Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was been found in violation of the Conflict of Interest Act for taking a private helicopter to an island owned by the Aga Khan, the head of the Nizari branch of the Ismaili faith.  A helicopter trip may not seem like a big deal, except for Trudeau's failure to recuse himself from meetings regarding a $15 million grant to the endowment fund of the Aga Khan's Ottawa-based think tank.  Outgoing Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson confirmed the suspicions of many that "the vacations accepted by Mr. Trudeau or his family could reasonably have been seen to have been given influence Mr. Trudeau in his capacity as prime minister."

Trudeau was ready with an explanation, telling assembled reporters he was uhhhhh for ummmmming with the daaaaaaahhhh and would take the steps necessary to guuuuuuuh his errrrrrr as soon as possible.  Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Andrew Scheer went to town:

As did the commentariat:

• Paul Wells, Maclean's: "Who will ever want to run for high office again, knowing the time-honoured option of an occasional tropical getaway to the sprawling demesne of a vaguely spiritual host who periodically petitions the federal government for grants-in-kind will forever be foreclosed?"
• Tim Harper, Toronto Star: "This government wins byelections, and its approval ratings remain steady, and most Canadians seem to be giving the finger to those inside the Ottawa bubble who chronicle Liberal fumbles.  But this episode should burst well beyond the bubble."
• The Globe & Mail editorial board: "Mr. Trudeau seems to believe his character is so unimpeachable that no one would dare conclude that an apparent conflict of interest on his part could in fact be real."
• Mark Bonokoski, Sun Media: ". . . it has become increasingly obvious that the PM and his cabinet cohorts have a tin ear when it comes to issues involving ethics."

Too true.  Between this and Finance Minister Bill Morneau's failure to disclose his ownership of a villa in Provence, the highest echelon of the Liberal government has an unfortunate problem keeping their vacation arrangements above board.  Their "sense of entitlement" evokes memories of what turfed the last Liberal government.  When will they learn?

A #cdnpoli tweep known only as @kingcambie offered a solution:

We really should annex Turks and Caicos, if only to keep the PM out of these imbroglios.

— kingcambie (@kingcambie) December 20, 2017

Well said, Your Majesty.  I think you're on to something.

Canadians have bandied about the idea of annexing these West Indies islands (a self-governing British Overseas Territory) since 1917, making it either a province or a territory.  Maritime trade ties between the islands and Canada go back a century earlier than that.  Canadian companies own the islands' power company and hospitals, plus most of the banks and a number of hotels, resorts, and law firms.  The territory's premier, Rufus Ewing, said he was "not closing the door completely" to the idea when asked in 2014.  It's not out of the realm of possibility.

The appeal to the public is obvious: a tropical island vacation, accessible with a Canadian passport.  The previous Conservative government didn't see the benefit, shooting down MP Peter Goldring's 2014 attempt to open talks, with sources speaking of their concern that annexation might lead to "a flood of refugee applications."  But that just was their pessimism getting the better of them again.  For Trudeau's Liberals, what better way to remind Canadians of the "sunny ways" that propelled them to power than to provide unhindered access to one of the sunniest places on Earth?

But there's more. Only eight of the 40 islands that make up the Turks and Caicos are currently inhabited.  That's more than enough left for Trudeau and all 30 of his Cabinet ministers.  Each one could construct a satellite office for their respective department and work from there at will.  The island left over can host a time share for senators, or perhaps a Second Cup.

Don't you see?  With an entire island all to yourself, who needs an undisclosed villa?  Or someone else's island?  No longer will Cabinet ministers have any incentive to deceive the public about their vacation plans.  Since all of those islands will be Canadian soil, it'll be that much easier to travel there via official transports.  And since each one will have a Cabinet office, the public will have a much easier time finding out who else was there and why.

This would be the single greatest thing Trudeau could do to renew the interest of young Canadians in federal politics.  Can you just imagine the gusto with which he would announce the annexation?  "YOU get an island! YOU get an island! EVERYBODY GETS AN ISLAND!!!"

Let's not sit on our hands any further.  We can only handle so many more demands in Question Period for ministers to resign over their holidays.  The time to make the Turks and Caicos Canadian again is now. 

Written by Jess Morgan

Once again, Ottawa proves to have learned nothing after years of getting military procurement wrong.  To win a contract to supply the Canadian Armed Forces with 88 new fighter jets, bidding manufacturers will have to pass a new "economic impact test," as announced on Tuesday.  The details of the test will be determined over the next few months, although Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains has offered a preview: "If there is economic harm to Canada, if there's an impact on Canadian jobs, if there's an impact to some of the key sectors in the Canadian economy, you will be at a disadvantage."

