Wells: Another farce on Bill Blair’s watch

2020/08/31 Leave a comment

Hard not to read this column by Paul Wells and not be discouraged. Why launch a process, led by a well-known expert, and then not provide the needed data and cooperate.

And even more shocking that Correctional Services Canada does not have any of the requested data on hand.

Fortunate that with immigration, IRCC has an abundance of data, and with diversity and representation, as does TBS, even if I sometimes complain and want more.

The GiC appointments index, on the other hand, bears some similarity to the issues raised in the case of Correctional Services Canada, in that there is no integrated spreadsheet of all appointments, only separate tables by organization, as I discovered when doing my baseline analysis in 2016 (Governor in Council Appointments – 2016 Baseline):

I’ve got my journalistic obsessions, Lord knows. But the notion that Bill Blair, the minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, is in way over his head was not something I brought to this game. It’s a learned response. Lately it’s kind of getting locked in.

First there was the federal government’s response to April’s mass murder in Nova Scotia, which amounted to three months of silence and stonewalling, a botched announcement of an “independent review” that would have no power in law to compel testimony, and a hasty retreat after three days because basically everyone in Nova Scotia was saying in the newspapers what hundreds of them had been trying to tell Blair in private for months.

The hallmarks of this farce were unfamiliar but, in hindsight, look characteristic.  A long period of bland assurance that all is well in hand. (“We’ll put the processes in place to make sure that those answers not only are obtained for Canadians, but done in a way which is trustworthy,” Blair told Maclean’s in June. “It’s not an easy thing to do, but that’s my job.” Nice touch, that last bit.) The belated realization that actually, freaking nothing is happening. And finally, the headline-driven climb-down, accompanied by assurances that the minister was on top of things all along.

Fast forward to the strange case of Anthony Doob, Emeritus Professor of criminology at the University of Toronto. He’s 77, he’s in the Order of Canada, he’s one of the most-cited criminologists in the field. Last summer Blair’s predecessor Ralph Goodale put Doob in charge of a distinguished panel to monitor changes to solitary confinement in Canada’s federal prisons.

The change was part of Bill C-83, and it amounted to replacing “segregation units,” where inmates could be holed up alone for up to 22 hours a day if they were deemed dangerous to other prisoners or if they were under investigation for disciplinary infraction, with “structured intervention units (SIUs),” where they could be kept for up to 20 hours a day. Under the new law, summarized with its limitations in this article, inmates would also be given regular “meaningful human contact” with a counsellor, elder or other helpful person.

It’s a very modest improvement to treatment that’s been found systematically damaging to inmates’ prospects of rehabilitation—and, in some cases, to their lives. A succession of courts have found disciplinary segregation violated inmates’ Charter rights. Finally a B.C. Supreme Court justice gave the feds a year to fix the system.

The stakes were high. Section B of the court’s decision begins with a long discussion of whether extended solitary confinement constitutes torture. The judge sounds inclined to conclude it does.

So Bill C-83 was the Trudeau government’s coerced response to a legal obligation, not a spontaneous decision for reform. But Goodale appointed Doob and seven colleagues because he wanted to make sure the reform was working. The SIU review panel “will play an essential role in ensuring that the new SIU system achieves our goal of humane and effective corrections,” Goodale said then. He told the panel to “give ongoing feedback” to Correctional Services Canada during its one-year mandate—and to “alert the Minister directly” about any “problems or concerns” with the new system.

On Tuesday of this week, Professor Doob announced the panel no longer exists and that it had achieved nothing because Correctional Services Canada gave it no usable information and Bill Blair did nothing to help when Doob tried to tell him what was happening.

Justin Ling has reported on this over at Vice, and it’s been reported elsewhere, but I want to emphasize the Kafkaesque absurdity of the situation.

Usually when this government screws up, its defenders look around for somebody they can designate an outsider, spoiler, saboteur or wrecker, somebody who doesn’t understand the Trudeau government’s beautiful mission and who seeks to discredit it. A Jody Wilson-Raybould, a Jesse Brown, a Postmedia. That’s hard in this case because every player in this drama was appointed by this government: Blair, CSC Commissioner Anne Kelly, Doob and his fellow panelists.

From Doob’s final report (“We have essentially not been able to examine any aspect of the SIUs during their first 7-8 months of operation”) and a telephone conversation I had with Doob on Friday, the short version of what happened is as follows.

In mid-November, the panel told CSC it would need a set of information on every inmate transferred to an SIU: the inmate’s case history, the reasons for transfer, the maximum number of hours in the SIU in a 24-hour period, the average number of hours of confinement per day over the length of the stay, and so on. It was a long list of indicators, but that’s why Doob sent the list to CSC before the SIUs even opened in late November, and it’s why he asked for the first batch of data to be sent in February. This would take time. Updates would follow every two months.

The information the panel requested was “all things that were administrative in nature,” Doob said. “It’s stuff that is almost certainly in their files somewhere.” If anything he asked for wasn’t available, he’d adjust. “I’ve been working with quantitative data for 50 years. This is the sort of thing that happens all the time. And you don’t worry about it.”

Correctional Services gave no hint that any of this would be a problem.

In mid-February Doob contacted the agency to begin figuring out how the data would be transmitted to the panel, how inmate confidentiality could be respected, and so on. This is three months after he told them what he wanted and five months after the responsible cabinet minister called his work “essential.” Doob’s contact at CSC said the agency hadn’t yet decided whether it would give the panel any of the information it had requested.

This turn of events “came to the panel as a complete surprise,” Doob wrote mildly in his final report. After some back-and-forth to insist on the importance of the panel’s request and gauge the agency’s willingness to block, he wrote to CSC Commissioner Anne Kelly in mid-March—and to Bill Blair at the end of March. From Kelly, he received no reply. Not until she saw her name cc’d on the complaint to Blair. That got a request from her for a meeting. But it took most of April for the meeting to happen. Finally in late May, CSC delivered data to Doob.

That data was unusable. Instead of a single spreadsheet with comparable indicators for every inmate, there were more than 900 spreadsheets. And Doob quickly discovered that depending on the criterion, the number of cases varied. Which meant that there was no way to compare among cases or between criteria. “It was a pile of crap,” he told me. Remember, this is a guy who’s spent decades in the field.

Doob’s dismayed response led to CSC, an organization with 18,000 employees, coughing up one (1) data analyst to work with him on cleaning up the data. His report is very complimentary about this data analyst, but after she’d worked for six weeks, he sent CSC a report advising the agency that he had no systematic analysis because he’d been given no useful data for most of his panel’s time on this earth.

CSC received that report on July 21. By an agreement Doob had reached with the agency when his panel was formed, it had three weeks to respond. After three weeks it hadn’t responded. After three weeks and six days, Doob received a letter from a senior deputy commissioner saying, in effect, sorry for the crummy data, we’re in the process of transferring our data collection from a platform that no longer works to one that doesn’t work yet. On the bright side, CSC promised monthly updates. On the downside, members of Doob’s panel were reaching the end of their one-year mandates, a couple at a time because they hadn’t even been appointed at the same time.

