The Words: Full transcript from Episode 22, Season 2

THE WEST BLOCK
Episode 22, Season 2
Sunday, February 10, 2013

Host: Tom Clark
Guests: Peter Van Loan, Craig Scott, Paul Wells, Stephen Maher, Brent Rathgeber
Location:Ottawa

Tom Clark:
Hello and welcome to The West Block on this Sunday, February the 10th, from the nation’s capital; I’m Tom Clark.

Coming up on today’s show, allegations of abuse and misconduct leave senators with some sober seconds thoughts Government House Leader, Peter Van Loan and the NDPs Craig Scott are standing by.

And, how much political capital will this cost Stephen Harper? Two of Ottawa’s top journalists weigh in.

Plus science of life in Parliament, one Conservative backbencher tells us why no backbencher should tow the party line.

Well following weeks of allegations that he was abusing the public purse, Senator Patrick Brazeau now faces much more serious charges of abuse, assault and sexual assault. Brazeau was appointed to the Senate by Prime Minister Harper in 2008 and joining me now from Toronto is the Government House Leader, Peter Van Loan. Mr. Van Loan, good to have you on the show as always.

I think we should point out right from the outset here that Patrick Brazeau has not been convicted of anything and yet your party in a sense has already passed judgment by booting him out of your caucus, and moving to suspend his privileges in the Senate. Why?

Peter Van Loan:
Well the nature of the allegations and the reported events are quite serious, so as a result, it was appropriate that action be taken and that he be removed from caucus, which is what the prime minister did. And this coming week when the Senate sits the government in the Senate we’ll be moving to take advantage of the rules that allow for his access to resources to be suspended and once he’s been charged with the serious events, as has happened.

Tom Clark:
So it’s the charge not the conviction that has moved you to do this. I want to go back though, to the moment that he was appointed by your government to the Senate. There were red flags all over Patrick Brazeau back at the time he was appointed. It was controversial then, why did the government or how did the government get it so wrong in appointing him to the Senate?

Peter Van Loan:
Well of course, our preference is to appoint elected senators, and the Prime Minister has done that every opportunity he has had, now with three senators: Burt Brown, Senator Unger and most recently Senator Black, just a couple of weeks ago. But in the case of Senator Brazeau, you should keep in mind that he was of course National Chief of the Canadian Congress of Aboriginal, a respected position at the time and obviously had some profile in that role.

Tom Clark:
Yeah, but at the same time, he had red flags all over him. If you go back to that time, there were people saying that he was really unfit to sit in the Senate. How could all those warnings have been ignored at the time only to end up where we are right now? I mean, this is surely a massive mistake to have appointed him to the Senate in the first place, no?

Peter Van Loan:
Well as I said, our preference is of course to reform the Senate. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’ve had legislation for some time to do that and we actually have now taken the step referring that to the Supreme Court for an answer on whether the process we’re following is one that will work. It made sense to do that since the province of Quebec was already pursuing a court action in the same regards. So we’ll get some clarity on that and also on the questionof if we were to take the step of abolishing the Senate, how do you go about doing that? So our real focus is trying to improve that and what we’d really like to be able to do it to have a vetting process where it is the people of Canada who do the vetting in elections as has been done in Alberta and a number of cases. And that way, we can have a really modern Senate, one that functions democratically; the way that I think most Canadians want to see it function.

Tom Clark:
Okay, well let’s deal though with Senate reform. You control the business of the House, as the House leader. You have not called debate on Senate reform in almost a year. February of 2012 was the last time that Senate reform was debated in the House of Commons. With your majority in both houses, you could push this right through if you wanted to. Why haven’t you done that?

