LP_468x60
on-the-record-468x60-white

This content is restricted to subscribers

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.


This content is only available to our subscribers!

Become a subscriber today!

Register

Already a subscriber?

Subscriber Login

This content is only available to our subscribers!

Become a subscriber today!

Register

Already a subscriber?

Subscriber Login

This content is only available to our subscribers!

Become a subscriber today!

Register

Already a subscriber?

Subscriber Login

A paper was released in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations this week, titled Conflictual behavior in legislatures: Exploring and explaining adversarial remarks in oral questions to prime ministers. The study compares the behaviours in the Parliaments of Canada, the UK, Australia, and Ireland, and how they dynamics can differ between them both in terms of tone, types of questions and attacks, and interventions by their respective Speakers during the oral questions. While it’s an ambitious project, it does nevertheless have a few of the limitations of doing a more quantitative analysis than a qualitative one, particularly because it relies on Hansard transcripts rather than in-person observation or observing the video broadcasts. As the only journalists in the Canadian parliament who has attended very nearly every Question Period over the past twelve or so years, I was interested to see what the paper has to say about the Canadian context.

One of the things I noticed first was that the Canadian portion was based on the 39th Parliament, from 2006 to 2008, being the first hung parliament of Stephen Harper’s government. This meant that Peter Milliken was the Speaker, so his particular style and temperament when it comes to the interventions he made in the Chamber are relevant to what was captured in the study, and there is very much a difference from Speaker to Speaker in terms of what sorts of things the Speaker will police within the Chamber and what he or she won’t (and if we’re talking about the current Speaker, Anthony Rota, well, he polices very little). This time period also means that Bill Graham was serving as interim Liberal leader and hence Leader of the Opposition for much of that time, and because this study doesn’t include the prorogation crisis of 2008, it doesn’t capture some of the absolutely explosive, drag-out exchanges between Harper and Stéphane Dion during that event.

One other observation I would make is that because this was a parliament that saw a new government, the prime minister was far more frequently available during QP, particularly in the early part of this Parliament, because everyone is so fresh and new, and full of energy. As time went on, Harper attended less and less, and you were lucky if he showed up twice a week, but oftentimes it was just Wednesdays, because that is caucus day. Something else that is particularly relevant to this study is that when Justin Trudeau formed government, he instituted a proto-Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesdays, whereby he answers every question on that day, with the intention that it allows anyone in the Chamber to ask him a question. That being said, it mostly gives opposition leaders more rounds to preen for the cameras rather than just the first round, but it can give more backbenchers the ability to ask questions, which is something that this study did look at.

With all of this in mind, one of the tables in the report looks at interventions by the Speaker, and on what grounds. The number of interventions around things like calls to order were fairly low, which surprised me, but it also could be that Hansard didn’t record nearly as many as happen live. In terms of interventions based on the content of the questions, Canada was second-lowest of the four, with only five recorded over the period studied, which seems unusually low in the current context, which could be an indication that MPs are pushing the limits more these days than they did back then. The other surprising statistic was that of directions to leave the Chamber, which only Australia had any, and they had a lot of them, in particular because of a rule that they gave their Speaker that allows him or her to oust someone for disruptive behaviour on a more explicit basis, and which their Speakers seem to exercise more frequently than what happens here.

As for questions containing conflictual remarks, Canada was the country that came out on top, with around 70 percent of questions containing such remarks. This compares to around 40 percent in both Australia and the UK, with Ireland coming in well behind at around ten percent of questions. Similarly, when it comes to questions that contain policy criticisms versus criticisms of the prime minister, government, or party, Canada ranked the lowest on policy criticism, where only about five percent of questions had policy criticism, but in this particular case, Ireland was not much better at around ten percent, while the UK was about 15 percent, and Australia close to 30 percent. And this one feels very true—we do focus more on personal failings than policy criticisms, which is one of the reasons why our Parliament has become increasingly less serious as time goes on.

