redding, Author at Loonie Politics

John Tory, the mayor of Toronto, bothers me. I think it's because he almost always, like a socially recalcitrant but well-meaning dad, takes three tries to do the woke thing, or maybe it's because he talks in circles even when answering the simplest of questions, but for whatever reason, I've never been his biggest fan.

Lately, Tory has been bugging me more than usual. Toronto has both a structural budget hole and a structural backlog on major infrastructure, particularly transit and housing. But Tory, operating in the post-Rob Ford paradigm of taxation timidity, categorically refuses to raise property taxes above the rate of inflation. To be fair, he campaigned on such a pledge.
But, ultimately, Toronto's finances are a perennial problem because its politicians refuse to bite the bullet and raise taxes; a tax increase at the rate of inflation isn't a raise so much as a cost-of-living adjustment.

Instead of raising taxes to pay for the investments Tory insists the city needs, he's chased a few boutique taxes (a hotel tax, for instance) and belatedly championed a plan to toll Toronto-owned highways, until his request was turned down by all three parties at Queen's Park.
Tory's plan was essentially to insist that commuters from the 905 â€” Markham, Mississauga and other GTA cities â€” pay to use Toronto-owned highways. In principle, he had a point. But it did not sit well, to say the least, with commuters in the 905 region, who regularly have their own property taxes go up by 2-5%, plus capital levies, to pay for the growth the region is experiencing. In essence, then, Tory was looking to outsource his need for a tax rise onto the 905, even at a time when the 905 resident is likely facing greater tax increases than their neighbours in Toronto.

Tory was hugely miffed when Premier Wynne announced she would not support his request to toll highways. All three parties at Queen's Park are united in rejecting tolls, and polling suggests the Conservatives Tory once led are poised to form government, yet it's Wynne's government who is getting the Mayor's ire â€” that seems at least a slight case of misplaced anger, but fair enough.

Now, Tory clearly feels like the rug was pulled out from under him when his tolling proposal was disallowed. However, the Premier did pledge she would double the gas-tax transfer to cities, which will provide Toronto with roughly comparable value as to what tolling could generate, so Tory's fiscal issues are at least dealt with even if his need for autonomy is still bruised.

I don't want to re-litigate to toll or not to toll. What I do object to his Tory's passive-aggressive responses since.

For the past few weeks, Tory has been demanding the province's upcoming budget fund Toronto's priorities, again, particularly in housing and transit. In response, exacerbated provincial cabinet minister after exacerbated provincial cabinet minister has been left to respond with various riffs on the refrain: "we are", followed by a list of projects already in the works with provincial funding. This week, Tory praised the Trudeau government for their investments; the province pointed out in reply that they're glad the feds are back at the table but the province has been investing even when the Harper government was cutting back. It's the inter-governmental equivalent of talking past each other.

What bothers me here is that Tory is essentially going from wanting to tax the 905 to asking for a provincial bailout (something he decried as acting like a needy school boy earlier this year). In both cases, he was seeking to pass the buck.

But that's exactly my point: the mayor of Toronto has gone from wanting to tax 905 commuters to somewhat tersely demanding a provincial bailout, even while complaining about a lack of autonomy. Tory could have the autonomy he craves to let Canada's six-largest government budget for its own future â€” if he had the political courage to raise property taxes in line with neighbouring municipalities. Until he does, he'll be caught demanding more money even while complaining that it's a demeaning exercise.

Photo Credit: Toronto Star

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If you haven't heard much from Canadian politicians about the NHL's decision to stay out of the 2018 Winter Olympics, it's not because you've missed their reaction. It's because they don't really care.

Canada's Minister of Sport, Carla Qualtrough, did take to twitter after the decision was announced. But even then, it was not an angry rant, as they abound on the social media platform. She merely expressed her support for Hockey Canada to defend our gold medals despite the announcement, which was "disappointing." Conservative Leadership candidate Lisa Raitt denounced the minister for dealing with this issue with a tweet, by tweeting her displeasure. On twitter. Sigh.

When Qualtrough was pushed by the press gallery to say more, she stuck to talking points about Olympic heroes and supporting our athletes, before passing the puck back to the players, hoping that they would show up anyway, and to you, asking that you pressure the NHL and its teams.

In the Commons, only Quebec City Conservative MP GÃ©rard Deltell raised the issue, but not in Question Period as you would expect. During a debate on the Federal budget, Deltell told Liberal MP Wayne Long that he would like to know what he thought about the NHL's decision, but even then, he pointed out that it was not the issue being debated. Long could have used this setup for an easy one-timer, but instead skated away.

Only Quebec City Mayor Regis Labeaume has expressed a strong opinion about the decision, mostly laying the blame on the International Olympic Committee and its "current reputation", a position no doubt triggered by Labeaume's own dealings with the IOC regarding a possible Winter Olympics bid by la Vieille Capitale.

But don't our politicians want our best players to represent our beloved country, you ask? Well, yes, of course. But they also know you don't really care, either. And if you don't care, politicians won't care.