Peter Van Loan:
Well the nature of Senate reform, change to one of our democratic institutions makes it a spot where we’re not terribly comfortable using time allocation or something like that to shove it though. We think it should be allowed the proper debate but we also saw in the number of times we called it early on that the Opposition was determined, both the New Democrats and the Liberals to filibuster this bill to the full extent possible. So we could spend literally months…

Tom Clark:
But you haven’t called it to the floor in a year…

Peter Van Loan:
That’s because it became apparent we could spend literally months of House time and not get anywhere. And at the same time we had this court action underway so we’ve taken the step now of referring our proposed legislation to the court that’ll clear the air on a lot of the objections that were there. We are optimistic that they will be supportive of the proposed approach to reforming the Senate and making it more democratic, that we’re looking to those answers but let’s not make any bones about it, the NDP and the Liberals were prepared to use all the House time possible and every procedural device possible to keep that debate going forever. And from our side, it’s you know when you’re trying to democratize a Senate change, those major institutions, it’s not the kind of step you want to take by imposing time allocation, by moving it through in the same fashion as you might with some other normal legislative business.

Tom Clark:
Okay, government House leader Peter Van Loan, a discussion that is no doubt going to continue but I certainly appreciate you coming in this morning and talking with us. Thank you.

Peter Van Loan:
Thank you.

Tom Clark:
Well the Conservatives say they want to reform the Senate. The NDP wants to abolish it entirely. So with his perspective on the state of the Red Chamber, I’m joined now by NDP democratic reform critic, Craig Scott from Toronto. Mr. Scott good to have you on the show.

Craig Scott:
Thanks Tom.

Tom Clark:
Mr. Van Loan was just here and he said basically that you guys are blocking any discussion of Senate reform in the House. True or false?

Craig Scott:
Completely false, that’s the kind of changing the channel tactic. He knows that that’s not the case. They haven’t brought it forward for over a year and of course we want to debate it because there are huge implications constitutionally and in terms of other factors but debating in the House is not delaying.

Tom Clark:
But let’s be clear about this Mr. Scott is that if they did bring reforms to the Senate, you probably wouldn’t want them anyway because you want to get rid of it, you don’t want to reform it.

Craig Scott:
That’s not quite right. We’re actually open to transitional approach to the Senate in the sense that we want to see it abolished, absolutely. And what’s been happening with it of late is all the more reason that Canadians get the fact that it’s a decrepit archaic chamber with some extremely good people but most of whom shouldn’t be there. And we’re open to any kind of reasonable reform, if it has provinces on side and if we have a sense that Canadians like the reform. But the reform would be a transition to abolition frankly.

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Tom Clark:
Well this seems to me maybe a change in nuance in the stance of the NDP but if you’re now saying that you want reform on the road to abolition, it seems that abolition in your view could be a long way off, if you get the type of reform that you think is going to work. Take me down that road a little bit…

Craig Scott:
Not quite Tom…

Tom Clark:
Go ahead…

Craig Scott:
Yeah not quite, the fact is that we have a situation where the NDP as Opposition, we want to be able to work with both government in good faith and with the provinces in a federation such as we’re in. And if there’s some kind of reasonable proposal that’s constitutional we could have found this out six, seven years ago by the way, this is the same version of the bill that they’ve had going for four different iterations. The fact they haven’t put it forward means that they pretty much know that there are constitutionality problems and they have no real intention of it passing. But we would be happy with some kind of a bill that has consensus as a way to try to reform the Senate and when Canadians see that it can’t be reformed they’ll understand why we want to abolish it. It will take some time because we have to take seriously the provinces as part of abolishing it. On any amending formula, it’s at least seven provinces and at 50 percent it might be anonymity.

Tom Clark:
I don’t want to get too far down that road before we deal with the here and now. We’ve got senators behaving badly, at least allegations of them behaving badly, what can we do right now other than deal with these cases as they come up? Is there anything institutionally that we can do and I sort of throw out the idea perhaps of vetting Senate appointments in front of Parliamentary committees before they end up in the Red Chamber. What do you think?

