Good Sunday Morning!
Oh my! What a week! Monday started with a predawn taxi ride to Union Station in Toronto to get the 6:30 VIA train to Ottawa. The day was laid out not just according to my personal schedule, but through a carefully hammered out parliamentary unanimous consent motion. Every detail of my day was pretty much set in stone—until it wasn’t.
The fixing of the calendar started five days earlier with a unanimous consent motion. In order to allow the Minister of Finance to deliver the long-delayed Fall Economic Statement (FES)—due to the House being in a paralysis created by the late September Conservative motion of privilege, we had passed a motion by unanimous consent on December 11. It was agreed that the Speaker would pause the privilege debate at 4pm on December 16 to allow Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to deliver the FES. The UC motion also set in place the round of speeches from opposition parties including the Green Party to respond. Each of us was to receive equal time to the Minister’s speech followed by five minutes each of Q&A.We received word on Friday that the Minister’s speech was expected to be relatively short: 15 minutes.
We had also received invitations, with a requirement for our representatives to be named and cleared in advance for what is called the “lock-up”. These lock-ups are routine whenever a budget—or mini-budget as the FES is often described—is tabled. I started going to lock-ups back when Paul Martin was Finance Minister and I was ED at Sierra Club. Non-government organizations have advance access to the embargoed documents, so does the new media, and each opposition party. Each party is designated its own room for reading the embargoed document with access to Finance Canada experts to answer more detailed questions before the document is made public. We surrender cell phones and other electronic devises at the door, like gunslingers going into Dodge. And we hunker down.
I knew when I boarded my 6:30am train that my Green team, including Finance critic Luc Jolicoeur coming in from Montreal, and Mike Morrice and members of his team would have been reading the document since 9:55am. I would race in to the reading and analyzing in progress and start my own intense study, reading until 2pm and then race over to West Block for Question Period. Only MPs are allowed in and out of lock-up but we are not allowed to take the document or any notes with us. By 4pm when the minister spoke and everyone else gets released from the lock-up, Mike and I would be ready to start giving media interviews about our reaction.
At approximately 5:40pm I would rise and give the Green Party speech in reaction.A lot of moving parts and we were ready.
Small glitch, at 9:07am with nary a hint to anyone, Chrystia Freeland posted her resignation letter on social media.
To say it sent seismic shock waves through the government, media and political process would be a giant understatement. I kept looking at her letter online as the train moved through familiar Ontario countryside. It was hard to believe. I even wondered if it was a spoof, a convincing fake of a letter. No, it was the real deal and it set out an equally impossible chronology. Trudeau had met with her on Friday (we later found out on zoom) and told her she was about to be fired as Finance Minister, but he still thought she would present, and defend, the FES—only then to be blamed and fired for the ballooning deficit? Really?
Getting to Ottawa I still assumed the team was in lock-up reading the FES, but no one was reading anything. All the lock-up rooms were full of thoroughly confused people. No one knew for sure if the FES would be tabled. And no one knew when we might start reading the embargoed document. The first rumour was that Industry Minister Francois Phillipe Champagne would read the FES. An hour or so later, we were told that Dominic Leblanc, Minister for Public Safety and Intergovernmental Affairs would read it. And then we were told we would get to start reading the FES at 1:30pm. We were monitoring media reports of journalists as confused as we were. Why was it taking so long to let us start reading?? Unless the FES was to be torched or recycled. When we got the 270-page book the first thing I checked was to find any telltale trace of Chrystia Freeland. There is always a letter from the minister at the opening. And then I noticed how the binding on the page facing the table of contents seemed slightly looser. Compared to last year’s statement which we had brought for reference, the place where the minister’s introductory letter was to be found seemed to have been carefully removed. My guess was by an exacto knife. Not a rough edge in sight. I imagined the feverish work of dozens of minions in rooms with locked doors, slicing the page—in English and in French —out of hundreds of books. No wonder it took nearly four hours to hand out the FES. Meanwhile in other frantic rooms, the PMO top brass must have been trying to figure out what to do. Or as MP Charlie Angus put it more bluntly to reporters, “What the F…k?”
I asked my question in Question Period, while the FES was still under wraps. I chose to ask about the climate crisis, the clip here includes the Conservatives heckling so loudly I had to stop trying to ask the question. Fortunately, the Speaker called for order and let me start over. Do watch “The Age of Stupid”.
At the appointed hour, the Speaker rose to pause proceedings for the presentation of the FES. What followed was yet another unprecedented moment. We waited to see which Cabinet member had drawn the short straw. Who was to stand and present the Fall Economic Statement? The Speaker waited. We all looked at the empty Liberal benches. The front benches, where the Cabinet members usually sit, were empty Even the back benches seems to have the bare minimum for quorum. No one rose. Opposition MPs popped up with points of orders. Could not the Speaker compel a minister to appear? Speaker Fergus was clear in re-reading our December 11 motion. The Speaker was to pause to permit the Minister of Finance to present. He had no authority nor instructions to insist a Minister of Finance (whoever might or might not serve in that post at the moment) present the FES. I added my point of order asking for guidance. Many of us had read the embargoed FES, but none of us could speak of it until it was presented. I hate to admit how much I loved asking if our House procedural experts, called the “Table Officers”, had access to guidance from a useful precedent, maybe from Lewis Carroll?
That seems to be the moment that prompted the Government to realize it could not leave the FES in limbo any longer. The youngest Cabinet member, a very fine young woman indeed, Karina Gould, Government House leader, came to her seat. As the Speaker recognized her, she rose and in as few words as possible, said she had “the honour to present the Fall Economic Statement in both official languages,” thrust it into the hands of a Table Officer and ran from the chamber. No round of speeches from Opposition leaders was possible. No one could give a speech of equivalent length of the ten seconds used so efficiently by Karina.
Some hours later back to the infernal and eternal debate on the motion of privilege purportedly about the failure of the government to produce documents about the Sustainable Development Technology Canada operations, we rose and reflected on the FES.
This is likely the most useful clip to watch, as Mike and I held a brief scrum filmed by CPAC. Meanwhile all the reporters, usually in the foyer, had rushed off in search of a secret hastily arranged meeting of the Liberal Caucus.
The drama did not end on Monday. By Friday the Prime Minister had unveiled a new re-shuffled Cabinet and Jagmeet Singh announced he was now ready to vote non-confidence in this government. With Parliament on the scheduled recess until January 27 we have time to breathe, and the prime minister has time to take a walk in the snow. We shall see. Meanwhile, I will do all I can to help prepare Canada for a new Trump White House and to confront the multiple threats of this polycrisis world.
Good news! My old friend Captain Paul Watson has been released from jail in Denmark! I had been working for his release and appreciate getting the Canadian consular services engaged, but big thanks to the Danish Green MPs who helped.
Best to you and hope you have loved ones near. If you are alone at Christmas, send me a note and your phone number. I’ll give you a call!
And forgive me, some of you will be getting a phone call as I make a last round of begging calls to fill the Green Party coffers for 2024. More than ever we need a plumped up bank account to face a sooner-than-expected election. You can donate at greenparty.ca.
Love and pray for peace. And to all who celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas. With the first night of Hanukkah the same night, Happy Hanukkah! And to all friends and readers, whether celebrating a special holiday or not, pause and rest and hold each other close. Counting our multiple blessings with gratitude is, I have found, the best way to be truly happy.
Elizabeth