Speaker's Ruling: Derek Lee speaks

It was Liberal MP Derek Lee who set off the chain of events resulting in today's historic ruling from Speaker Peter Milliken about Parliament being supreme  -- over  the prime minister and cabinet and government. I caught up with Lee after the ruling was over, and I've put the interview below. (Note to media colleagues, competitors -- if you want to use any of this in your stories, feel free, in the new parliamentary spirit of collaboration,  to give the Star credit ... or Tim Naumetz or Kady O'Malley who were also there....)

 

Derek Lee: It puts off for a couple of weeks the final chapter. The government and its members now know they can’t hide behind secrecy or claims of secrecy in relation to these documents and we all have collectively to put something together to protect the sensitive documents.

Q: Do you know what that would be?

A: We’ve done it before and we may end up swearing members. We may end up having documents that can be looked at or not copied or taken away.

Q: Or a Security Intelligence Review Committee type thing.

A: We’ve done it before. We don’t have to set up something permanent. Although it’s my view that we should.

Q: When have we done it before?

A: The al-Mashat inquiry, the five-year review of CSIS. All had top-secret documents made available to MPs and it worked.

Q: So what should Canadians take away from today’s ruling?

A: I would say the supremacy of their Parliament in holding their government to account has been confirmed by the Speaker. We didn’t invent anything here today. We just dusted it off, gave it a spin  and it worked; it’s going to work. And all of us in the House will be committed to making it work. We’ve got two weeks to hammer something out on the detail and I’m very happy. These opportunities to benchmark some of these powers don’t come up very often; like once every 50 or 100 years, but in a minority Parliament, things do come up like this.

Q: So was history made today?

A: Our Speakers have never been so clear as this one was today and if people aren’t sure, they just have to read his remarks again.

Q: When did you realize this was turning your way?

A: Well I always knew it was a question of privilege but at one point in talking with him, it became apparent that he was going to look back at the House to construct this mechanism, rather than turning to me to move a motion. It’s hard for one MP to kind of bring it all together with one motion. I don’t have the whole department of Justice behind me. So he’s looked back to the House. He’s said this is a matter of huge significance; you have an obligation essentially to our electors to make it work. If it doesn’t, he’ll come back to the House and we will then move a motion that does the job.

Q: Which one moves the motion

A: I got up first, so he will probably turn to me. … In the end, this is so significant and the proof is here today because he didn’t follow the standard procedure, any motion that does go forward will have his thumbprint on it. But he isn’t going to turn to anybody until he sees some consensus in the motion. And that’s exactly what I would do.

The precedent here today is the clear, unequivocal, benchmarked statement of authority of the House to send for papers and records and it is absolute. And he says the House has never acted to curtail its powers. It was always absolute and it still is. So that’s the rule, that’s the law.

The government members took it quite well. It maybe wasn’t a cold shower, I don’t know. I mean, I wrote a book on this, it wasn’t new to me. But to some of them, to hear that said, it would be a bit of a cold shower.

Q: Were you one of the ones applauding?

A: At the end? Oh, I was happy with it. You know why I was happy? Because he didn’t have to turn to me. I had a motion ready, but the route that he took is the one that I had speculated on and I am ready to work with that too.

Q: Technically now we have a case of contempt, right?

A: “Incipient contempt” – certainly we have a contempt in motion if it continues. But they’re actually continuing with this little striptease of releasing documents every once in a while. But the House said forthwith so that compliance would involve both an initiative by the government and an initiative by the House on our end to protect those documents that were sensitive or in need of protection. Both have to get done.

Q: And where does this put the Iaccobucci part of all this?

A: I’d like to see him be an adviser, collaborator in the mechanism. He’s not dumb. He has experience. He’s probably looked at 5,000 or 10,000 documents by now. Let’s not waste his efforts. But the Speaker actually made the point that his role was not collaborative..

Q:  That the government was his “client.”

A: Right. I spoke to (Justice Minister) Rob Nicholson about this in the early days on this. I said don’t do it. He actually asked me if a mechanism like that would work and I said to him only if the person you bring in is approved by Parliament to do work for us. Will that work. He obviously didn’t pay attention to that. 

Two parties can hire one person… It’s like a mediation. If one of the parties loses confidence, you back off both, so it’s tricky, but Iaccobucci could do it. And now that we’re there, this will succeed.

Q: Do you think there’s enough trust in this Parliament for them to have their act together in two weeks?

A: I think the trust has to exist between the people on that committee, so you’ve got 10 or 20 people involved. That should be sufficient. We’ll overcome this distrust in the House and God forbid that the Prime Minister wouldn’t be onside. Will he take this as a loss or an insult? He wasn’t there…

Q: Do you take anything from the fact that the Prime Minister wasn’t there in the House?

