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| Mike doing the photogenic thing. Photo by Jason Hendriks c/o the Danforth Greens. Used under the "Fair Use" copyright provision |
Hulet: The next question is a bit philosophical, but that's how I roll. Let me set this up.
Years ago, after the 9/11 attacks I was asked to be part of a panel discussion and I was kinda horrified to hear one of the other panelists---a cabinet minister---go on and on about how totally freaked-out she was by the whole thing.
This gets me thinking about how you, as a politician---and Dao knows anything's possible nowadays---how do you balance showing your concern and sympathy while at the same time trying to be a force for stability and encouraging people not to give into their fears?
I'm asking this because after 9/11 almost all the politicians told us to panic as much as possible. Then our foreign policy turned our nations into wounded bears that proceeded to wreak havoc around the world. It seemed almost that you weren't patriotic or sympathetic to victims if you didn't act like the sky was falling. But that is exactly what the terrorists wanted governments to do.
I'd like to know if you wrestle with this question. If so, how do you handle it?
Schreiner: I've had to deal with this issue on something of a smaller scale.
Hulet: Like the Incel guy driving down that sidewalk in Toronto to kill women.
Schreiner: Yeah, yeah.
I think one of the first speeches I gave at Queen's Park was after the Danforth shooting. That happened right after we started sitting.
What I try to do is balance empathy, condolences, grieving. Acknowledging the public trauma and the need to grieve with a call to unity, coming together and not using the event as an opportunity to divide or score political points. I think by taking that approach I've got a lot of positive feedback from people across the political spectrum---even from people who disagree with me on policy issues---even on the particular policies associated with the tragic event that happened.
I think at some level we're motivated by either fear or hope. I tend to usually land on the side of hope because I think that those who follow fear tend to divide and conquer, or, to energize and mobilize things like the war machine. Those that land on the side of hope and resilience can overcome and develop solidarity.
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Hulet: How willing are you to tell people something that they don't want to hear?
Schreiner: I have no problem doing that. Sometimes it's led to some of my most meaningful moments with people.
I'll give you two concrete examples.
One of the very first events in the provincial campaign last spring was when the Guelph District Realtor's Association had all four candidates in to speak. I laid it on the line that I was adamantly opposed to opening up the Green Belt for development---period.
I knew that one of OREA's (the Ontario Real Estate Association) top priorities was opening up the Green Belt for development. Their argument is that the housing affordability problem is a supply issue driven by not having enough access to green space for new housing. All the reports I've seen argue that that is categorically false. I stated the facts. I stated my position. And I said the other ways that I'd support their industry and the important role realtors play in our society. Because they do pay a critically important role.
If you think about it, some of the people who support the most community events are realtors because they have a vested interest in the vitality, vibrancy and live-ability of a community. So I wanted to recognize all of that but I wanted to be really clear and honest.
After that one of the board members of OREA---who wasn't from Guelph---came up to me afterwards and said "You know what. I was blown away by your speech and I was particularly impressed by your honesty, lack of bullshit, total transparency. When you disagreed, you stated your case very effectively. I'm going back to OREA and say that maybe we should rethink our position on opening the Green Belt for development."
At the very least I think it impressed one person because OREA never changed it's position. Which is okay because later when I was our MPP when I spoke to OREA I made the exact same case to the entire organization---over a thousand people were in the room.
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I looked into OREA's website and I couldn't see per se anything that boldly said that the organization was interested in opening up the Green Belt for development. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't pushing that agenda, just that they were being careful about what they said in public. I did look through their submission to the 2019 "Housing Supply Action Plan", which was sub-titled A BOLD PLAN TO SAVE THE DREAM OF HOME OWNERSHIP IN ONTARIO. On page 24 it suggests that Ontario should "remove the straight-jacket of the 'one size fits all' growth plan".
This section goes on to add gems like the following:
Right now, that growth plan says that almost the entire GTA has got to look like Younge and Eglinton, the (previous government) has really put municipalities in a planning straightjacket.
OREA CEO Tim Hudak, March 2017
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| All of the GTA is supposed to look like this? Younge and Engliton in Toronto. Photo by BradBeattie, c/o Wiki Commons. |
It's hard to understand what OREA really wants, however, because while the above would seem to imply that they are opposed to high-intensity housing, it also has a policy of supporting what they call "as-of-right zoning". What this means is that they want the zoning around transit nodes (subway stops in Toronto, bus express lanes---like Gordon Street in Guelph) to be changed to allow intensification.