Craig Scott:
Well I think there would be a little push back from the Red Chamber because the only real place that could be done is probably in the House. If I can make a suggestion, there’s a big role the media can continue to play here. One of the biggest problems of the Senate, apart from ethical gaffs or worse with Mr. Brazeau, is that this is a chamber that is full of party political fundraisers, and frankly some of them go back to the old style bagman. They’re there to support their party, especially the Conservative Party of Canada. Mr. Harper has appointed 58 senators. Many of them criss-cross the country shoring up the tory vote for House of Commons elections. They’re completely illegitimate as an institution. Taxpayers are funding this kind of activity. Mr. Duffy was one of the ones…is one of the ones most on call to go on fundraisers after the prime minister. He’s just one example of somebody using the Red Chamber illicitly for party political reasons when at the beginning the Senate was supposed to be about regional representation.

Tom Clark:
This is a big discussion and we’ve got to continue it. And the media does have a role in continuing that conversation but I thank you for taking part in it this morning. Craig Scott from Toronto with the NDP thanks for your time.

Craig Scott:
Thanks Tom.

Tom Clark:
Well coming up on The West Block, looking at the political costs of the Senate meltdown. Two of Ottawa’s top journalists join me next. Stay tuned.

Break

Tom Clark:
Welcome back to The West Block. Well many questions have been raised in the wake of last week’s news from the Senate, not the least of which is, the future of the Senate itself. Well joining me now, Paul Wells of Maclean’s Magazine and from Post Media, Steve Maher. Welcome to you both. Let me start with this, how badly does any of this hurt Stephen Harper? Steve?

Stephen Maher:
This is a government that’s starting to show its age I think. We’re six years in, and messes are starting to accumulate. The Senate looks like a mess and it looks like Stephen Harper’s mess. He’s responsible for the institution as it is now. He said he’d reform it. He was elected in 2006; he just now gets around to sending a referral to the Supreme Court. He appointed these people, most spectacularly, Senator Brazeau. So it is sticking to him and there’s no way around that.

Tom Clark:
Paul?

Paul Wells:
I’m not sure people vote on whether or not the Senate is a mess. If they did, every government since 1867 would have fallen at the first hurdle. But what we’re seeing is the shortcoming of Harper’s incrementalist approach. He likes to go at every issue from a viewpoint of can I pick away a chunk of today and then leave it for a while and come back tomorrow? You can’t do that with the Senate, it’s a Gordian knot and you either throw all the resources of government at reforming it as Mulroney did in 1992 and failed, or you leave it alone. And I think right now he’s wishing he’d left it alone from the beginning.

Tom Clark:
But I’m wondering though whether we have reached critical mass in terms of public opinion on this. I think most times Canadians shrug their shoulders when it comes to the Senate no matter what they’re up to but this concentration of senators misbehaving, do you feel that that’s really sort of pushed the agenda though more towards the idea of reform or abolition? That Canadians are finally saying, look let’s just get rid of this stupid thing or at least reform from it and to Van Loan, when I was talking to Peter Van Loan, he said well I don’t want to use time allocation to push this through because it’s so important. I mean the two seem to be at odds with one another.

Stephen Maher:
Well Mr. Harper really can’t either abolish it or reform it I don’t think, not without a huge effort that might not succeed as Paul says. So it’s an ongoing problem that they’ve got to manage and it reminds me a little bit when I was first working on the Hill, Dave Dingwall was in trouble for his expenses and he coined the phrase, “I’m entitled to my entitlements”. These kinds of things can be very toxic for a governing party because taxpayers and voters looking on are saying well that doesn’t seem right that he’s claiming… that Senator Duffy is claiming a living allowance for his primary residence in Ottawa. So you set up these tensions within the government because they want to help out their friends in office but they also have to account to the public for how they are spending the money, so it’s awkward for them.

Paul Wells:
It’s possible for people to be in favour of a reform and to never ever be able to agree on a reform proposal. During the 17 months that he was prime minister, every once in a while, Paul Martin would face this question, why don’t you make the Senate more representative? And he used to say, well as soon as the provinces agree on a plan we’ll be happy to look at it because he knew that in a thousand years they would never agree on a plan. Alberta and British Columbia because of the number of senators they have now, they’re interests are diametrically opposed when it comes to serious Senate reform, and Stephen Harper knows that better than anyone. Burt Brown, the senator who ploughed the Triple-E Senate or else into his field…cornfield humpty dump years ago and is now one of the few elected senators in the Senate, announced to a newspaper reporter some details of Harper’s plan for Senate reform and was shot down an hour later by the prime minister’s office that said no that’s not the prime minister’s plan. If Burt Brown doesn’t know what Stephen Harper’s plan is, that’s your first hint that there isn’t one.

