certainly proliferate in Canada if we adopted a PR system.

Remember that accountability under our current system means that we can throw the bums out, and we tend to every ten years or so.  That's a good thing.  If you have a system that insulates a party that can just shuffle its coalition partners around, it's not accountability, nor can you easily hold a party to account when you elected them on one platform, but large planks of it were traded away as part of the negotiation process to form a cabinet post-election.

What is perhaps the most galling part of all in the electoral reform debates that we're now seeing is the air of inevitability that its proponents adopt much like separatists parties, be they in Quebec or Scotland.  Lose a referendum?  Never mind we'll just have another one in a few years.  That one will pass for sure!  People just didn't know enough this time, but next time they will!  The fact that neither the Liberals or the NDP are promising a referendum on their proposed electoral system changes makes it even more troubling should they form a government, it isn't necessarily a mandate for electoral reform, considering the comprehensiveness of their other platform promises.  Neither seems to show any regard for the fact that Canadians have rejected electoral reform in the past, and very likely would again.

Our system actually does work, and if we dispel the myths and outright mistruths being put forward by the pro-reform crowd, it could lead to a reinvigoration of our system.  But that requires an honest conversation about what the system is and what it delivers, and few people seem willing to have just that.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


A report from real estate firm CBRE Inc., provided exclusively to the Financial Post, shows the Greater Toronto Area is the tightest market in North America for industrial space


It's an issue that one thinks is more closely associated with films like Gattaca, but rather than simply being concerned about a well-dressed future (and Gattaca certainly was that), the issue of genetic privacy is one that has been demanding attention for years.  The urgency of this issue has grown, particularly as genetic testing becomes more readily available for the public with those 23 and Me commercials playing constantly.  While most of the concerns right now are around the availability of insurance, it could extend to things like employment, and then we'd really be getting into a Gattaca-like situation where you could be ruled out of a job if you are found to have genetic characteristics that are deemed unsuitable.

With mere days left in the current sitting, the government introduced a bill on genetic privacy, something they have been promising since the 2013 Speech From the Throne.  The problem?  That the bill they tabled is pretty useless as it regards the actual concerns that people have with relation to their genetic information being used or misused.  There is also no time for the bill to actually even start the legislative process, and was intended to be both a placeholder on the Conservative Party platform, and as an exercise in checking off the list of promises not yet fulfilled.

For years now, there have been private members' bills that have attempted to address the growing problem of genetic discrimination, and in the current parliament, a bill put forward by Liberal Senate leader James Cowan has been the only one to make some progress in getting input and buy-in from stakeholders.  The problem?  The government wasn't keen on it, and requested that their senators try to stop the bill in its tracks and so they did.  Months of delay was followed by a stunning attempt to gut the substance of the bill in committee, and now the bill awaits report stage where that gutting will either be adopted or rejected, but regardless, there is not enough time for it to go through either way, never mind that they could have passed this bill years ago and put those protections to Canadians on the books.

When it came time for the government to put forward their own bill, one might think that they were going to take the best parts of Cowan's bill and slap a coat of paint on it to present it under their own brand a tried and true tactic used by governments of all stripes.  But no what they presented was quite frankly a mess that doesn't address the real concerns that Canadians have about genetic privacy.

The biggest flaw, of course, is that the government's bill does nothing about the problem of the insurance industry either demanding to see the results of a genetic test, or forcing potential customers to take one.  In fact, insurance isn't in the bill at all, and the government has claimed throughout their objections to Cowan's bill that it's a provincially regulated industry, so they can't deal with it.  While it's true that there is a jurisdictional issue, it's not so cut-and-dried.  Cowan's bill went at it from a different direction, regulating not the insurance industry or employers, but rather the conduct that was of most concerns requiring tests, or forcing disclosure of tests that had already been performed.  Cowan's bill relied on the federal criminal power to prohibit that conduct something that is clearly within the federal Parliament's jurisdiction.  Over the years that the bill was on the Order Paper and being debated in the Senate (remember that it had the reset button pressed on its progress after the 2013 prorogation thanks to the rules of the Senate when it comes to private members' business), not one province objected to this when they had ample opportunity to do so.  That the government insisted that this was an overreach was simply not the case, and their bill leaves that vulnerability in place.

The other comparisons between the government's bill and Cowan's are also pretty telling instead of adding "genetic characteristics" to the Canadian Human Rights Act, they would instead treat a genetic disposition to a disability as discrimination on the grounds of disability, which is already happening under case law.  Adding the results of genetic testing to the Privacy Act doesn't actually deal with the issue of insurers or employers getting access to genetic test results or requiring a person to take them.  And their decision to add genetic tests to personal health information under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act doesn't help people in BC, Alberta or Quebec, nor the healthcare sector in Ontario, New Brunswick, or Newfoundland and Labrador thanks to loopholes in the Act.  Some protection.

