Tony Abbott had his meetings with Stephen Harper and the Governor General yesterday, but it was really clear that his man-crush was on Harper. Or “Stephen,” as he kept calling him, with effusive and somewhat obsequious praise for his being a “beacon” for centre-right parties around the world. (This after Abbott inadvertently referred to the country as “Canadia” upon his arrival Sunday). Both took hard lines against carbon taxes, as Abbott is in the process of trying to repeal the one in his country (where the Australian Senate is holding it up and may continue to until the next Senate election in two years), while Harper literally finger-wagged about how at least he was honest about not wanting to kill the country’s economy. Harper also answered a question about the prostitution bill during the press conference, and gave the same line he used regarding Insite and the harm reduction measures there – that prostitution wasn’t harmful because it’s illegal, but it’s illegal because it’s harmful, and woe to all the harm it does. Err, except that the Supreme Court ruled that the illegalities that surrounded it made it so harmful that it killed the sex workers involved. We’ll see if Harper’s reason flies with the Supreme Court when it winds its way back there. Abbott also stood by the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, and said that countries should never apologies for doing what was necessary to protect themselves. Okay then.
The Sona trial wrapped in Guelph yesterday, where the Crown insisted that Michael Sona was guilty but that he was not the only one involved. Sona’s own lawyer pointed to the fact that there were too many inconsistencies – and even the Crown agreed that Andrew Prescott was a problematic witness – not to mention the fact that Sona didn’t have the IT skills to pull it off, given that he couldn’t even install a printer without Prescott’s help, let alone set up proxy servers. No explanation was offered as to why Sona would have gone to great lengths to cover the tracks of the calls while then going around and telling everyone in Ottawa that he did it if he was indeed the culprit. The ruling will be delivered August 14th.
Kady O’Malley looks at the high-risk defence that the NDP are mounting in the face of the allegations around partisan mailings and the “satellite offices,” and how they risk damaging their credibility and their usual defence that they’re not mired in scandal like the other two major parties. The risk to Mulcair is that he faces the possibility of being charged with deliberately misleading the Commons, which could be a major blow to the party.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, no real friend to the government’s military procurement strategy in the first place, released a report yesterday that casts serious doubt on the wisdom of buying single-engine F-35 fighters given the demands of patrolling the arctic and our expansive coastlines, while we simultaneously have a failing search and rescue system in this country that couldn’t rescue a pilot that went down in time if, say, a Canada Goose got sucked into said single engine and the plane went down. It also pointed to the period in history where we had single-engine planes that were involved in 110 crashes and killed a number of pilots despite never being in combat, thus earning them the name “widowmakers.” Oh, but Peter MacKay assures us – the F-35 engines won’t fail! Sure they won’t.
Thousands of residential school survivors are seeing their compensation claims being delayed because they’re having trouble getting the necessary documents, and the health centre that has those documents has been swamped by requests and can’t process the demands fast enough.
In the wake of the Moncton shootings, here is a look at why it’s difficult to stop potentially violent people, though work is being done so that police are getting mental health training protocols, while families can go before a judge to order help for mental health problems.
As he prepares to depart the Upper Chamber, Senator Hugh Segal reflects on thirty years in political life, Senate reform, the current direction of the Conservative party, and what is great about the institution.
Paul Wells looks at the souring relationship between Stephen Harper and Barack Obama.
And Charlie Gillis looks at how data-driven election campaigns might actually be pushing down voter turnout, as they stop engaging in the traditional means of face-to-face engagement in favour of narrow targeting. I think he may be onto something, given the dearth of engagement that I was exposed to during this campaign, where I haven’t even received so much as a brochure from one major candidate, let alone any door-knocking. It would seem to me that it’s not a phenomenon too dissimilar to the way that voter turnout also went down when elections enumerators stopped going door-to-door, because that used to be the signal to people that they had to pay attention to the election. Nowadays, with the permanent voters list, that face-to-face contact is gone, and people can easily tune out, which doesn’t serve democracy.