And that was Mulcair’s appearance at committee – chippy, evasive, too-cute-by-half, and when he did answer a question, he did it in a sarcastic and fulsome manner (in the actual sense of the word) so as to run out the clock. The answers were full of selective facts and half-truths, raised incorrect facts about Conservatives supposedly co-locating constituency and party offices (in point of fact they were merely in the same strip mall, even though NDP staffers tweeted out photos taken from an angle so that the party sign was in the same shot as the constituency office sign, and thus constructing a wholly disingenuous image). When the NDP members of the committee weren’t busying themselves trying to run out the clock with frivolous points of order, they and Mulcair gave obsequious paeans to how wonderfully the NDP were doing as the official opposition and how the other parties were trying to punish them for it. And when it was all over, their MPs and staffers pronounced both in the House and over social media that they demonstrated “real accountability” and showed how to answer questions. In other words, they behaved as appallingly as the Conservatives do in their evasions and talking points, and patted themselves on the back for it. Well done, everyone! You’ve done parliamentary democracy proud. The committee, afterward, ordered an investigation into who has been leaking information from this whole saga to the media. Meanwhile, CTV has learned that some of those “parliamentary” staff were working in the Bourassa by-election, which may have been run out of that Montreal office. Oh, but they were “on leave,” so it doesn’t count, which makes the insistence that there are strict lines between party and “parliamentary” staff because they have separate unions all the more dubious (as a tweet from this one Liberal partisan demonstrates). At the same time, an investigation by House of Commons administration has advised the Board of Internal Economy that NDP MP Guy Caron broke the rules by sending partisan mailers into Bourassa around the time of the by-election using House resources. Oh, but they always follow the rules, remember? Here is the At Issue panel taking on the day’s events.
The NDP president has apologised for the unsubstantiated smear made against a Senate Liberal earlier in the year around “stats” around absenteeism rates. One imagines that there was a threat of a lawsuit that prompted such an apology. That said, to read a sentence like “The statements made in the NDP’s publications were false and unfounded” really gives you pause as to the other things contained in their snarky press releases.
Among the rules that Jason Kenney plans to bring in to fix the Temporary Foreign Workers programme will be limits that tie it t the local unemployment rate, and that ensures that these workers are paid more, so as not to incentivise companies to hire them instead of local workers.
The government received some 30,000 responses on its prostitution law consultations. One suspects that a good number of these will be form responses sent in by religious groups looking to advocate for either full criminalisation or the Nordic Model, where criminalising the johns will simply recreate the same dangerous conditions that saw the previous laws being struck down.
Stephen Harper took a swipe at Trudeau over his enforcement of the party’s pro-choice stance, saying that the Conservatives welcome all kinds of different viewpoints. Harper of course just won’t let anyone act on them, and one might notice the sheer number of pro-life Conservatives who aren’t running again in the next election, which I’m sure has nothing to do with the way that he has stymied every attempt to reopen the debate possible.
A group of First Nations chiefs are holding a two-day meeting, an early draft of their demands of which threatened an economic shutdown of the country if they didn’t get their demands met, which involved withdrawing the First Nations education bill and the creation of a new committee with First Nations leaders – at the government’s expense. The minister was not amused and called out those “rogue chiefs” for their threats, which may have exacerbated the situation.
Elsewhere, Residential School survivors are afraid that stories of their abuse that they told behind closed doors could be made public if the documentation winds up in a National Research Centre. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission says that they are simply seek clarification on the disposition of these documents and that they will be sealed within said Research Centre, but now there are fears that they’ll be made public eventually.
Two former Service Canada employees are being charged with defrauding the government of over a million dollars after they set up fake community groups to receive government grants, which they then pocketed.
Dean Del Mastro and his official agent have officially pleaded not guilty to charges that they overspent in the 2008 election.
Former PMO director of communications Andrew MacDougall writes that social media can be used as a “Rosetta stone for journalistic bias,” with the evidence being that editors don’t oversee reporters’ tweets. Erm, okay. It’s not exactly a compelling argument, and it smacks a lot of looking for confirmation bias so that it justifies their complaints when the reporting doesn’t go their way.
Senator Fabian Manning complains that not enough MPs – including members of his own government – have no conception about the East Coast, and that it might as well not exist as far as they’re concerned.
Over in Alberta, Jim Prentice is now officially in the running to be the next leader of the Progressive Conservatives, and at that point, premier.
I have a column up that looks at the reasons why this “satellite office” business is part of a bigger problem where MPs are conflating their actual roles and the official opposition has enough of a sense of self-aggrandisement that they now believe themselves to be the equivalent of ministers of the Crown. No.
And economist Andrew Leach shows the absurdity of NDP candidate Joe Cressy’s position around Keystone XL when you apply the very same metrics to agricultural products. If one policy is better for oil, why not for grain?