Tom Clark;
Alright, I want to go to one other issue that sort of got knocked off the pages this week because of what happened in the Senate and that was the robocalls in Saskatchewan. It had to do with redrawing district boundaries but what made it newsworthy I guess was that the Conservatives first said, no, no we didn’t make those calls. And then a few days later they went, well actually we did make those calls. And then, a senior member, Tom Lukiwski, who is the Parliamentary Secretary to the House Leader, says well it was all Jenni Byrne who happens to be the campaign manager and as close to Stephen Harper as you can get. I mean if the Senate hadn’t happened this would have been a big story but Paul what do you make of that?

Paul Wells:
Incidentally, I think some of Stephen’s reporting encouraged the Conservatives to change their story when he…

Tom Clark:
I was going to get that…

Paul Wells:
When he and his colleagues found a forensic voice analyst to say that the voice on those calls is awfully familiar, and then the Conservatives memory improved rapidly in the hour or two after that. I’m not sure what to make of this Lukiwskithing that it’s Jenny Burn’s responsibility. He seemed to have been making essentially a flowchart argument that the person in charge of party operations is Jenni Byrne, the director of the party and therefore she is responsible. Strictly speaking, that’s not quite the ultimate truth. The ultimate truth is that the leader of the party is responsible, his name is Harper. Steve will know better than I how much trouble they’re in right now and maybe we should ask him.

Tom Clark:
Absolutely and better to be complimented from the outside than have to do it yourself, but congratulations.

Stephen Maher:
Well the compliments likely go to my friend and colleague, Glen McGregor who heard the voice message and said that sounds like the same guy, Matt Meyer who we remember from the Pierre Poutine call. And one of the things that strikes me about this is that at the time when the original robocall controversy broke and obviously someone connected with the Conservative Party appears to have deliberately tried to confuse people about where they should vote, the extent of it is still something of a mystery but there is hundreds of thousands of dollars, a lot of human suffering in investigating this. You would think that the Conservative Party and Mr. Harper and Jenni Byrne would have said nothing more that’s even a little bit questionable. Here’s our policy book. We are not going to break CRTC rules. We’re not going to break the Election Act. We’re going to do everything by the book. And in Saskatchewan they did not do that. They did a deceptive push poll and then did not know seem to know that they had done it until we found a voice analyst who said that they had. So it’s a little bit surprising.

Tom Clark:
I’ve gotta stop you there because I want to leave some time to say that if you haven’t read Deadline, which is Steve Maher’s eBook; terrific read and Paul Wells, you’ve got a book coming out in November and an announcement to be made right here on The West Block.

Paul Wells:
Well yeah, I’m writing a book about Stephen Harper and it’s going to be on the newsstands in November, about the same time his hockey book is on newsstands so they make an excellent pair of purchases for Christmas. The title of the book is going to be: “The Longer I’m Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada 2006 to …”

Tom Clark:
Paul Wells, coming out in November. Thank you both very much for being here, Steve Maher, Paul Wells.

Coming up on The West Block next, one backbench MP stands up for his right to speak out against his own party. Stay with us.

Break

Tom Clark:
Welcome back. Well the benches in the House of Commons are filled with 308 MPs who represent 34 million Canadians, but only a handful of those will hold any power within their parties make decisions and decide their party’s policies. So what of the hundreds of men and women who don’t hold power? Well here it is; your weekly West Block Primer:

During an election campaign, politicians try to appeal to the needs and concerns of the Canadians living in their riding. Once elected, the voters expect their MPs to go to Ottawa in order to represent them and voice those same needs and concerns. But all too often, an MP’s voice just becomes one in their party’s chorus. Instead of being able to vote with the conscience of their constituents in mind, MPs come to Ottawa only to find that the vast majority of votes are whipped. That means that the party leader gives the MP no choice but to vote as told. Over time, many MPs even go one step further, saying what the party tells them to say and even thinking what the party tells them to think. Call it a case of political Stockholm syndrome.

