Roundup: Ending a sitting on a witch hunt

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Alberta’s legislature wrapped up its session last night, and it saw the passage of bills that included rolling back protections of LGBT students in schools, changing overtime rules and cutting wages for students, not to mention Jason Kenney spending millions of taxpayer dollars to promote conspiracy theories and to conduct a witch-hunt against people who say mean things about the oil industry. So much of it would be cartoonish if there wasn’t such a worrying trend of Kenney simply lying to keep his population angry. And if you pay close attention to this Postmedia wrap-up of the sitting, it doesn’t call out the moments when Kenney egregiously lied (especially around the stunt with the ear plugs) and the story just both-sidesed the whole thing. We’ve taught them that they can get away with lying, so they’re doing it with impunity.

Meanwhile, here’s Stephen Maher on the witch hunt public inquiry, and Andrew Leach has been throwing shade at the whole thing, which is always worth a read.

Good reads:

  • At a festival in London, Ontario, Justin Trudeau was met by protesters demanding climate change action and electoral reform.
  • Mary Ng says that she did raise the plight of the detained Canadians while she was in Dalian and Beijing (but won’t say who she raised it with).
  • A UN special rapporteur who probed the death of Jamal Khashoggi wants Canada and others to convince the G20 to not hold a meeting in Saudi Arabia.
  • The RCMP are going after the “Canadian Nationalist Party” for intellectual property violations, while determining if their leader should be charged for hate speech.
  • The Vancouver Sun has traced those “Ontario/BC/etc. Strong” text messages to the same company used in the robocalls scandal.
  • The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that you courts can apply bail conditions to someone who is not charged with a crime but waiting on a peace bond hearing.
  • MPs have been warned against using the Chinese app WeChat because of security vulnerabilities.
  • Andrew Scheer continues to demand more retaliation in the face of Chinese trade actions, as though it wouldn’t backfire and result in China escalating their actions.
  • After setting up a very expensive “transformation office” that didn’t apparently do much, Doug Ford has scrapped it.
  • Kevin Carmichaels parses yesterday’s StatsCan jobs data and how it will be interpreted by the Bank of Canada.
  • Heather Scoffield writes about the need for investment in infrastructure if we are going to electrify and decarbonise our economy in order to meet climate goals.
  • Colby Cosh spills some home truths about public art, particularly in Edmonton (with some mention as to the Chateau Laurier situation in Ottawa).
  • My weekend column looks at why we can never really fully depoliticize judicial appointments in this country, and why doing so would actually be a bad thing.

Odds and ends:

CBC has tips about what to do when you think you’ve identified misinformation or disinformation online, and how to verify it.

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