June 2019 - Page 3 of 5 - Loonie Politics

So let me get this straight, no pun intended.

Premier Doug Ford, the day after saying he doesn't believe politicians should ever march in parades (apparently forgetting all the times he, a politician, has), went to the York Region Pride Parade.

Notably, pointedly he marched with the uniformed York Region Police, alongside his local MPPs.

This was no accident.

Pride Toronto, like other Prides throughout the world, has mandated that uniformed police officers are not welcome to march. They cite a history of police violence against queer and marginalised communities as their rationale for why. Stonewall itself fifty years ago was a riot against police brutality against queer communities.

You can choose to agree or disagree with this decision; the LGBT community itself is split on the matter, with the motion that mandated the decision a narrow one.

But Pride is for the LGBT community and their allies. It is our decision to make â€” not a straight, white man with a history of homophobic comments. (Who can forget his repeated references condemning "buck naked men" as this understanding of the Pride Parade when he was a Toronto city councillor.)

What Doug Ford did this weekend seemed to many like the equivalent of showing up to a vegan's house with steaks. He showed up thinking he could dictate what was right for the LGBT community, and that's wrong, that's not allyship; that's white, male, heterosexual privilege incarnate.

It is odd to me that a straight man who is not an ally to the LGBT community felt it was his place to use the weight of his office to tell the LGBT community how to celebrate the progress we've made, progress that started with a riot at Stonewall about, in part, police violence.

But odder still is this political trope we see where commentators and progressive staffers call on the likes of Ford or Andrew Scheer to march in Pride.

I have a simple question: why would we want them there?

If you do not support LGBT rights, if you voted against equal marriage, if you rescind modern sex ed, if you have a history of homophobic comments â€” I do not understand why people think simply marching in a parade is a good idea, much less that it washes away all those sins.

You don't get to walk the parade route if you don't walk the walk in your policies, votes and rhetoric. The parade is not a place for pandering if you do not follow through in real life.

I felt the same way about former Conservative leader Patrick Brown, when he made a big deal of showing up to Pride, notwithstanding his opposition to sex ed or his anti-LGBT rights votes in Parliament, which (to my knowledge) he never apologised for.

Here's my bottom line. If you want to walk in Pride â€” do the work, don't just show up and think the mere act of walking down Yonge Street in a boa absolves you of your record.

This is not complicated.

LGBT people and Pride itself are not props for Conservative politicians to virtue signal that they're inclusive, notwithstanding their votes and their policies.

Pride is an inclusive event, but it is also a political one. It is a march for our rights, and a celebration of the history that has pushed those rights forward. You need to be LGBT or an ally in order to attend, and if you attend as a straight ally, quite frankly you should know that you are there to support the LGBT community, not to dictate your views back to the community.

To quote Doug Ford himself when an LGBT protestor was roughed up at Ford Fest in 2014: "I apologize to him for what happened but you can't go into any event, a sporting event even, taunting people" â€” as if the "Ford Nation" folks were on one team and the LGBT protestors were on the other.

In other words, if you're a straight, white man going to go to Pride â€” much less a Premier with a history of homophobic remarks and anti-LGBT policies â€” you're there to support the LGBT community, not to dictate your preferences.

Photo Credit: CBC News

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.

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On Sunday at 10:30 PM, after hours of an extraordinary session where MNAs debated all night long, the National Assembly adopted Bill 21 by 73 votes against 35, the CAQ government was supported by the Parti QuÃ©bÃ©cois in its endeavor. Bill 21 effectively bans the wearing of religious symbols by certain public servants in positions of authority, overriding their Charter rights.

The adoption of Bill 21 followed the adoption of another controversial measure at 4:10 AM on Sunday morning. Bill 9 aims to reduce the processing time of immigration files, while allowing better selection of immigrants, to be chosen based on their economic profile and the workforce needs of Quebec. Bill 9 also reduces the number of immigrants by 40,000 and eliminates 18,000 current cases, representing 50,000 people. These people will have to re-apply and start from scratch under the new law.

Despite a barrage of opposition protests, both Bills, sponsored by Immigration, Diversity and Inclusiveness Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette, where adopted by using closure to suspend the normal democratic rules for adopting legislation.