So what are Canadians left with?  A voluntary code of conduct by the insurance industry, who promise not to increase the rates on existing policies if genetic testing information is disclosed to them.  In other words, if you're going to get a genetic test, you'd better make sure that you already have insurance lined up beforehand, otherwise you may not be able to get it in the future or certainly not at a reasonable rate.

It's no wonder that privacy advocates, from the Privacy Commissioner himself to the BC Civil Liberties Association, were strongly in favour of Cowan's bill.  Even 23 and Me was in favour of it.  The bill was well researched, well drafted (which, believe me, is a rarity for private members' bills), and something the government could have gotten behind like they promised to in that Throne Speech.  Instead, they dug in their heels, tried to gut Cowan's bill so that the only thing left in it would be the title and the definitions, and put a weak sauce alternative in its place while patting themselves on the back for a job well done.  That means that we might very well be headed for Gattaca, only without the dress sense.

 

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


By now you've heard the numbers out of the Auditor General's report on the Senate, with 30 senators being named, nine serious enough to be referred to the RCMP, and all of the associated hyperventilating and concern trolling about the existence of the Senate itself.  You'd think, given the outrageous headlines and pronouncements by the pundit class, that this was a third-world kleptocracy with dictators riding gold-plated airplanes and bilking their impoverished populations so that they can build new mansions and set up nest eggs in offshore bank accounts.

It's not.  Nowhere even close.

Let's all take a deep breath, and take a look at things in their actual context.  Out of 116 current and former senators, 86 were not found to have any problems.  Of the 30 that were flagged, 21 have relatively minor issues some of which were genuine mistakes in paperwork, others have a difference of opinion with the auditors and let's be clear, these are opinions.  The Auditor General himself, Michael Ferguson, said, "we had to exercise our professional judgement in determining whether expenses were incurred for parliamentary business."  Given what we have heard from some senators about the claims they are disputing, there are genuine differences in what they felt was parliamentary business that was conducted under the rules as they existed at the time.  In some cases, those senators felt that the auditors ignored the documentary evidence or even corroborating witness testimony that the expenses were for parliamentary business.

There are nine other senators for whom the AG recommended further investigation, and he suggested the RCMP may be a body to do it.  He did not actually suggest criminality in any of those cases, despite what you may have heard from hyperbolic media reports in the past several days.  In five of those cases, there were questions of residency issues, but unlike in the Duffy trial, these senators had drivers' licences and health cards from their provinces of residence, which is something.  Two of the nine were not cooperative, and he felt the RCMP might have the powers to obtain the documents necessary.  The final two senators in question had contradictory evidence that the auditors were unable to determine if they had legitimate claims or not, and again he hoped a body with more investigative powers might be able to get to the bottom of what's at stake.  He's not saying they defrauded the taxpayer.

This isn't to say that there aren't expenses flagged that are dodgy or that should have been paid back.  And chances are, you'd find that in pretty much any organization especially elected legislatures.  None of what we've seen here compares to some of the expense scandals we've seen in places like Nova Scotia, where MLAs were buying flatscreen televisions and portable generators out of their MLA expense accounts, or even the UK House of Commons, with the famous expenses for moat cleaning.  These issues are not even close.

Let's also put the dollar figures in perspective.  The audit period covered $186 million in Senate expenditures, and less than $1 million was flagged, and that number is likely to dwindle with arbitration into the value judgements the auditors made when flagging some expenses, and with potential future investigation in to the other nine problematic cases.  The audit itself cost nearly $24 million, and sure, it may save some money in the future as better control systems are being put into place, but let's also not forget that the Senate has been improving their spending rules and transparency over the past number of years.  It's a slow process, but it was not an absent one.

Which brings me to the problem with the main concern and recommendation of the AG, which is about the lack of independent oversight for senators.  "As a group, Senators are responsible for governing themselves and how the Senate functions," the report says.  "They design their own rules, choose whether to enforce those rules, and determine what, if any, information will be publicly disclosed."

All of this is true, but nowhere in the report does it say that this is because of parliamentary supremacy.  Parliament is self-governing, and that includes the Senate.  It needs to be in order to be independent in the governance of our country, and yes, the House of Commons is just as self-governing as the Senate is, so don't let any abolitionist talking points let you think otherwise.  Ferguson says he wants an independent oversight body, but that body will still need to include senators because of parliamentary supremacy.  Otherwise, you have one unaccountable body trying to rule a parliamentary body, and if we're going to do that, then we might as well just start giving power back to the Queen because that ultimately is where that path leads.

I'm not saying any of this to be a Senate apologist.  I have a great deal of respect and even affection for the institution for the work it does and for some of the very respectable people who are among its members, and if there is wrongdoing, then it's better that it be called out for the sake of all involved and especially the health of the institution going forward.  No one is disputing that.  But let's also remember that the kind of rhetoric we're hearing about the Senate, and its legitimacy as a parliamentary body, is grossly disproportionate to what this report actually says, and what has been uncovered.

