THE WEST BLOCK
Episode 39, Season 2
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Host: Tom Clark
Guests: James Cowan, Keith Beardsley, Jennifer Ditchburn, John Manley
Location: Ottawa
Tom Clark:
Welcome to The West Block from the nation’s capital on this Sunday, June the 2nd. I’m Tom Clark.
Well coming up on today’s show, as the Senate scandal continues to boil over, the Opposition leader in the Senate calls for more disclosure. Liberal Senator James Cowan is here.
But the key questions lie in the prime minister’s office; joining us, a former deputy chief of staff to the prime minister and one reporter who’s been on top of this story since the beginning.
And finally, out goes Mark Carney and in comes Stephen Poloz. What does the new Bank of Canada governor need to keep his eye on? Canada’s CEOs weigh in on that.
But first, amid the murk of the Senate scandal are the growing scandal are the growing questions of what to do with this archaic institution and whether we should have it at all; if it’s to be reformed, how and why? And it’s not the first time that these questions have been asked. Here it is, your weekly West Block Primer:
Ever since the Senate was created in 1867, people have been trying to breach its walls of undemocratic privilege. Even Sir John A. Macdonald was no fan of the Senate and many leaders since him have tried to mount a successful attack. Since the 1970’s there have been upwards of 30 proposals to change it and all have failed spectacularly. The last big change was way back in 1965 when they started forcing senators to retire at the age of 75. After that came a parade of good intentions. The Meech Lake Accord and Charlottetown Accord both launched a barrage trying to move the Senate into the age of democracy but with no success. The Reform party demanded a Triple-E Senate; Elected, Equal and Effective. Well that went nowhere. The current government hasn’t been in much of a hurry. It introduced Senate reform in 2011 but then let the bill sit without debate for almost a year before then sending it off to the Supreme Court for an opinion. So, Canada remains one of the few countries in the world where the prime minister gets to personally appoint the upper chamber of government; some distinction, some honour.
Tom Clark:
Well before we get to the next generation of reforms, let’s deal with the current generation of Senate controversy. To talk about that, I’m joined by the Liberal leader in the Senate. Senator James Cowan joins us from Halifax. Thanks very much for being here Senator.
James Cowan:
Good morning.
Tom Clark:
The NDP have released a list of the top 15 spenders in the Senate. In that quarter where the 36-day 2011 election took place, that was the same period of time where Mike Duffy was double dipping. Of the top 15 spenders, 10 of them are Liberals. How do we know that they weren’t pulling a “Duffy” and campaigning on the taxpayers’ dime?
James Cowan:
Well, first of all, you’re not allowed to campaign on the taxpayers’ dime…
Tom Clark:
Well that didn’t stop some people…
James Cowan:
I understand that but I think everybody knows the rules. I certainly know the rules and I would expect that everybody will comply with them.
Tom Clark:
I guess the issue is this though, we’ve got no evidence to suggest that they were double dipping at all, but nor do we have any proof that they weren’t. And this really comes to the point of the question, that with the background now distrust that the public has for the Senate that when the Senate finally did look in to a couple of senators and found, oh my gosh, there are some expense problems here, why wouldn’t the Senate decide to do this sort of audit of every senator, or at the very least, post all of their expenses online where everybody could see it so it so that there wouldn’t be this type of controversy.
James Cowan:
Well as I say, the expenses are posted on a quarterly basis.
Tom Clark:
But they’re very…but Senator, they are posted but you can barely get anything out of them. I mean they’re not detailed. They don’t tell you where they were. They don’t tell you what the exactly the money was spent. I mean it’s very cursory.
James Cowan:
I agree and I think we ought to have a greater level of disclosure and I’m sure we’ll move towards that.
Tom Clark:
Do you think that that level you want to go to would include that idea of openly posting every expense from every senator online and in the process of doing so, make you far more transparent than the House of Commons?
James Cowan:
I agree, I think that we should move towards that. I felt that for a long time but I don’t make the rules in the Senate. I’m the leader of the Opposition in the Senate and I hope we’ll learn some lessons from this but I come back to the point, Tom, that this is not a problem with the rules of the Senate so much as a problem with the interpretation of the rules. To me, these rules are perfectly clear. I know what my name is. I know where I live. I don’t have any difficulty deciding whether a particular expense is going to come out of my own pocket or I’m going to charge it to the taxpayer. Those rules are perfectly clear for most people. Some people apparently have difficulty understanding them or are trying to scam the system and they get caught. And that’s the system so we may need to fine tune the rules but to assume that it’s because there aren’t any rules or that everybody who is either submitting expenses or is then monitoring the expenses from a staff level isn’t doing his or her job, I think is a leap too far.