Over 30% of the space surrounding Ontario’s major transit hubs are predominately single-family homes with the capacity for up to 4 million new housing units, which, if developed, could support the expected population growth of the Province for the next 24 years (Ryerson CUR, 2019).
A bold decision to mandate as-of-right zoning along provincial transit hubs will not only build enough homes to satisfy Ontario’s needs for a generation, it will keep thousands of cars off our road and support our low-carbon transit systems.
A Bold Plan, p-10
One thing I have found, however, is a quote from the CEO of OREA---Tim Hudak (yeah, that Tim Hudak, past leader of the Ontario Conservatives)---talking about the "damage" the Green Belt has done to housing affordability.
“But in the Toronto area, the government’s created its own artificial barriers that are spiking prices,” he said. “So if we don’t address that, then I do worry that young people won’t be able to find a home of their own, and secondly, it will slow down economic activity.”And, of course, there was Doug Ford's infamous statement to a select group of home builders during the last election. One can only suspect that if there hadn't been such a storm of outrage leveled against him at the time, OREA's website might have posted something a little less diplomatic on the issue.
I'm on the record as being in favour of loosening some municipal zoning regulations to allow more high intensity housing, so I am receptive to some of the OREA argument. But I don't think that more green field development is what's needed. So kudos to Mike Schreiner for standing up for the Green Belt at meetings where the public might not have been able to listen in.
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More recently I spoke to the Ontario Police Association and explained to them why I don't support carding. You could hear a pin drop in the room when I said that. Afterwards I had a lot of police officers come up and say that they totally disagree with me but they had more consideration for me as a politician than any other they'd met because no one had ever come into that room and just so straight-forwardly tell them something that they knew they disagreed with. I stated my case and that's led to some really productive conversations.
I have to give the Police Association of Ontario---and their President Bruce Chapman in
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| Bruce Chapman, Twitter photo. Fair Use copyright provision. |
And I realize that those are bigger issues in places like Toronto. But these issues are important in Guelph too. By having an honest conversation about it, this has led to additional conversations about other issues---which has led to mutual respect and more and better and deeper understanding of the challenges that police face, that I face as a politician, that members of the community face, that people who feel that they are being targeted face.
Sometimes I think as a society we're afraid to have those conversations but I think it's essential we have those sorts of conversations and I think that is part of what leadership is all about.
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First off, let's see what a police "card" looks like. I couldn't find an example of what's called a "Toronto Police Services 306 Form", but I did manage to get an image of a Hamilton Police card. From what I've read, it is almost a exact copy---and it does have those onerous questions that people who've been "carded" complain about.
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| Sorry about the quality. This is the best image I could find. Photo from CBC's Hamilton Police carding form is 'almost a carbon copy' of Toronto's. Used under the Copyright Act's "Fair Use" provision. |
This information is tremendously important because the people who design and manage security databases often don't put enough info in the database to let front line staff know enough to make a good "judgement call" of the relative danger that the particular person in front of them offers to society at large. As a Global News story by Patrick Cain about the complexity of erasing simple possession cannabis convictions pointed out,
What this could mean to a customs officer is that someone who is in front of them and that red flag for "possession" could mean heroin, crystal meth, fentanyl, or whatever. In addition, add a little paranoia about "maybe this minor charge was the result of a plea deal", and crossing the boarder becomes a royal pain in the butt for the rest of a person's life.The problem is that while police forces can enter the type of drug someone is charged with possessing into data which is sent to the RCMP, they don’t have to and often don’t, the force told Global News last May. So a record can show whether someone has a record for possessing an illegal drug, but not necessarily which one.As well, someone found with a small amount of pot could be charged under one of two sections of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, one of which relates to marijuana specifically, and one of which is more generic.
Moreover, as another story by Cain on the same subject points out,
I also often seems that the people who design the databases simply haven't really thought about how to remove someone who has been put on it by mistake. For example, consider the case of a six year old Toronto resident who ended up on a no-fly list.Once data crosses the border, Canada permanently loses control over it, says immigration lawyer Guidy Mamann.“Once the Americans have that information, they have that information. How is it going to be erased on the American side? You can erase it on the Canadian side, but that data has already been sent over.”