Anyone following the endless Canadian military supply saga knows what that means.  The economic impact test has already earned the sobriquet of "the Boeing clause," referring to the government's recent dispute with U.S.-based Boeing Co., who requested action against Quebec-based Bombardier Inc. for unfairly subsidizing the cost of 75 new C Series jets ordered by Delta Air Lines this spring.  The U.S. Department of Commerce complied in the fall, slapping a 300 per cent tariff against Bombardier.  Unless Boeing drops its challenge, its Super Hornets have little chance of taking to the air for Canada.

The government took another shot at Boeing with its decision to buy an interim fleet of used F-18 fighter jets from Australia, instead of new Super Hornets, as previously planned.  This raised eyebrows quickly, given the similarity between the used F-18s and the 30-year-old fleet of CF-18s the government is looking to replace.  Multiple officials from both governments came forward to assure us that the used planes would be perfectly suitable, since they "know this fleet extremely well" (per Gen. Jonathan Vance, Chief of the Defence Staff) and have modifications ready to keep the planes in the air longer.

So perhaps Canada is not getting the "bucket of rusted-out bolts" that Conservative MP Tony Clement described in Question Period on Tuesday.  Not that his party has the moral authority to criticize the Liberal government's handling of this file.  Their own mishandling of a purchase of F-35 jets, announced in 2010 and slammed by the Auditor General in 2012, did a better job increasing the useful life of the replacement debate than that of any actual plane.

The government could avoid such snafus if it stopped using the military as an economic development agency for Canada's best-connected manufacturers.  Political and industry interference was built into the Conservatives' 2015 whole-of-government procurement strategy, which promised "timely" delivery and a "streamlined" purchase process.  But the "third-party oversight" this strategy established would be shared between two Cabinet departments and an arm's-length "Defence Analytics Institute" with four industry executives on its board of directors.  Worse, the strategy called for "leveraging our purchases of defence equipment to create jobs and economic growth in Canada" as if that's an official mission of the Canadian Armed Forces.  This muddled plan appears to have died with the Harper government, only to be replaced with more muddling from the Liberals.

Our military's two most pressing objectives should be to meet our capability requirements under NATO and NORAD, and to assert sovereignty in the Arctic.  Every procurement decision of the Canadian government, now and in the future, should be made with one or both of these goals at top of mind.  Yet a generation of efforts at getting new submarines, icebreakers, helicopters, even combat boots have been plagued with delays, overruns, and recalls everything but getting the best equipment, on the best timeline, at the best price.

If there's one thing Canada should be getting from Australia, it's their bipartisan, multigenerational commitment to a few clear and broadly applicable principles of national defence, as the Canadian Global Affairs Institute's Matthew Fisher noted last February.  All decisions on policy, budgeting, and procurement are made with due consideration for self-reliance, working with limited resources and influence, operations closer to home, and contingency planning.  Meanwhile, a simple defence White Paper in Canada only lasts as long as the government that drafted it.  No wonder a new Canadian government responds to the defensive decisions of the new one by simply hitting the reset button, as the Liberals did with the search for a new fighter jet.

Of course, by the time any government managed to draft those clear and broadly applicable principles, we might be reduced to scrounging spare plane parts from museums.

Oh, wait.

Photo Credit: Jeff Burney Loonie Politics

Written by Jess Morgan

A trite Canadian truism you hear from time to time is that while the United States was founded to be a deeply decentralized country, with maximum self-government powers afforded to its states, and ultra-centralized Canada the opposite, in modern times, these fates have ironically reversed.  Canada, they say, now has provinces far stronger than American states.

Proponents of this line of argument tend to focus on money.  Canadian provincial governments represent a much larger chunk of overall government spending than state governments do in America, though provincial governments also receive far more federal subsidies for this spending than their American counterparts.  In terms of self-determination, however, that is, the right of sub-national governments to craft laws that reflect different priorities from the federal government, and indeed, one another — what Americans sometimes call the "laboratories of democracy" idea — there is little contest.  States like Kentucky and Vermont take far more serious their right to diverge on a policy level, than, say, Alberta and Ontario.

For a revealing contemporary case study of North American federalism, consider the effort to legalize marijuana, a crusade both the United States and Canada are embarking upon at the moment.