Simon Jolin-Barrette, nicknamed Simon Jolin-BÃ¢illon (Jolin-Gag) by Quebec Solidaire MNA Vincent Marissal, was not ashamed one bit to shut down debate and force it down the throats of the Opposition. He even casually went jogging on the Plains of Abraham while debate was ongoing.

Jolin-Barrette also surprised everyone by bringing last-minute amendments to the secularism law, putting in place an enforcement mechanism, more or less setting in place a niqab police, in charge of being on the lookout for contravenors to the law, and imposing penalties on government employees who contravenes the law.

This is basically the flipside of Iran's GaÅ¡t-e ErÅ¡Äd, the religious police established to impose Islamic dress codes, particularity regarding the hijab, patrolling to find women who are deemed improperly dressed according to the dress code.

In Quebec, improperly dressed now means wearing any religious symbols for many public servants. The law now prohibits teachers and public school directors, police officers, prison guards, lawyers and judges to wear these symbols. But fear not, it doesn't actually apply to employees who held these positions at the end of March who have been grandfathered. And everyone can still wear a wedding band, somehow. Because not all religious symbols were created equally. A two-tier secularism law, applying unequally to the same categories of employees, with some symbols excluded.

The law also contains the notwithstanding clause, exempting it from the application of the Canadian and Quebec human rights charters. But if the Legault government believes this will stop all judicial recourse, it is wrong: a court challenge was already moving forward by Monday afternoon.

The Federal Liberals, meanwhile, are agitating again, denouncing Bill 21. Quebec Liberal MP Anthony Housefather stated that it was "a sad day for Quebec" and that the law "violates individual rights and shatters some people's dreams."

Interestingly enough, Housefather also didn't issue his statement in french. But the question is, after denouncing the Secularism Law so forcefully, as Prime Minister Trudeau did in the past, what will the Federal Liberal Government do about it?

Four months before the next Federal Election, chances are they will do nothing. Liberal strategists know full well what happened to Tom Mulcair in 2015, when he stuck his neck out to defend the rights of religious minorities. The NDP became instantly the target of both Conservative and Bloc attacks, while Trudeau was hiding behind simple boilerplate statements about values, flying under the radar.

For Trudeau to step up now would require the usage of the power of disallowance to wipe it off the statute book. This power has not been used by the Federal government since 1943. The Federal Liberals' rhetoric about the Charter is apparently based on strong values, but the Liberals' strongest value is their hunger for power.

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As the political drama around the government's environmental assessment legislation, Bill C-69, rages on, a number of the country's pundit class have prematurely started offering plaudits about how this is somehow indicative of the "new" Senate somehow "working," and that even the record number of amendments that the government did accept were somehow all thanks to this new system of independent senators that carefully heard the evidence, weighed their options, and presented a "balanced" set of amendments to the government for their careful consideration. The problem, of course, is that this is almost entirely a work of fiction that is being perpetrated upon the Canadian people, and amplified by credulous columnists.

Bills C-69 and C-48, the latter of which would ban tanker traffic along BC's north coast, have become symbolic of the fight between conservative provincial governments, flocking under the banner of Jason Kenney, and Justin Trudeau's federal government. The rhetoric is entirely overblown, of course â€” neither bill is unconstitutional, as Kenney claims. C-69 won't kill any future pipelines or major infrastructure projects, nor will it add to any industry uncertainty â€” after all, the current system, implemented by the Harper government, has resulted in a lot of litigation because it introduced too much uncertainty into the system, and ignored certain obligations, such as the the duty to consult Indigenous communities that would be affected by project, and it was this duty to consult that resulted in projects being struck down by the courts â€” Northern Gateway and the Trans Mountain expansion in particular. (Despite the mythology, it was not the environmental assessment that killed Energy East, as that process had not even begun yet â€” the economics of the project were no longer viable once Keystone XL was back in play).