Because, as the NHL season is winding down, playoff fever is about to hit Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton and Calgary. This, the NHL hopes, will cure your Olympics' blues. The Stanley Cup finals will be played in mid-June. Then summer will come and go, and by the time you put your mind back to hockey for next season, it will be too late to reverse the decision and allow players to go travel and compete in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Calendars will have been set, arenas booked, travel plans firmed up.

Of course, the decision for NHL players to attend the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi came only in July 2013. But unless the NHL is bluffing or the IOC blinks, it will be the first time the NHL has not participated in the Winter Olympics since 1994. And it is a shame, really. Some will argue, as one of my Twitter followers did, that we are better off with amateur players who appreciate being at the Olympics than overpaid NHL Players. Except NHL players do appreciate it. And this is exactly the point: the best players in the world are not being paid to play in the Olympics. It brings the spirit of the game back to its essence. Playing for pride. Playing for your teammates. Playing for your country. Playing for everyone back home.

Alas, if money is somewhat out of the equation for hockey players, it is at the crux of the issue for both the NHL and the International Olympic Committee. TV rights, advertising revenues, players' insurance, you name it.

The NHLPA reacted quite negatively to the news. But will players defy Gary Bettman's edict? Maybe some players will. Alex Ovechkin was very clear: "Somebody going to tell me 'don't go', I don't care. I just go." Will his Caps' teammate Evgeni Kuznetsov also represent Russia? "Of course, if Russia needs us. Of course." Most others, while critical, didn't commit to go.

Could 200 top NHL players follow Ovechkin and travel to Pyeongchang next February, despite the ban? While the European Federations might not be shy to suit up NHLers, it will definitely not be the case for Hockey Canada and USA Hockey, who are relying heavily on the NHL for funding. The NHL will not be afraid to crosscheck anyone who defies its decision: players, teams or NHLPA alike.

Which brings it back to you. The NHL has already shown it is taking Canadian fans for granted. Calgary Flames owner Ken King just made a passive-aggressive statement about moving the team out of town if a new arena isn't built. The League is expanding in Las Vegas, of all places, snubbing Quebec City, assuming (rightly) that fans there will still watch hockey even without a team. New York is big enough for two teams, but not Toronto, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Canadian TV rights are worth 400 million a year twice as much as US TV rights, for a tenth of the population. The NHL knows that Canadian arenas will remain full this spring. And next year. They, too, don't really care what you think. They know you will show up or tune in anyway. Who cares about the Olympics?

Photo Credit: Toronto Star

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Even though I think his idea is completely ridiculous, I feel for Maclean's journalist Scott Gilmore, who went public with plans for a new centre-right party in light of ongoing shenanigans and alt-rightward drift that have been plaguing the federal leadership race.

The problem I have with Gilmore's idea to have a series of dinners across the country with conservatives who are just as embarrassed as he is to call themselves conservatives is the fact that the decision sprung from a feeling of shame rather than any genuine belief in any coherent political philosophy or coalescing around an issue.

To make matters worse, the thousands of Canadians that Gilmore has apparently identified have been standing around uncomfortably waiting for someone else to make the first move for years.

I don't trust such self conscious and diffident people to deal with the tough issues confronting Canada should they ever form government.

Still, I don't think Gilmore deserves the kind of accusations of disloyalty he is currently being tarred with on social media. I'm even willing to believe that he didn't do this to appease his wife, who just happens to be Liberal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, or that this is some Trudeauvian plot to split the party.

That's because Gilmore has already made enough mistakes that we don't have to resort to conspiracy theory. He's not disloyal because he genuinely and naively thought this would be well received, and he's not a pawn in a plot because Trudeau's people are more skilled than this at dividing the party.

Here are the three most glaring errors I can see.

If You Twist My Armâ€¦.

Have you ever noticed how every time someone thinks about running for the leadership of a political party in Canada, they spend months refusing offers and denying the thought has even crossed their minds while an anonymous group of activists set up a website trying to "draft" them?

I used to roll my eyes at the notion of obviously ambitious and power-hungry politicians pretending that they had to be dragged with their fingernails digging into the floor to the party's leadership. Now, however, I realize the utility of this deception, because Canadians really, really don't trust self-promoters, or anyone who appears to be in it for themselves.

And this was Gilmore's first mistake. He put himself front and centre.

Unless your last name is Trudeau, or you are one of the lucky few Canadians to achieve international superstardom, you have no business presenting yourself as the solver of Canada's problems. That's why our most successful politicians barely tinkered with the machinery that keeps our country clunking along and couldn't be picked out of a lineup by most of the people who elected them.

Conservation of Matter

I like to tell conservatives from other lands, "If your definition of conservatism is: Never change anything, ever, for any reason, then Canada is the most conservative country in the world."

It doesn't matter what you're proposing to change. It doesn't matter how minor or irrelevant the change is. Look at how the NDP gets into screaming matches over whether to remove the "New" from "New Democratic Party."