In both the United States and Canada, narcotics are regulated by federal law, and in both countries marijuana is listed as a dangerous, banned substance.  Yet because American states hold a constitutional power Canadian provinces do not — the ability to pass criminal law — America has long been a patchwork of differing pot laws, with standards of decriminalization, medical use allowance, and now legalization, varying wildly from state to state.

To be sure, the contradiction between America's federal and state drug laws has provoked anxiety among legalization's champions, who fear a Washington crackdown.  President Obama's justice department quelled much of this by essentially choosing to let state law supersede.  The new Republican attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has been said to favor reversing course, though he is restrained by the ideology of his party, which has an official disposition of standoffishness when it comes to self-determination of the states.

In Canada, by contrast, an absence of criminal powers for the provinces has kept pot an exclusively  national concern, and with it, a far more one-size-fits-all mentality.  In contrast to America, all recent Canadian marijuana policy — the decision to allow its use as medicine, the authorization of private medicinal clinics, and now full-scale legalization — was decreed top-down by the feds.

A glimmer of opportunity for the Canadian system comes from our constitution's broad grant of authority to the provinces to regulate the sale of commercial goods.  This is the root of Canada's famously inconsistent liquor laws, in which the differing rules for where, when, and how you can buy booze reflect different paths taken by provincial governments in the post-prohibition era.

Since then, however, Canadian federalism has become disinterested in such creativity, a fact which reflects not only the provinces' increasing subservience to Ottawa at a legal level, but an ideological one, too.

If there is a premier in Canada Liberal, Conservative, or New Democrat — who has any real aversion to Prime Minister Trudeau's marquee initiative to legalize marijuana, they've shown scant sign of it.  In their public statements and acts, all have obediently swallowed the premise that legal pot is a legitimate initiative of the federal government which they are obliged to respectfully implement in the most helpful fashion they can muster.

Groupthink within the Canadian political class, in turn, dictates that legal pot should be sold by the state — a recent National Post survey reveals that of the provinces that have articulated plans to date, all but Alberta seem to be in favor of government monopolies, at either the wholesale or retail level, controlling the drug's distribution to the public.  This is in sync with the other unchallenged consensus that pot sales must generate government revenue — Minister Morneau recently agreed to a 75-25 provincial/federal split â€” which implies government's commercial interest in pot's sale and consumption.

This, however, grinds against the other universally shared assumption that pot is vaguely dangerous in some way, and should thus be demonized through expensive government propaganda, with the permissible place, time, and manner of sale subject to elaborate regulation to discourage irresponsible consumption (and presumably alleviate the guilty consciences of the lawmaker community).

Whether there will be any actual enforcement of these costly new regulations seems an open question; for years Canada's provincial governments have turned a blind eye to vast amounts of illegal cannabis sales in their largest cities — including brazenly illegal storefronts — on the grounds that conventional wisdom declares persecution of pot dealers passé.

Among outside observers, in the press and elsewhere, there seems to be a slowly solidifying consensus that Canada's legalization of marijuana is being systemically botched, subordinate to all the stereotypical predispositions of waste, redundancy, contradiction, and inefficiency to which the bloated dopey beast of government is inclined.  In theory, no provincial pol desires this, but the lack of any strong voice of dissent evokes Jerry Harvey's concept of the Abilene Paradox, in which a bunch of people too timid to think for themselves passively go along with what they assume to be the settled consensus of the larger group — even though individually, each member of said group privately holds deep reservations.

A few years from now, as we survey the aftermath of  legalized marijuana in Canada, which will almost certainly have achieved none of its stated goals but exacerbated many of the problems it was supposed to solve, there will be plenty of blame to go around.  Begin with the sad decline of Canadian federalism.

Written by J.J. McCullough

After a year of predictability, everything in Ontario politics has been turned on its head in the last month.

First was Premier Kathleen Wynne's beginning of her mea culpa town hall tour across the province.  In what looks like an unprecedented move, where a sitting premier uses taxpayer money to essentially do pre-election campaigning, Wynne is taking a page out of PM Justin Trudeau's playbook in trying to directly engage the electorate in the hopes of changing the channel on a spate of negative headlines.  Because these town hall events are government-funded they are not supposed to have any sign of Liberal Party of Ontario involvement and have to be open to the general public.  I attended the first town hall on November 20, at the Concert Hall on Toronto's Yonge Street — in a Liberal stronghold — and there were no OLP signs or paraphernalia, and Wynne didn't mention her opponents, instead focussing the conversation on her government's record.  However, one odd thing about the town hall was there were a group of 20-30 specially-selected attendees given bracelets and seats on the stage, behind Wynne and the host of the event, former Globe and Mail journalist and current vice-president of PR firm NATIONAL Jane Taber.  When Wynne spent 90 minutes answering questions from the floor she picked a few from this specially-selected group, which seems odd when this is supposed to be a non-partisan event.  Who were these people given preferential treatment?

