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It's PCPO Convention weekend as I write this, and you know what THAT means: It means some unfortunates will have to get off their asses and actually organize stuff.  Since nobody in Canada actually likes organizing stuff, or has the first clue how to organize stuff, things have gone completely off the rails.  Prepare yourselves for lots of PC Party fartcatchers doing their best impression of that cartoon dog wearing the hat in the burning house, doing a better job than you'd expect at convincing everyone who can quite clearly see the fire that "this is fine", as they blather from the stage about "principles" and "renewal" and "bright futures."

Ordinary citizens could safely fail to notice the bloodbath over the largely ceremonial office of PC Party President between party grandee Brian Patterson and perpetual outsider Jim Karahalios over whether the party exec has been sufficiently purged of loyalists to the unlamented Patrick Brown (or something), but those who are being paid to run this shindig must rely on the only reflex they have when this sort of thing happens: stick their heads in the sand and affect a dead smile.

But don't go overboard drowning your sorrows at the Toronto Congress Centre cash bar because then you'll miss Tanya Granic Allen and the PAFE-chafers working to ensure that the "pro-family" constituency, whatever that is, makes its voice heard.  They might be working to pass some policy resolution (such as some nebulous "Parents' Bill of Rights") that will never come close to making it into the next platform, or change the party constitution the same constitution that has been trampled for years whenever convenient  with some amendment that will be ignored or overwritten whenever the exec sees fit to do so.

Other than a Toronto Star headline to the effect of PC PARTY CONTINUES TO FLIRT WITH THEO-CON TRUMP-STLYE FASCISM, there isn't a damn thing that any of these bunfights will amount to, and the particulars know it well.  You would think, with the party in this much disarray, and with the aforementioned Mr. Brown's potentially libelous and clearly overheated vanity project set to drop the same weekend, that the NDP would be able to make some headway.

However, in their infinite wisdom, the left party have decided to take Patrick Brown (that noted feminist) at his word and try to Kavanaugh PC Finance Minister Vic Fedeli, despite the fact that the allegations against Brown are far more credible.  Oh well.  Anyway, if that doesn't tickle your pickle, the feisty folks down at OCAP will be hosting the cleverly-named "Stick It To Ford" rally outside the Ford family business, Deco Labels and Tags.  Get it?  They're STICKING it to Ford because it's a STICKER company.  Ahahah.  Well, according to Facebook less than 200 people have signed up to stand out in the cold on a Saturday afternoon, so I guess at least somebody got the joke?

So you might be asking yourselves why we cannot have proper political organization in this country, and why it is that every political concern I've just described (and the ones that I haven't), be it left or right, grassroots or big business, has this same desperate amateur-hour feel.  The answer is that this has nothing to do with organization, because organization involves moving towards a goal.  This is about various petty lords carving out virtual or real fiefs and raising armies to battle one another, not for any political or policy end, but to satisfy their own egos and to enrich themselves, because when you pull back and look at the provinces squabbling over nothing, or the meaningless intrigues of Ottawa, you realize that is what this country is.

But even the pretense of organization- finding like-minded people and working together- does not apply, because the people working under these petty lords are not of like mind.  Whatever types of shenanigans take place in, out, and around the PC Party Convention, those shenanigans will not be done in the service of any high principle.  Rather, it will be done in the hope that someone does something that will get them lots of likes on social media, or their backs patted by their fellow wretches.  These days, that's all you can get people excited for.

Photo Credit: Toronto Sun

Written by Josh Lieblein

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.


The debate over how much external oversight the Senate should be subject to is heating up again, as the Government Leader in the Senate err, "government representative," Senator Peter Harder, is going on tour across the country to insist that the proposed audit and oversight committee of the Senate contain external members.  Conservative Senator David Wells, who chaired the sub-committee that recommended a senators-only audit committee, is pushing back and saying that Harder is ignoring crucial parts of the proposals.  But what if they're both right?

The debate over the creation of an audit committee predates the massive audit of the Senate conducted by the Auditor General, and one of his recommendations was the creation of an oversight body, but the AG was fixated on the fact that it be external to the Senate.  There are problems with this, however, because the Senate is a parliamentary body and not a department of the public service, and as such, it needs to be self-governing.  Imposing external controls is a diminution of self-government no matter how you slice it, because it says that our political actors are not able to govern themselves and if you agree with that notion, then we may as well turn over control back to the Queen, because as much as said political actors may disappoint us, we have mechanisms to hold them to account (and yes, that extends to the Senate as well, though they may be less obvious).

Having heard this argument before, Harder came armed with counterpoints in his latest Policy Options oeuvre, insisting that external oversight won't necessarily diminish parliamentary sovereignty, and that inclusion of an external component on the oversight committee is not precluded by Parliament's self-governing status.

"Far from undermining this privilege, the inclusion of external members would constitute an appropriate and welcome exercise of the Senate's privileges," writes Harder.  "In the end, the Senate as a chamber would remain supreme, and the arrangements could be undone if that is its will."

He's not entirely wrong here, so long as he sticks to the notion that an oversight body include external components  and I stress that word, because it's what sets aside some of the more reasonable propositions for what the AOC could look like from the Auditor General's vision.

I will remark that this appears to be Harder softening his position, which used to be that he wanted the AG's vision implemented, end of discussion.  Part of what allowed him to be so strident, in my estimation, was the fact that he did not live through the AG's audit, nor did he understand just how problematic it actually was, where he and his audit team substituted their personal judgment over what was and was not a legitimate expense no matter how much documentation a senator may have had to back up their claims.  A lot of that personal judgment was both capricious and arbitrary, but in the aftermath, many senators simply repaid the demanded amount to make the situation go away rather than keep their names in the papers.

