Thoughts on BC Politics and More

There's a maximum of five sitting days left before the House of Commons rises for the holiday break — but there's a lot left in store before parliamentarians head home to their ridings. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre intends to use a motion on Tuesday to press the Liberals on whether they support a new oil pipeline to the Pacific Coast, which includes overriding the existing oil tanker ban off BC's north coast. The same day, Justice Minister Sean Fraser will hold a news conference about a new bill updating the Criminal Code to "protect victims and keep kids safe from predators," according to his office. And just before Christmas, the federal government must submit a new plan to reform the on-reserve child welfare system, as a group of First Nations leaders and children’s advocates prepare a competing proposal. CBC senior reporter Olivia Stefanovich has more on that looming deadline — and what First Nations leaders are planning to do next ... CLICK HERE for ...

The same day that Premier David Eby and federal Justice Minister Sean Fraser talked about bail reform, three BC Supreme Court verdicts were posted publicly. Coincidentally, the cases involved some of the same issues that come up in the legislation itself: extortion, repeat offenders and intimate partner violence. The carefully considered verdicts provide some context in the form of random glimpses into what is happening in BC courts today ... CLICK HERE for the full story  

Premier David Eby was up in the legislature last week under fire for assorted shortcomings and had to come up with an omnibus defence to all the failures laid at his feet. One of his comebacks was that “BC is leading in crime reduction.” “An 11 per cent reduction in the crime severity index and a seven per cent reduction in the overall crime rate. Our actions are showing results.” The numbers come from a StatsCan annual survey. They are handy for rebutting Opposition critics, but he is the first to acknowledge that they don’t do much to convince anyone outside the legislature. This week, he confirmed once again how pervasive the public worry about crime is, statistics be damned ... CLICK HERE for the full story

The federal government has long objected to provinces using the Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ “notwithstanding” clause, arguing it lets them trample over the rights of Canadians. But that view, flawed as it is, is nothing compared to Ottawa’s latest gambit on this issue, writes Andrew Roman.  Liberal Justice Minister Sean Fraser’s recent intervention in the case of Quebec’s Bill 21 asks the Supreme Court of Canada to declare limits on the use of the notwithstanding clause. This would amount to a backdoor amendment of the Constitution by the court, one that would give judges even more power and leave elected representatives even less scope to avoid or undo their harmful decisions.  More than just an attack on provincial autonomy, writes Roman, it threatens to upset the balance at the heart of Canada’s federal democracy ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Recent weeks have seen myriad commentators wonder if Canada’s elbows are “down” with respect to U.S. President Donald Trump’s provocations. Significant sympathy must be given to Prime Minister Mark Carney here in dealing with an unpredictable narcissist. Figuring out the best strategy is a mug’s game.  But no one should doubt that the PM does not want Canada to become America. Recent weeks have also seen immense scrutiny of Attorney General Sean Fraser’s written argument against the notwithstanding clause in the case English Montreal School Board v Attorney General of Quebec. This is continuing to prompt outrage from provincial political leaders and constitutional law scholars (particularly those in Quebec and western Canada), who assert that the argument advanced by Fraser risks destroying a constitutional settlement and provoking a national unity crisis. This in turn has led to commentary (notably from Andrew Coyne), countering these commentators. What perhaps is under-appreciate...

Kelowna Mayor Tom Dyas says his city fully supports the federal government’s intention to introduce bail reform legislation this fall. In a letter sent to Sean Fraser, Canada's minister of justice and attorney general, Dyas wrote that businesses and visitors are “frustrated by repeated and escalating crime” that can be pinned on chronic offenders. It was highlighted recently in a damning survey by Business Improvement Areas of BC, which represents 55,000 businesses in 80 downtowns, main streets and commercial districts throughout the province ... CLICK HERE for the full story 

He’s a tall, skinny lawyer shaking up the housing sector’s status quo with his ambitious reforms. No, not Premier David Eby — we’re talking about his federal doppelganger, Housing Minister Sean Fraser. Fraser has been on a run of reforms since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed him to the housing portfolio in July. He’s making waves nationally for bringing a sense of urgency to the file previously unseen at the national level. Fraser’s track record so far has been impressive — withholding housing funds from municipalities that aren’t taking the proper steps to boost affordability (like Metro Vancouver), penalizing short-term rental operators to free up housing stock and reinstating pre-approved standardized housing designs to speed up construction times ... CLICK HERE for the full story  

... federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser says no such partisan skew was intended for the distribution of the $4-billion Rapid Housing Initiative (RHI) fund. “I can assure you that there’s not decisions taken to deliberately fund one opposition party more than the governing party, and one opposition party less,” Fraser said Monday. “It’s a function of the projects that come into the fund for application that meet the scoring criteria.” But that “scoring criteria” did introduce a bias into the program that did indeed see large urban centres — where Conservative MPs are generally underrepresented and New Democrats are significantly over-represented — receive more attention from the RHI while smaller municipalities received relatively less ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Canada’s housing minister says the federal government isn’t ruling out changes to its ambitious immigration targets, but maintains the country should also focus on what it can do to increase housing supply when it comes to addressing current housing challenges.     “When we look to the future of immigration levels planning, we want to maintain ambition and immigration, but we want to better align our immigration policies with the absorptive capacity of communities that includes housing, that includes health care, that includes infrastructure," Sean Fraser said in an interview on CTV’s Question Period with Vassy Kapelos on Sunday ...   CLICK HERE for the full story

  Housing Minister Sean Fraser says the federal government should have never got out of the housing business even as high-income professionals are struggling to find affordable housing.   "For the better part of the last half century, federal governments of different partisan stripes, by the way, liberal and conservatives, have stepped away from forwarding affordable housing in this country," he said. "That should never have happened, but it did."   Fraser said now much of the country is dealing with a housing crunch that has no easy fixes ... CLICK HERE for the full story