Once upon a time I and a few other enterprising young conservatives decided we were going to merge the two provincial conservative youth wings in Ontario into one, because none of us could figure out why we needed two. Unlike Gilmore, we took the additional step of a holding a referendum of Conservative youth in Ontario on the idea just so we could say we had the support of the youth members.

Even after the vote passed with a ridiculously high percentage somewhere in the 90% range if memory serves- we were astounded when a few youth members decided the merger had to be stopped at all costs once we got through drafting a joint constitution.

Our mistake was assuming that senior party members weren't going to drop everything to stop what seemed, at best, to be a formality. The passion, creativity and venom of our critics was astounding, and of course we were accused of disloyalty, being Liberals, losing the next election, destroying the conservative movement and worse.

Listen to Gilmore on CBC's The Current from this past Friday trying to defend his idea against two other party activists vehemently opposed to the idea and who are barely restraining themselves throughout. He seems utterly befuddled by the backlash. But if I and those other conservative youth did more homework than he did and still got put through the wringer, I have to ask- what did he expect?

The Future Is Now

When you look at Gilmore's website, you get the sense that he wants this party to be a community project where everyone contributes equally. He and his guests are going to sit down, have a couple of conversations over dinner, and see what develops.

OK. So let's assume that the best and brightest of Canada's conservative movement turn up, instead of a bunch of disaffected Red Tories who have had it up to here with these socially conservative yokels who keep messing things up. Assume they eventually get past ranting and raving about how everything is the fault of those OTHER guys. What then?

How many people with experience building a party from the ground up is he expecting to come to dinner? Are we going to get fundraisers, campaign managers, senators? People with relevant expertise? Are there any people with experience drafting a constitution, creating software for managing data, setting up bank accounts, and with proprietary access to the all important lists of people to call?

Does Gilmore expect that fiscally conservative, gay marriage supporting students who want pot legalized will suddenly acquire the expertise to compete with, much less defeat, hardened CPC full-timers?

Let me close by saying once again that I don't begrudge Gilmore his attempt. This leadership race is about settling- for the next couple of years at least what kind of party we actually want to have beyond the Stephen Harper Party. Everything that has happened is to be expected and, in any other place and time, would be a welcome if messy exercise in democracy without any frightened exclamations that the end of the CPC is nigh.

But we are Canadians, and we have been socialized to believe that difference of opinion inevitably leads to acrimony and disaster. So, more likely than not, conservatives in Canada will do what they do best and make their worst fears come true.

Written by Josh Lieblein

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In the face of bills meandering their way through the Upper Chamber, the Leader of the Government in the Senate err, "government representative," Senator Peter Harder, has put forward a series of proposals to ensure that bills get their sober second thought in a more streamlined and efficient manner. If this sounds familiar, it's because much of it eerily follows some of the proposals put forward by Government House Leader Bardish Chagger in her own discussion paper on how to "modernize" the House of Commons' own Standing Orders for the sake of predictability and efficiency.

As with Chagger's proposals demonstrating her dubious competence as House Leader to negotiate with other parties to get bills through in a reasonable amount of time (which is coupled with our increasingly debased parliamentary debating culture), this proposal by Harder looks an awful lot to those inside the institution as an admission of failure that he's unable to do his own job of shepherding the government's agenda, so now he wants to change the rules. In recent days, Harder has gone out of his way to insult senators who were appointed under previous processes, and in his paper, launches a broadside at the Conservatives forming the chamber's Official Opposition, accusing them of delaying for the sake of delay, and of undermining the credibility of their arguments through use of tactics.

Part of the problem, however, is that Harder hasn't been doing his job. I've spoken to a number of people in the Senate who say that on these very bills that he's now expressing grave concern that they've taken so long bills like C-6 on citizenship revocations, and Bill C-16 on trans rights Harder hasn't been trying to use his moral suasion as "government representative" to try and get the other caucuses to try and move them along. As well, he has yet to use the actual powers given to him as Government Leader (though he may style himself something else) to invoke time allocation on bills that he sees as critical to get passed in shorter periods of time. You would think that if they were that important, that he would be able to convince enough of the independents senators or the Senate Liberals to support such a motion go get these bills through, but he hasn't.

Another reason why Harder seems not to be doing his job is that opposition majorities are not a new phenomenon in the Senate. In fact, they are a regular occurrence after a change in government, and yet, we have a history of Government Leaders who have been able to get legislation through the chamber despite an angry and more numerous caucus on the opposite side, with plenty of hard work and negotiation. They managed to make it work using the existing rules of the Senate, and yet Harder has not and as we've seen, indications seem to be that he hasn't even tried. For him to ask for the rules to change at this point seems premature at best, and suspect at worst.

