Saturday was the final Liberal leadership event, the big “showcase” faux convention, which was, well, a bit blah. (My take on it here). Aaron Wherry captures Trudeau’s speech. Tim Harper notes that while Trudeau clearly carried the day, the real work lies ahead of him. John Geddes looks forward to Trudeau’s first QP as leader. Michael Den Tandt says that Trudeau’s biggest obstacle is going to be the party elites who want to control policy top-down rather than from the ground up like Trudeau is proposing. Andrew Coyne sees Trudeau as the best of an uninspiring lot, though he does think Martha Hall Findlay would be the candidate to actually shake up the party. The Toronto Star editorial board endorses Trudeau for leader.
The government is freaking out about the story that RBC is replacing Canadian employees with temporary foreign workers brought in from India. RBC says it’s not hiring temporary foreign workers (which is technically true – the company its subcontract is), and it sounds like there’s going to be an investigation into the whole affair.
Correctional Services Canada is quietly re-hiring some of the part-time non-Christian chaplains that they laid off, but is totally spinning this as not reversing their previous cuts.
The Information Commissioner is concerned that budget cuts will have an adverse affect on Access to Information requests as under-resourced departments keep those requests on lower priority.
The NDP say that Julian Fantino’s office sent out a directive saying he wants all communications in need of his signature to be made in English, and are getting the Language Commissioner to look into it. Fantino denied it and tweeted in bad French to prove it.
Aaron Wherry disputes some of the characterisations about the Warawa Rebellion happening in Parliament, and that it’s not really just about stamping down on the abortion debate. (And he’s right).
Over in Labrador, the Liberals are questioning the pre-writ spending that the Conservatives are undertaking, which they claim gives them an unfair advantage. But seeing as the writ was dropped on Sunday, well, there isn’t any more pre-writ spending to be had.
Leading up to the NDP’s policy convention, it seems one of their priority resolutions will be a code of conduct for paid campaign staff on being nice to campaign volunteers. No, seriously – and they want penalties if they’re not nice. They’re also debating the rejection of public-private partnerships, marijuana decriminalization as the “first step” to legalization, and a foreign investment review of the Zellers takeover by Target. No, seriously. And yes, changing the party constitution’s preamble. The rest of the policy resolutions up for debate are all listed here, and some of them are rather…colourful. (Stopping all pipelines, mandatory labelling for gluten, sanctions against Israel, reviewing the constitution every six-to-eight years, and national strategies for everything under the sun, to name a few).
Elsewhere on the Liberal leadership file, John Geddes looks at the ways in which Trudeau was tested over the course of the campaign. One of Trudeau’s campaign team – and a former MP – details his frustrations with the “convoluted” registration system for the leadership voting process where many people didn’t realise there were two stages, but he’s still satisfied with the process overall.
And Tabatha Southey talks about her mother, living in the heart of Guelph, dealing with Conservative robo-calls and their interminable survey questions, and how she will lecture them back on the value of the secret ballot and such. And it’s a delightful read.