Once you are on a list, you can get stigmatized for life. And this has been going on for a very long time. I once met a guy on a train in the US who said that he'd given up on travelling to Canada because he'd been arrested while taking part in a protest against the Vietnam war---ie: 50 years ago---and gotten charged with something that put him on a list that was shared with Canada Customs. As a result, he said that every time he crossed the border he ended-up being hassled for hours. Another fellow I know made the mistake as a teenager of trying to cross the boarder into Canada for an afternoon with less money in his pocket than the Boarder Guards deemed sufficient---he gets such a hassle now as a middle-aged man that he's also given up coming to the "True North strong and free".
And don't think that this is just a question of inconvenience. Consider the case of Maher Arar who got onto a list because he talked to someone that the RCMP were watching and an FBI agent said that Arar had been identified by Omar Khadr while in Afghanistan. (Arar was actually in North America and under surveillance by the RCMP at that time.) The result was him being kidnapped by American security officials and dragged off to Syria to be tortured. (Totally illegal and unconstitutional---buy hey, that's how America rolled in those days. This is why politicians shouldn't scream that the sky is falling whenever there's a terrorist attack.)
If you really want to get all "sci-fi" about this, consider something called "predictive policing". What this is is a high tech version of the old movie trope of a detective making up a map where he identifies crimes with pins and then uses it to predict where the malefactor will "strike next". In effect, data is put into an artificial intelligence program and it spits out suggestions about where police should be concentrated. In and of itself, this is a pretty good idea. But, of course, a problem arises if the data that it works with comes from the same people who put a 6 year old on a no-fly list and don't seem to have developed a way to take him off it. Here's a rather long YouTube video (13 minutes) from Wired that discusses the key issues in some detail.
None of this is to say that our police and intelligence agencies shouldn't be collecting information and sharing it. We live in a world where a lot of crazy dangerous technology is floating around and we do have a very small, but unfortunately significant percentage of the population want to do serious harm to their fellow citizens. But the people managing the databases have to seriously "up their game" if they want to have the confidence of ordinary people. It's simply ridiculous in this day-and-age to have extremely vague charges put on databases where information that's found to be wrong cannot be purged. And the information has to be better sourced that a beat cop's assumptions about someone else he really knows absolutely nothing about.
So again, kudos to Schreiner for taking a hard stance about carding even in venues where the audience thinks that it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
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Hulet: This is kind of an "inside baseball" question. What does the election Doug Ford to lead the Conservative party say? Are there any lessons from this for the other parties---in the way that they choose their leaders?
Schreiner: [Schreiner laughs]
Yeah. Maybe not have such a complicated voting system. One that allows somebody who doesn't get the most votes elected leader. That would be one thing.
Hulet: They have a transferable vote system---.
Schreiner: Yeah, but it is also weighted by riding too.
Hulet: Oh, okay!
Schreiner: It was even more complicated than STV (Single Transferable Vote)---way more complicated than STV.
What delivered him [Ford] the leadership wasn't STV, it was the way in
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| Christine Elliot should have been Conservative leader? Photo by Jwiki2014, c/o Wiki Commons |
Hulet: So in some Conservative Riding Associations an individual's vote is worth more than one in another?
Schreiner: Yeah. It comes down to how they do the weighting. I don't know how the formula works. Every time I've tried to read about it, it seems incredibly complicated.
So one lesson to be learned is to have a fair voting system!
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| Patrick Brown, past Tory leader. Photo by Laurel L. Russwurm, c/o Wiki Commons. |
We elect a leader by who can sell the most party memberships. Not by who has the best policies, or who has the most charisma, or who is the best campaigner, etc.
Hulet: Or even who has worked the hardest---.
Schreiner: [Schreiner laughs]
Or even who has worked the hardest for the party!
It's just who sells the most memberships. That is a horrible way of electing a leader. I don't care which party it is. So it's something that I should probably think about for my own party.
Somehow we have to change the way we elect party leaders in this country. Doing it through selling memberships leads to all sorts of problems. The Conservatives are still trying to deal with all sorts of problems---bogus memberships, phantom memberships---around Patrick Brown winning the leadership---let alone Doug Ford!
On a broader level the takedown of Patrick Brown and the election of Doug For has shifted the debate we had on climate action in such a substantive way that it makes me wonder what else is at play, because I know there was a huge "axe the tax", anti-carbon tax, anti-climate agenda that led to getting rid of Patrick Brown and replacing him with Doug Ford. That's completely changed the national conversation on climate action, and potentially set Canada back another decade. Which at this point would be too late to prevent serious climate damage.
So the leadership race has had significant implications not only for politics in Canada but public policy and particularly climate policy.