In his paper, released on Friday, Harder cites several models that the Senate could consider rather than the status quo things like programming motions (as they do in the UK, while Chagger's proposal for the same has MPs are up in arms), uniform time limits after which bills are considered to be "deemed adopted" whether they were voted on or not (much as the Estimates are now in the House of Commons), setting completion dates for bills into the Rules of the Senate (as the Saskatchewan legislature employs), or his preferred model, the creation of a Senate Business Committee to schedule and manage the debates. There was a programming motion used around the debate on Bill C-14, with medically-assisted dying, but that was also in recognition of the fact that there was a Supreme Court of Canada-imposed deadline on the process, which senators were cognisant of. Most other bills that aren't of a fiscal nature don't face those kinds of time constraints.

Part of the problem with his Business Committee proposal is that it seems to misunderstand that the Senate is a deliberative body, and sometimes, deliberation takes time (which the proponents of the amendments to C-6 have certainly found). One of the reasons that we don't often see a lot of successive debate on bills is that the next speaker generally wants to take time to craft a response to the speech that was just delivered before responding to it, which is valid. As well, the current Rules of the Senate greatly empower individual senators and ensures that they have the right to speak to any issue it's one of the reasons why the entire Order Paper is read out on every sitting day, though generally caucuses will negotiate as to what business they plan to cover that day at the "scroll meeting" every morning. Harder's Business Committee proposal would be a step to curtailing those individual powers, which seems a bit antithetical to his other usual stance in that he's looking to blow up the Westminster model in the Senate and trying to do away with caucuses in general. It's also very problematic that his specific proposals that different committee decisions would require different thresholds to pass goes against the constitutional requirements that the Senate be able to operate by majority vote.

The fact that Harder is trying to push this issue of trying to better manage the Senate on his own terms is indicative that he's trying to grab power without having the votes to do so in the chamber, and that's a problem. As well, there should be no presumption that all bills must pass, because it's the Senate's constitutional role to stop bills that they deem a problem, nor should sober second thought be relegated to a timed exercise. The Senate has institutional independence, and Harder seems to have forgotten that fact in his bid to turn the chamber into a bureaucratic advisory body.

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On Friday the annual sunshine list of all of the public-sector employees making over $100,000 in Ontario was released. The list caused the usual feeding frenzy throughout media circles as they plucked the most interesting and high-paying of the lot.

However, what is more important than focusing on those few top execs paid over a million dollars is the overall monstrous and unsustainable size of the public sector today at large. Despite the thousands of Hydro One employees no longer disclosed on the list the past two years (since the Liberals began selling the profitable asset off), the number of public-sector employees on the sunshine list jumped from 115,431 in last year's list to 123,410 this year. And next year that number will undoubtedly rise even more drastically as wage freezes are lifted and the Liberals look to buy the continued allegiance of the glutinous public-sector unions and members.

Recently retired Canadian Press reporter Keith Leslie pointed out this bloating of public-sector salaries in a tweet: "22,311 Ontario public sector workers made $144K or more in 2016, equivalent to $100K in 1996 when 4,576 made first Sunshine list." It would also be fair to say that with many underlings now cracking into the list that the public sector has generally benefited from salary increases in the past two decades that far exceed that of the private sector or inflation.

In the most recent data (2011) from Statistics Canada I could find on the Ontario public sector, there were 1,330,805 people employed by the three levels of government and $74.4 billion spent on their wages and salaries. Since then, public sector employment has only increased, and I'd hazard a guess, ravenously eats up more of the province's revenues (I'll get back to the reader on the numbers if/when I find them).

But this should surprise no one. When public unions in Ontario spend 94 per cent of all third-party advertising in the last three elections ($15 million) primarily attacking the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, essentially playing kingmaker, the trend towards a more bloated government bureaucracy and exorbitant wages and salaries is the inevitable consequence.

And now this unsustainable trend is leading to its inevitable conclusion. The province of Ontario has a debt of about $317 billion and is the most indebted sub-sovereign borrower in the world, yet the Wynne government still thinks we can afford to spend another $130 billion in transportation projects. Then there's the scheme to sell off Hydro One to make a quick buck to artificially balance the books just before an election, only to have no real solution to stay out of red ink in subsequent years, especially after selling off another revenue-generating asset and increasing the debt load by re-amortizing debt on hydro projects for temporary relief.

So when King Midas can no longer pretend there's not a looming tsunami of debt about to crash down on the province do you think average Ontarians are going to still grind their teeth once a year at a lunchroom supervisor making $111,949.67? Do you really think that job will remain when reality sets in?

Perhaps it's time public-sector employees stopped asking what more their province can do for them, but rather what they can do for their province. More likely than not however, their greed will end up with many of them jobless and pension-less as the ponzi schemes unravel.

Written by Graeme C. Gordon

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The Quebec Liberal government tabled its budget last week and it quickly became evident that it was a political masterpiece in communications and cynicism. After three long years of cuts and austerity, the Quebec government is back! There is still one budget to go before the 2018 election, but clearly, the Quebec Liberals have turned the pre-election corner. Couillard's plan rests partly on economic growth, which has turned out as it was projected in 2014. If growth remains stable, expect even more goodies in the next budget, a few months before the next election.

