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UPDATE: Canada’s Parliament approved the Conservative resolution with 221 Yea votes, 51 Nay votes and 12 abstentions, meanwhile Justin Trudeau’s alma mater McGill University voted in favour of a pro-BDS resolution with 512 for and 337 against.

So while our collective political attention, or at least mine, has been focused south of the border, or on less partisan though equally polarizing issues like taxi protests, celebrities being screwed over and basically anything but Canadian federal politics, our parliament has been debating a motion to condemn the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel) movement which will come to a vote today, the same day McGill University votes on whether or not they will adopt a pro-BDS stance or not.

Yes, that’s what our elected officials are spending their time and your tax dollars doing. It started when the Connservative Party, our Official Opposition put forward this resolution:

“That, given Canada and Israel share a long history of friendship as well as economic and diplomatic relations, the House reject the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which promotes the demonization and delegitimization of the State of Israel, and call upon the government to condemn any and all attempts by Canadian organizations, groups or individuals to promote the BDS movement, both here at home and abroad.”

Now that may sound like typical Harper-era BS. We even got to see Jason Kenney railing against what he thinks is anti-Semitism, completely ignoring the fact that criticism of a state’s policies has absolutely nothing to do with the religion the majority of the people in the state follow.

What’s different this time is that even though Stephane Dion initially called the resolution divisive, it now looks like Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government will be voting for it today. The NDP and Greens will oppose.

This is a really embarrassing moment for the Parliament of Canada. While toothless, the resolution is a clear indication that our parliament, and moreover the Liberal Government, doesn’t respect the right of economic boycott, an overall effective tactic protesters can use to bring about real change.

Now remember that Bill C-51, the so-called anti-terror bill that leaves the definition of terrorism so broad it can apply to anyone the government wants to tag with it,  and C-24, Harper’s second-class citizens bill, which could strip citizenship from anyone convicted of “terrorism” are both still on the books. The Liberals haven’t scrapped C-24 or changed C-51 yet, both things they promised to do. In that context, this toothless statement seems a little more menacing.

Makes sense that there is a petition out against this and people are urging Canadians to contact their MPs (and making it easy to do so). I have signed the petition and sent an email to my MP, who is a Liberal and sadly will probably vote for this resolution anyways. If you agree with me, even if you don’t agree with BDS at all but think Canadians have a right to call for economic boycott nonetheless, I urge you to do the same.

While Justin Trudeau clearly likes appeasing the right wing, including the right-wingers in his party, while at the same time trying to mollify the left with some feigned indignation followed by actual voting support for the very thing they are indignant about, I think a clearer message is in order. Here is my resolution, which, sadly, will never come before Canada’s Parliament :

  1. Criticism or promoting an economic boycott of the State of Israel is not anti-Semetism and any politician who argues so is either uninformed or a political opportunist
  2. Condemning economic boycott is un-democratic
  3. Any politician who supports a resolution condemning the BDS Movement can no longer claim to be progressive and must admit that they are just a neocon in progressive clothing from here on

Contact your MP and sign the petition, but if that doesn’t work, then please make me this one promise: vote any MP who supports this monstrosity of a resolution out of office the first chance you get!

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Alex Tyrrell is the new leader of the Quebec Green Party. He’s also a candidate in today’s provincial by-election in Outremont, running against Quebec Liberal leader Philippe Couillard. While Couillard had initially agreed to debate him, the PLQ boss has since backed out.

“The small parties have tougher questions to ask than the big parties do,” Tyrrell theorized about Couillard’s change of heart in a phone interview, “it would be a lot easier for him to debate Pauline Marois or Francois Legeault than the leader of the Green Party or candidates from Option Nationale or Quebec Solidaire.”

Tyrrell would have pressed Couillard on Anticosti Island and the fracking agreement former Liberal leader Jean Charest signed with the private sector, where residents only get 3% of the royalties (known in some circles as “the theft of the century”). While Premier Pauline Marois had campaigned against hydraulic fracturing for shale gas, she has done an about face since being elected simply by changing the wording. Apparently “oil shale” is okay for her, or fine enough that she would have no reason to attack Couillard on the issue.

Tyrrell also thinks public transit is extremely important. The Greens haven’t had their policy convention yet (Tyrrell was only elected leader a few months ago), but when they do, Tyrrell will be arguing (as he is in Outremont) for free public transit.

“Free transit is really an incentive that will be matched with a major expansion of the public transit networks across the province,” he said, “it’s also a social justice issue. We think it’s completely unfair that people have to pay $77 per month if they’re not a student for an STM pass and more if they come farther away. It’s counter-intuitive.”

Tyrrell thinks the incentive approach is much better than some heavy car tax. He feels that making public transit a province-wide priority and increasing funding to this shared provincial/municipal responsibility will achieve both social justice and environmental goals without penalizing workers who live far from public transit and need their cars.

“Even if some people live far from major cities,” he argues, “if we reduce the number of cars in the cities, it will reduce climate change.”

The riding he hopes to win tonight is not only a transit hub, it has been Liberal for quite some time. While Tyrrell admits that residents there have been represented by a fair share of cabinet ministers, it doesn’t mean the Liberals have been listening to what they want.