One of the other interesting statistics tracked was the number of backbench questions to the prime minister that contained some kind of conflictual question. During that Parliament, there appeared to be a mere one in Canada (and now I’m curious to know what it was), which is unusual because the Conservatives, especially in the early days, were very, very restrictive in terms of message discipline and control, because they had seen how loose lips from candidates like Cheryl Gallant helped to sink them in the 2004 election, so in 2006, they clamped down hard on message discipline and haven’t much let up since. (Notably, in the past two elections, it was the leaders who largely helped sink themselves because of their own comments). The UK had much higher number of conflictual questions to the prime minister, but that’s also not surprising because of the culture there where a number of backbenchers in safe seats have the latitude to criticize the government, which is not the case in most Parliaments. Also of note was that Australia and Ireland didn’t record any such backbench questions in the study.

There is more to delve into with this study, but it does point to a much more adversarial political culture within Canada, and one with strong opposition. I would be curious to see if future studies differ in their results, both because of changes that Trudeau made to QP, and with different Speakers in the big chair, but this does start to help position how we treat our QP in relation to how it works in other similar Parliaments, and points to ways in which we can and must do better.

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.


Because we are living in an age of deeply unserious politics, we have seen yet another example of how correctly stating whose jurisdiction a particular constitutional responsibility lies becomes the dumbest political scandal. To wit, on Monday, prime minister Justin Trudeau stated that housing is primarily not a federal responsibility, but that the federal government was going to step up and do what they could do help provinces and municipalities with the crisis that we have collectively been sleepwalking into for a couple of decades now. Immediately, opposition leaders, the pundit class and much of legacy media all declared that these words would haunt Trudeau, because as we are all well aware by now, the discourse in this country is completely dysfunctional when it comes to discussions about jurisdiction—something that the premiers have long been able to take advantage of in order to avoid responsibility for the messes that they’ve created and refuse to clean up.

As legacy media has declared that “nobody cares about jurisdiction,” it has given tacit permission for opposition politicians to simply lie about what the government is doing, and should be doing—not to mention about what they would do if they were in government. To that end, Pierre Poilievre summoned journalists to a scrum outside of the West Block on Tuesday, and tried to ridicule Trudeau’s assertion about federal responsibility, pointing out that policies around immigration, infrastructure and taxes are things the federal government has power over, and that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is federal (ignoring of course that it operates at arm’s length from government). None of these, however, are an actual constitutional responsibility around housing, and none of these addresses any of the root problems around the housing crisis.

Yes, the federal government could and should create tax incentives for purpose-built rental housing, but that won’t help if you can’t get a permit or zoning for a rental property, whether a low-rise gentle-density building on a single lot or a high-rise. We cannot forget that in some cities like Vancouver, there are tens of millions of federal dollars for affordable housing projects that are languishing because the city won’t issue the permits for them. The federal government has already mandated housing and density around infrastructure projects they help fund, and they are already finding federal properties that they can either sell or develop into housing—things Poilievre says he would do if he were to form government (but more likely would just take credit for the work already done).

What Trudeau cannot do, which Poilievre pretends he could if he were in government, is force municipalities to give out more building permits. There is no constitutional power to do so, and if you think that picking fights with mayors and threatening to withhold federal infrastructure dollars to do so is a winning gambit and not a recipe for prologued court battles, well, you’re in for a surprise. Trudeau’s government is trying to use a carrot approach with their $4 billion Housing Accelerator Fund to incentivize municipalities to use that money to streamline their processes or undertake other processes that can get more housing projects started, but it also took them a year to start getting that money out the door, so there is a lengthy turnaround time for any of these kinds of policies.

Trudeau also cannot force lower rents or stop “corporate landlords” or the practice of renovictions, as Jagmeet Singh demands, because landlord/tenant legislation is entirely provincial. Yes, the Liberals did make some kind of a promise around “renovictions” in the last election, but they have never laid out just what mechanism they hope to use to stop them, which is as much of a problem in terms of the misleading processes that other parties are making on the housing file. Singh also accuses Trudeau of not showing leadership and simply pointing fingers at provinces and municipalities, but he has never articulated just what “showing leadership” is supposed to look like when you don’t have the federal levers to fix the root problems, which are very much about cities refusing density, and the NIMBYism that pervades this obstruction.