The other thing to remember is that C-69 is not hated by all resource industries. In fact, the mining industry, which accounts for the majority of all environmental assessments, has been in favour of the bill because it does attempt to reintroduce a sensible process. The oil and gas industry, meanwhile, has been working on their mythology around the supposed "no more pipelines" premise of the bill, and more to the point, keep lamenting that we once upon a time built railways and we couldn't do that any more under this system â€” ignoring the fact that the railways caused the displacement of many First Nations communities, and relied on virtual slave labour to build it. Probably not the best example to use, guys.

When it came to the Senate's examination of the bill, they put on a big show about cross-country consultations in order for the bill's opponents to theatrically demonstrate the level of concern about how this would somehow devastate the energy industry in the country (forget the world price of oil), and in the end, they were presented with a group of amendments from both the Alberta government and the oil and gas industry lobbyists, which they claimed would make the bill acceptable, but would in fact gut it and create more of the uncertainty that the bill was trying to undo. And because of a deal between the Conservatives and the other factions in the Senate, they decided that rather than fight it all out, they would simply pass all provincial and industry amendments in order to let the bill proceed without more procedural wrangling.

Amidst this, however, were a series of amendments that came from the Cabinet, who realized the longer the hearings on the bill went on that, yeah, there were things that did need fixing, and they would introduce those amendments in the Senate. (This after dozens of government amendments that were adopted in committee stage in the House of Commons. A perfectly drafted bit of legislation this bill was not). Normally, however, when these government amendments are brought forward in the "new" Senate, they will come by way of the Leader of the Government in the Senate â€” err, "government representative," Senator Peter Harder, or his deputies, Senators Bellemare or Mitchell. Mitchell was sponsoring the bill in the Senate, and was on the committee studying the bill. The amendments did not come via him. Instead, the government passed them through other members of the Independent Senators Group.

At this point, the bill was a complete dog's breakfast, with amendments that directly contradicted one another. Normally the Senate would undertake some actual due diligence and ensure that those were dealt with so that there was a passable bill that could go back to the House of Commons. Not this time. Rather than do the actual work that is the entire raison d'Ãªtre of the Senate, Harder declared that it would be best if they just let the government sort out which amendments they would keep and which they would strike down â€” in other words, when any blowback happened, the Senate could say that they did their job (when they didn't), and all blame would be laid on the government's feet. It was a deeply cynical play, and yet, the Independent senators lapped it up.

As could be expected, the government rejected the bulk of those amendments, and pretty much all of the Conservative or industry amendments. But while Independent senators were busy patting themselves on the back for getting some ninety amendments passed to the bill, what they either ignore or haven't been told is that some ninety-five percent of "their" amendments that got adopted came from the government, but were laundered through the ISG. And on most bills where the government has accepted amendments â€” stats that Harder likes to crow about when he touts the "success" of this "new" Senate â€” those amendments came from the government in the first place.

Meanwhile, we see plenty of columnists now, trying to sell the notion that the Independent senators reached these amendments after due and careful consideration, so maybe the government should let them go through. Except that's not what happened. Digging deeper into what transpired shows that this "new" Senate is not living up to its promises (not to mention that there seems to be a problem with the legal drafting arm of the Department of Justice that keeps sending these badly flawed bills to Parliament). Stop taking Harder's word for how the institution is working, because it's not reality.

Photo Credit: Jeff Burney, Loonie Politics

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Resource development and indigenous rights can be treacherous territory for the Alberta government. Just look at how the lack of proper consultation with indigenous groups scuppered progress on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

But Premier Jason Kenney navigated to solid ground this week with a productive meeting with most of the Alberta First Nations' chiefs.

The UCP will introduce a bill in the fall legislature session to create the Indigenous Opportunities Corporation designed to support First Nation resource investment. A $1 billion fund will provide loan guarantees and financial backstopping for indigenous projects. And there's also $24 million on the table over four years to provide legal, technical and financial advice for the initiation of projects.

Clearly Alberta would support a First Nations-led bid to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline. Indigenous ownership or a major ownership stake in the pipeline would change the narrative around resource development in a number of ways, all of them to the UCP government's advantage.

The issue of aboriginal consultation would be quieted with such an ownership shift. The political credibility the federal Liberals got from buying the pipeline to keep the project alive would be stale news, supplanted by the Alberta-aided First Nations initiative.

