Good morning,
Queen’s Park – the site of the Ontario legislature – saw some legislative fireworks yesterday. Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government is pushing through their plan to cut the number of Toronto city councillors in the midst of a municipal election. This time, the legislation has the so-called notwithstanding clause attached, a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency constitutional tool used to get around a judge’s ruling that struck down an earlier version of the proposed law. Many conservative legal scholars say they are uneasy about the clause’s use.
The daily Politics Briefing newsletter is written by Chris Hannay in Ottawa. Have any feedback? Let us know what you think.
TODAY’S HEADLINES
Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland is rejoining her fellow Liberal MPs in Saskatoon for the caucus retreat, after a couple of unproductive days in Washington. North American free-trade agreement talks appear to have stalled.
Border Security Minister Bill Blair says new investments the government is making should bring down the 20-month wait time for refugee hearings, though the independent tribunal that hears the cases says that, at this point, they’re just hoping to slow down the wait times' growth.
Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc was found by the federal ethics commissioner to have been in a conflict of interest while in charge of fisheries.
The federal government has reached a settlement with veterans to pay back $100-million in pension payments that were clawed back. The settlement still has to be approved by the Federal Court.
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe says relations between his province and Ottawa are a little “frosty.”
Regina MP Erin Weir says he’s going to pursue the NDP nomination in his riding again, even though leader Jagmeet Singh kicked him out of caucus earlier this year and has made it clear he’s not welcome back.
And Liberal MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes says she turned down an opportunity to continue to be a parliamentary secretary because she found her strong social media presence was interfering with her job. “Unfortunately, over the last few months, the small NGOs that I meet with and want to interact with and want to help build their brand, got caught up in my ‘she’s a racist’ rhetoric,” she told The Hill Times.
Campbell Clark (The Globe and Mail) on the New Democratic Party: “The NDP’s good-fight, third-party appeal has also been a potent electoral argument on occasion, when the NDP could offer to wield influence if voters gave them the balance of power in a minority Parliament. As it happens, that just might be their most credible option in next year’s election.”
Allan Hutchinson (The Globe and Mail) on Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s use of the notwithstanding clause: “The problem is that people are getting mixed up about two distinct issues: the constitutional question of what governments can or cannot do as a matter of constitutional law, and what they should and should not do as a matter of democratic politics. Mr. Ford can likely do what he proposes as a constitutional matter, but he should not be doing so as a political matter.”
Marcus Gee (The Globe and Mail) on the clause: “Constitutions should be built for worst cases. They are made to last generations, even centuries. They exist to protect us against the most unscrupulous of rulers in the darkest of times.”
Chris Selley (National Post) on Doug Ford’s other ideas: “Ford is partisanship in the raw, devoid of the Mulroney-esque niceties and utterly immune to cognitive dissonance. Few if any like him rise to the top, but every party’s base has its share of these people, and he can only embolden them.”
Linda Trimble (Policy Options) on being a woman in politics: “Be aware of the ways in which metaphors of battle and romance rob women of political agency. Using allegories of love and marriage puts female leaders firmly in their socially constructed ‘proper’ place – the home and family. Describing a leader as a ‘perfumed political bulldozer’ or a ‘female political killing machine’ infers that her toughness is mitigated by her femininity. Perhaps it is time to replace tired these battle metaphors with equally evocative yet gender-neutral accounts of political competition.”
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Chris Hannay