None of what has been uncovered in this report undermines the legitimacy of the Senate, its role in our parliamentary democracy, or the very good work it does.  And let's not understate that fact the Senate often does far better work than their peers in the Commons, who incidentally are far less transparent than the Senate has been even despite the AG's concerns in his report, and who have had far bigger spending scandals in the past few years.  Let's all use a little perspective in the days ahead.


As Michael Chong's Reform Act is being debated in the Senate, the issue about the place of the grassroots party members has become a sticking point for many of the participants in both parties.  Can democratic reform and a "rebalancing" of the powers of MPs fit within the kind of framework that Chong proposes?  Or is this the right discussion to be having at all?

The logic goes, as articulated by Senator David Wells and others, that if thousands or tens of thousands of party members voted to select a party leader, why should it give a mere handful of MPs the right to overturn that decision?  Add to that, a prime minister is chosen because millions of Canadians voted for that party to form government, so why again should caucus have the right to interfere?  It's this kind of logic that proves just how broken our system of leadership selection has become in this country, and why we find ourselves with complaints of a democratic crisis.

We can blame the Liberal Party for this state of affairs, going all the way back to 1919 when they decided to choose a new leader by way of a delegated convention rather than caucus choosing their leader, as was the tradition in a Westminster parliament, and which remained the case until very recently in the UK and Australia, where they too are starting to move to a hybridized system, apparently not having learned from Canada's mistakes.  What we got was a leader who no longer was accountable to the caucus that he guided when William Lyon Mackenzie King, the first leader chosen by this new method, faced a scandal, he is said to have told his caucus "You didn't choose me and you can't remove me."  And thus, the ability of caucus to hold their leaders to account was broken.

The problem with delegated conventions, which have since evolved into systems of "one memberone vote," or more recently the Liberal party's "supporter" system where one didn't even need to be a party member to have a say in who the leader was going to be, is that it started to presidentialize the party leaders.  No longer accountable to the caucus, they amassed even more power as they gained the ability to sign off on candidate nomination forms not by nefarious design, mind you, as the measure was intended to be quality control against spoof candidates and hostile takeovers of riding associations by pro-life groups but they accumulated that power nevertheless.  And because the pool of voters by which the leader was elected from grew so greatly, it diluted any sense of accountability to that membership because it was too nebulous to have any meaning.  In fact, Justin Trudeau is probably the most unaccountable leader in Canadian history by the sheer fact that the group that selected him is so ephemeral not even being paid-up party members that he can't answer to them.  Add to that, the "supporter" system was never actually intended to be about "more democracy" it was about populating the party's voter identification database, which is a further dilution and debasement of the meaning of leadership selection.  And no, bi-annual leadership review votes aren't accountability, particularly when the leader gets to decide what constitutes the threshold by which the party membership still has confidence in him or her.

The method of selection is intrinsically tied to accountability and ability to remove that leader, which remains one of the most gaping logical flaws in Chong's bill.  It's also why those commentators who respond to the likes of Senator Wells with questions like "Does Australia removing their leaders by caucus make them less democratic?" are completely wrong because they're ignoring the fact that in Australia, or in the UK during the time of the widely-cited Margaret Thatcher example, it was the caucus who selected those leaders, and therefore they were fully empowered to remove them.  What Chong attempts to do by trying to kludge a hybrid system in statute by which a large electorate can vote in a leader but also allows caucus to remove that leader with a relatively high bar, is create a freakish monster that cannot be workable particularly if you look at what happened in Manitoba, where caucus tried to remove their leader, but the party membership elected to keep him in place during a review vote.  How that is a preferable system is completely baffling.

The fact that people consider the current system of membership selection as being "bottom-up" and caucus removal as "top down" is a mere illusion of "more democracy" where accountability is lacking.  There is a balance between democracy and accountability, and this bill knocks the scale over completely.  If we want leaders to be accountable, then we need to return to a system of caucus selection as in a representative democracy, and give the grassroots more input in other ways, such as a more robust party president and policy work that isn't coming out of the leader's office.  Parties themselves need to decide on more ways to keep themselves accountable with respect to vetoing nominations, or with deciding whether an MP should be kicked out of caucus.  Putting these things in a bill particularly one as deeply flawed as Chong's is inviting future trouble and will make the system even more broken.

What Chong proposes is untenable and unworkable.  This isn't democratic reform that empowers MPs it further removes their ability to hold leaders to account because it enshrines in legislation that party leaders are elected by a process outside of caucus.  Selection matters.  Giving them the power to tacitly remove a leader doesn't make that leader more accountable it sets up a conflict with the membership like we saw in Manitoba.  This is no way to run a representative democracy, and it further reduces MPs to the roles of ciphers for the leader.  Hopefully, Senators will realise this and defeat the bill on its merits.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.