But let's be crystal clear: If the PLQ now has surpluses and can reinvest and sell this budget as the "return of hope", it is only because of major previous cuts to public services when they took hope away. One has to admire the planning that went into it, looking at the election cycle, to cut deeply first in order to be able to build up a chest of pre-election goodies.

Coming less than a week after the stationary exercise bike that was the Federal Liberal's budget, the timing couldn't have been better. The contrast between the two budgets is certainly helping Philippe Couillard and his government.

While Justin Trudeau's government has lost control of the deficit with very little to show for it in terms of jobs, actual infrastructure projects, help for middle class families or increases in support for the front-line services they rely on, the Quebec government is increasing social investments, especially in health and education; implementing tax cuts and getting rid of some user fees while balancing the books.

Of course, this is only possible because Quebec's public services have been starved for the past three years. Premier Couillard likes to say that the Liberals "literally saved Quebec", ignoring of course that it was the Liberals who were drowning the people in the first place.

By gutting the capacity of the state to deliver services and help people, the Quebec Liberals have simply set the stage to implement its greater vision, one where the private sector takes more and more room. One key example is the 2.2 billion dollars Quebec will invest in the Caisse de DÃ©pÃ´t's RÃ©seau Ã‰lectrique MÃ©tropolitain. The REM, as it is known, is a 67-kilometre electric, driverless train system that will link Montreal's airport and train station to the north and south shore. Instead of investing that money in the four underfunded public transit agencies already in place (count them four: the STM, AMT, STL and RTL), the government is going all-in with this P3 project.

Yet, while cynical, the plan is being executed quite well. Will it be enough for Quebec voters to forget all the major problems, scandals and mismanagement? The aftermath of the Charbonneau commission on corruption? The major breakdowns in the health care system under the chaotic performance of Health Minister GaÃ©tan Barette? The Minister of Education's ejectable seat, with five different ministers since the last election? The increased fees for childcare despite the previous election's rhetoric? The completely disorganized mess during the biggest snow storm of the year that left hundreds stranded all night on Highway 13? The answer is possibly.

Because meanwhile, facing Couillard's Liberals, is a divided opposition. The right-wing Coalition Avenir QuÃ©bec is not lifting off the ground: even its Leader FranÃ§ois Legault admits that the party's organisation is lagging. At this point, Legault is mostly putting his hopes on people wanting change and being (slightly) more popular than LisÃ©e to ride a wave to power.

Meanwhile, the separatists are divided amongst three camps. While Jean-FranÃ§ois LisÃ©e trumpets that the Parti QuÃ©bÃ©cois is still the Admiral Ship of the Soverignty Fleet, the PQ is taking hits from the surrounding flotilla. Starboard, it is being shelled by the radical Option Nationale, because of LisÃ©e's decision to postpone a referendum until after 2022. Port side, the PQ is being torpedoed by the leftist Quebec Solidaire and the arrival of media darling Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, taking such a hit that the PQ won't even run against QS' new star recruit. To complicate matters, there is the possibility of a reborn Quebec NDP running candidates in 2018.

Under these circumstances, if an election had been held before the tabling of the budget, chances are Couillard would have formed another government, albeit probably a minority. Things are looking even better for him now.

Photo Credit: Huffington Post

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A high-ranking staff member at a public institution has done something stupid. Caught in the eye of the storm, the organization has dropped the cone of silence. The offending employee's comments have been scrubbed clean, and the company has enacted a policy of silence. The company will say nothing, in the hopes this will all just disappear.

The problem here is the organization in question is the Globe and Mail. But this is the paradox: a newspaper that routinely demands public officials be accountable for their decisions has decided these standards do not apply to themselves.

I'm writing, of course, about boobghazi. In the pages of Canada's Most Important Newspaper, Leah McLean wrote a truly bizarre column about a party where she decided it might be fun to have someone else's baby give her a quick suckle, without bothering to maybe ask the kid's parents if that would be okay. The baby daddy was Conservative leadership candidate Michael Chong, who has confirmed the whole "odd" incident.

Anyway, if you've read this column, you probably won't have read it on the Globe's own website. Just as people started to notice the immense weirdness of the story, poof it vanished. Now if you head to the link you get an error message. Unfortunately for the newspaper, the Internet Archive exists, so the column is still easily accessible.

So this leaves us with the question: if McLaren's column is true, why was it unpublished?

It's a question still waiting to be answered. A number of stories have been written about the column, by outlets both foreign and domestic. None of them, from the National Post to the Washington Post, received any response from the paper.

The Globe owes the public and its readers an answer. When a newspaper makes a mistake or has to remove a story, they post a notice saying, "This is what we've done, and this is why we've done it." It's a way of being transparent with readers so they know what's going on in their newspaper.

In absence of actual information, absurdity fills the void.

Living as we are in the Age of Bullshit, where lies and spin have been focused grouped into shiny perfection, newspapers are looking to burnish their image as truth-tellers. The Globe is no exception. In an open letter to readers earlier this year, Globe editor-in-chief David Walmsley writes how important journalism is in a democratic society, and how seriously the newspaper takes its responsibility.

