As the Conservatives head to Halifax for their caucus retreat, the Kellie Leitch/Canadian Values question is threatening to expose some of the caucus rifts – particularly as Leitch feels a bit put out that Rona Ambrose decided to distance herself and the party from Leitch’s proposal, and Leitch has been musing openly about filing a formal complaint with the party that Ambrose has essentially involved herself in the leadership campaign in this way. There are a couple of things that I would note from all of this – one is that we place way too much emphasis on caucus solidarity on all things in this country, and blow any disagreement between party members out of all sense of proportion, usually with some variation of “Is [insert party leader here] losing control of their caucus?!” It’s hyperbolic and it’s nonsense, and it enforces the perceived need for everyone to always be in lock-step, which is terrible for democracy. The other thing I would note is that this is that Ambrose was scrambling to prevent damaging the Conservative brand, and Leitch’s inability to grasp nuance is apparently also a sign that she isn’t able to grasp the magnitude of this floodgate that she’s opened. The fact that she keeps insisting that this isn’t what it clearly is – directed toward certain Muslim communities (remember kids, a dog-whistle is a coded message, while this one is right out there in the open) – while saying that it’s about trying to find a “unified Canadian identity” and not about identity politics (no seriously, she said this – you can check the video), continues to highlight that she is completely and utterly tone deaf. Ambrose is being left to pick up the pieces of Leitch crashing around like the proverbial bull in the china shop, because Leitch is too tone deaf to see what she’s doing to the party brand. So sure, there are rifts in the caucus being formed as a result. While we shouldn’t try to pretend that parties need to be uniform in all things, Leitch should also realise that some rifts are bad for the brand you’re trying to build and probably shouldn’t be papered over.

And while we’re on the subject of Leitch, John McCallum calls her anti-Canadian values screening proposal “Orwellian.”

Good reads:

• While Thomas Mulcair says he’s going to try to brand Justin Trudeau as Harper Lite™, Unifor president Jerry Dias says Mulcair should have resigned already.
• Harjit Sajjan says he wants to limit the use of caveats and to make protection of civilians at the heart of any peace operations deployment.
• It turns out that when Julian Fantino claimed that a leaked email that demanded all correspondence for him to sign must be in English was “doctored,” he was wrong.
• Here’s an interview with the former director of CSIS, who has sensible things to say about the power of disruption granted in C-51.
• There is an attempted court case claiming that Citizenship and Immigration discriminates against parent and grandparent reunification cases.
• Here’s a look at Jean-Yves Duclos, who went from studying the economics of social policy to directing it as minister.
• Tom Clark interviews Kevin O’Leary from his plane.
• James Bowden reminds us why deployment votes are a bad thing.

Odds and ends:

Stephen Harper is going to be an advisor at Dentons LLP, in addition to his new consulting firm.