Hulet: Sometimes it's like you are watching a still pond and then you notice that there are these big ripples and you wonder what is happening under the surface.
Schreiner: Yeah.
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The first issue that Schreiner is identifying is that the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario does indeed elect it's leaders with something like the American Electoral College. By that I mean that there is a trade off between "representation by population" and "representation by geography" baked into their selection process.
The key issues come in Article 26 of the PC constitution. One part says
and another26.5 For the purpose of apportioning ballot results among the candidates, each Electoral District shall be assigned up to 100 Electoral Votes.
What this means is that if you have 4 ridings and the vote count breaks down like this:26.6 Upon the completion of a ballot, the votes cast in each Electoral District shall be counted. If 100 or fewer votes have been cast, each candidate shall receive Electoral Votes equal to the number of votes cast for the candidate. Otherwise,each candidate shall receive Electoral Votes equivalent to the percentage of votes cast for the candidate.
- 88 votes for Ford and 12 for Elliot out of 100
- 76 votes for Ford and 24 for Elliot out of 100
- 92 votes for Ford and 8 for Elliot out of 100
- 929 votes for Elliott and 71 for Ford out of 1000
Shortly after the leadership race the leadership candidate that came in a close second to Ford---Christine Elliott---refused to concede defeat. As Ipolitics reported on March 11 of 2018, her campaign argued that
“Thousands of members have been assigned to incorrect ridings” her statement read. “For example, Mount Hope, inside of Hamilton, had its members assigned to Chatham-Kent, several hundred kilometres away. Our scrutineers identified entire towns voting in the wrong riding. In a race this close, largely determined by geography, someone needs to stand up for these members. I will stand up for these members and plan to investigate the extent of this discrepancy.”Elliot is making a very serious charge here. She is saying that votes in one riding were switched to another. Potentially it could have had tremendously important effect on the final electoral vote tally. But this is a place where the trail goes cold---I couldn't get any detailed info about the individual Constituency Association vote count and there was a declaration that an internal audit didn't show any problems that would have been enough to influence the final result.
I also tried to find some numbers for the relative number of paid-up Ontario Progressive Conservative members broken down by Constituency Association, but didn't find anything. It might be that this exists somewhere, but I suspect that it is info that the party wants to keep secret. There are practical reasons for this in that it would help other parties decide where to put their scarce resources when an election comes.
Having said that, the CBC's Eric Grenier was able to get some internal vote tallies unofficially from the leadership race and he used them to write a story. According to him
Ford won not because more members supported him or because he could win in more parts of the province. He won because he was more popular in his best regions of Ontario than Elliott was in hers.In addition, the transferable voting system that the Tories use also meant that after the first round of voting, the votes for Tanya Granic Allen---a strong social conservative---went mostly to Ford. Her votes were also very strongly clustered geographically in the Windsor area, which meant that they provided a lot of electoral votes to Ford.
(Incidentally, mixing an electoral voting system with a transferable vote ballot would add in the complexity that boggles Schreiner's mind. Every time lower-tier candidates would get dropped off the ballots and their votes were transferred to the voter's second choice, the percentage of electoral votes would have to be re-calculated, which would change the total vote tallies for the front-runners still on the ballot. This would make counting ballots at the same time both a tedious and surprising thing to watch---especially in a tight race.)
It seems to me that geography-biased voting system in the Conservative constitution "put the thumb on the scales" in favour of Ford. If so, this is yet another example of Stalin's dictum that it is often more important how votes are counted than whether or not you have a vote at all.
But having said that, to be fair to the Conservative party, politics isn't just a matter of people---but also geography. Canada, in particular, has lots of different subcultures spread over a huge geographic area. That's why, for example, in the 2000 federal election the Bloc Quebecois won 38 seats even though it didn't even run a single candidate outside of Quebec. Conservative parties all over the world have a hard time winning seats in urban settings. For a very long time the Ontario Conservatives have had the same problem here---their rural Constituency Associations are strong and their urban ones weak.
The obvious way to fix this problem is to bring in urban voters and listen to their problems so the party can create policies that appeal to them. That is probably why the "Electoral Vote" system was written into the Conservative constitution. If voting was simply a question of one person one vote, the people in weak ridings would be drowned out by the people in strong ones. This would mean that a party with a strong rural membership would never seriously consider urban issues---which would stop it from growing in urban areas. But, as Schreiner and Elliott point out, this means that the system is vulnerable to "gaming" by a smart campaign that can mobilize votes to take over these weak Constituency Associations. I suspect that the Electoral Vote system makes the Conservative party uniquely vulnerable because it magnifies the inherent problems that come from the second issue that Schreiner identifies: electing leaders based on how many memberships they sell.