"The values of a strong and independent press are clear. Journalism is driven by a commitment to curiosity, a fidelity to the facts and a determination to discover the unknown," he writes. "Our commitment is to provide the truth, to offer a safe harbour for the exchange of ideas that is central to a fair and just society."

It's interesting though, when it comes to the truth of the paper's handling of McLaren's column, Walmsley has provided nothing. For kicks, I emailed him to ask why McLaren's column was removed, and why there was no retraction notice posted. I've not heard back.

One of the remarkable things I've found in my time doing media reporting is how much like their public relations rivals reporters really are. Rare is it for a journalist to reply to direct questions about their work, or the work of their staff. Most of the time, an email to an editor or producer will get forwarded on to the communications department, who will issue an anodyne reply.

Theoretically, this is the bailiwick of the Globe's public editor, Sylvia Stead. Her position was designed there to stand between the newspaper's staff and the public to sort out this kind of mess.

The trouble is Stead is bad at her job. Whenever she's faced with a controversy of any weight and consequence, her wagon gets circled with all the rest of Globe's management.

Take, for example, the sortied tale of Margaret Wente. One of the Globe's star columnists, Wente has a nasty habit of stealing the work of others and passing it off as her own. This is, in theory, the kind of situation where a public editor could really hold their paper to account. Instead, the public editor has been less an advocate for the readers and more a sanitized conduit for the paper's management.

Confronted with Wente's plagrarism, Stead recapped the allegations, quoted from the Globe's ethics handbook, and got a quote from Walmsley. She told readers how the corrections would read in the paper, and what notes would be added to the columns. She did not offer analysis of what happened or pronounce on whether Wente's behaviour was appropriate.

In other words, she issued a press release, dressed up as a public editor column.

So far, Stead hasn't written anything about McLaren's column. I emailed her to ask if she would be tackling the issue, and received no reply. But even if she did write on it, I have little hope her column would be of consequence.

If the Globe was really committed to the truth, it would be straight with its readers. Until then, the high-minded rhetoric about truth, justice, and democracy are just words â€” worth little more than the paper they're printed on.

Photo Credit: National Post

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His departure from McGill was a terrible moment for the talented columnist and editor and a disgrace to one of Canada's oldest institutions of higher learning

TORONTO, Ont./Troy Media/ There was a time when Canadian universities defended academic freedom with passion, authority and gravitas. Those days are over: hurt feelings and crocodile tears now trump free speech on our university campuses.

Here's a pertinent example. Andrew Potter resigned last week as director of the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University, mere days after writing a critical column about Quebec in Maclean's magazine. (He'll stay on as an associate professor for the duration of his three-year contract.)

His March 20 piece examined the recent snowstorm in Montreal, which caused a shutdown of a major route, Hwy 13, and left 300 cars temporarily stranded. He depicted this "fiasco" as a "political scandal, marked by administrative laziness, weak leadership, and a failure of communication."

Potter said it was an example of "the essential malaise eating away at the foundations of Quebec society." In his view, "Compared to the rest of the country, Quebec is an almost pathologically alienated and low-trust society, deficient in many of the most basic forms of social capital that other Canadians take for granted."

For proof, he analyzed Statistics Canada's 2013 General Social Survey. Quebecers ranked last, or near the bottom, in categories like civic engagement, trusting people and having close friendships.

"Quebec isn't just at the lower end of a relatively narrow spectrum," wrote Potter, but "rather, most of the country is bunched up, with Quebec as a significant outlier. At some point, charm and uniqueness betrays itself as serious dysfunction and the famous joie de vivre starts to look like nihilism."

The reaction from la belle province was anything other than, well, belle.

Many were furious at Potter, a former Ottawa Citizen editor-in-chief and Maclean's columnist, for the less-than-cheery portrait he painted. Several were angry at the magazine, which famously called Quebec "the most corrupt province" in its Oct. 4, 2010, issue.

McGill kept a relatively low public profile during this brouhaha, save for a March 21 tweet: "The views expressed by @JAndrewPotter in the @MacleansMag article do not represent those of #McGill." In private, the scuttlebutt was different. As Maclean's reporter Michael Friscolanti noted, "Sources say McGill endured such intense backlash over Potter's Maclean's piece that the university left him only two choices: resign or be fired."

On March 23, Potter officially resigned from, as he called it, "the dream job of a lifetime" due to "the ongoing negative reaction within the university community and the broader public to my column."

It was a terrible moment for the talented columnist and editor and a disgrace to one of Canada's oldest institutions of higher learning.

Columnists tend to have strong opinions and engaging ideas. They write, speak, research and analyze particular areas of interest, and share their plethora of opinions in print, radio and TV. You can agree or disagree with them, but they should have the freedom to discuss their positions and defend their views.

Potter has been doing this for years. He's written thought-provoking columns and books on topics like political philosophy, pop culture and consumerism. Like all columnists, he's not perfect: he apologized on his Facebook page for the Maclean's column (before his resignation) due to "some rhetorical flourishes that go beyond what is warranted by either the facts or my own beliefs."