And Kenney would have also defused some simmering domestic resentment building over his government's dropping of routine First Nation land acknowledgement at official events. In recent weeks it has become clear that his ministers and MLAs aren't required to make the acknowledgement of treaty territory, a precursor to most speechifying in Alberta which became routine under the NDP.

Pointedly, Kenney made a particularly detailed acknowledgement at the meeting with the chiefs. "We meet today on lands that were the home of Alberta's first peoples for millennia, before the Dominion of Canada and First Nations came together in a spirit of peaceful co-operation under the great treaties that enjoined the Crown eternally to respect and uphold the rights, privileges and traditions of Indigenous communities in Alberta," he said.

The chiefs at the meeting said they were pleased with the promise of the new crown corporation to aid economic development. The fund boosts access to working capital not often available to indigenous businesses.

Arthur Nosky, Grand Chief of Treaty 8 First Nations, praised Kenney.

"I believe we have a premier at the table, with cabinet support, that is willing to address the issues that we've faced in the past," he said.

And Grand Chief Wilton Littlechild expressed the core truth about Canada's First Nations and resource development. There is no black or white response to issues such as pipelines and energy resource development.

"We also heard concerns, of course, about 'Is it possible to have sustainable development and promote respect for Mother Earth at the same time?'" Littlechild said after the meeting.

"From our experience the answer is yes."

"It's not no to any development or yes to all development. We need to seek a balance, and that's been the approach of those successful First Nations that have been able to capitalize on that opportunity."

Forging an alliance with those First Nations is a key move for Kenney. He called involvement of indigenous people in natural resources development an "economic and moral imperative."

Beyond the canny immediate political advantage the meeting affords, Kenney is building on a longtime close relationship between Alberta premiers and First Nation chiefs. Peter Lougheed, Don Getty, Ralph Klein and others maintained open communication on a host of issues, sometimes brokering agreements involving the federal government and indigenous leadership.

Kenney is starting, of course, with the area of the relationship he finds most comfortable â€” economic development and jobs.

He also is subtly using the establishment of the crown corporation to tweak the previous government's nose. He says the cash for the aid will come out of the money Kenney expects to realize from the cancellation of the NDP government's lease of railcars from CN and CP to fill the oil-export gap created by inaction on the pipeline file.

Photo Credit: CBC News

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It's weird living in QuÃ©bec and not being the centre of some Canadian unity crisis. Here we are in 2019 and a Trudeau is standing in the House of Commons lambasting a bunch of premiers for threatening national unity, and none of them are Quebecers.

Strange times we live in. Anyway, what is the crisis? Pipelines, of course. The Senate has cleared Bill C-69 with a series of amendments that weaken many of its provisions. Conservative provincial premiers â€” and the non-partisan premier of the Northwest Territories â€” sent the prime minister a letter saying his government must accept those changes, lest he threaten national unity. The bill, they say, would put an end to pipeline construction.

They also insist Bill C-48, which would ban tanker traffic along the northern B.C. coast must not be passed on similar unity ground.

"As it stands, the federal government appears indifferent to the economic hardships faced by provinces and territories. Immediate action to refine or eliminate these bills is needed to avoid further alienating provinces and territories and their citizens and focus on uniting the country in support of Canada's economic prosperity," the premiers say in the closing of their letter.

That is some pretty incendiary language, coming from a group of people demanding unity. Accusing the prime minister of, essentially, wishing their citizens would rot in the poor house is really something.

Perhaps this is all my haughty indifference sitting here in Lower Canada. There has been some polling that does seem to show westerners are feeling a sense of alienation.

But, who exactly has been stoking that? It seems we may have forgotten the campaign now-Alberta Premier Jason Kenney ran. Large parts of his pitch were based on a series of fantasies about the raw deal Alberta gets from equalization and how he will get the formula changed through, I guess, force of will.

It was a campaign built on resentment, toward the former NDP government, toward the rest of Canada, and toward Trudeau.

If Kenney were as serious about unity as the letter he signed implies, he might have conducted himself differently on his quest to gain power.

Instead, these demands for unity ring more as a bargaining strategy, meant to strong-arm the feds into doing the bidding of the west.

