Roundup: Raising the spectre of domestic terror

Posted on by

It was an odd event yesterday – a Conservative MP asking the PM during Question Period to respond to “unconfirmed reports” to a domestic terrorism link to a hit-and-run case in Quebec involving two members of the Canadian Forces, where the suspect was shot and later died. It was only hours later that the RCMP released a brief statement that the suspect was known to them, and that he may have been radicalised. It’s still early days in the investigation, but one wonders if it’s perhaps too soon to suddenly believe we have ISIS cells operating in Canada, and that this wasn’t an isolated incident where one individual who, by all accounts, was a recent convert for whatever reason, and decided to act on the vague ISIS threats that were made public in media reports. I guess time will tell, but expect the government to start using this incident as justification for greater counter-terror legislation. At the same time as this story was breaking, the Director of Operations of CSIS was at a Senate committee, saying that they do the best they can with prioritizing their investigations, but can’t cover every base because of budget limitations. Duly noted.

The health minister says that Canada won’t send any more medial personnel to west Africa without a clear medical evacuation plan. She says she wants to do more, but at the moment she is looking at other possibilities. Meanwhile, preparedness test drill was conducted in Halifax, which apparently went well. A study published in the Lancet says that based on commercial air traffic patterns, it’s likely that Canada will see an Ebola case in the coming weeks. University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran believes that delays in developing the Ebola vaccine is costing lives, and that Canada should cancel the development contract with the current licensee in order to let a larger company use their resources to develop it faster.

The coming passage of the government’s “cyberbullying” bill is splitting their own base, as groups like the Canadian Firearms Association are opposed to it because they see it as government intrusion.

Justin Trudeau says that if the Conservatives go ahead with income splitting, that a Liberal government would cancel it because it only benefits a small number of families, and he would rather spend the money investing in things like infrastructure or education. The Conservatives immediately turned this into a narrative that “Trudeau will raise taxes.”

The government is scaling back their order for Arctic offshore patrol ships from the original six-to-eight, to five with an option for a sixth. That, combined with the loss of resupply vessels, leads one to question the government’s military planning capacity given how much they’ve oversold the programme and how they haven’t managed to contain the cost inflation of their projects before any steel has even been cut.

Five years after an audit flagged the sloppy practices at CBSA when it comes to handling detained goods, a follow-up shows that some of the same problems persist, especially with the security management of their own warehouses.

The Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse wants the government to focus more of their anti-drug strategy dollars on combating alcohol abuse than illicit drugs, given how much more harmful that alcohol tends to be.

The union representing a majority of the employees at the CRA are still negotiating with the government over giving up their voluntary severance pay (that other public servants have since given up and had paid out), and the negotiations are moving to include the changes to banked sick days, which other public sector unions are now taking up.

Aaron Wherry dissects the latest Conservative attack ad against Justin Trudeau, while Glen McGregor offers up some context for the selected quotes taken from the Globe and Mail. (Hint: The Globe did not actually say what the ad claims they did).

Jenni Byrne, currently the Prime Minister’s deputy chief of staff, will be the campaign chair in the next general election. That also means that women will be running all three major party election campaigns.

Part three of the Ottawa Citizen’s look at the coming Big Data election looks at how voter identification and micro-targeting worked in the States, and how that has been slowly coming to Canada.

Jennifer Ditchburn recounts a bitter Conservative nomination battle in Northumberland Peterborough South, where one of the candidate’s father’s – who owns Canadian Tire – was selling memberships at his stores, and others cried foul. It also split along lines where Jason Kenney supported one candidate and Brian Mulroney another, which will make for a very interesting vote on November 1st.

Here are another seven revelations from Trudeau’s memoir.

Former dominatrix Terri-Jean Bedford is being given an Ontario Civil Liberties Award next month, for her work in the Supreme Court challenge bearing her name.

Andrew Coyne writes about the relentless criticism of the Prime Minister, despite the fact that he appears to have accomplished so little other than pursue power for the sake of it.

And my column this week looks at how those assertions that “Parliament has spoken” on the topic of assisted suicide are all false and misleading.