On Tuesday, Doob sent Ottawa reporters his final report with a cover-letter broadside, via the office of Kim Pate, a (Trudeau-appointed!) Ontario Senator with a long career in criminal-justice reform. “Our panel no longer exists,” he wrote. And it wasn’t just a problem that it wasn’t given the information it needed. It’s a problem because the agency that jails a huge prison population seems uninterested in how they’re doing. “CSC is telling us that it does not have systematic information on the operation of its Structured Intervention Units and apparently never made the gathering of this information a priority.”

Remember Bill Blair? Remember how he had nothing to say when Doob warned him through official channels in March? He did now, once Doob made his concerns public. “There have been news reports on the Correctional Services of Canada’s work with an Implementation Advisory Panel,” a statement from Blair’s office read.

“It is amusing to me that they don’t even acknowledge that these ‘news reports’ come from a report (from our panel) that CSC had for weeks,” Doob writes in an annotated version of Blair’s statement that Doob has been sending reporters.

The statement rehashes some of the background of the panel and adds: “We have dedicated extra resources to expedite this request.” Doob’s response: “CSC itself, for its own purposes, should want to know how the SIUs are operating. They shouldn’t have to be pushed into getting these data by an independent panel. They should want to know. Hence the implication that we are requiring them to dedicate ‘extra resources’ is, quite frankly, offensive.”

At midweek, Doob received a telephone call from Blair. “He said to me, ‘I’d like you to do this job,’” said Doob, who had written to Blair five months earlier warning that he was not being permitted to do his job.

Doob still thinks it’s worth knowing whether a court-mandated and hastily-developed reform is achieving its ends. He still thinks somebody should do the work he tried to do. Will he, now? “I told [Blair] that a necessary condition would be that I actually have the data in front of me,” he says. Promises of data later aren’t enough.

But that’s what Doob needs before he’ll even consider doing for Blair the work Goodale assigned him, the work he’s spent all of 2020 trying to do. “That’s the necessary condition. I don’t know what the sufficient conditions would be. If they even exist.”

A few concluding thoughts.

Once at a public event, I met a staffer from the Prime Minister’s Office I didn’t know yet. This person worked on files related to science and research policy, a longstanding preoccupation of mine. “When you tweet about science policy, I wind up working all weekend,” this person said. Sure, it was flattering, and I’m sure it wasn’t meant as a rigorously truthful or complete statement. But it also struck me as a little odd. I’m not smart enough to write anything on science policy that I haven’t heard from researchers. Why would my tweet be the thing that provokes overtime shifts? Why not the scientists?

I thought about this conversation when I learned that a report from a duly-constituted government-appointed panel isn’t enough to get the responsible minister involved in the file—but a headline in Vice is. Blair’s call was “a response to what’s in the media,” Doob told me, “not to what I’ve sent the government.”

This is what many people who work with this government tells me. Public servants, consultants, NGOs. Official channels are useless. Process is window dressing. This government consults but doesn’t listen, and whatever the plan is, it’s never as useful to know the plan as it is to have the personal phone numbers of a half-dozen senior staffers so you can text one of them and urge an improvised change of plans.

A couple of weeks ago Rob Silver, a supremely well-connected Liberal working for a mortgage firm, was in the news for his attempts to secure a legislative change that would benefit his company. Silver’s overtures were fruitless and I offer no opinion on their propriety, but he plainly knew what you need to do if you want to get something done in this town: Call Mike McNair, call Elder Marques, call Justin To. Write a letter to the minister? Don’t be old-fashioned.

When Anne Kelly became the Commissioner of Correctional Services Canada, Ralph Goodale wrote her a public mandate letter. “I encourage you to instil within CSC a culture of ongoing self-reflection,” he wrote, amusingly in hindsight. “This includes: regularly reviewing policies and operations to identify what works and change what does not… and welcoming constructive, good-faith critiques as indispensable drivers of progress.”

But in a government in which only a handful of staffers can actually make a decision, very few people in any department have the kind of autonomy Goodale was hoping Kelly would exercise. When the decision-making pipeline is no thicker than the PMO, and every particle of communication is the product of a chain involving dozens of staffers and bureaucrats reaching across government, nobody has the right to decide. So nobody is accountable for their decisions.

I don’t just mean that in the negative sense that nobody is sanctioned for a bad decision. I mean nobody has the authority to make a good decision. Things just happen. Or they just don’t. In a real sense, we’re not governed. We’re just given a constant runaround by people who, in many cases, would prefer not to be part of the immense machine delivering the runaround. Which is how a panel appointed to answer a basic question — has Canada stopped torturing people yet? — could work for a year and find no answers. And somehow it’s nobody’s fault. Not even Bill Blair’s, I guess.

Source: Another farce on Bill Blair’s watch

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Online registrar threatens to drop anti-immigration website

2020/06/24 Leave a comment

Of note.

Brimelow, if I recall correctly, was mentioned by Paul Wells in his The Longer I’m Prime Minister as having an influence in his decision to replace the 2011 Census with the less accurate National Household Survey:

An internet registrar is threatening to delist a website that is a leading promoter of white nationalist and anti-immigration views, a move that could make the site accessible only to diehard users willing to use a special browser to find it on the dark web.

Network Solutions’ parent company, Web.com Group, notified a civil rights group on Friday that it has “taken steps” to terminate the company’s account for VDARE.com, which would make it unreachable on the public internet unless it can find another provider willing to register the domain name.

VDARE remained online Monday. The website has until Thursday to transfer the domain before Network Solutions may delete its services, a parent company lawyer said in a letter to a VDARE attorney last week.

In April and in May, the head of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sent letters urging Network Solutions to drop VDARE. Kristen Clarke, the Washington, D.C.-based group’s president and executive director, wrote that VDARE peddles “anti-immigrant and anti-Black hate,” spreads misinformation about the coronavirus and encourages violence against migrants.

“This is part of our ongoing work to confront the ways in which hate activity festers online,” Clarke said Monday. “We know that many white supremacists and extremists are not organizing in basements. They are using these platforms and websites to spread their dangerous ideologies, target victims and incite violence.”

In Friday’s response to Clarke, a company attorney said VDARE’s content “does not represent the values of our organization” and violates its “Acceptable Use Policy.” The policy bars customers from using its domains “to display bigotry, racism, discrimination, or hatred in any manner whatsoever,” the same company attorney said in a letter to a VDARE lawyer last week.

VDARE founder and editor Peter Brimelow said his site’s content hasn’t changed in the 20 years that it has been a Network Solutions customer.

“Censorship is just intensifying,” he wrote in an email on Monday. “We’re still working on a replacement, but there is certainly a chance we’ll have to go dark for at least a couple of days. And anyway we have no confidence that any US-based site will stand up to the PC lynch mob for long.”