It's not like McGill didn't know this about Potter. They must have realized he would continue to express opinions and the free exchange of ideas at the institute, albeit in different ways than column writing. As well, they should have defended his right to free speech, as an academic and as a human being.

Based on what happened, they either did nothing to help him or everything to bring him down. Whatever the case, it's lodged a massive dagger in academic freedom at our universities that will be virtually impossible to remove.

Troy Media columnist and political commentator Michael Taube was a speechwriter for former prime minister Stephen Harper.

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While the filibusters around whether or not to proceed with discussions around changing the Standing Orders continue to loom in the House of Commons and its Procedure and House Affairs committee, it behoves us to take a look back at where this desire to "streamline" and be more "predictable" and "efficient" comes from.

The desire for a government to get through their legislative agenda in the face of opposition is a time-honoured struggle in any system of government, and our Westminster-style parliaments are no exception. Westminster itself has faced challenges dating back to 1832, around the advent of our modern system of Responsible Government, and has tried to use various procedural tools in order to deal with it, many of which we inherited in Canada. But we've also picked up our own bad habits here in Canada, in part because of the way we've tried to "modernize" the way our own House of Commons operates.

Many of these bad habits come down to the way we structure debates which is to say that for the most part, we're no longer actually debating legislation or issues. Instead, thanks to the advent of speaking lists and doing away with the rules forbidding prepared speeches, we're no longer actually engaging in a process of debate, but rather, we're simply tasking MPs to stand up in the House of Commons to read speeches into the record. The poor wretches condemned to House duty get up, read their script, and then half the time pack up and leave immediately after as the next person gets up to read their own prepared speech. The rest of the MPs who have to be there to maintain quorum are more likely than not doing paperwork or are working on their laptops, some of them with conspicuous headphones on, not paying attention. Sometimes MPs will ask something in the few minutes allotted to questions and comments after a speech, but half the time, it's their own bench standing up to reinforce their points.

What this has in turn led to is an inability to let debate collapse. What is supposed to happen is that each party gets their say about the issues before them, and for the majority of bills which should be fairly uncontentious, it should allow things to proceed after a few hours and the bill can be either sent to committee, or if it has returned from committee, it can debate what amendments were proposed. The bulk of work should be done by the committees, but you wouldn't know it based on the pattern we've devolved to here, where second and third reading debates have become these grotesque monstrosities instead of what they are intended to be.

For those of you who don't know the intricacies of parliamentary procedure (for which I don't blame you), second reading debate is supposed to be about the general principle of a bill. It's not supposed to be the specifics, which is what committee study is for. For any given bill, one generally only needs a few hours of second reading debate for that very reason, but that's not what's been happening. Instead, we're seeing interminable speechifying at second reading because opposition parties (and the NDP have been particular culprits in this regard) often refuse to let debate collapse at this stage. It's often where time allocation motions have been brought in so that it can move along to committee and report stage, the most important aspects of debate where the substantive issues can be examined and any amendments recommended can be decided upon.

Where this speechifying tendency met with obstinacy was over the Harper years, when a government bent on pushing the rules to the limit and abusing the parliamentary process with a number of omnibus bills that threatened Parliament's ability to properly study those bills. Add to that, Stephen Harper's Government House Leaders were keen to ram these through with little consensus as to timing from the other House leaders. By the 41^st Parliament, with the NDP as Official Opposition, debate management largely disintegrated as Peter Van Loan was inept at working with the other House leaders, and the NDP refused to let any debate collapse, and hence, we had time allocation the "guillotine" of debate being invoked over 100 times.

When they formed government, the Liberals made the foolish promise not to use procedural tactics like time allocation, but as the inability to let debate particularly at second reading collapse continued apace with undaunted speechifying into the void, they too succumbed to the temptation, albeit far more infrequently. When they did try to get creative with how to schedule debate around the assisted dying bill which they were trying to do under a Supreme Court of Canada-imposed deadline they tried bringing in Motion 6 last May to keep any delays to the bill at a minimum while still trying to maximize debate times. The opposition cried foul, lit their hair on fire and mischaracterized it as this draconian breach of their rights and privileges as Members of Parliament (which it was not, for as heavy-handed a move as it was), and the tensions exploded in The Elbowing, and we wound up with a completely unnecessary and repetitive 84 speeches at Second Reading on that bill.

With Bardish Chagger now proposing programming motions like we see in the UK as an alternative to time allocation, we're seeing more of this hyperbole and insistence that the Liberals are trying to "kill democracy." It won't kill democracy (the UK being proof of that), but what Chagger seems to be missing is the fact that even with programming motions, they still rely largely on consensus with other House Leaders to implement successfully, and does little about the length of second reading debate, which is where our problems in Canada lie..