A: He was one of the few leaders to leave. I saw him leave. He’s Prime Minister and he may have other responsibilities. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. I was disappointed he didn’t stick around for some of it. And if he has good attitude as Prime Minister, the resolution will be pretty easy, because the House has done this before, successfully.

What works

Twice in the past two days, people have sent us  press releases, with big capital letters at the outset: "UNDER EMBARGO" until such-and-such a time. This is new. And if there are PR professionals out there, reading this, a word -- embargoes are negotiated with the media, not dictated. If you want us to sit on information, and thus not do our jobs, a polite request and explanation for  why we would do so  would be nice. Personally, unless I say yes to an embargo, I have no reason to go along with one. 

And that brings me to another point -- that negotiation thing. Really good negotiators are able to say why it's in your interest, not their own, to come to some agreement. Years ago, when I was writing a book about an MP (who had somewhat extraordinary success getting what she wanted in her riding)  I was struck by how many cabinet ministers were able to say her simple recipe: she walked into the minister's office and said, "here's why this thing I want would be good for YOU." 

On some days in Ottawa, it's kind of amazing to watch how many people can forget this simple truth. Flacks call and explain why they need publicity; aides call and complain that we aren't making their ministers look good; lobbyists (bad ones) rant that we aren't doing stories that serve their clients.  And we do it too -- we tell folks we need to be on front page or we need stuff that makes our bosses happy.  Why that should be relevant to a politician or anyone else, I have no idea. Unless you assume that the other person is totally focused on giving you what you want and not at all concerned about him/herself. 

Which brings me again (and for now, enough about this) to that revealing little document that ministerial staff prepare before a "message event." See previous couple of posts. Notice that there isn't a word in there about the public interest. "Message events" are all about polishing the image of the politician and making him/her look good. 

That's the egregious part of the whole, painstaking preparation --  not one question or blank space for the part where the public benefits. I'd venture to say that it's one of the reasons the public has simply checked out.  The self-interest is obvious and apart from being kind of offensive, it's impractical too. No one actually wants to spend a whole lot of time listening to what you want or what makes you look good. 

Insert "desired headline" here

Further to the earlier post today, the Hill Times has helpfully supplied us with a copy of the "Message  Event Proposal" form that is now a staple of a world gone mad in Ottawa. We'd do well to remember that this is the same government that kept hauling out all those oversize novelty cheques (see blank space for "props", below).  Information, in this universe, is something to be "rolled out"  and "marketed." Just like Slap-Chops -- only difference is that Vince says he can't do this all day.

  

The life of a Conservative staffer

 Some interesting glimpses of the life of Conservative staffers in the papers this morning. Via The Hill Times, we learn of this bureaucratic monstrosity called an "MEP" -- proof that truth is stranger than farce. 

After a prolonged search, The Hill Times obtained an example of a MEP, a three-page document. An exhaustive document, the Message Event Proposal amounts to a sort of media shadow play that attempts to predict how information will play out in the press. It asks for a "desired headline" and "desired sound bite," "web highlight caption," "desired picture," "key questions and answers," and "official talking points." It also asks for details on event backdrops, props, speech length and tone, and attire of the speaker.

And then, in The Globe today, the story of how Jason Kenney's office handled the barring of George Galloway and his attempt to come to Canada. Really looking forward to the outrage from all those Anne Coulter fans.  

Management, autocracy, tyranny

At week's end, we have some smart columnists reflecting on what we've been learning about Harper's leadership through the combined controversy over Guergis-Jaffer and the parliamentary showdown over Afghan documents. There's our own Chantal Hébert and then, some other must-reads: 

Paul Wells, in Macleans, has some important insights into the PM's obsession with secrecy. I particularly like this turn of phrase: 

But this Prime Minister cannot help himself. If he knows something you don’t, he values that thing out of all proportion to its true worth.

And this little snippet should give us all pause. 

During the 2006 election, one Conservative staffer was assigned to stake out the coffee shop where Liberal staffers would pause from long days in their party’s campaign war room. History doesn’t record that the overheard chit-chat did the Conservatives any good, but it made the leader feel better. Today, reporters seeking comment on any story are quizzed at length about their intentions. They may or may not get a call back with any information. But the information they surrender is collated and analyzed for trends on the issues that interest the media.

I'm betting the PMO is now wishing they paid as much attention to Mr. Jaffer's website and conversations as they do to reporters. As I mentioned on CBC this week, it takes the PMO approximately 10 minutes within putting something online to let reporters  know that we've done something to offend the folks at Langevin.  It took more than seven months after Mr. Jaffer's arrest for the PMO to exhibit any curiosity about his post-political dealings. 

The other must read of today is Dan Gardner's column in the Citizen. He apologizes for his alarmist tone, but I'm glad someone is rattling people's attention about this parliamentary standoff. If you thought prorogation was a slap in the face to democracy, pay some overall attention to the trend line here, Gardner is warning. 