Tom Clark:
One of the sort of background items of this though, is that it was because of a media investigation that all of this came to light. It wasn’t because of any systems that exist in the Senate that rooted out these wrongdoers or this type of inappropriate calculations on the part of some senators.
James Cowan:
Well the next point was I was going to give…applauded you and the media because I think the media has done a superb job here. And I think that they really have done great work. They’ve asked all the right questions. And I think frankly that the Senate has been very slow and very incomplete in the way that we have responded to reasonable requests from the public and from the media for information.
Tom Clark:
I think it’s safe to say that most Canadians are simply appalled by what they’ve seen in the Senate over the past month or so. And it brings up the whole question of reform of the Senate, something that people have been trying to do since 1867 without very much success. When the esteem of the Senate is as low as it is now, isn’t now the time to take a look at this institution and see if we can bring it into the 21st century?
James Cowan:
Well, you and I should have a chat sometime about all the good work the Senate and individual senators can do and the role of a second chamber. We certainly do need a second chamber. We could certainly make some changes. We probably wouldn’t design a Senate in 2013 the way we would in 1867 but as you know, we have a constitution. There are very strict provisions in there, complicated provisions, difficult provisions with respect to change and I don’t know that how much of an appetite there is in Canada right now for constitutional change which will involve the provinces. I think the simple answer…
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Tom Clark:
I suspect there’s a huge appetite in this country to do something about the Senate right now.
James Cowan:
Absolutely, the best solution is to appoint better senators. That would…that’s the best fix.
Tom Clark:
Senator James Cowan, Liberal leader in the Senate, thank you very much for taking the time this morning to talk to us. I appreciate it.
James Cowan:
Have a good day Tom. Thank you.
Tom Clark:
Well coming up next, what’s next in this scandal? One of Harper’s former deputy chiefs of staff and a trailblazing reporter join us here next. Stay tuned.
Break
Tom Clark:
Welcome back. Well is the Senate scandal really about the Senate or is it about how politics is played and by what moral rules? Joining me now to talk about this are two meticulous Hill watchers, Jennifer Ditchburn of the Canadian Press and Keith Beardsley, a former deputy chief of staff to Stephen Harper. Welcome to you both.
Keith Beardsley:
Good morning.
Jennifer Ditchburn:
Thank you.
Tom Clark:
Keith, let me start with you. We’re two weeks into this now, the prime minister’s response to it, has it made the situation better or worse for him
Keith Beardsley:
Probably worse but you have to go back much further than two weeks. You’ve got to go back to February-March when they were going out defending some of these people and now they’re eating their words. So this is a long process and he sort of blew that meeting, the caucus meeting, had a chance there with a national audience and he didn’t come out the way people wanted so now he’s playing catch up. And I think this is the problem all along for PMO that they are playing catch up; they’re in a box and there’s nothing much they can do to get out of it other than hang tight where they are, let things blow out, let some other issue come up that will move this one off the table.
Tom Clark:
Jen, let me turn the first question back on you and that is, is this a scandal about the Senate or is this a crisis of moral leadership and how the game is played?
Jennifer Ditchburn:
Well I think that the prime minister’s office would like this to be a scandal about the Senate because that serves their purpose in terms of Senate reform and you can see how they want to frame the issue around some rogue senators that have not done the right thing. But our frame is more on that $90,000 dollar cheque as directly tied into what’s going on in the Senate. And that’s where you get into a question of judgment at the very top and also of just plain old ethics. I mean, under what universe would a $90,000 dollar cheque to a senator be acceptable? So I think it’s a question of frames and the prime minister’s office is trying to switch the frame to reform.
Tom Clark:
Keith, your time inside the PMO, give me some idea of what you think the discussion right now is. You described it as playing catch up but what does that mean in real terms?
Keith Beardsley:
Well they have to decide what language they’re going to use for one thing and right now, I think if you talk to the public they’re not happy with the language they’re hearing, the so-called famous talk points. You know they’re disappointed. You don’t hear anyone saying we’re angry we’re upset, which is what the public want them to say. So that’s part of the issue and the other is as Jennifer said how do you move it away from PMO? How do you move it on to the Senate and we’ve been seeing a little bit of that with leaked emails and this type of thing. But that’s their problem; they can’t come out and say anything that will sort of short change these commissions or these investigations that are ongoing. So they can’t compromise them, and they can’t come out and say anything that once these investigations are over they might be proven wrong. So they’re really in a very narrow position here with very, very little manoeuvring room.
Tom Clark:
You know, that brings up an excellent point. One of the curious things that’s happened in the last few days seems to be almost an orchestrated campaign by the Prime Minister’s Office to discredit what’s left of Mike Duffy. There are leaked emails and I don’t want to say that the source of those emails was the PMO but that’s one place you might go looking. But certainly the PMO has been on record as saying you know Mike Duffy spoke to Stephen Harper about this back in February and Stephen Harper was very direct saying, Mike you have to pay this back yourself. What’s going on here because as I said there doesn’t seem to be much credibility left for Mike Duffy in this scandal and yet he’s come under renewed attack by the Prime Minister’s Office?