Another sub-plot to this crisis has been the concern-trolling around immigration numbers, and how “irresponsible” it is for the federal government to maintain high levels when we have a housing shortage. Frankly, this is not only a gateway to racist commentary (and believe me, I see it all the time in my social media), but we continue to need these high immigration levels because of our labour shortage and aging population. If anything, this should be a kick in the ass for the provinces to do something about the housing crisis, especially as provinces like Ontario demand more control over the immigrants they want to settle in the province. The added issue of international students not being able to find housing is a crisis that the provinces entirely created for themselves by cutting funds to post-secondary institutions and freezing tuitions, which forced those institutions to seek more international students (whom they can soak for much higher tuition). They should be held to account for this.

Because housing is a provincial responsibility, and because municipalities are creatures of the provinces under the constitution, premiers have the power to do something about this crisis, whether it’s abolishing R1-zoning in municipalities, forcing density targets, or using their own resources to build and maintain social housing (particularly in light of the fact that many provinces took federal dollars intended for that housing and then spent it on other things). We should also have legacy media demanding accountability for this from provincial governments like they’re supposed to do. Instead, we get them saying things like “a federal responsibility is what voters tell the federal government its responsibility is,” or demands that the federal government “force the provinces to force municipalities” to do something—because apparently the prime minister can just Green Lantern away Sections 91 and 92 of the Constitution. If the premiers are going to be forced to move, it’s because their voters are demanding action, and that can’t happen so long as we collectively keep making excuses for them and trying to blame the federal government instead.

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.


What, if anything, are we to make of the bombshell news that Canada’s prime minister and his wife are separating? Given the private tragedy of divorce, especially when children are involved, is it none of our business? Or must we give attention to the private lives of public figures? Especially political ones?

My immediate inclination is that decency requires us to avert our gaze. It’s bad enough already without headlines. And in this case I know nothing beyond what has been in the headlines, and the news stories calling for respect for the Trudeaus’ privacy while discussing in detail how and when they met, their syrupy public anniversary exchanges and so on.

Unfortunately their case illustrates that we cannot separate out the private character of eminent people from their public conduct, especially if they are in “public life” in the sense of politics and government. And tellingly, the separation was treated as newsworthy, even internationally. I first heard of it from NBC not a Canadian source.

Why do politicians’ private lives matter? Well, during the vehement debate over U.S. entry into the League of Nations after World War I, President Woodrow Wilson was largely incapacitated by a stroke, which probably increased his already problematic tendency toward impatience and intolerance when he was able to focus on the issue.

Since American failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles is conventionally thought to have contributed to the coming of World War II, and since at critical moments Wilson rallied Democrats to reject a reasonable compromise over ratification with “reservations” to protect U.S. sovereignty, his health was a matter of urgent public interest. Like FDR being secretly too sick to function at the crucial Yalta conference shaping the post-World War II settlement. Or responsibility for America’s nuclear deterrent resting with a man whose handlers are struggling to conceal his senility.

Even if a famous person is not a politician it seems to me to matter what kind of person they are. You can no longer separate out the neuroticism of Woody Allen’s art from his “private” misconduct. But the worst thing he could do to a stranger was get them to pay for a movie they then didn’t like.

Government is a whole other story. Despite all the high-falutin’ political rhetoric about bringing us together, at bottom government is force. It is the entity in society that claims and enforces a monopoly on the legitimate initiation of violence to compel compliance with its wishes.

Politicians routinely muddy the waters on this matter, claiming companies have coercive power and posing as David against, say, the Google Goliath. But it’s government that can seize your bank account, enter your property without consent on various grounds including to inspect your septic system for no reason, and escalate from a warning note to a fine to jail time to lethal force even over initially trivial matters. Try refusing to pay a traffic ticket and see what happens if you go all the way. They will too. And rightly so because the rules must be enforced.

In tyrannies the appalling personal qualities of a Hitler, Stalin or a Saddam Hussein are of course of vital public interest and of course unavailable. But even in democracies, with constitutional limits on the state including semi-guaranteed free speech, governments wield awesome power, often in frivolous ways. Given Lord Acton’s dictum that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” we need to know what sort of person is wielding it or frantically pursuing it.

Consider the problem of addiction. It surely requires a compassionate response. But if someone in authority is hooked on powerful drugs, it’s not a “private” matter. Especially if they’re lying about it, because of the spectre of hypocrisy.

