Roundup: CETA got signed

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Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland went to Brussels over the weekend to sign the Canada-EU trade deal (known as CETA), but this was the real signing, as opposed to the several signings staged by the Harper government at much earlier iterations of the process, which they wanted to use to show how pro-trade they were, and how much work they were doing on the trade file. And yes, they did get the ball rolling on CETA, as well as the TPP, and a number of trade deals with a bunch of small countries with tiny economies that do very little trade with Canada, and loudly proclaimed the number (as opposed to the worth of those signed deals). So there’s that. At the signing ceremony, Trudeau also downplayed the delays and praised the democratic way in which it all happened, essentially saying that it’s not a bad thing to raise questions and to have them answered, which is fairly gracious of him (and fits with the overall character of his government to date in acknowledging the challenge function of parliament and the media – though he may want to let his Senate leader, Peter Harder, know, as Harder rather arrogantly doesn’t believe that the Senate needs an official opposition).

Of course, now comes the hard part of implementation, which will doubtlessly have numerous stumbling blocks along the way, and we’ll likely need several reminders about why the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism isn’t actually an attack on sovereignty, and how the improvements that Freeland negotiated to the system are a net positive and will likely form a model for other such systems going forward. We’ll hear yet more cries from the NDP and other left-leaning critics about those concerns, but the deal is moving ahead.

Good reads:

  • The Governor General is on an official visit to the Middle East, and visited Syrian refugee camps in Jordan.
  • John McCallum is expected to announce expanded immigration target levels early this week, but groups warn that better support services need to be offered.
  • Dominic LeBlanc and Jody Wilson-Raybould visited the site of that diesel spill on the West Coast.
  • The Commons ethics committee is going to look at how political parties use private information in their databases.
  • Ed Fast says he’s not going to the COP22 summit if he has to sign a delegate agreement, no matter that any “muzzling” sections are removed.
  • The national security committee of parliamentarians will be a review body and not ongoing oversight…which is how parliamentary accountability works.
  • Here’s a look at how Michelle Rempel got her motion on Yazidi refugees to pass in the Commons.
  • Thomas Mulcair says that his party’s abysmal showing in the Medicine Hat by-election was because the party is “in flux.”
  • Steven Blaney called Deepak Obhrai and Michael Chong “models of integration” – except that Chong was born in Canada.
  • Paul Wells writes about the need for CETA, and the lack of trust in corporations getting in its way.

Odds and ends:

Here’s a look at the six new Ontario senators apparently being named today.