The Liberals
blame the Conservatives
for only balancing the budget
in election years.
Instead,
they promise to run three deficits
– put the money into infrastructure –
then balance the books on the fourth year.
Just in time for election,
if math serves.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)
Parliament hangs by the thin cotton thread of government-issue gloves. Once a week the Commons speaker parades down the corridors in a tricorn hat accompanied by security guards marching in spotless white gloves. It is a display of ancient parliamentary democracy in form, if not in fact. The effect is mildly infuriating and mainly pathetic.
Professor David Schneiderman of the University of Toronto’s law faculty argues the Prime Minister’s Office has cut the brake line on Parliament and gone full throttle with executive control. “This is not meant to be a polemic directed at the Harper Conservative government,” he writes. It is what it is, and has been going on for some time.
Red, White & Kind Of Blue? suggests the 40th and 41st Parliaments marked a new low in executive control that appears to ape traditions of the American republic – but only the bad parts. “Political authority is now, more than ever, concentrated in the person of the prime minister,” Schneiderman writes; “The Harper initiatives were intended to move constitutional culture further along in a U.S. direction, with an emphasis on limited and divided government. He has sought to do so by exploiting Canada’s constitutional malleability via discretionary prerogatives and control over parliamentary legislative agenda.”
So, the Prime Minister tried to amend the Supreme Court Act by shoehorning illegal clauses into an omnibus bill alongside fisheries regulations. He signed and ratified a 31-year trade pact with China without ever consulting Parliament. He has staff assign MPs to recite speeches they’d never written, and vote on bills they’d never read.
And who was to stop him? Red, White detects “a disinterest in the press to instruct Canadians about the parliamentary fundamentals of responsible government”; “As Conservative talking points get channeled through the rituals of balanced journalistic practice – hearing from one side and then another – there seems to be no countervailing narrative that is as compelling or effective.”
Red, White is crisp and unnerving. It suggests Parliament is so malleable, and many of its participants so weak, it dispensed with ancient checks and balances without a shot being fired. “The presidentialization of the Canadian prime minister is improbable only because the prime minister is already so much more powerful than the president,” Red, White concludes.
Stephen Harper nine years ago told the Western Standard, “Well, I’ve got more control now.” The Prime Minister was more eloquent in a 1997 remark that Professor Schneiderman pulls from the archives. “Anybody who has seriously studied the parliamentary system knows that the House of Commons has long ceased to be a serious legislative body,” Harper said then. “It is first an electoral college to maintain the power of the incumbent Prime Minister and second a debating forum for partisan alternatives to the current dictator.”
Just don’t try to dispense with the white gloves. Parliament prizes its traditions.
By Holly Doan
Red, White & Kind Of Blue? The Conservatives & the Americanization of Canadian Constitutional Culture, by David Schneiderman; University of Toronto Press; 328 pages; ISBN 9781-4426-2948; $23
Cabinet granted a contractor permission to hire non-union migrant workers though it violated the Employment Department’s own rules. Confidential memos disclosing the order were obtained through Access To Information: “They prefer to be an employer of non-unionized labour”.
One of Canada’s largest companies is again being cited for firing sober workers under its random drug test policy. A labourer at a J.D. Irving Ltd. subsidiary was fired a week before Christmas though he’d tested negative for drugs and alcohol: “What I don’t understand is the rush to judgment”.
Recessions drive more Canadians into self-employment, according to two decades’ worth of tax data. Analysts at Statistics Canada said figures suggest the worse the economy, the likelier more people will resort to working for themselves: “You would expect the recent recession would have a bigger impact”.
A Canada Revenue Agency error resulting in the loss of a multi-million dollar judgment is headed to Tax Court. A judge earlier ruled tax collectors failed to produce “precise evidence” they ever mailed a notice to an oil company on underpayment of royalties: “It wasn’t written in pencil”.
The Elections Commissioner is determining whether the post office breached federal law with a carefully worded mail-out justifying service cuts. All parties but Conservatives in the last Parliament pledged to halt cuts to home mail delivery: ‘We expect them to play by the rules’.
Federal tax collectors see nearly a half-million errors a year on Social Insurance Numbers, according to newly-released data. The figures include tens of thousands of invalid numbers submitted after cabinet cancelled the issue of SIN cards: ‘This could help’.
New security systems including “panic buttons” are being installed at a federal border crossing alarmed by last June’s escape of American fugitives near Québec. Canada Border Services Agency did not comment: “These are killers”.
A greying Canada will be calling for greater government assistance, says a new national study. The Institute for Research on Public Policy said Parliament’s stated aim of seeing pensioners avoid institutional care will require planning: “They don’t much care about whose mandate it is to do it”.
The CBC is in court for the second time in two years on complaints it breached copyright law. The Crown corporation is accused of broadcasting famous images of a 2014 winter storm without permission: “There is frustration”.
A federal judge has ordered a businessman be jailed for violating the Trademarks Act and ignoring a court order to pay thousands of dollars in penalties. The unusual ruling follows three years of litigation: ‘It was brazen indifference’.
A national panel is devising Canada’s own version of the U.S. Energy Star program on efficiency. Executives commissioned Duke University to research an equivalent system for sub-Arctic industry: “We want to give ourselves the same benchmarks”.
Canadian retailers in the first quarter of 2015 saw the largest three-month decline in employment of any sector in fifteen years, according to new Statistics Canada figures. The massive job losses coincided with layoffs and store closures at Future Shop, Sears Canada and other chains: “There is considerable restructuring going on”.
Cabinet in 1958 considered stripping a minority religious group of its Canadian citizenship and paying to deport members to Russia, according to newly-released files. The mass exodus was requested by the British Columbia government, but never approved on fears of bad publicity: ‘It would be a mass movement by ship from Vancouver to Vladivostok’.