Most Canadians have little or no understanding of how parliamentary government works, and Stephen Harper has consistently stoked that ignorance and used it to his advantage. He governs like a president, and since Canadians' understanding of government comes mostly from American television and movies, that seems reasonable.

What people don't realize, however, is that the American president is restrained by institutional checks and balances, including a strong and independent Congress. Stephen Harper is subject to no such checks and balances: If he is a president, he is a one-man government.

Errol Mendes calls it "prime ministerial autocracy." In 17th-century England, they had a simpler term for it. It is "tyranny."

Politics and the Pen: a P.S.

Last month, I wrote about the big Politics and the Pen gala, and specifically, its tribute to my old friend Shaughnessy Cohen.  The Writers' Trust, happily, has put the videos from the evening online and I'm delighted to share them here on this blog too.  You can click directly below to see the PM's quite funny video to the party; you'll have to click through to the Writers' Trust to see the 6-minute-long tribute, produced by Bravo.

Stephen Harper Speaks at 2010 Politics and the Pen Gala from Writers' Trust of Canada on Vimeo.

All about contempt

In today's Globe, a useful preview of the issues surrounding the Speaker's coming ruling on Afghan documents. 

The analysis omits one important aspect, however, and that's the coalition crisis of late 2008, early 2009. The Speaker of the Commons, if you think about it, is in much the same position as the Governor-General was back then -- forced to decide whether the government was flouting the institution of Parliament. Technically, Prime Minister Stephen Harper had shut down the Commons in defiance of the majority's will in that chamber.  Three parties, forming more than 50 per cent of the seats in the Commons, had sent a clear signal that they'd lost confidence in the government.  

The government responded with a massive PR campaign, portraying this as undemocratic and a separatist conspiracy. That PR campaign, repulsive as it was, probably saved Harper's skin. I'm told, by reasonably reliable authority, that the Governor-General realized she'd face the same onslaught if she gave approval to the coalition to replace Harper's government. So she gave  the Prime Minister  a lecture instead, with the instruction -- and this is important -- that he work harder at co-operating with the majority in the Commons. 

Flash forward now to last December. Those same three parties have passed an order that amounts to a legal instruction -- produce the Afghan documents. The government has resisted, more or less. The Speaker has to decide if this is contempt. 

The Governor-General and her advisers are watching this debate, obviously. In many ways, it's a sequel to developments during the coalition crisis. The Speaker is being asked to judge, effectively,  whether Harper has followed instructions to play better with others.  Like it or not, separatists or no separatists forming the majority opposition in the Commons, we do live in a parliamentary democracy, and minority governments can't go around  bullying those institutions and using negative, PR campaigns to justify it.  Saying that the military's interest prevails over the Commons is even more worrisome for those of us who are fans of democracy -- if the military trumps the will of the elected, why not just turn over Parliament to the armed forces, as they do in banana republics? 

My bet is that the Speaker tries to find some middle ground, like the Governor-General did, to avoid precipitating a crisis of trust in Parliament too. He may give the government another chance to comply with the parliamentary order. He may regard the massive document dumps in recent weeks as partial compliance.  

But there's another event too that will be at the front of his mind -- the more recent controversy over prorogation. Canadians have shown they're not entirely uninterested in whether Parliament is working or not.  I wouldn't assume that the public is simply going to roll over and agree that the government has every right to do what it wants in the House of Commons. The Speaker has an unenviable balancing act to do with this ruling. 

Why does scandal sell?

On CBC's Cross-Country Checkup yesterday, there was an intriguing discussion of whether Ottawa (collectively, the media and politicians)  was too caught up in scandal. It was a clever way of using scandal to protest about scandal, but that's another point. For what it's worth, here's the two cents I was offering (aloud, while cooking in the kitchen) as the broadcast unfolded. 

* Neither the media nor the politicians decide the pre-eminent story in a vacuum. If scandal sells, someone's buying. That would be you, the readers/consumers of news. Some callers made this point. And these days, our editors can actually quantify, immediately, the kind of stories that people want to read, through web stats. Thousands and thousands of people have  "clicked" on our stories about the Guergis-Jaffer controversy. I haven't seen the web statistics for the Liberals' thinkers' conference, which was preoccupied with matters of pension reform, foreign policy and the digital future, but I doubt it holds a candle to the readership of stories about sex, drugs and errant politicians. 

* It is true there is little reward for politicians who want to talk about policy or have discussions in shades of grey, rather than black and white. The media spent the last year ripping apart the Liberals for not tackling policy discussions, then rewarded the three days of Montreal policy discussions (see above) with either minimal coverage or snide dismissal from folks who didn't even attend.  The New Democratic Party regularly uses Question Period to tackle policy issues.  It's heartening to see, in fact, day to day. The reward, in poll numbers or media attention? Nil. 