Many websites that publish white nationalist, white supremacist or anti-Semitic material have struggled to stay online or been booted off mainstream internet platforms, often after violent attacks by far-right extremists.

Google and GoDaddy yanked The Daily Stormer’s web address after the neo-Nazi website’s founder, Andrew Anglin, published a post mocking the woman killed when a man drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters at a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Social media platform Gab, where the suspect in the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre spewed anti-Semitic messages before the 2018 shooting rampage, was briefly knocked offline after registrar GoDaddy and others dropped the site. Gab returned after a Seattle-based company, Epik, agreed to register it.

Users spewed anonymous hate on 8chan, an online message boar d, until a string of mass shootings by gunmen who posted manifestos on the site led to it getting forced offline in August 2019. The disruption ended when the imageboard relaunched in November under the new name 8kun.

This isn’t the first time VDARE has been dropped by a technology company. Facebook announced last month that it removed accounts linked to VDARE and other groups, including pages devoted to the QAnon far-right conspiracy theory.

Brimelow sued The New York Times Company in January, claiming the newspaper defamed him by referring to him as an “open white nationalist.” The suit seeks at least $5 million in damages.

Last Thursday, newspaper lawyers urged a federal court in New York to throw out the lawsuit, accusing Brimelow of playing “word games about how his fringe views should be characterized.”

“Brimelow has promoted theories at the heart of white nationalism and white supremacy, including that certain races are predisposed to commit crime and that IQ is linked to race,” they wrote.

Brimelow has denied that his website is white nationalist but acknowledged it publishes works by writers who fit that description “in the sense that they aim to defend the interests of American whites.”

Brimelow also operates a Connecticut-based nonprofit, VDARE Foundation, which raised more than $1.8 million in tax-exempt gifts, grants and contributions between 2014 and 2018, according to an IRS tax filing.

Source: Online registrar threatens to drop anti-immigration website

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Wells: Let’s reopen Ontario and Quebec. You go first.

2020/04/29 Leave a comment

I am always impressed by the sophisticated understanding of Paul Wells when it comes to how governmental decision-making and his avoidance of overly simplistic arguments of many commentators (he calls out some). Just as he did in The doomed 30-year battle to stop a pandemic, a welcome dose of reality and constraints, where governments have accountability unlike those writing opinion columns:

At last the day came when the politely populist premiers of Ontario and Quebec—the provinces where four-fifths of Canada’s COVID-19 patients reside—announced their plans to roll away their stone and step into the post-pandemic light.

The plans were nearly empty and the premiers looked terrified.

The Ontario document, A Framework for Reopening Our Province, has timelines that mention no date after April 27, which was the day the document was released. It listed three phases: “Protect and Support,” which is what’s been happening; “Restart,” which theoretically comes next; and “Recover,” which in theory will happen someday. The “Restart” phase is described in conspicuously belts-and-suspenders terminology: a “careful, stage-by-stage approach” during which “public health and workplace safety will remain the top priority” and “public health officials will carefully monitor” whether there are new outbreaks “for two-to-four weeks.” The big question: “whether it is necessary to change course” and essentially revert to the current cave days.

This next phase will kick in when cases are durably declining, hospitals can handle any influx of new cases, and public-health tracing can follow any new cases. The second of those boxes, mercifully, has probably already been ticked. The third may never be, because this is such a sneaky virus. Where is Ontario on the first? A reporter asked. Premier Doug Ford couldn’t say.

Quebec, the epicenter of the Canadian outbreak, has a slightly more concrete plan about which Quebec officials seemed commensurately less confident. “If we see that the situation isn’t under control, we’ll push the timetable back,” premier François Legault said. “The watchword will be prudence.”

Another watchword will also be regionalism. Montreal is in the very early stages of a decline in active caseload following what was, and in many ways remains, one of the worst outbreaks in North America. The rest of the province looks more like the rest of the country. So Legault is re-opening elementary schools and public daycares outside greater Montreal in two weeks, on May 11. In the Montreal region they’ll open a week later. High schools stay closed until September.

And even that timetable exaggerates the imminence of a post-COVID social era. Schools will reopen “if and only if” the situation doesn’t deteriorate from now to May 11, Legault said. And school won’t even be mandatory: “Parents who want to keep their children at home won’t be penalized in any way.”

It’s pretty easy to anticipate 72 hours of large-scale game theory beginning on May 9, as tens of thousands of parents use Facebook, Zoom and text messages to ascertain whether they’re better off sending the kids to school or keeping them home. Class sizes will, in any event, be capped at 15, essentially requiring some number of parents to keep their children out.

And after that? When does your local barber shop, dry cleaner, skate sharpener or driver’s license office open? We’ll see. It’s a far cry from the easy certainty of commentators like the  shock jocks on Quebec City radio and the more nuanced impatience of columnists in the Sun papers, which essentially delivered their readership whole to the Ford Conservatives.

It’s an impatience all of us have heard in family conversations. It’s an impatience most of us feel. You know the songbook as well as I do: Look, this is ridiculous, nobody signed on for global economic euthanasia, nobody was told in March that we’d still be here in May and maybe July and maybe January, everybody has to die of something, suicide and obesity and delayed surgery kill people too, and we’re pushing those numbers up as we try to tamp this one down. (Suddenly everyone’s a public-health ninja who knows more about all this than Theresa Tam and Bonnie Henry.)

But it’s quite another matter to be the person in charge when the rubber hits the road. People are full of bravado for society and sometimes less so for their circle. Two weeks seems a reasonably manageable timeframe for a partial resumption of what was, after all, everyone’s everyday life until mid-March. But push it forward and make it personal: How do you feel about sending your own son or daughter back to school tomorrow? Are you ready for a family dinner this weekend? Everyone’s got to die of something, so how about Uncle Ned in late May by drowning in his own pulmonary fluids? That’s a harder call. It helps explain why the plans Legault and Ford released on Monday were, in Ford’s words, road maps and not timetables. And why it left some columnists, whose responsibility extends no further than their keyboards—I know, I live there too—righteously cranky.

The fact is, it’s hard to plan next steps because disaster continues despite the best efforts to contain it: 57 deaths in Ontario in one day, 84 in Quebec. Many more still to come. The closest parallel to this coronavirus in recent history was the 1918-19 flu outbreak, and that one was worse in the fall than it had been in the spring.

Legault and Ford aren’t even leading the process of deciding what happens next: like good populists, they’re being led by it, and if they looked worried on Monday it’s because they’re well aware there’s a shift change underway in the reopening debate. The debate was led until now by people who gain by sounding bold. They’re finding themselves outnumbered by people with everything to lose. Suddenly waiting doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.

Source: Let’s reopen Ontario and Quebec. You go first.

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The battle against Quebec’s Bill 21

2019/11/11 Leave a comment

Good article by Paul Wells:

Sure, the leaders of Canada’s federal political parties didn’t have much to say during the election campaign when reporters asked what they planned to do about Quebec’s Bill 21. The law, which prohibits public servants in the province from wearing religious headgear and other symbols, is so popular politicians are reluctant to challenge it directly.