Jenifer Ditchburn:
Well that’s a pattern that we’ve seen over the years with the Prime Minister’s Office is that people that run afoul of them, you know they’re thrown under the bus or thrown under a Mack T ruck basically. But the problem here, there are a couple of things that are out of their hands or a few things. Mike Duffy, we have no idea what he knows, what documents he has, what he might turn up. We’ve all been waiting to see what he has to say. Once it gets into the hands of the RCMP, well it’s in the hands of the RCMP now, that’s out of their hands. They can’t control that process. And the Ethics Commissioner, those are things that will unfold as time goes on and they you know, as you say have to sort of hang tight and wait to see what happens. But you know that’s where I think they’re trying to manage what they can but there are a lot of ends that they can’t tie up.
Tom Clark:
To both of you, do you think that we’re ever going to find out or under what circumstances would we find out why that cheque for $90,000 was written by Nigel Wright because that’s still remains at the centre of all of this doesn’t it?
Keith Beardsley:
Oh it does and at this point, I don’t see that ever coming out unless Nigel says it himself or Duffy comes out and gets into a bigger discussion, and that’s part of the problem PMO has, is they can’t control what may or may not come down the road. So they have to keep everything fairly tight, fairly close and try and change the channel. Maybe come up with some type of Senate reform rules. Maybe come up with the idea we’ve seen pushed around of posting all MP and senators’ expenses, which would be nice to see anyways. But they have to have some type of high ground to take and at this point it’s very, very difficult.
Tom Clark:
Go ahead…
Jennifer Ditchburn:
Well I think the problem is maybe we’ll never know but the facts sort of don’t compute. With everything that we know about the prime minister’s office and Keith knows a lot about this, I mean the level of control over all aspects. I mean we know the prime minister will stay up late red-marking memos from the Privy Council Office. He’s a very detail-oriented person. Then you have someone like Nigel Wright you know who is involved in the highest echelons of corporate Canada and Bay Street and very strategic minded, a very cool operator. So you take those two things and you think how could this have happened? The explanation doesn’t really add up and I think for that reason, even though we don’t know exactly what went on behind the scenes, it still sort of defies credibility and that’s I think the problem.
Keith Beardsley:
That’s the problem, exactly.
Tom Clark:
Coming back to the first answer where you said Keith that you don’t think things are any better for the prime minister’s office now than they were two weeks ago when this all kicked off. What about the lasting damage to the brand to the Conservative brand? Jen, do you think it is that lasting or is it something that they’ll get over?
Jennifer Ditchburn:
I mean it’s hard to assess right now and the problem there too is the Conservative brand is so wrapped up in Stephen Harper. You know it’s really all about the leader and it has been for seven years. If it was a little bit more diffuse among more people, I think that might make it a little bit better for them. And look how much they’ve invested in Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin; they’re also so wrapped up in the Conservative brand. It’s not just on the ethics front too I think that they’ve been wounded but also on law and order. I mean every time they’re going to bring up white collar crime and so on, I mean they’ve sort of eroded some of the standing that they could have on some of those issues going forward. But it’s a little bit too early to assess completely.
Tom Clark:
I’ve only got 15 seconds left but what about that moral high ground?
Keith Beardsley:
I still say the same thing. Its two years to go. There is a chance to turn the thing around. The problem they’ll have is these issues will keep coming up months down the road which will bring the story back up. But yeah, they have two years and if they come up with an agenda that people are looking forward to or they can woo the country on, they’ll be all right. But it is damaging right now, no doubt about it.
Tom Clark:
All of a sudden that successful completion of the European free trade deal becomes very important. Keith Beardsley, Jennifer Ditchburn, thank you very much. I appreciate you being here this morning.
Well coming up next on The West Block, there’s a changing of the guard at the Bank of Canada. What challenges await the incoming governor? That’s next. Stay tuned.
Break
Tom Clark:
Welcome back. Well in what has got to be one of the most talked about career moves in Canadian public life, Mark Carney becomes the Governor of the Bank of England on July 1st and tomorrow, Stephen Poloz will take over his job as the Governor of the Bank of Canada. What obstacles will the new governor have to negotiate in the years ahead?
Well joining me now to talk more about this is John Manley, the president and the CEO of the Council of Chief Executives here in Canada. Mr. Manley thanks very much for being here.
John Manley:
My pleasure.
Tom Clark:
So tomorrow we have a new Governor of the Bank of Canada. From your perspective and that of your members, what is the single most important thing that he has to do?