But that's essentially what Kenney has made his party: the political face of the oil industry. The promise of creating an energy war room, where the province would become the lead mouthpiece for oil companies, is an interesting one.

One of the reasons Alberta has been hit so hard by a global downturn in oil prices is because it's a province built largely around the oil sector. It's made worse by the difficultly in extracting . The construction of new oil projects requires huge capital investments and large lead times, something that puts its at further disadvantage. Further entwining the province with the industry isn't going to help the province when the next crisis hits.

(A quick digression: It's bizarre how the idea of a war room is being used as some sort of reasonable use of government resources. A war room is where hacks sit around spinning the news. I guess in an era when everything is politics, everyone's a hack.)

Anyway, what many of the amendments proposed by the Senate, and pushed by the premiers, do is weaken Bill C-69, lessening the amount of public input, and shielding decisions from legal challenges. This is something the oil lobby is wholeheartedly behind, because they say it creates needed stability to the consultation process.

But the reason those court challenges have succeeded is because of the negligent way consultation has been done in the past. Constant complaints on the length approvals take, belie the fact industry and government have not taken their duty to consult Indigenous people seriously. By treating the process like a checklist to fill out, rather than a genuine effort to understand the grievances of Indigenous peoples, courts have again and again struck down natural resource projects. Governments and companies thought they could force through the projects, constitution be damned, and were forced to begin again.

Codifying the limitation on consultation and court challenges flies in the face of that. It's a shameful sop to industry, and just one more dereliction of the promise of reconciliation. Not exactly unifying stuff, that.

Which brings us to another part of this premiers' letter. The people of BC don't seem quite so bothered tanker traffic may be banned off a part of their coast, and their premier didn't sign the letter.

And this is the other side of that unity coin. What exactly is the unifying principle of forcing pipelines on provinces and First Nations opposed to them? Where's the outcry against one province's industry forcing itself on other parts of the country.

What many of the premiers have done is put the pain being felt by one segment of their population â€” and, yes, the oil companies â€” ahead of another long neglected segment.

These premiers dismiss the crisis of unity environmental degradation causes, the crisis of unity forcing pipelines through unwilling jurisdictions causes, the crisis of unity that cutting the public's voice from resource projects.

Makes it tough to figure out just who it is that's causing the unity crisis.

Photo Credit: Alberta Politics

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Conservatives across the country might think they were pretty clever when they decided to play the national unity card regarding the Federal approach to the Energy file.

On Tuesday morning, the Conservative premiers of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick and their friend from the Northwest Territories wrote to Justin Trudeau to raise their concerns about bills C-48 and C-69.

Bill C-48 would ban oil tanker ships off the coast of British Columbia, making it quite difficult for Alberta oil to get to market, even with previously approved projects like the Northern Gateway pipeline.

Bill C-69 would overhaul the entire process under which major infrastructure projects such as pipelines are reviewed and approved. While the stated goals are to eliminate uncertainty, provide clarity and accelerate the process, opponents are claiming the bill is vague and muddy and will in fact block every single project.

These concerns are legitimate.

Their strident threat regarding national unity was not.

Asking Trudeau to accept amendments to his bills is one thing, to link these amendments to the very future of our country is not. These five provinces and one territory are representing 59% of the population. None of them being the province who actually tried to separate, twice.

The six premiers are playing a dangerous political game with national unity. Jason Kenney has played in that movie before. Back in the fall of 2018, the aspiring Premier was claiming that separatism was on the rise in Alberta because the Federal Court of Appeal reversed a cabinet decision to allow Trans Mountain construction to go ahead.

"I'm a Canadian nationalist and, by the way, separating ourselves from the rest of the country is not how we're going to get market access. But still, that frustration is real," Jason Kenney said on CTV's Power Play last September.

Yet, this spring, he was back at it, claiming that unless there was a new pipeline, "then somebody's going to come along and capitalize on that 50 per cent separatist sentiment in Alberta " and warning of a constitutional crisis if the Liberal's environmental-protection bill is not amended.

And Jason Kenney has now enrolled five other Conservative premiers to fan the flames of Alberta separatism over this policy disagreement.