But that doesn’t mean nobody is challenging the law. Controversial laws usually find their way into a courtroom. One of the most pointed legal cases has been filed by the English Montreal School Board (EMSB), which released the text of its Quebec Superior Court challenge three days after the federal election.

Unfortunately, lately the English Montreal School Board is a bit of a mess. On Wednesday the Quebec government placed the board under trusteeship. Education minister Jean-François Roberge appointed Marlene Jennings, a former federal Liberal Member of Parliament, to take over the board’s management.

As further reaction to “an appalling situation” that included apparent contracting irregularities and the use of taxpayer money to buy alcohol and jewelry, Roberge handed the board’s financial statements over to the anti-corruption unit of the Sûreté du Québec.

This is all a handy reminder that history sometimes rests on unsteady shoulders. But the Quebec government is allowing the board to proceed with its Bill 21 challenge, which these days is just about the most popular thing the EMSB does.

Bill 21, “An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State,” was one of the first laws passed by the government of Quebec premier François Legault, the founding leader of the popular, centre-right Coalition Action Démocratique (CAQ) party. It sets out a long list of government-affiliated jobs—certain members of the legislature, police, prosecutors, teachers and others—whose holders are henceforth banned from wearing “religious symbols” on the job.

The law defines a “religious symbol” as “any object, including clothing, a symbol, jewellery, an adornment, an accessory or headwear” that is “worn in connection with a religious conviction or belief” or that is “reasonably considered as referring to a religious affiliation.” That’s really broad, but in practice it will most often be a device to keep female Muslim clerks, cops and teachers from wearing headscarves or veils at work.

At the end of October, before the government took most of the board’s powers away, I visited Montreal to discuss the impact of Bill 21 with EMSB officials. Angela Mancini, the board’s chairwoman, met me for breakfast.

Mancini said the board has had to turn down three teacher candidates it would otherwise have hired because Bill 21 doesn’t permit them to teach while wearing a headscarf. She worries about the message the law sends to students.

“When you tell a student that a teacher can’t wear her veil, or his kippa (a Jewish head covering for men) because it’s wrong, it’s almost like you’re telling them that when they wear those religious symbols, it’s a wrong thing. So we risk having a generation of students grow up thinking, if you wear a religious symbol, there’s almost something wrong with it,” she said.

Bill 21 is broadly similar to bills that were introduced by Quebec’s short-lived Parti Québécois government, led by then-premier Pauline Marois, in 2013 and, in milder form, by the Liberal government of Philippe Couillard in 2017. Defenders of such measures say it’s important for the Quebec government to show no religious preference in its relations with citizens. It’s often said to be justified by the fact that, until a half-century ago, Quebec was in many ways a Roman Catholic theocracy. The text of the law says it is “important that the paramountcy of State laicity”—an absence of religious affiliation—“be enshrined in Quebec’s legal order.”

The EMSB’s Mancini isn’t impressed. “I think the separation of state and religion has been going on for a while, regardless of whether teachers wear symbols in a classroom,” she said. “In my mind it goes back to fundamental rights. People are allowed to wear the symbols that they choose to wear.” In a school setting, parents and students should rest easy, she said. Wearing a headscarf or a crucifix “doesn’t mean teachers are going to impart” their religious convictions to their students, she said.

The board has retained the services of Power Law, a prominent Montreal firm, to challenge Bill 21. The lawyers’ argument is novel and promising, as we’ll see. And it’s probably for the best that the file has been turned over to outside experts, because Mancini and her colleagues have a lot of other concerns on their minds these days.

In January the majority on the board voted to cut Mancini’s pay from $38,000 to $10,000 after she missed a series of events in preceding months. She is unapologetic. “I’ve gone on record as saying I feel intimidated and harassed by certain members of the board,” she told Maclean’s.

The board was created in 1998 after a constitutional amendment replaced Catholic and Protestant boards in Quebec with French- and English-language boards. With 42,000 students, the EMSB is the largest English-language board in Quebec. Under Quebec’s language laws, only students whose parents were both educated in English in Canada, or the children of foreign professionals on short-term postings in Quebec, are permitted to receive an English-language education.

The EMSB’s administration has been factious for as long as the board has existed. In 2000 one commissioner attacked another, who had to be carried out on a stretcher and sent to hospital. But the board delivers results despite the fireworks, Mancini said. At 92 per cent, it has the province’s highest share of students who complete high school within seven years of beginning. The province-wide seven-year success rate is 79 per cent, well behind.

That record of school success despite distractions might bolster the board’s case in challenging Bill 21.

The board’s lawyers, Perri Ravon, Mark Power and Giacomo Zucchi, face a substantial obstacle: the law invokes the controversial “notwithstanding” clause of the 1982 Charter of Rights to affirm its effect despite the protections of Sections 2 and 7 through 15 of the Charter. Those are all the big Charter rights. Section 2 lists “fundamental freedoms” including freedom of conscience and religion, thought, belief, opinion and expression, and free association. So you can’t tell a judge the law defies freedom of religion. The Quebec government has already made full use of its ability to say, “We know, but we’re doing this anyway.”

Ravon, Power and Zucchi need to shop further down, in more obscure regions of the Charter that the “notwithstanding” provision can’t reach, for support. They’ve settled on two paragraphs. Section 23 guarantees minority-language educational rights. The EMSB’s lawyers argue that Bill 21 “impermissibly infringes” the delivery of an education under Section 23, because it limits whom the board can hire and promote.

The lawyers’ second line of attack is more novel and promising. They point to Section 28 of the Charter, which demands that rights be delivered equally to both men and women. It’s a short paragraph: “Notwithstanding anything in this Charter, the rights and freedoms referred to in it are guaranteed equally to male and female persons.”

In the Charter’s 37 years, very little jurisprudence has built up around Section 28. Most of the action has been around Section 2, the sweeping guarantee of fundamental rights. And when Section 2 isn’t swept aside by the “notwithstanding” provision, which it almost never is, courts don’t need to consider Section 28. But in the case at hand, Section 28’s guarantee of gender equality may prove powerful indeed.

Ravon and her colleagues point out that 88 per cent of preschool and elementary teachers in the EMSB are women and that 53 per cent of all Muslim women in Canada, according to some public-opinion surveys, wear headgear. They further note that Simon Jolin-Barette, the cabinet minister who steered Bill 21 through the National Assembly, specifically restricted the law’s applicability to men when he said facial hair, such as the beards of Jewish or Sikh judges or police officers, is exempt from the law.

The government’s repeated assertion, the board’s lawyers write, is that Muslim women are “subjugated” into wearing religious garb. “No consideration is given to women’s agency and autonomy”—to the possibility that they simply want to dress as they do, the lawyers write.

