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Monday, June 21, 2021

When Life Imitates Research or How Lame Can Parliamentary Oversight Be in Canada?

 Phil, Dave, and I are hopefully finishing our book project this summer that compares the role of legislatures in the civil-military dynamics of democracies.  The starting point of this project was my realization that the relevant committee in Canada, the House of Commons Defence Committee, was largely blind and irrelevant.  Today, I am seeing that this starting point remains valid--that oversight over defence here is a mess, and that the House of Commons has little leverage.  Why?  Well, as Phil and I wrote in an article originally entitled "Ignorant Critic or Informed Overseer," (editors/reviewers insisted on something far less accurate), the Canadian political system rewards mindless point-scoring and does not incentivize serious oversight.  

And today?  Today, the Liberals on the Defence Committee filibustered for so long that the report on the Vance/Sexual Misconduct/Abuse of Power scandal in the Canadian Armed Forces is not going to happen.  I didn't know that filibustering in committee was a thing, but now I do.  Our paper had focused in part on the contrast between majority and minority governments.  That this investigation would not have gotten very far in a majority government because the government of the day controls the agenda, so the Defence Committee is prevented from looking into anything too serious.  When the governing party does not hold a majority of seats in the House of Commons, then the opposition parties, if they can cooperate, can control the agenda and investigate what they want.  Well, we might want to revise the article since I did not appreciate the filibustering thing.  

The domestic context is this: Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan is important politically to the Liberals--he raises money and brings in votes.  So, they want to protect him, and a report, politicized or not, would be pretty scathing since the Minister essentially admitted that he does not understand what is job entails.  Which means that the party that proclaims to be feminist is preventing a report from being issued on how the Canadian Armed Forces leadership has failed their women and their men.  I guess the bet is that the Liberal base will see the effort to produce the report to be a Conservative game to score points unfairly, just as they saw the censure of the Minister last week to be such (with the Conservatives playing into this).  There were enough Liberals on my twitter feed arguing that Sajjan has been treated unfairly that this strategy might work.  And it is easier to refute a non-report than a report.  

If I were the Conservatives, I would disseminate a draft report, one that is stripped of the most strident partisan sniping and focuses simply on the failures of Sajjan and the Liberal Party to take this stuff seriously.  Will they do that?  Probably not given the stuff they crammed into the censure motion.  

Like much of the past year, I am not so much surprised but appalled to find that my previous views were confirmed.  This filibuster, along with the Conservatives upending the relatively new intelligence review board, shows that, well, the Canadian political system is not really that mature.  Every actor seems to choose the shortest-term, most partisan option, which then does not really help that much since everyone else can see that is what they are doing, reducing the legitimacy of pretty much all involved.  

These folks make me feel like an idealist or naive, but I just think that one can be smart and partisan and still have an eye on the national interest.  The key should be that the parties different on how to define the national interest, rather than focusing solely on how to score some meaningless points.  Instead:

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