The Angus Reid Institute points out that half of Alberta residents say the province could separate. But in the last provincial election, the Alberta Independence Party ran 63 candidates. For its efforts, it received 13,531 votes only 0.71% of the vote. Hardly registering, then, as a political option. Or, at least, nobody is capitalizing on it.

So who is going to come along and capitalize on that separatist sentiment? By repeating his statements on separatism, by recruiting other premiers to his cause, by increasing the tension in a deliberate, strategic fashion, Jason Kenny is apparently doing better at raising support for Alberta Separatism than the Parti QuÃ©bÃ©cois is able to in Quebec.

If he truly believes in Canada, Jason Kenney should stop playing with separatist matches around the pipelines, before it blows up in our face.

Photo Credit: Burnaby Now

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Shortly after Justin Trudeau's 2015 election victory, pundits in the media began obsessing over the Liberal's polling numbers, wondering when the honeymoon with voters would come to an end. After all, such high levels of popularity could not go on forever. Like Icarus flying too close to the sun, Justin would surely succumb to hubris and tumble back down to earth.

Well, the honeymoon has long since been over. And now, pollsters and pundits discuss the possibility of a Liberal minority or even a Conservative win this fall.

Perhaps disappointment is an eventuality in politics. As Robert Browning wrote, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp." The same is true for politicians.

Yet the Liberal's drastic reversal in popularity represents something far more disillusioning than mere disappointment with the limitations of government.

As Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau has crassly betrayed the trust of many of the voters who stood by him in 2015. The duplicity over electoral reform was perhaps the most noteworthy example. Retaining omnibus bills and lying about the size of its deficits are others. It must be becoming harder to say with a straight face that "Canada is back."

Politics is a deeply personal affair. By breaking so many promises, Justin Trudeau was also breaking hearts.

It's in the Liberal DNA. Commonly known as "campaigning from the left, then governing from the right."

Maybe he learnt from his father. Pierre was a man who broke many hearts, and not just of the many women whom he dated.

Nonetheless, Pierre had a lasting hold amongst millions of Canadians. One that allowed for his routine forgiveness.

In his first term in office, Pierre was confronted with the escalating violence of the Front de liberation du QuÃ©bec. To counter the terrorist threat, he invoked the War Measures Act. While the decision to do so cemented his "tough guy" image, he ultimately lost the support of many young and progressive-minded voters. Hell hath no fury, like a voter scorned. By the next election, the Liberals were reduced to a precarious minority government.

And yet, two years later, the electorate forgave Pierre and rewarded the Liberals with a second majority in 1974.

By 1979, Canadians had again become disenchanted with Trudeau Sr. Most notably, Pierre had cynically broken his word by embracing wage and price controls. As retribution, voters forced him into early retirement.

Mere months with the Tories though, and the electorate had a change of heart. After Joe Clark's budget failed to pass in the House of Commons, Pierre returned from the political wilderness and was rewarded with his third and final majority.

It's not at all certain his son will be given the same clemency.

Colourful socks and appearances on GQ magazine will not save Justin's political fortunes. Just as Pierre's romantic dalliances with Barbara Streisand and Margot Kidder did not save his. Celebrity, like infatuation, is shallow and fleeting.

The lesson to be learnt from Pierre Trudeau's political longevity, lies instead with his unshakeable conviction on the issues that mattered most to him. When it came to bilingualism, patriation, the Charter, and Quebec's place in Canada, Pierre Trudeau was unflinching in his beliefs. No apologies, back-tracking or capitulation.

Nor did any level of opposition daunt Pierre, as witnessed when he boldly spoke out against the Charlottetown Accord as a private citizen. The accord had the backing of Brian Mulroney's federal government, the media, big business, countless academics and all ten provincial premiers.

No matter. By conclusion of the referendum, Pierre's convincing arguments against Charlottetown carried the day. He succeeded, as he almost always did, in securing the public's support. Once the pain of heartbreak had dulled and the glamour faded, respect for the man and his conviction endured long afterwards.

Alas, his son has yet to show the same grit.