John Manley:
He has to try to find a way to get some real growth in the Canadian economy. We’ve been you know puttering along at 1.5, 2 per cent, maybe a little bit more than that but not very vigorous and as we see the U.S. start to move forward now, it’s going to be important to see the Canadian economy get some traction.
Tom Clark:
Well we had some good news on Friday, 2.5 per cent growth, which was higher than economists predicted but you’re right, the American economy is really showing some signs of action here. Is there a danger for Canada that if the American economy does charge ahead that we can be left behind or is that good news for us?
John Manley:
We always…our boats all rise when the U.S. sea rises, so I think that this isn’t a race in GDP growth. When the U.S. economy is growing, that’s good for us so come on U.S., let’s go.
Tom Clark:
Getting back to your first point though, that the job of the governor, among others, is to try and ignite the economy. What’s the single most important thing that you have to do in order to get that growth you’re talking about?
John Manley:
Well always remember his real job is to keep prices stable. I mean he is the anti-inflation guy. Now we haven’t seen any sign of inflation in this country for a long, long time and that’s why interest rates are so low. But I think he will be watching as the economy does pick up, whether there are any signs of inflation. Eventually interest rates have to go up Tom and I think the important task that Stephen Poloz is going to have is when to begin to make that move.
Tom Clark:
You know one thing Mark Carney said consistently when he was the Governor of the Bank of Canada as did Jim Flaherty, the finance minister, specifically about your members; it is that Canadian businesses have been doing a pretty terrible job of putting their money back into the economy. That they’re sitting on wads of cash and that that’s holding this country back. I don’t know how the new governor feels about it but how do you respond to that?
John Manley:
Yeah, in fact, Mark Carney did kind of relent on that in the last few months but I think the reality is that once you had a near-death experience, you tend to be a little bit cautious when you’re confronting the situations that brought you to that situation. And in 2008, literally the credit markets in this country and the United States shut down. And companies that didn’t have cash on their balance sheets, we can remember their names, but they’re no longer around.
Tom Clark:
The single greatest impediment to growth in this country, a lot of people have said it is the skill shortage deficit that we have. Do you see the same thing?
John Manley:
Yeah, this is something our members are pointing out all the time that it’s like we’ve got this phenomenon. We’ve got people without jobs over here and a lot of them are recent graduates, and smart, young people and some of them both you and I know. And over here, we’ve got jobs without people. And we’ve got to find a way to neutralize that failure to match people and jobs. It’s costing us a lot. It’s costing also the lost productivity and I think part of it is education and training. I think the business sector is going to have to do a lot more training on its own. Some of it, we’re just…you know we’re pumping people out of universities that have the wrong skill sets.
Tom Clark:
I hate to leave that important issue where it is, but because we’re a bit restricted on time, I did want to ask you one thing; just over my shoulder is the Centre Block of Parliament where you sat as the deputy prime minister of this country for a number of years. What do you make of what’s happening on the other side of Parliament Hill down in the Senate chambers and what everybody is talking about in this country, just from an old political view, what do you think?
John Manley:
Well you know I think what’s being revealed is an abuse of the privilege that members of Parliament — and senators are members of Parliament, we tend to confuse that but they are parliamentarians — and they are expected to be really pretty pristine in how they deal with their affairs. And I think it’s always damaging to the public trust and therefore it’s damaging to the whole political class when we get issues like we’ve recently been having on spending. And I know it plays out in the daily cut and thrust of Parliament as a partisan issue. Personally, I think it hurts everybody. It just makes people more cynical and less respectful and that’s not good for our institutions.
Tom Clark:
Is there a solution to it?
John Manley:
Well you know I think we have to back away from the notion that everybody that’s in these offices is going to be honourable and you have to have systems as we do in corporate Canada where you know your expenses have to be checked by somebody and they have to be verified. You just can’t be reimbursed without having proper checks and I think that’s what is going to have to happen.
Tom Clark:
John Manley, always good talking to you. Thanks very much for dropping by.
John Manley:
Thanks Tom.
Tom Clark:
Well just a few notes before we go. A royal anniversary of note today; it was on this day 60 years ago, millions of people around the world watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In that age before satellites or cell phones, this was the biggest media event in history, with film of the coronation being flown around the world for almost simultaneous local broadcast. The anniversary will be officially recognized this Tuesday.
And before we go, if you think you’re fed up with the shenanigans on Parliament Hill, take a look at this:
High atop a lamppost on the Hill, this red-winged blackbird lets politicians and even journalists know exactly what he thinks.
Visuals of a red-winged blackbird attacking politicians and journalists on their heads as they walk along a sidewalk and across the Hill.
Well the bird had the last word. That’s our show for this week. I’m Tom Clark. Look forward to seeing you next week
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