The first two words of Section 28 are “notwithstanding anything.” Kerri Froc, an assistant law professor at the University of New Brunswick who’s made a career out of studying the parts of the Charter everyone else ignores, wrote her doctoral thesis on Section 28. She notes that it almost certainly trumps Section 33, the “notwithstanding” clause. A 1982 federal government guide to the charter calls Section 28 “one guarantee that cannot be overridden by a legislature or Parliament.”

What judges will do with all this, we’ll have to wait and see. To add to the EMSB’s internal struggles, there’s a government-imposed, potentially existential problem. Bill 40, another proposed law introduced by Legault’s CAQ government and making its way through the legislative process, aims to eliminate school boards in Quebec altogether. It’ll probably be law early in the new year.

Can the EMSB’s challenge to Bill 21 continue past the legal demise of the board that launched it? “Short answer: We don’t know,” an EMSB spokesman said when I asked.

Meanwhile, Bill 21 contains sunset provisions that protect the jobs of public servants who were already in place when the bill became law. In the school-board setting, that means teachers who wear headscarves can’t be hired (or promoted), but they can keep the jobs they already had.

On my visit to Montreal I visited Carlyle Elementary School, a richly multicultural school in the leafy northwestern Montreal suburb of Town of Mount Royal. I met Haniyfa Scott, a kindergarten teacher. She grew up a few kilometres from the school. She and her husband converted to Islam in the 1970s. She has adult daughters who were raised in the faith until they were 18, after which they could make their own choices. They have continued as observant Muslims.

Scott showed me an agenda she uses to keep track of plans and appointments, the sort of richly-decorated spiral-bound thing you see in schools all over. This one contains a note on one page which she read aloud to me. “Canada is multicultural. In 1971 we made a rule to be multicultural. People come here from the whole world. In Canada, we like to respect everyone.”

Scott looked up from the page. “Did the CAQ not read that? Did they not understand that?”

That’s actually the crux of the controversy, I reminded her. Supporters of Bill 21 intend it precisely as a rebuttal to multiculturalism “à la Trudeau,” a reference to the belief, widespread in Quebec nationalist circles, that Pierre Trudeau introduced his multiculturalism policy as a way to contain Quebec nationalism. The state has no religion, the argument goes. Multiculturalism’s prerogatives end, or should, where Quebecers’ collective right to define the terms of their distinct society begin.

Haniyfa Scott is skeptical of such claims. “I’m listening to you,” she said slowly as I repeated these arguments, then paused. “I don’t know. Talk is cheap. I don’t know.” She says she has a daughter with two young children, one of them a four-year-old girl. “She dresses just as I do. She goes on the bus or Métro every day, and she is never offered a seat. Never offered a seat. Doesn’t that strike you as a little strange? And it brings me to tears.”

As an emissary of the Quebec state, shouldn’t she be religiously neutral? “I don’t think I’m going to persuade anybody in my classes to become a Muslim. I don’t think I have that much influence. I might influence them to do better in their math or their language or study science, that’s what I would aspire to, but my job is not to convert anybody.”

I followed Scott into her classroom, where she quizzed a roomful of 5-year-olds on the sound the letter U makes. Some of them were mightily distracted by the presence of a Maclean’s photographer. None remarked on the wardrobe choices of their teacher, whom they’ve never seen dress otherwise. Around them, all unseen, swirled a political, social and legal controversy that won’t end anytime soon. The kids paid all of it no mind. Does the word “cup” have a U sound? Yes, they agreed solemnly, it sure does.

Source: The battle against Quebec’s Bill 21

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Why Quebec’s Bill 62 is an indefensible mess: Wells

2017/10/25 2 Comments

Another great analysis and critique by Paul Wells, going through the issues one-by-one:

Before we begin: Look, I’m one of the good anglos, the ones who’ve lived in Quebec (largely in French) (and enjoyed it), understand at least some of its distinct ways and can recite at least some of the catechism by heart. In this July column I walked readers through the Quiet Revolution and its revolt against the dominance of the Roman Catholic church, to help explain why attitudes toward so-called ostentatious religious signs are often different there. “The Quiet Revolution in Quebec was specifically a rebellion against religious influence,” I wrote then. “Progressive politics in many other parts of the country has been a politics of generalized tolerance; in Quebec progressive politics was often a politics of specific resistance.”

That column won respectful comments from many in Quebec and a long Reddit thread of the imagine-finding-something-so-reasonable-in-Maclean’s-of-all-places variety, along with heaps of scorn from some anglophone colleagues. Chris Selley at the National Post is still subtweeting.

Anyway, having thus re-established my credentials, I’m here to tell you that Bill 62, the so-called “Act to foster adherence to State religious neutrality,” is a ludicrous claptrap that the government of Philippe Couillard should withdraw before it collapses in court under the weight of its own absurdity. Here’s why.

The bill ostracizes behaviour that isn’t religious. Obviously inspired, or provoked, by the face coverings worn by a tiny number of women in Quebec who profess the Muslim faith, the bill hasn’t the guts to say, “Muslim women shouldn’t cover their face.” So it says instead that nobody may cover their face. “Personnel members of bodies must exercise their functions with their face uncovered, unless they have to cover their face, in particular because of their working conditions or because of occupational or task-related requirements,” the bill says. “Similarly, persons receiving services from such personnel members must have their face uncovered.”

This means, as we’ve seen, that if you cover your face for any reason except workplace safety, you can’t do work for the Quebec government—or receive its services—for the duration of the covering. The justice minister, Stéphanie Vallée, has said that this extends to sunglasses. Surely scarves, ski hats and beards are a no-no too. All of which is odd, because this is supposed to be about religious neutrality—it says so right there in the bill’s title—and yet no provision restricts any specifically religious behaviour or garb.

It permits all sorts of religious behaviour. Since the bill limits only face covering, it establishes no prohibition against public servants wearing crucifixes, turbans, kippehs or indeed any Muslim-associated garment short of a veil. So in seeking to establish “religious neutrality,” it forbids things that aren’t religious and has no effect on a wide range of things that are. Faut le faire, as we say.

It tells a lie about Quebec. The bill’s tiny number of supporters—almost all of whom say it is insufficient in itself but that it serves as a kind of handy limbering-up exercise for the really repressive anti-headgear measures that must follow—purport that it is valuable because it reminds everyone that state actors must refrain from identifying their religion, because “the State has no religion.”

But the State isn’t Leviathan, the aggregate total of all human activity on its behalf. In a modern democracy, the State is plural. The state isn’t colourless: it has the skin of whichever bus driver or file clerk you’re talking to at the moment. It isn’t dimensionless: it is as tall or short as the judge or cop you’re facing. It isn’t even devoid of political opinion, for its members are free to vote. And it isn’t faithless in retail, only wholesale. While the Quebec government has no established religion—never mind the crucifix over the Speaker’s chair in the National Assembly, it’s just there for dramatic irony—its employees are, of course, free to turn toward whatever deity they dread or cherish, or to ignore them all.