Later appeals processes involving former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Ian Binnie showed that many of the AG's conclusions were not reasonable, and later still, a legal analysis of the findings in order to demand collection from senators who refused to pay showed that the AG applied standards to his review that were far and above what a court of law would deem reasonable.  This is important context to keep in mind when discussing whether a wholly external body would be appropriate for the Senate, given that this exercise was so flawed.

When the Senate did study the issue and recommend the creation of the AOC, the sub-committee who made the recommendations also recommended that the five-member body be comprised wholly of senators, but to Senator Wells' point in rebuttal to Harder, they also recommended the inclusion of both internal and external auditors be made permanent advisors to the committee, and that the AOC should review all Senate expenditures, rather than just individual senators' expenses, and that it should conduct blind, random audits of those individual expenses.

Wells also made the point that Harder is trying to make it look like senators are marking their own homework, like the Auditor General somewhat erroneously did and Harder did frame his Policy Options piece with polling data on the Chamber's "credibility deficit" with the public.  But Harder is both right and wrong here.  I do think that there needs to be some external component on the committee even if there are external auditors permanently attached to it in an advisory capacity in order to enhance the credibility of the exercise.  By the same token, you can't become too beholden to the notion that this will somehow restore the legitimacy of the Senate in the eyes of the public, because I'm not sure that's remotely possible given the generations of myth-making and narrative-pushing that the Senate has been subjected to.

To that end, I still believe that the reasonable compromise remains patterning the AOC on the House of Lords' audit committee where the five-person body contains two external members.  It has the benefit of both having the external component that will make the exercise a more legitimate one in the eyes of the public, while still maintaining the body as one under the control of the Senate in its self-governing capacity.  That should satisfy both sides of the debate, provided that they can tone down their stridency.  We also need to keep in mind the actual magnitude of the Senate's expense "scandal," which was largely overblown outside of the Duffy and Wallin examples that brought it to such national attention, for which the Senate did recoup the misappropriated expenses through their internal processes once they were brought to light.  There were no moat cleanings being expensed, and we should stop trying to pretend otherwise.  There is a sensible approach to the creation of the AOC, and hopefully the Rules committee will see that in its deliberations.

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.


 

"You found forty thousand golden dragons for a champion's purse, surely you can scrape together a few coppers to keep the king's peace."  So says Lord Eddard Stark in George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, unhappy at the prospect of a tournament planned in his own honour.  For the sake of the people pushing for a Yes vote in a plebiscite on Calgary's bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics, let's pray the comparisons to a character played by Sean Bean end there.

It seems that they do.  As Hand to King Robert Baratheon, the fictional Stark is forced to watch the tournament go ahead, despite its enormous cost and the more serious problems of lawlessness and privation gripping the Seven Kingdoms.  The real-life Yes side, on the other hand, has been forced to watch their dreams of Calgary 2026 die at the hands of 56 percent of voting Calgarians.  The disappointment is the same, but the outcome, and the people responsible for it, could not be more different.

And they are not alone.  According to the New York Times, other previous Olympic venues have passed on the opportunity, for reasons of environmental damage, financial burden, or public opinion.  After decades of purpose-built athletic facilities gone to weed, cost overruns ranging from 13 percent to 280 percent, and dodgy dealings between local Olympic authorities and the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the list of bidders for 2026 is down to two: Stockholm, Sweden, and a partnership of the Italian cities of Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo.  And Stockholm's bid may not be long for this world.

You almost feel sorry for Calgary's Yes campaigners.  "Remember 1988?" they pleaded.  "By gum, it put Calgary on the map!  We can bring that magic back!  We'll renovate all the old venues, and we'll only need two new ones!  They'll totally be useful after the Games are over!  Just ask this Paralympian you've probably never heard of!  Think about it, Calgary: Do you want to be Vancouver, or do you want to be Winnipeg?!"

Perhaps those arguments were more persuasive in the years leading up to 1988, when Alberta was still in the throes of its oil boom and shitting money.  Circumstances have changed since, to say the least.  Whatever the short-term and I do mean short benefits of the Olympics may be, Calgarians and others have determined that the long-term waste makes those benefits just not worth it.  Not even $700 million from the province and $1.4 billion from the feds were enough to sweeten that awful, awful pot.

"But what about our infrastructure needs?" tries Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, who had been in favour of the bid.  He knows now that he'll have to make a case for federal cash without the Olympics.  Sadly, the No vote wasn't enough of a wake-up call for him to prioritize 1,800 affordable housing units over a long-awaited multisport venue.  Nor was it enough for the feds here represented by Sports Minister Kirsty Duncan, saying via a spokesperson that the money was contingent on a successful bid to prioritize the fundamental needs of Canada's municipalities over tournaments.

Nonetheless, Cowtown won't be so easily cowed.  If other cities across Canada haven't written off the Olympics completely, they don't seem to relish the idea of hosting a Games enough to get one.  Tokyo will host the next round in 2020.  Beijing will follow in 2022.  After that, Paris, 2024.  Four years later, Los Angeles, 2028.  And after that . . . well, not Calgary, anyway; Nenshi stands chastened and rebuked for his now-dashed hopes.  Hopefully, this plebiscite has set a precedent of refusal for decades to come.

But there's only one surefire way to protect Canadian taxpayers from the Olympic myth.  If the only way to get anything significant built in this country is for the feds to pony up, it follows that the only way to stop something significant, yet wasteful, from being built is for the feds to say no.  It's well and good for some countries to spend lavishly on nationalistic propaganda to distract their own people from their true needs.  Canada should not be part of that company.

Photo Credit: Calgary Herald

Written by Jess Morgan

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.