Nevertheless, the event felt authentic overall and most of the questions came from upset Ontarians who felt the Liberal government or Wynne had slighted them in some way.  Even third-party advertising group Ontario Proud was able to crash the event and ask the premier why her government paid the Hydro One CEO millions of dollars last year.  Ontario Proud also recorded video of the uglier moments of the event to put on its Facebook page to share with its nearly 300,000 followers (for more background on Ontario Proud you can check out my piece for CANADALAND, "The King of Canadian Conservative Shitposting").  The second town hall takes place in Brampton — another Liberal stronghold — Wednesday evening.  Although I can't make it, Loonie Politics columnist Josh Lieblein will be in attendance and is going to give me a full report on what should be another raucous event.  It will also be interesting to see if Wynne does some town halls in rural Ontario, or if these supposedly non-partisan town halls are only aimed at Liberal ridings and predominantly Liberal-voting constituents.

The second major sea change in Ontario politics was Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario Leader Patrick Brown's makeover.  For months the press and opposition parties had been hammering Brown and the PCPO for not putting forth their own plan and solutions for how they would deal with the problems of the province they so readily criticize the Liberal government for.  The PCPO policy convention finally put speculation to rest when Brown revealed he was taking the party into Red Tory territory.  Brown unveiled his "People's Guarantee", a signed contract with the people of Ontario, which promises if he doesn't give the middle class 22.5 per cent off their income tax, give families up to a 75 per cent tax refund for childcare, give hydro ratepayers 12 per cent more off their hydro, give $1.9 billion towards mental health in the next decade and enact a "Trust, Integrity, and Accountability Act" he won't seek a second term in office.  The reader might have noticed those guarantees were all about giving Ontarians more handouts and tax breaks from the government.  Not exactly typical of the Conservative playbook, but probably one that is more palatable for a largely progressive and big-government-loving electorate.  The roughly 150 policy proposals released at the end of last month by Brown comprise mostly of increased government spending, which raises the question how a PC government would be able to balance the books in its second year in office.  The math doesn't add up.

But here's where the real irony comes in.  The opposition parties are now questioning the fiscal viability of the PC's plan.  Yet the LPO hasn't been able to balance the books in years and has racked up record level debt, but now the party is claiming the PCs are the ones that can't be trusted and are guilty of over promising.  Meanwhile the Ontario NDP have pipe dreams like regulating gas prices and buying back Hydro One without accurately costing any of it.  Basically no parties' numbers come even close to adding up.

Another noteworthy change from the convention was that Brown had changed his haircut and had his charismatic and successful sisters introduce him, two factors that could help soften Brown's heretofore cold public image.  It's like the PCPO and Brown were playing dead until finally showing their hand at the end of November.

Finally, the third sea change is the supposed fickleness of a vast swath of the electorate of Ontario, who apparently swing wildly back and forth in their support for the three parties, unable to make up their minds on who they'll vote for.  According to a Forum poll released in early December, the Liberals had fallen back to third place at 24 per cent compared to the Tories at 40 per cent and the NDP at 26 per cent.  But just as things were looking pretty bleak for the Liberals, they miraculously surged back to first place four days later, according to pollsters at Campaign Research.  The new poll showed the Liberals at 35 per cent, Conservatives at 34 per cent and the NDP at 22 per cent.

Of course that kind of rapid change in the electorate over no time flat is completely implausible.  Especially with nothing Roy-Moore-level controversial swinging the tide.  Instead it's far more probable both of these polls aren't worth the rivers of ink and breathless discussions given to them.

The fiscal and polling predictions in Ontario all are a load of bunk.  The methodology of these polls and them being unquestioningly reported by partisan news outlets shouldn't be taken seriously.  The fiscal projections by the different parties need to be revealed for their irrationality.  The PCs need to be challenged on their all-goodies, no-tightening-the-belt platform.  And the Liberals need to be called out for spending taxpayer money on de facto pre-election campaign stops and for claiming a balanced budget that hides the true costs.  Breaking down these phoney numbers and events will be exhausting, but it's far more worthy endeavour than taking and reporting them at face value.

Written by Graeme C. Gordon