The Prime Minister knows this -- why do you think he only takes two questions at his rare press encounters? The less politicians say, the better. Note that Harper been saying nothing about anything quite some time now -- it's only the Guergis-Jaffer affair that has attracted some attention/criticism about his minimalist attitude to disclosure. 

* This all said, much of the  Cross-Country Checkup discussion yesterday revolved around journalism as the business of giving people the information they want.  Should we only do stories that get a massive amount of clicks on the website? Of course not. There is, I hope, still room for the public-service model of journalism. When you hear people say: "No one cares about the Afghan-detainee story," I'm not sure how we should respond. Okay, we'll stop looking into it then? Throw some busty hookers into the debate? 

* And one final point, which I sort of said when I was on The Current last week. At the risk of sounding whiny, it's worth noting that politics takes up a lot less space in the news than it used to occupy. There used to be room in the paper for the serious and the scandalous. We managed to cover all of Mulroney's ministerial resignations in the 1980s, as well as free trade and the constitutional travails. Now, as a result of a combination of factors -- shrinking news pages and fewer reporters, the triumph of consumer journalism over the public-service model, the tendency of the media to inflate one story at the expense of others (a trend that one smart friend of mine traces to Princess Diana's death) -- there just isn't the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time.  I think there's probably a whole discussion that can be had here around the idea of competition -- are we competing to be the same, or competing to be different? But this blog post is long enough. 

Comments most welcome.

In Jaimie's memory

Update **** A longer version of this post is available online here. My editors saw this one, asked for more, and Jaimie's family obliged ****

It's been a rough week for politics, one of those  weeks that can make you forget about the good side of the business -- the idealists, the community-building, the genuine desire to help  that drives most people to get involved in political life.

To end this week, then, I'm using this blog to promote a cause. The Jaimie in the headline here, full disclosure,   was the beloved  daughter of some old friends of mine -- Rick Anderson and Michelle  Williams.  She was also the niece, cousin,  granddaughter and friend to a lot of other political people you've heard from over the years.

Jaimie's struggle with cancer, which ended sadly a few months ago, was simultaneously one of the saddest but most inspiring sagas one could ever hope to see.  Jaimie was an optimist about everything, including politics, and her friends and family have come up with a lovely way to keep that part of her alive. I'm printing the idea here in full, with all the contact/donating information, and encourage all to consider helping out. Thanks. 

Three months ago, a brilliant, courageous and passionate young woman lost her life to neuro-endocrine cancer, at the age of 23.

Losing Jaimie Anderson was tragic on many levels. Her brother, sisters, parents, extended family and wide circle of friends feel her absence in their lives tremendously, many hundreds of other people who were aware of her dignified and strenuous fight against her illness were deeply moved.

One of the things Jaimie cared about was politics and public life. She grew up in a family that nurtured this passion, and in the months she was able to work before and during her illness, she had the good fortune to work on Parliament Hill and make a contribution.

In Jaimie’s memory, we are creating what we hope will be an enduring Internship where each year, a deserving young person is given an opportunity to work with a Member of Parliament for six months. The Internship will be non-partisan, and the focus of the work will be on projects to help constituents, and to improve grass roots democracy, two subjects very close to Jaimie’s heart.

We are launching this effort with $10,000 and are aiming to raise at least $50,000 to endow this Internship on a permanent basis. Those wishing to make a personal or corporate contribution may do so as indicated at the bottom of this page. Or please feel free to email either banderson@national.ca or katepurchase@gmail.com with your interest and we will be happy to help with the arrangements. There will also be a fundraising event held this fall to bring people together who want to celebrate Jaimie and this effort in her name.

Your support would be greatly appreciated, and you will be contributing to a worthy cause, in the memory of an exemplary human being.

Thank you,


Bruce Anderson and Peter Mansbridge
Co-Chairs, Advisory Board
The Jaimie Anderson Parliamentary Internship

Advisory Board:
Nancy Jamieson
Rick Anderson
Michelle Williams
Kate Purchase
Erin Anderson
Mollie Anderson
Tyler Anderson

For those wishing to contribute online, click here:

https://mediant.magma.ca/fdnott/donations/

It's incredibly simple to do, takes two minutes and donations over $20 will be eligible for tax receipts issued by the Community Foundation of Ottawa.

Blackberry recall

One of the many alleged sins of Rahim Jaffer and Helena Guergis included his use of his wife's  Parliament-issued blackberry.

Apparently, however, this isn't all that unusual in political families on Parliament Hill.

How do we know this? Because "reminders" were   issued at the Conservative and Liberal caucuses this morning -- ie, if your husband or wife has one of the three BlackBerries you were issued, hand it over. Apparently the rules were never all that clear. But now they are.