“For the longest time, they’ve been taken for granted by the Liberal Party,” he says of Outremont electors, “there’s a pattern of the Liberal candidates not showing up for debates and not being involved in the riding.”

Tyrrell would like to change that and has been going door-to-door in Outremont to get that message out, despite having to split his time between Outremont and leading the party. He’s found that people there are disappointed that, while the Greens and other smaller parties are running, the major parties (PQ and CAQ) are treating it like a foregone conclusion that Couillard will win.

“The feeling I’m getting,” he recounts, “is that the people are disappointed that the other parties aren’t running and that the by-election is being abused not only by the Liberals but by the other parties as well who are refusing to participate. I think they’re not very happy about being taken for granted.”

* polls in Outremont and Viau are open until 8pm tonight, Monday December 9th. Voting info is available at monvote.qc.ca

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Monday’s by-election results in four ridings (or mini-election) were not particularly memorable. But, as a federal political wonk, I have no choice but to scrutinize them to see if they have any augurs, good or bad, for the three major political players (please note that I am deliberately excluding the Green Party and Bloc from this analysis) in 2015’s Federal election.

As the old joke goes, the results of elections are never as important as what the political spin-doctors working for the winners make them out to be. Nor are they as insignificant as those working for the losers would have you believe.

First, let’s look at the winners. There can be no doubt that Justin Trudeau has plenty to crow about after his party not only maintained their strongholds in Bourassa and Toronto Centre, despite hard-fought NDP campaigns in both, but also came within 400 votes of stealing what had been previously regarded as one of the bluest riding in the country, Brandon-Souris, Manitoba.

The fact that they had a strong candidate with Tory roots (Rolf Dinsdale) certainly helped. But it’s clear that the Liberals benefited from a massive protest vote in the election most likely from both NDP (the Dipper candidate had finished second in 2011) and Conservative voters, many of whom appear to be pissed over Harper’s ongoing senate scandal. This coupled with the surprising results in Provencher (where they also finished second) seems to indicate that whatever political baggage Trudeau the Younger’s name once carried with it in Western Canada, and his tendency to alienate Western Canadians voters with various verbal blunders, is becoming less of a burden for the Liberals.

freeland mcquaig buttons

NDP strategists, on the other hand, have little to brag about after their party failed to increase its seat total in the House of Commons. While many dippers may be genuinely upset over Trudeau’s seriously tacky appropriation of Jack Layton’s now legendary deathbed address to his fellow Canadians, more cynical politicos will probably tell you that the party’s outrage over the victory speech quote probably had something to do with their desire to shift the focus of the media away from some fairly dismal election night results.

Bourassa may never have truly been within reach for the NDP (after all, it did belong to our new Mayor Denis ‘trade Deharnais’ Coderre for the better part of the last 16 years), but they definitely expected a closer contest in the Montreal North riding where they witnessed a huge growth in their vote share last time around with an unknown candidate and hardly any electioneering. Better news came out of Toronto Centre where star candidate Linda McQuaig did a bang-up job of challenging her Liberal rival, Christy Freeland, and came a close second in the final tally. Should she choose to return in 2011 after the riding is split into three, with the Rosedale (one of the wealthiest in neighbourhoods in Canada) portion forming a new separate riding, she would most likely win it.

The biggest losers though, arguably, were the Harper Tories. Not only did their fortress in Manitoba come under formidable siege from the Grits, but they suffered a historic defeat in Toronto Centre, with their worst finish in history, and a terrible showing in Bourassa.

The conventional political wisdom about by-elections is that they are won or lost based your ability to motivate the base. This is surely bad news for Conservatives in the next Federal election. In Brandon (a quintessentially western rural riding if ever there was one) , where the party used to be able to count on overwhelming support, their voters seem to have either stayed away from the polls in droves, or worse, voted Liberal.

Prime Minister Harper must now face the music: his political shenanigans involving the Senate are starting to take their toll on his party.

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This post originally appeared on QuietMike.org, republished with permission from the author

The main promises Stephen Harper made during his 2006 campaign were to reform Canada’s Senate and make our government more accountable. So far, mission failed.

Harper said at the time that if Senate reform failed, it should be dismantled. Back then, Harper’s vision of the senate completely Americanized our upper chamber.

Harper wanted to see an elected senate with a maximum term limit of eight years. This would no doubt have led to the same partisan stalemates we see in Washington.

Harper’s initial stab at senate reform was shot down by the Liberals in the Senate who dominated the chamber when the Conservatives first came to power. However, shortly after their majority win in 2011 they introduced bill C-7, also known as the Senate Reform Act. The bill would limit Senators to a nine-year term and would allow the provinces to hold elections to choose their representatives.

senators1

Instead of passing the bill through parliament which hasn’t even been debated in 15 months, the Conservative government asked the Supreme Court of Canada to look at the constitutional requirements for five possible options for Senate reform:

• Fixed-term Senate appointments

• Repealing the property qualifications required to become a senator

• A system in which the federal government consults the provinces, but still appoints senators at a national level

• A system in which the provinces choose their own senators

• Abolishing the Senate altogether

The Canadian Senate was created with the intention of having a “place of sober second thought” before bills become law. Unfortunately some politicians serving in the senate, past and present, have come to respect the upper chamber as a place of second income.

