Roundup: Get off that former diplomat’s lawn

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For the past couple of days, we’ve been bombarded by this suggestion that the Saudi Arabia spat has been all because the Liberals spend too much time doing their diplomacy over social media rather than in person – which is utterly ridiculous, and smacks of a bunch of retired diplomats railing about kids today before they yell at them to get off their lawns (while they hike their pants up to chest-level). If you actually look at the tweet in question, versus the kinds of vacuous press releases that governments issues on diplomatic issues all the time, about how they “strongly condemn” this or that, there is no actual difference whether it’s a press release or a tweet, except for the character limit (and even then, sometimes no difference at all). There’s a term for this – moral panic.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1027338409768087553

Meanwhile, the opposition has gotten in on the “diplomacy by tweet” game, which is awfully rich. Some of these same voices have been ones who would rant and rail that the government didn’t issue tweets condemning one government or another fast enough, or who’ve issued their own foreign policy missives by Twitter on their own. And then there’s the fact that they’ll rail about any diplomacy done behind closed doors with other countries, but when it’s done in the open like this? Terrible. Just terrible.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1027247475135008769

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1027248707467702273

The other thing I would mention is the fact that while there are demands that diplomacy be done either in the open or behind closed doors – take your pick on what the outrage du jouris – the assumption that Chrystia Freeland doesn’t know what she’s doing here is also puzzling and not borne out by history. Remember not that long ago, with the pogrom against LGBT people in Chechnya, and there were voices on all sides howling for Freeland to make some grand public gestures about what was going on. As it turns out, she was personally working behind the scenes to get some extremely vulnerable people out of the country and to safety before they wound up in a concentration camp, which she very well couldn’t do while making grand public gestures. All of which to say is that this posturing around Twitter diplomacy is absurd and helps no one.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau isn’t backing down or apologising to Saudi Arabia. Fortunately, their freeze on investments doesn’t affect our economy very much.
  • Here’s a look at why Canada’s allies are staying silent during this dispute.
  • In a not unrelated development, Canada halted the deportation of a Saudi asylum seeker at the request of the UN.
  • A lawyer who specializes in impaired driving cases raises concerns about the roadside testing devices approved by the federal government for cannabis.
  • Parks Canada is resuming work on a stalled attempt to protect heritage shipwrecks in Canadian waters.
  • The Conservatives are demanding a debate and vote on the Mali mission. The government has offered a take-note debate months ago (as it should be).
  • The National Observerhas reconstructed a timeline of how Kinder Morgan got the government to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline, using corporate filings.
  • Incidentally, the reporting that the pipeline will cost $1.9 billion more than estimated is wrong – that was a stress test figure.
  • Jagmeet Singh will indeed be running in Burnaby South, and says he’ll move there and run there again in 2019. He also cites electoral reform as a reason to run.
  • Here’s a profile of Julia Sanchez, the NDP candidate running to replace Thomas Mulcair in Outremont.
  • Éric Grenier crunches the numbers on Jagmeet Singh’s chances in Burnaby South, and finds that it’s going to be a tough fight.
  • Chris Selley details the “bureaucratic terrorism” faced by second-generation-born-abroad Canadians who can’t get citizenship thanks to Conservative laws.
  • Terry Glavin offers yet more perspective on the Saudi Arabia spat.
  • My column wonders about the state of constitutional lunacy that we’ve seen in both federal and Ontario politics over the past couple of weeks.

Odds and ends:

Liberal Senator Mobina Jaffer has been diagnosed with cancer, and had a toe amputated as a result.

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