After back-tracking upon his unreserved welcome of refugees, waffling on an arms deal to Saudi Arabia and adopting the Conservative's emission targets, it increasingly appears Justin will compromise on any principle. Especially once the political pressure has shaken his nerve.

And while Justin's steadfast support for abortion services is admirable, he faces no effective political opposition in this country. Neither Andrew Scheer, nor Maxime Bernier, have shown any willingness to claw-back these services.

If Justin wants a second chance, he will need to earn back the public's respect. And that means demonstrating some of his dad's steely-eyed conviction, no matter the opposition.

Maybe then Canadians will forgive Justin, as they forgave his father.

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Over the weekend, the Ontario Liberals held a convention to determine the rules for their forthcoming leadership race. Two successive votes were held in order to change the rules from a delegated convention to a one-member-one-vote system, and both failed, the latter vote getting 57 percent approval but shy of the 66 percent threshold needed to change the rules. While this does mean that they have dodged a bullet in terms of not adopting a system that is the most corrosive to our system of politics, it's clear from the rhetoric being deployed by MPPs and party luminaries that they haven't learned their lesson, and that they are keen to keep heading on a self-destructive path. Worse, the fact that there are those in the party who are trying to draft "star candidates" like astronaut Chris Hadfield shows that nobody in the party has learned a single lesson about what is wrong with politics these days.

Judging from the reporting from the convention, it appears that the recent Progressive Conservative leadership contests in Ontario that resulted in the wins by both Patrick Brown and Doug Ford were enough to spook some of the Liberal delegates into not backing OMOV, which shows that at least some of the party membership has thought twice about the allure of OMOV. After all, as OMOV systems allow, Brown was able to mobilize "supporters" across the province that had no particular loyalty to the party or its machinery that Christine Elliott was not able to, and essentially rented a voter base to win him the leadership. Likewise, the particular rules of the PCs' weighted OMOV system allowed Doug Ford to win the leadership in his contest without winning the popular vote because of how the weighting worked (not to mention the other problems with ballots that Elliott, also the challenger in that contest, was prepared to challenge in court before she backed down).

Both Brown and Ford were outsiders to the party, and neither had a seat when they were made leader Brown still holding his federal seat at the time. That Brown and Ford were essentially interlopers to the party could seem like both a feature and a bug of the system feature in that people convince themselves that this allows for fresh blood and a fresh vision for the party to rally around, and bug in that it can completely undermine the party's established policy direction as voted on by its membership. Because OMOV encourages leadership cults, it insidiously hollows out the party so that the leader becomes the party, and MPs/MPPs are expected to rally around them because they supposedly won the "democratic legitimacy" of the membership and if MPs/MPPs dare to question the leader or the process, they are derided as "elites" trying to usurp the place of the "grassroots" membership.

But the problem is that it's not really a grassroots system. OMOV masquerades as such, but is really more an exercise in astroturfing the term applied when highly organized campaigns use the trappings of grassroots democracy to manipulate the process. That's why their leadership membership base is so ephemeral because they are essentially rented by the campaign to get their leader elected, but these are not people who stick around afterward. They disappear into the aether, while the actual grassroots party members, who volunteer and spend their time doing the hard work of debating policy resolutions, and performing the necessary accountability function at the ground level, are essentially hung out to dry. The policy work they spent their time on has become meaningless because now leadership candidates are expected to come in with policy platforms as part of the process, the actual grassroots be damned.

And then come the excuses, with proponents citing that it's more "modern," or more "democratic," or that it somehow gives everyone an "equal voice at the table." These are all false, and more to the point, what they do is remove accountability from the system. Leadership reviews are not accountability because they can be gamed in the same way as OMOV leadership contests (look at the experiences of Greg Selinger in Manitoba, or Jeremy Corbyn in the UK), and an ephemeral and nebulous membership body that elected a leader cannot be expected to hold him or her to account after all, when you're accountable to everyone, you're accountable to no one.

The other problem we now face in trying to dissuade parties from this terrible system is the allure of the database signing up as many names as possible to participate in these sham "democratic" processes is the real desired outcome, because parties believe that these databases are what wins them elections. It was the goal of the federal Liberals when they did away with their membership fees and allowed for "supporters" to vote for their leadership aside from exacerbating the problems of OMOV, it was all about populating their voter identification database, because they were years behind the Conservatives in that regard. For a party in rebuilding mode like the Ontario Liberals, this is a siren song that it seems only a just enough members were able to shake off before it lured the party onto the rocks.