There are so many problems with our senate the least of which are the senate expense scandals. Whether we keep the status quo by appointing our senators or we choose to elect them, the senate has no business in a parliamentary democracy.

We presently appoint our senators which is anti-democratic to begin with. We elect our members of parliament to the House of Commons to write our laws and table our budgets. It’s ridiculous to think the people we elect can be overruled by those who were not.

But what is the alternative, an American style election for senators that could grind parliament to a halt just the same? Let’s not forget to mention the added cost of holding the elections in the first place. Those of you who think this works need only look south of the border.

Even the notion of limiting the number of years a senator can serve is counterproductive and could cost the tax payers more money in pensions. Our MPs and Prime Minister can serve as long as the population chooses to keep them in office, if it isn’t broken, why fix it, right?

The senate is and has always been an elitist institution. Elected or not, there has been a law in place for the last 145 years that stipulates that a senator must own $4000 worth of land. It isn’t much compared to 1867, but if you rent your home, you cannot sit in the senate.

Canadian-Senate-Cartoon (1)

The senate is broken and in my opinion beyond repair, it doesn’t work, it costs too much money and it gets in the way of governing the country. I’m not the only one who believes this historically useless establishment should go the way of the Dodo. Over 40% of Canadians now feel the senate should meet its end, although the number might be fueled a little by the expense scandals.

Some of the most successful parliamentary democracies in the world do not have an upper chamber or a senate including every Scandinavian country (Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark). Advancement thrives in these progressive countries because there is no second House to obstruct it. Why do we need to be different?

There are those in Canada who insist on defending the Senate because they care about our history and about Canada’s links to the British parliament (which were severed decades ago). Quite frankly, the Canadian senate is as useful to the Canadian people as the Queen of England, but at least the Queen only costs us the salary of one Governor General.

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Tuesday night’s BC election was supposed to be an in-the-bag victory for the NDP. Instead, it turned into a cautionary tale of Canada’s altered political landscape.

Adrian Dix, BC New Democrat frontrunner, will perhaps go down in history as the suffocated canary who somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

According to Angus Reid, a forecast before the election showed New Democrats were the party of choice with 45% of decided voters and leaners. Liberals were in second with 36%. On Election Day, however, Liberals won 44.4% of the popular vote with the NDP trailing at 39.5%. This translated into Liberals winning 50 of BC’s 85 legislature seats ― an increase of five seats.

Unlike Quebec PQ premier Pauline Marois, Christie Clark’s supporters should not hail Clark as the Iron Lady of the West. Premier Clark failed to secure for herself a seat in her own riding of Vancouver-Point Grey. An MLA elected in a Liberal stronghold will likely surrender their seat so the party leader can run in a by-election.

Liberal Premier Christy Clark first sworn in by Clerk of the House E. George MacMinn as BC’s 35 Premier on March 14, 2011.

Postmortem assessment will likely uncover ‘leadership’ as the underlying cause of the BC NDP losses. BC’s election may have had more to do with Dix’s incompetence than Clark’s popularity.

Polls definitely showed that while federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s popularity rose, Clark’s popularity declined. Neither her nor Dix inspired province-wide confidence.

Indeed, Clark’s only saving grace was her ability to stay on message as the only viable candidate to stabilize BC’s economic sector and create jobs. BC Conservative leader John Cummins, shared similar policies with Clark but ultimately, his skepticism about global warming proved incompatible with BC voters.

An effective strategy for Dix would have been to prime Northern Gateway and frame it as a political clash between BC’s populous left against its irreconcilable right. Dix did no service to the party by clouding his position on Northern Gateway with qualifiers while Clark had indicated willingness to do business with Alberta if the price was right. An uncoordinated effort to attack the right in cooperation with the Greens also proved devastating.

What happened  should give NDP brass in Ottawa pause. Party leader Tom Mulcair, who had openly campaigned for Dix and saw this election as a potential warm-up for the next federal campaign, has already pledged to apply the lessons learned here in 2015.

This result was also bad for Dix’s campaign manager Brian Topp, also Jack Layton’s former chief strategist, a member of the NDP old guard and last year’s federal NDP runner-up to Mulcair. Topp’s miscalculation shows signs that the Orange Wave is regressing. Its effect could prove fatal to the federal campaign.

mulcairBC’s election represents the largest NDP experiment since the 2013 Montreal convention rejected creating a provincial party in Quebec. It may soon be the NDP’s Spanish Civil War before World War II.

Clark’s negative attacks on Dix and Dix’s unwillingness to be nasty in return, shirking away from confrontation at the televised debate, proved lethal.

Is the negative attack strategy no longer just a Harper hallmark, but a matter of political survival? Canadian politics may have not only shifted further into negative campaigning, but proved it is here to stay.

New Democrats may have to commit sacrilege against their fallen hero whose dying breath was of love being better than anger and optimism being better than despair if they want to win in 2015.