None among us can claim to be free of that vice except by proving the contrary. But if someone in public life chronically combines deceit with self-satisfaction to an unusual degree, and lies with particular skill, we need to know.

Bill Clinton famously said otherwise. His policy of “compartmentalization” supposedly meant he could betray his wife without giving voters the slightest reason to doubt his trustworthiness. But Donald Trump proved otherwise, with the Narcissistic patterns in his personal and business affairs prominently and predictably on display in his political life. And he proved that Democrats who winked at “Slick Willy” were setting an irresponsible precedent.

Now I am going to make a couple of points about Justin Trudeau. First, I remember him attending one G7 summit as almost the only Western leader with any children, let alone more than replacement rate. And it struck me as positive and important, an expression of hope for the future and faith in our way of life glaringly absent among the Angela Merkels and Emmanuel Macrons.

Second, he has been polemically sanctimonious on gender politics. So if it turns out he was also guilty of some sort of transgression against “traditional” family values it would be pertinent.

Especially given his long record of hypocrisy across the board, from militant and sanctimonious anti-racism despite that blackface business to the Kokanee grope dismissed with moral relativism to taking a private vacation on the first National Truth and Reconciliation Day. Or just saying in the 2015 election “We have a plan to make housing more affordable for those who need it most – seniors, persons with disabilities, lower-income families, and Canadians working hard to join the middle class,” only to snarl in the face of a housing crisis in 2023 that “I’ll be blunt … housing is not a primary federal responsibility”.

My National Post colleague Tristin Hopper wrote about this housing issue right before news of the separation emerged. And surely it was a question not just of an evolving policy stance, but of the slick hypocrisy of someone for whom nothing is ever his fault. If you elect someone known to be a self-absorbed cad, guess what you get.

Right. SNC Lavalin. And when the separation story broke, Hopper added that “Sophie and Justin were more public about their relationship than basically any other political couple in Canada’s history”. You can’t flaunt your marvellous private life as a political asset then sweep the broken pieces under the rug as if nothing had happened, and the attempt is itself revealing. As when a politician makes their religious faith part of their appeal, gets caught faking it, and says it’s between them and God.

Or consider two other lively issues pertaining to U.S. President Joe Biden. First, he’s forever banging on about what a family man he is, but for years literally refused to acknowledge the existence of his seventh grandchild because she was part of his son Hunter’s disorderly addicted life.

Standing loyally by your troubled child really is an admirable quality and Biden had a right to make it part of his pitch to voters. But by the same token denying your innocent grandchild really is deplorable, to the point that he had to flipflop on it. And again, he did so in a revealing way.

NBC tried to make it sound like an achievement, saying “on Friday, Biden finally spoke out about his seventh grandchild whom, for years, he wouldn’t so much as acknowledge in public. Now, the president wants to meet little Navy Joan Roberts of Arkansas and dispel the notion that he was ignoring a vulnerable member of the Biden family tree that is at the root of his political identity, according to the people familiar with the matter.”

For my money, finally sending out the spinmeisters to claim that “now” you want to meet your grandkid for PR reasons reveals the true man in ways we need to know about precisely because he wouldn’t want us to.

Second, if it’s really true that his “loyalty” to his wayward son included participating in business calls as Vice-President that led to lucrative deals, including for him, he deserves not just opprobrium but jail time. It certainly can’t be brushed aside as “private”.

Prudence and charity are required here. We don’t want to be ghoulish, or gossips, or indulge in Schadenfreude over the failings of others when our own would not withstand scrutiny. Before mocking then-Prince Charles’ hacked pillow-talk consider how your own might play across the screen. And genuine repentance deserves forgiveness. But character matters in “public life”, especially government.

When people seek political office, they insist that they are trustworthy. When they then say their private life is none of our business, they reveal that they are not.

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.


This content is only available to our subscribers!

Become a subscriber today!

Register

Already a subscriber?

Subscriber Login

This content is only available to our subscribers!

Become a subscriber today!

Register

Already a subscriber?

Subscriber Login

This content is only available to our subscribers!

Become a subscriber today!

Register

Already a subscriber?

Subscriber Login