As the stories on Raj Grewal’s gambling debts and intended resignation continue to trickle through, a number of them have taken on a vaguely conspiratorial tone. A lot of facts that shouldn’t be out of the ordinary are treated as suspicious for absolutely no reason at all. For example, people keep wondering why he was reassigned from the finance committee in September “with no warning.” Gee, what else happened in September that would have affected committee memberships? Could it have been the fact that the parliamentary secretaries all got shuffled, so committee assignments need to be rejigged? Maybe? And whoa, he asked questions on catching money launderers to law officials and FINTRAC agents during a study on – wait for it – “Confronting Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing: Moving Canada Forward.” Such an amazing coincidence that is totally suspicious. And the latest “revelation” is that Senator Jean-Guy Dagenais says that a retired Mountie told him a year ago that he heard Raj Grewal was under investigation, and he therefore thinks PMO should have known then. Erm, except that neither the OPP nor the RCMP tell the PMO what they’re investigating because they operate at arm’s length, and more to the fact, Grewal was a backbench MP, which I cannot stress enough.

To that end, Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column looks at the issue of parties policing MPs’ off-hours, considering the Clement and Grewal situations, while Susan Delacourt cites those same two cases, and wonders if we need to do a better job of screening backbenchers. And I’m pretty dubious because backbenchers are not ministers. They don’t have access to secret materials (Clement, I remind you, is a former minister and thus a member of the Privy Council, and his activities on NSICOP are outside of the usual activities of a backbencher), nor are they public office holders. Their job is to hold government to account – they are not part of the government, and it doesn’t matter what committees they’re on. Treating them as the same thing is not only a gross overreach, but frankly it will give MPs a wrongheaded sense of their place in the system, which is already suffering because of civic illiteracy.

Are Grewal’s debts concerning? Yup. Is it a crisis that he was mentioned in passing as part of an investigation into other suspicious characters? Maybe, but we don’t know enough to say whether it is or not, and the baseless speculation and ginned up allegations aren’t helping. Should Trudeau and the PMO have been more candid from the start about the reasons Grewal was resigning? Probably, and given this government’s inability to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, their approach once again blew up in their faces. But treating this affair with clickbait headlines and spinning random facts out of context in order to make them seem sinister is bad reporting.

Good reads:

• Justin Trudeau will be signing the New NAFTA with Donald Trump and Enrique Peña Nieto today in Argentina.
• Chrystia Freeland announced Magnitsky Act sanctions against 17 Saudis for their roles in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
• Statistics Canada says that police-reported hate crimes rose dramatically in Canada last year. (I’m not sure if this is just more reporting, as with sexual assaults).
• The Parliamentary Budget Officer says that irregular border crossers cost the federal government about $14,000 each (but his future projections are speculation).
• There is some consternation on the figure being used when it comes to the number of homeless veterans in Canada.
• The government allocated $8 million for the RCMP External Review Committee’s backlog a year ago, but that backlog has barely shifted.
• The unclassified version of the NSICOP report on the prime minister’s India trip is set to be released on Monday.
• Here is a look at our allies’ warnings about Huawei, and how it may be too late in Canada to cut them out of our 5G network entirely.
• Here’s a very good read about the tendency to be competitive about which region’s economic woes are worse, particularly between Ontario and Alberta.
• Doug Ford released his climate plan, which involves a carbon price – just one that pays into a trust that industry can access in the hopes of future technology.
• Rachel Notley plans to buy some 7000 rail cars and several locomotives as her plan to move oil in lieu of pipelines.
• Ontario MPP Amanda Simard quit PC caucus to sit as an independent. Ford said they voted to expel her, backtracked, and claims they tried to call her are disputed.
• New Brunswick is joining Saskatchewan’s court challenge against the federal carbon price backstop. (Good luck with that).
• The Canadian Press’ Baloney Meter™ tests Jagmeet Singh’s assertion that the Canada Post back-to-work legislation was “the worst, most draconian legislation.”
• Michael Petrou says that a unified European army would mean Canada would lose influence in NATO and other alliances.
• Robert Hiltz throws some shade at Andrew Scheer over his reaction to the Oshawa plant closure, and how his solution to everything betrays a lack of depth.

Odds and ends:

Here is the transcript of Paul Wells’ conversation with Rachel Notley on Wednesday.

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