What they aren’t supposed to do, of course, is impose their religion on others. But that leads me to the bill’s worst outrage:

It reintroduces the coercive State. If the best (and still none too good) argument for Bill 62 is that “the State has no religion,” then it is absurdly out of bounds for the bill to dictate how the citizen must behave in her interactions with the government, on vaguely, passively-aggressively half-assed religious grounds. Even if every public servant in Quebec were made to read the collected works of Richard Dawkins, spayed or neutered, chopped or stretched to measure, issued the regulation skin tone, accent, wardrobe and whatever else were necessary to telegraph the State’s neutrality on a hundred relevant axes of faith, appearance, socio-economic status and whatnot else—even if you stipulate that the State may do that to its own emissaries, then it’s still really weird for the State to require an equivalent neutrality of the citizen.

Here we see Bill 62 dipping into the territory Richard Hofstadter described in his classic essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics: the odd propensity of groups to imitate, unconsciously, the behaviour they most despise in the opposing groups they fear or target. Hofstadter was describing anti-Communist groups in the Cold War United States, imposing the same secrecy, rigid organization and even penchant for falsification that they feared in Stalinism. But Hofstadter specified that the instinct was owned by neither the left nor the right, and that it wasn’t restricted only to Cold War contexts. The paranoid style is easy to spot in all kinds of contexts where people worry too much.

What’s wrong with Islam, after all? The Couillard government’s response comes in layers: (i) nothing, which is why the bill doesn’t name Islam; (ii) terrorism, though of course, most Muslims shun and hate terrorism, and at any rate, wearing a niqab on the bus has nothing to do with terrorism, so never mind; (iii) coercion—in this case, the belief that some women wear certain clothes because they know men who require it. Well, ain’t it the damnedest thing, then, that Bill 62 seeks to fight coercion with coercion. A singularly time-limited, bashful, unevenly applied, hypocritical coercion, but coercion all the same. Orwell said some things are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them. Similarly, some things are so reminiscent of the overweening Catholic Quebec state of the mid-20th century that only in the name of purging such authority could anyone dream them up.

The fear at the root of bills like C-62 and the substantially more odious Parti Québécois Charter of Quebec Values is that noxious ideas will spread: that the most backward and extreme interpretations of Islam will win converts simply by being permitted to exist. But that’s silly. There’s no perceptible rate of conversion to Judaism in Outremont simply because a lot of Hasidim live there. Muslims don’t make me Muslim by standing near me.

If the State has no religion, then the simplest way to express this principle—after unscrewing the crucifix from the National Assembly’s rear wall—is to forbid the active promotion of religion while on the taxpayer dime. Proselytizing, in other words. If the guy at the SAQ folds religious tracts in with your wine receipt, it’s okay for the government to say that’s a no-no. If your Jewish or Muslim doctor tries to trade a hernia operation for a conversion, that could be seen as going a step too far, and appropriately sanctioned. That all of this sounds ridiculous, because of course there is no doctor or liquor sales clerk who acts like that, is simply further evidence that there is no real problem here to solve.

The Quebec Liberal Party could have been the one to say so. But a characteristic of the Quebec Liberal Party, going back decades, is that it keeps forgetting that a “Quebec consensus” exists only to the extent that every player in the society’s elite chooses to play. On religious accommodations as on various elements of the national unity debate, if courageous leaders would simply say, “I disagree,” there would therefore be no consensus.

The Couillard government having failed to do so, it has fallen to just about every serious commentator in Quebec to point out Bill C-62’s obvious incoherence.  Many are doing it in a curious two-step: the bill is terrible, but isn’t it awful that those obtuse anglophones outside Quebec, with their worship of multiculturalism, don’t understand it. We are reminded that France has laws similar to Bill C-62. As if comparison were justification. As if any element of France’s relations between Muslims and the non-Muslim majority were worth copying. The enclaves where communities rarely mingle? The very low rate of integration?

Bill C-62 deserves criticism because it is a terrible bill. Its title doesn’t match its contents, it permits and forbids things with no logic, it would lead to a government whose actions would be less just and less coherent than they already are. I don’t associate sloppy work with any ideal of Quebec, and I’m surprised that some of the province’s politicians and commentators think anyone should.

Source: Why Quebec’s Bill 62 is an indefensible mess – Macleans.ca

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Jagmeet Singh’s Quebec problem: Paul Wells

2017/07/14 1 Comment

There have been a series of articles on the problems posed by Singh’s candidacy in Quebec. This one by Paul Wells goes into more detail than most, other good ones are by Konrad Yakabuski ( Singh complicates the NDP’s Quebec quandary ) and John Ibbitson ( In Jagmeet Singh, a unifying figure with divisive potential ):

The second most-popular story on Le Devoir‘s website as I write this is about mounting anxiety in the Quebec wing of the NDP over Jagmeet Singh’s candidacy for the party’s leadership. “Several activists are panicking” at the thought, the story says.

The problem? Singh, a practicing Sikh, wears a turban and kirpan. “To have a leader who’d wear ostentatious signs” of his religious affiliation, “we are not ready,” Pierre Dionne Labelle, who was an NDP MP from 2011 to 2015, says on the record. “Would I be at ease with that? I don’t think so.”

This is the first time Le Devoir has found a New Democrat willing to speak on the record about concerns over Singh’s candidacy. Several others seem willing to share similar concerns off the record. The story also adds two cases where Singh’s positions in provincial politics could arguably have been influenced by his religious beliefs: a private member’s bill that sought to exempt Sikhs from having to wear motorcycle helmets, and a member’s statement over the provincial Liberal government’s controversial changes to the primary-school sex-education curriculum.

I could quibble with the latter of these examples. Singh’s statement on the sex-ed curriculum could have been made by Patrick Brown, the province’s Conservative leader, who is not Sikh. “The lack of inclusive consultation before announcing the curriculum was disrespectful to parents in my constituency,” part of Singh’s little speech, is a stock line in much of the opposition to the curriculum change.

But it’s less interesting to debate these points than to note that the anxiety Le Devoir chronicles exists, that it’s a challenge to the Singh candidacy, and to try to understand why these concerns are being expressed most loudly by the NDP’s Quebec wing.

Luckily we have a recent poll to guide us.

On June 26 the Angus Reid Institute published the results of surveys in the United States and Canada on attitudes towards diversity in political leadership. The Canadian results come from a randomized sample of 1,533 members of Angus Reid’s online panel; full methodology can be found here. Respondents were asked whether they would vote for a party led by a woman, a gay man, a man or woman wearing a religious head covering, and so on. This produced all sorts of fun cross-border comparisons—68 per cent of Canadians expect an atheist Prime Minister in the next 25 years, against only 37 per cent of Americans who expect an atheist President. But the internalsfrom the poll suggest other useful comparisons. Here’s the Canadian regional table showing responses for various questions that begin, “Would you yourself consider voting for a party led by a person who is…”

 

Screenshot 2017-07-11 13.20.30

Support for a Sikh-led party is only 46 per cent in Quebec, the lowest regional score in the country by eight points. On the generic “…man who wears a religious head-covering,” support is lowest in Quebec by 12 points. Support is also lowest in Quebec for parties led by Muslims, by Jews, and indeed by evangelical Christians.