If anything, what ails our system of debate management is not the rules around it it's the fact that our House Leaders apparently don't understand what each stage of debate is for, and the fact that we should be actually debating as opposed to reading prepared speeches into the record for the sake of it. Programming motions won't make our House Leaders more competent, nor will the Liberal's ham-fistedness around this. Getting back to the basics is where we need to start, and that means eliminating speaking lists and scripts.

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When Canadians tuned in to their favourite network on budget dâ€Žay, they were expecting to see the Finance Minister giving his speech and getting the details on what the government had in store for them. Instead, they watched anchors, journalists, experts and other talking heads scrambling to fill up time until Bill Morneau was allowed to speak.

One can only imagine the TV producers cursing as they watched the opposition throw a wrench in their coverage plans. â€Ž Some anchors were apologizing to their viewers for the delay, explaining superficially what was happening but not really why, basically dismissing the whole thing as procedural shenanigans and the usual political circus.

By delaying the tabling of the budget, Conservative and New Democrat MPs â€Žwere doing their best to bring attention to the most recent power-grab attempt by the Trudeau government.â€Ž Too bad if millions of Canadians had to wait another half-hour to find out which tax was being increased or which credit was being cut.

â€ŽThe stunt, as some called it, worked as more air time and column inches were devoted to the issue than in the preceding days, when everybody was consumed with pre-budget leaks and speculations.

â€ŽNow, there is nothing wrong with wanting to modernize the way the House of Commons works. â€ŽBringing forward proposals to do so is absolutely legitimate. And this is what â€ŽLiberal House Leader Bardish Chagger did when she brought forward a discussion paper on this very issue two weeks ago. The opposition was skeptical and raised concerns, as they should.

Everything went south however when â€Žthe Liberals tried to ram through a process and a timeline at the Procedure and House Affairs Committee in order to adopt these proposalsâ€Ž unilaterally. Double ramming! So much for discussion. Good bye consensus. The opposition was outraged that these changes could happen without their support and a filibuster ensued a tool which, coincidentally, the government wants to do away with!

This is the second time the Trudeau Liberals have tried to kneecap the opposition. Last May, in a knee-jerk reaction to almost losing a vote in the House, the government tabled Motion 6, which would have removed most of â€Žthe few tools the opposition has to slow down the government's agenda, giving even more power to the government over Parliamentâ€Ž. The opposition balked and pushed back, using tactics that ultimately led to Justin Trudeau losing his cool and causing the now infamous "elbowgate".

Once again this week, the PMO might have overplayed its hand. â€Ž Which is unfortunate, as some changes might be well worth considering carefully.

It might indeed be time to bring in electronic voting in the House. While it would remove the possibility for the opposition to "slow-vote", this is not exactly the most effective form of protest. It would, however, speed things up and possibly allow for more dissent, as MPs would not feel the same pressure to toe the party line as they do when they have to stand up against their own.

The elimination of Friday sittings is another one. Most legislatures already do not sit on Fridays. This would allow MPs of all stripes to spend more time in their ridings. But it would also benefit the government. Even though the day is shortened and attendance sparse, it is one more day for the opposition to keep the government accountable, one more day of coverage on any given issue the government would rather avoid scrutiny on.â€Ž

Other proposals while disguised as modernization, seem to be more about the normalization of undemocratic practices.

For instance, the Liberals committed to "end the improper use of omnibus legislation". They would somehow make it "proper" by adding extra votes and allowing their division for committees' study. Proper thing?

The government is also proposing to do away with Time Allocation, a tool used with great regularity by governments to shut down debate. This is a good idea MPs should be able to take the time necessary to study government legislation. Parliament should not be considered as the government's rubber stamp.

Sadly, the Liberals wants to replace Time Allocation with something worse: pre-programmed time limits for the House and committees to debate bills, avoiding the annoying process and potential backlash of imposing Time Allocation, all while shortening MPs' speaking spots. Similarly, stripping MPs of the right to move motions during Routine Proceedings would remove one of the only tools the opposition has to slow down legislation and set the agenda.

Finally, â€ŽThe PMO doesn't particularly enjoy having to keep Trudeau in the House regularly for Question Period, so they are proposing to have him show up only once a week, like they do in the UK.â€Ž It would make it much harder for the Opposition to keep the PM accountable. Funny thing is, there is absolutely nothing preventing Trudeau from acting unilaterally and showing up only once a week to take all the questions that day. Indeed, Trudeau skipped QP the day after the budget. Clearly, the PMO would rather do it under the cover of the rules.

Getting rid of the long-standing tradition to obtain an all-party consensus before overhauling the Standing Orders is a terrible idea, no matter how annoying the opposition can be with the limited tools it has. â€Ž It would create a dangerous precedent and set our democracy on a slippery slope. If Stephen Harper had tried such a power grab, the Liberals would have rightly been apoplectic. So why, as NDP House Leader Murray Rankin wisely asked last week, do they want to hand over these powers to Kevin O'Leary? Or to Kellie Leitch, for that matter? Or Mad Max? Gawd. Mad Maxâ€¦

Photo Credit: Macleans

Author: redding

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