Roundup: Recalling the committee

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Yesterday was the day when the Commons immigration committee returned to town for an emergency meeting on the irregular border-crossing situation, and in the end, they agreed to hold two more meetings in the next few weeks to get a better sense of what is going on, and what the government’s plans are. There’s partisan gamesmanship happening on all sides of this, and each party wants a different outcome from these hearings, but they’re going to happen, and despite the fact that Michelle Rempel tries to spin the fact that she “forced” the Liberals to pay attention to this, she was apparently pushing on an open door as they were happy to do it, as their position is that this gives them an opportunity to correct the spin and misinformation that Rempel and her compatriots are putting out there.

Meanwhile, the government also made it clear that they were going to give funding directly to the City of Toronto to deal with their housing situation for migrants (only a few of which are actually irregular border crossers) because the provincial government has abdicated their responsibility to do something – while other communities outside of Toronto are willing and able to house and resettle more of them, and are actively seeking to do so. David Reevely gives more context here, and in particular notes that while the number of migrants is relatively small, the bigger problem is that they’re being put into a system that is already stressed.

But the rhetoric carries on, and Andrew Coyne takes it on in this piece – that, despite the claims, this isn’t actually a “crisis,” and treating it as such isn’t helpful, nor are the suggestions that the Conservatives are throwing out there. And worse, the Conservatives have put out a particularly problematic Twitter campaign that is being decried as racist, basing itself on a headline from a Diane Francis column in the Financial Post which is full of outright misinformation (particularly the notion that irregular border crossers aren’t screened – they absolutely are), torque, and reheated Conservative talking points. Coyne went further in a twitter thread, but regardless, the Conservatives continue to walk a fine line around pandering to xenophobic anger while still insisting that they support “orderly immigration,” as though we that were feasible 100 percent of the time. Real life doesn’t work like that, and Canada has been fortunate in that we’re protected by three oceans and American paranoia, but now we have to deal with a fraction of the migrants that other countries do. Maybe it behoves us to act like grown-ups about this.

https://twitter.com/CPC_HQ/status/1018901437730865152

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1019025705865076736

Good reads:

  • Some current and former members of the prime minister’s youth council are calling on him to cancel the Trans Mountain pipeline purchase.
  • The US is filing WTO challenges against the retaliatory tariffs imposed on them by countries including Canada.
  • The numbers of public servants being fired for misconduct and incompetence is on the rise, thanks to new performance tracking measures.
  • A year after the much-touted interprovincial trade deal was signed, there has been little tangible progress in relaxing barriers.
  • Weeks after Paul Wernick’s talk about his suicide attempts due to the pressure of being a Hill staffer, it sounds like the Liberals and Conservatives have done little.
  • The Lobbying Commissioner has rejected the claim that a member of the government’s firearms advisory panel was engaged in lobbying.
  • Indigenous housing providers say the government’s plans to make social housing more sustainable will negatively impact them based on how they’re arranged.
  • Former child refugee Abdoul Abdi is no longer facing a deportation hearing for the time being, but his supporters are still calling for intervention.
  • The government hasn’t provided reports on the integration of Syrian refugees (but this piece has major problems in how it treats them like economic migrants).
  • Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column walks through the stages of Cabinet shuffle speculation.
  • Adam Goldenberg explains some of the cultural differences between the Canadian and American Supreme Courts, including the different nature of partisanship.
  • Colby Cosh uses a recent nomination withdrawal in Alberta to look into the ways in which parties are trying to prevent “bozo eruptions” in their ranks.
  • Paul Wells wonders about the cognitive dissonance in Republicans as Trump cozies up to autocrats like Putin and takes Putin’s word over his own intelligence agencies.

Odds and ends:

There was an election bribery trial in Alberta after a joking promise of free dried moose meat to people who voted in a municipal election.

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