This would probably be a good time for this Maclean’swriter to say the Angus Reid data don’t show a generalized inability among Quebec respondents to show “openness” to “difference.” No, the results are way more interesting than that. In fact, Quebec respondents were markedly more likely than respondents in the rest of Canada to support parties led by a gay man, a lesbian or an atheist. And there was no marked difference between Quebecers and other respondents when the hypothetical party leader was transgender, Indigenous, black or a woman.

In no other part of the country do the results line up as they do in Quebec: markedly less likely to support parties whose leaders wear some visible sign of their religious affiliation, markedly more likely to do so if their difference is expressed in some other way besides religion.

There’s an obvious explanation for this, but it rarely gets mentioned whenever the debate over so-called “reasonable accommodations” rears its head in Quebec or outside. It’s that Quebec has a markedly different cultural history with organized and visible religion than much of the rest of Canada.

Many older Quebecers, those whose memories stretch back before the mid-1960s at least, have personal memories of a time when the Roman Catholic church had a strong influence over public affairs. Even most younger Quebecers will have been taught, in great detail, about the period before the Quiet Revolution. And the Catholic church was pretty big on ostentatious displays of religious affiliation.

(You needn’t take my word on any of this. Marie McAndrew, a professor at the Université de Montréal’s faculty of education, has written often and thoughtfully on the “reasonable accommodations” debate and its cultural roots. In this representative piece, she writes: “…[W]e must remember that the people of Quebec who are of French-Canadian origin have a specific and usually more negative relationship with religion than people in the rest of Canada…. For most people born before the 1960s, in fact, the association between religion and public space evokes bad memories or at least memories that are incompatible with their democratic ideals.”)

The Quiet Revolution in Quebec was specifically a rebellion against religious influence. Progressive politics in many other parts of the country has been a politics of generalized tolerance; in Quebec progressive politics was often a politics of specific resistance. I lived in Quebec for five years and have written about its politics in instalments for nearly a quarter-century since, and I find this is one element of the debate over religion and politics that’s hardest for many non-Quebecers to grasp: suspicion of religion in politics is often a progressive impulse in Quebec politics. (Emphasis on “often,” as in, “of course not always, in Quebec or anywhere else.”)

Source: Jagmeet Singh’s Quebec problem – Macleans.ca

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Europe under siege: Good long read by Paul Wells

2016/04/11 Leave a comment

Good long read by Wells on the radicalization and other challenges in Europe. Where he ends up of note:

All of which suggests, to me, that the long-term solution to the urban terror of ISIS is not to shut down borders, banish newcomers, bulk up the surveillance state and out-tough the murderers. Certainly there is a market for that prescription. On a Monday night several days after the Brussels bombings, a gang of thick-necked soccer hooligans descended on the square in front of the Bourse, tearing down peacenik banners and picking fights with passersby who seemed, in the eye of the roving strongmen, excessively eager to make nice with Islamists. The police finally saw the counterprotesters off with water cannon. There will be plenty of politicians offering the marchers their brand of tough medicine in the next election, in Belgium and across Europe. There have been for decades.

But if Islamism is vying for the attention and affection of distracted and dissolute kids, whether second-generation rebel sons of moderate Muslims or slapdash converts from Christianity or atheism, then it is not in the West’s long-term interest to try to out-tough the killers. Rather it is to sap the appeal of terror and murder by ensuring, consistently over the long term, that another way of life really does look better.

On that score, I daresay that Europe, for all its strains and its frequent inanity, is doing well. On a bad day you could almost sell the notion that EU and ISIS are funhouse-mirror images of each other: polyglot, border-skipping multinational operations that operate in defiance of history, logic or human nature. But the comparison flatters ISIS and cheats Europe. The foreign fighters who have streamed to Raqqa to join the jihad have as often recoiled in horror as they have been embraced as useful recruits. The murders of innocent dozens in Paris, including Muslims, have badly undercut the appeal of ISIS in the French-speaking world. Cédric Mas, a French analyst, has pointed out that the latest issue of Dar al-Islam, the French-language ISIS propaganda magazine, devotes an unprecedented amount of space to defensive arguments for its terror attacks in Europe—and contains no long-term forecasts about the organization’s future. It is as if, at the moment of its apparent triumph, ISIS has found itself thrown on the back foot among its own clientele.

Europe, meanwhile, is Europe, revelling in its history and culture, refining its admittedly clumsy policing, learning from error. And not incidentally, living as a rich, compelling community—richer in many places, in important ways, than Brussels.

On Monday at a conference organized by the European Policy Centre think tank, Thomas Fabian, the deputy mayor of Leipzig, described the policies his German city of 500,000 people has adopted to integrate the more than 5,000 migrants who moved there last year. The newcomers are distributed throughout the city, including in affluent neighbourhoods, instead of being left in ghettos, Fabian said. The newcomers are obliged to take German lessons. Each family is assigned a city social worker to check in now and again, but for the most part newcomers are encouraged to leave their homes to visit doctors and other services, to strengthen their personal responsibility and self-reliance. The goal of it all, Fabian said, is to make sure the newcomers join Leipzig’s broader community, a community whose residents, 300 years ago, included Johann Sebastian Bach.

This is a better way to act. It is more fulfilling and will, over time, be more attractive. By coincidence I arrived in Brussels on the same Thalys train route, from Amsterdam through Brussels to Paris, on which three vacationing Americans subdued Ayoub El-Khazzani eight months ago. No guard rifled through my bag as I boarded, and the train did not stop at the border between the Netherlands and Belgium.

In my car was an American family. The mother read aloud to her three sons from a Harry Potter book for the duration of the two-hour trip. A society where family, community, technology and security can co-exist that well—most of the time, never perfectly—is stronger than it looks. Stronger than it has been made to feel this year. In the long-term battle between Europe and its assorted tormenters, keep betting on Europe.

Source: Europe under siege

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with ,

Wells: Justin Trudeau takes Ottawa’s debates to Washington

2016/03/14 Leave a comment

Interesting snippet from Paul Wells’ account of Trudeau in Washington:

The other striking moment came when Trudeau raised, by himself, his decision to repeal the provisions in the Conservatives’ “Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act,” C-24, that stripped some convicted terrorists of their Canadian citizenships.

“One of the things the right-wing had done was put forward a bill that took away the citizenship of convicted terrorists,” he said. “A number of countries have done that around the world. It seems like a fairly obvious thing to try and do. If someone’s gonna commit an act of war, an act of terrorism against the country, they probably shouldn’t deserve to keep Canadian citizenship if they’re doing that.”

This is indeed a decent paraphrase of the arguments Conservatives made in support of C-24. Trudeau said his opponents “felt they were on very, very safe ground” with their policy.