So what happens when someone breaks party lines? Well last year we saw Ontario MP Bruce Hyer quit the NDP caucus when he felt that he was being punished for breaking ranks and supporting the abolition of the long gun registry. And with me now is a Conservative Member of Parliament who also isn’t afraid to speak his mind, Brent Rathgeber. Welcome. Good to have you here.

I want to read back to you something that you wrote last week in your parliamentary blog that goes right to this point. And here’s what you said, you said, “I understand that members of Parliament, who are not member of the executive, sometimes think of themselves as part of the government: we are not. Under our system of responsible government, the executive is responsible and accountable to the legislature”.
In affect what you seem to be saying is that even backbench, in this case Conservative MPs but let’s call them government MPs, have got a duty. And let me ask this as a question, do they have the duty to hold their own cabinet to account as parliamentarians?

Brent Rathgeber:
Well I think we do. I think not only do we have the duty; I think we have the responsibility. So the elected legislature is the people’s body and they elect them and 308 of us in general elections, but the cabinet of course is chosen by the prime minister and they are the executive. They’re the ones that execute the laws. They are the ones that spend the money but its parliament’s, I would suggest duty and constitutional responsibility to provide a check on government and hold a government to account.

Tom Clark:
But let’s be realistic though, if a backbencher votes against his own government, the future is not terribly bright for that backbencher. I mean the chances of you getting into cabinet or even being a parliamentary secretary become rather limited if you are seen as somebody who’s holding your own executive account and also from time to time, I suppose voting against them.

Brent Rathgeber:
Sure but that’s premised on the suggestion that it’s only the executive that’s important in this city or in this country and I dispute that premise. I think legislature is important. We’re the ones that pass the laws. We’re the ones that pass the appropriation for the government to make and that’s Parliament as a collective. So I think the role as being a legislature is being a member of Parliament is important in holding the government to account and to assure that the executive pays attention to the tax dollars that they spend.

Tom Clark:
To become, in your view, an effective Parliament and for parliamentarians to be effective you would have to, would you not, have to somehow change or diminish the role of party discipline in the House; the whipped vote, the expectation that the backbencher will always support the executive. How do you do that?

Brent Rathgeber:
Well it’s difficult to serve more than one master and certainly my primary loyalty is to my constituents; they’re the ones that elected me. But I also have a loyalty to the prime minister and to the Conservative Party of Canada because after all, I was elected under their banner and I have no delusions that I would have been elected had it been under some other banner, certainly not Alberta.
So you have dual loyalties. So you look at it at a case by case basis. Thankfully I’ve never been in a position where I couldn’t stand up and support a government bill or a government initiative. And I think it’s important because I understand that there will be consequences of standing up and voting against a government bill or a government initiative.

Tom Clark:
What do you think your chances are of getting into cabinet?

Brent Rathgeber:
Well I’m not here to become a cabinet minister. I ran for Parliament and Parliament is an important institution. Parliament is the elected body that holds the government to account. I take that role seriously and I’m happy to be where I am.

Tom Clark:
Brent Rathgeber, fascinating conversation. Thank you very much for your time today.

Brent Rathgeber:
My pleasure.

Tom Clark:
Well that is our show for this week. Here are a few things we’ll be keeping our eyes on:

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty hits the road again, this time it’s to Moscow with his G20 counterparts and on Saturday, Liberal leadership hopefuls will be in Toronto for their third debate. They are now just, count them, two months away from the vote.

And remember our website: http://www.thewestblock.ca for all the latest information.
Now as we leave you this week, we want to show you Winterlude here in Ottawa and something special commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Korean War with a special hockey game commemorating what Canadian soldiers did in their time off in Korea. Until next Sunday, I’m Tom Clark.