We as Canadians need to come to grips with the fact that our leadership systems are broken beyond repair, and OMOV is not going to solve the problems in our system, because it is the problem. And no, the Ontario Liberals' status-quo of a delegated convention is not much better it still keeps the accountability away from the leader, and it still creates leadership cults. As much as people don't want to hear it, the first step in fixing what's wrong with our politics is to return to having the caucus choose the leader. It's not to find a celebrity or messiah for people to flock to it's about restoring accountability, and returning the power to MPs/MPPs and to grassroots members. That won't happen under OMOV.

Photo Credit: Toronto Star

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Canada, while imperfect, has worked hard to be open, tolerant and understanding in its beliefs and policies. The PM's words don't reflect that

The outcome of the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls was going to be difficult for the Indigenous Canadian community and Canadians in general. That much was always clear.

What happened last week, however, changed the parameters of this discussion and led us down a rabbit hole we should have never entered.

The inquiry said Canada is carrying out a "genocide" against Indigenous peoples. Not in the past, mind you, but in the present.

The Organization of American States was stunned by this news. As Secretary-General Luis Almagro wrote in a June 3 letter to Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, "the mere presumption of the crime of genocide against Indigenous women and girls in your country should not and cannot leave any room for indifference from the perspective of the Inter-American community and the international community."

Almagro also wanted to include "an Inter-American mechanism to this investigation." Recognizing that Canada "has always sided with scrutiny and international investigation in situations where human rights are violated in different countries," he continued, "I am expecting to receive a favourable response to this request."

The whole situation was quickly getting out of hand. It could have easily been defused if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had intervened in a diplomatic manner with strongly worded language and a helping hand.

Alas, Trudeau took a very different tact. He said during a press conference at last week's Women Deliver summit in Vancouver, "We accept the finding that this was genocide and we will move forward to end this ongoing national tragedy."

The sound of jaws dropping was deafening. While the historical treatment of Indigenous peoples experienced in Canada was awful, it wasn't genocide.

Merriam-Webster defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group." There have been instances of genocidal annihilation around the world, including the Nazi Holocaust, ethnic cleansing in the Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, civil wars in Rwanda and Somalia, and the bloodthirsty savagery of the Islamic State.

Canada's Indigenous peoples have never experienced anything of the sort.

Certainly, they've been mistreated and isolated throughout history. They've experienced racism on a province-to-province basis. Native Canadian leaders have struggled to work productively with the federal government, no matter the political stripe, due to generations of mistrust. Historical concepts like residential schools were well meaning (in some communities) at the start, but ultimately failed in practice due to neglect, abuse and hatred.

But Canada has never engaged in the "deliberate and systematic destruction" of Indigenous peoples, either in the past or the present. One individual or group's perception isn't an entire country's reality. As well, the dislike and/or hatred of a select few doesn't represent the diverse views of the many.

Irwin Cotler, a former federal Liberal cabinet minister, human rights lawyer and head of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, may have said it best when he told CBC News, "If we say everything is a genocide, then nothing is a genocide."

This is exactly the trap Trudeau fell into.

All the PM had to do was politely critique the inquiry's assessment. Acknowledge its suggestion of genocide as an opinion open to interpretation, but stress that Canada, while imperfect, has worked hard to be open, tolerant and understanding in its beliefs and policies. He could have announced a process to assess the information, speak with native leaders and report back.

He did no such thing, however. In his ongoing quest to curry favour with Indigenous peoples and enhance his credentials as an apologist for our country, he reacted to the controversy by calling something that clearly wasn't genocide exactly that, genocide.

Putting the genie back in the bottle will be impossible. Generations of Canadian prime ministers will now have to deal with the ramifications of Trudeau's irresponsible and historically inaccurate response.

Words matter, prime minster. Take another sip from your "uh, paper, um, like drink box water bottles sort of things" that you and your family apparently use, and think about it.

Photo Credit: CTV News