“The problem is, as you scratch into that a little deeper, you realize it only really applies to citizens who have, or could have, a dual nationality. So a kid who was born in Canada, and only has a Canadian citizenship — but whose parents were born, for example, in Pakistan — could lose his citizenship if he committed an act of terror, [whereas] a kid who was tenth-generation Canadian home-grown terrorist could never lose his citizenship. And suddenly we’d made citizenship conditional on good behaviour. Or on non-heinous behaviour, which comes down to the same thing. And that devalues the citizenship — made two classes of citizen.”

Trudeau’s tone suggested he knew this was not, on the face of it, a winning issue for him. “And it came to the point where, in one of our largest debates, I was standing on stage against the former prime minister. And he was telling people that I was willing to stand up and restore the citizenship of the one Canadian who, under this law, had had his citizenship taken away.

“He knew he had me on that one. I’m actually standing there defending the right of a Canadian — stripped of his citizenship for terrorism — to become, once again, a Canadian citizen. And I stood there, and I defended that principle, that you should not be able to take away citizenship from anyone. And our government would be, because we’d reverse that law, restoring the citizenship of someone who was convicted of terrorism in Canada.

“And that’s a perfect narrative for the politics of fear and aggression. And yet it’s me sitting here as Prime Minister of Canada, not Stephen Harper.”

Source: Macleans

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Meet Sir Michael Barber, the political delivery man: Wells

2016/02/20 Leave a comment

Good profile of the delivery guru, advising the Government.

Given the ambitious nature of the Government’s platform, and the likely need to make some difficult choices given fiscal and other realities, will be interesting four years hence to see what worked and what did not:

Since he left the Blair government, Barber has honed these ideas into what he calls “deliverology,” the art of ensuring governments meet their goals. He’s become a global consultant spreading the gospel of deliverology to governments as far-flung as Australia, the Punjab, the U.S. state of Maryland, and to Ontario under the province’s former Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty. When a large number of McGuinty-era Ontario staffers moved to Ottawa to work for the Trudeau Liberals, Michael Barber could not be far behind.

And so it came to pass that, during a three-day retreat for Trudeau’s cabinet in St. Andrews, N.B., in late January, Barber was in the room with the ministers for almost the entire time. Trudeau has appointed Matthew Mendelsohn, the former director of an Ontario think tank, as a senior public servant responsible for “results and delivery.” Mendelsohn’s job is modelled on the position Barber held with Blair.

Perhaps it is no surprise that Barber, the object of such ardent affection and attention from the new Trudeau crew, is equally impressed with this young Canadian government. “What they were saying was, ‘We know that often, including in the Blair case, it took a whole term for a new government to learn the disciplines of delivery and then get it right in the second term,’ ” Barber told Maclean’s. “ ‘But we want to get it right the first time.’ ”

The obstacles facing any new government are well-known. First, the usual constant barrage of unforeseen events. Second, the pressure to come up with new ideas rather than checking to see how the old plans are working out. Tony Blair was a sucker for a new idea. In his new book How to Run a Government, Barber calls Blair’s first-term administrative style “government by spasm.”

The alternative to spasm is an attempt to install a routine. A new government asks itself a series of basic questions. “One is: What are the priorities?” Barber asks. “The second is: If you succeeded in delivering a given priority, how would you know? What would success look like in 2019, at the end of this mandate?” The third question is, “How would you know at any given moment you’re making progress toward your goals?” This leads a delivery-oriented government to develop a set of indicators—usually publicly available and thus, if they’re heading in the wrong direction, acutely uncomfortable for the government. How many kilometres of roads have been paved to date, how many megatonnes of carbon went into the atmosphere, that sort of thing.

“It’s not tremendously exciting, but it’s really important, getting the priorities, the definitions of success, the trajectories, the data, the routines to monitor progress, and then the ability to solve problems as they arise,” Barber said. “Because however good you are at planning, you’re not going to get it right. The real world never works out exactly as you anticipate. So having routines to correct and adjust the plan all the time is important.”

One element that helped bring Barber and Trudeau together is a common sense that ambition should not be a bad word in government. “There are times when doing little seems to work, and underpromising and overdelivering seems a good option,” Barber said. “But that’s certainly not the analysis of the Trudeau government, and certainly not the prospectus that they put to the Canadian people during the election. They said, ‘Actually, Canada needs big change, we want to build an inclusive, diverse Canada, we want some renewal of faith in democratic institutions, we want to reduce climate change, we need a big infrastructure upgrade.’ These are big challenges.”

Source: Meet Sir Michael Barber, the political delivery man

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Inside Justin Trudeau’s ‘turbo-Zen’ army: Wells

2015/12/11 Leave a comment

My favourite quote from this good overview of the Liberal government’s ambitious agenda and working methods. Well worth reading in its entirety:

(Muscle memory is turning out to be a constant challenge for the Trudeau crew as they work with the federal public service to implement their stacked agenda, after Stephen Harper spent a decade trying to dampen bureaucratic enthusiasm. In meetings on refugee resettlement, the Trudeau adviser said, “It became clear early on that [bureaucrats’] overriding objective was not to get yelled at. We had to say, ‘Guys, that’s not how we’re going to work.’ ”)

And this quote on tone:

But much of the tone comes from the Prime Minister himself. In early group conversations in the Langevin Block where the government’s top political staffers and bureaucratic advisers work, Trudeau has often been the one who cuts conversations about the day’s worries short and reminds others to consider the long-term goal, people familiar with those meetings said.

“He’s got 320 campaign promises, and four years to deliver them, and he really wants to ensure they don’t get off track,” the longtime observer said. And so participants describe a peculiar characteristic of the Trudeau government in its early days: despite the rush to deliver on commitments and the early hiccups of botched plans or unforeseen catastrophe, the general atmosphere has been one of eerie calm. Turbo schedule, Zen attitude.

“Totally Zen about headlines,” the Trudeau adviser said. “How do you think we survived the last six months?”

The longtime observer confirmed the self-diagnosis. “If the nanny thing had happened to Harper, his PMO’s reaction would have been, ‘Who do we shoot?’ ”

And on implementation of the longer-term view:

But the long-range focus is not merely a matter of Trudeau’s personal style. It is baked into the design of his government. “Right from the get-go there was a keen desire to make sure we focused on results and pacing of delivery,” Peter Harder, a former deputy minister who ran Trudeau’s transition team, said in an interview. The most visible sign of this is the most important cabinet committee. Under previous governments it would have been called “priorities and planning.” Under Trudeau it’s called “agenda and results.” Its goal is to relentlessly track progress against targets to make sure the government delivers on its agenda items. “It’s never been done before,” Harder said. “Our cabinet committees [in previous governments] have always been focused on incoming events, not on stocks of results.” The agenda and results membership list includes three ministers who are often named among Trudeau’s closest personal confidants: House leader Dominic LeBlanc, Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains.

Source: Inside Justin Trudeau’s ‘turbo-Zen’ army – Macleans.ca

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