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Yeah, it's blue type time again. I'll be brief. I think that most people who read this blog can afford to give me a buck a month. And if I could get that, it would prove that local indie news can be a "thing". You can pay through Patreon or Paypal.
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There is a second element to this, namely allowing leadership candidates to sign up new members so they can vote for them.
The basic problem that Schreiner identifies is that people who get signed up in a leadership campaign are often people who have very little knowledge of or loyalty to the party. This can be extremely damaging to the ability of a political party to "stick to it's ideals".
The Conservatives have a especially interesting history with regard to party membership. There's an article by Tom Blackwell in the National Post website that raises some interesting points. It relates that just before Patrick Brown's career as party leader struck an iceberg and sank with all hands, he bragged about the party having 200,000 members. That's a pretty impressive number when you compare it to the 20,000 odd members that the Liberals say that they have. (Please note that the Liberal Party of Ontario doesn't elect it's leaders through a direct vote by party members---they still use delegates from Constituency Associations at a provincial convention. That means that there isn't anywhere near the same pressure to sell memberships during leadership races.)
But when Vic Fedeli---the interim leader who replaced Brown---took over he said that that was an exaggerated number and the correct figure was really only a paltry 130,000. But Blackwell got another quote that made things look even more complicated:
This confusion over how many members the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario actually has is troubling. Membership is very easy to define---it is the people who have their dues currently paid up and who are in the central database. It should be very easy to give a reporter a precise number. It's not as if people have to go into a room filled with filing cabinets and pour over paper membership forms anymore. If a party doesn't have a good grasp of who is or is not a member, for example, then it just stands to reason that there are opportunities to "game" the voting system---especially if you are doing it on-line.In an email sent Sunday, Thomas DeGroot, the party executive’s chair of IT, tells Jag Badwal, party president, and Marc Marzotto, the membership chair, that, “as requested,” he had reviewed the memberships.“I can confirm to you that during Patrick Brown’s tenure, the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario’s membership has grown to over 200,000, to be exact it has grown to 234,066 members,” he says in the missive, obtained by the National Post.
Once the leadership race was over and it was time for the general election, another membership issue raised it's head. This YouTube clip from the CBC was released by a source within the Conservative party to the Liberals. It seems to show Ford himself directly breaking an internal Conservative party rule governing nomination races.
The issue is that Ford and his team were pushing his favoured candidate in a specific riding by paying for their memberships.
Tom Blackwell, from the National Post, had another story about this and got a Conservative former MP to speak on the record about this nomination race:
Of course, the "insta-members" that Trottier is talking about are with regards to a nomination race for a specific candidate for Queen's Park. But it is obviously also the sort of thing that can make a big difference in the race for party leadership. And that's exactly the point that Schreiner is making---and admits could be a problem for any political party, even the Greens.Bernard Trottier, who served as the federal Conservative MP in the neighbouring Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding from 2011 to 2015, told the Post he came to the nomination meeting to support Surma but was dismayed by the flood of new members he saw. He confirmed that a number of buses were used, but said he had no direct knowledge that Ford paid for any of their memberships.“It really bugs me when people go out and recruit what they call insta-members. You just know you’ll never see these people again,” he said. “I don’t know if there were cash payments for memberships. It was just my observation that at this nomination meeting there were a lot of people you knew were not dyed-in-the-wool members. They were insta-members and they were trucked in from various buildings and so on.”Trottier said such problems are endemic in the nomination process and argued the provincial party should follow the example of the federal Conservatives and ban cash payments for membership. By requiring a credit card, the payment can be matched with the actual member.“Somebody with a big roll of $10 bills can buy memberships. The best way to inoculate against that is … no cash for memberships.”
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Even if you don't sell memberships and bus in "insta-members" you can still get an uneasy feeling about the way leadership races get made by selling memberships. Should the leadership of a party go to an outsider who is famous? Or should a leader be famous because of the work he's done for the party? Doug Ford seems to have built his "brand" through his relationship with his brother, the "Ford Fest" barbecues, and, his outrageous persona. I suspect that a great many old time Conservative members are wondering right now about how they could go back to the days of Bill Davis, who's motto was "bland works".
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| Bill Davis, from Ontario Archives. Reference code: G 17-43, #3-27. Photographer unknown. |
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