And now, the hangover from Wednesday’s Ethics Commissioner’s report, starting with the inevitable demand from the opposition parties that the Commons Ethics Committee reconvene for an emergency meeting to hear from the Commissioner, plus a list of witnesses, to fully explore the whole thing in front of the cameras yet again. And while a meeting has been called for next Wednesday, it will inevitably be that the Liberals on the committee (or rather, those from nearby ridings who have come to the meeting to fill the seats) will say that with the report, we’ve heard everything we need to and Canadians can make a decision in October, and deny permission for the meeting, which will then be followed by the other parties bemoaning the cover-up and secrecy, and then we’ll move onto campaigning. As you do.
Elsewhere, we heard from Jody Wilson-Raybould who said that the revelations about how deeply SNC-Lavalin was working with the department of finance was a surprise to her. Jane Philpott said she felt sad by the whole affair, and troubled by the attempts to discredit Wilson-Raybould in the prime minister’s submissions to the Commissioner, and she thinks an apology is warranted. Trudeau, however, is steadfastly not doing so. Mario Dion thinks that his office needs the power to levy sanctions for breaches like this one, as there currently aren’t any. SNC-Lavalin will be carrying on with their Federal Court of Appeal bid to get judicial review for the Director of Public Prosecution’s decision not go discuss a DPA with them.
Another emerging theme from this whole sordid affair is the issue of the post-retirement careers of Supreme Court of Canada justices, several of whom became embroiled in the affair. Amid calls for new rules around what constitutes proper activities for these retired justices, there does seem to be a recognition by the current Chief Justice and the Canadian Judicial Council that there may be an issue, and they are having these discussions.
Meanwhile, Chris Selley notes that the Commissioner’s report seems to impugn the way that governments do business, especially when they make a big deal about investing in a company and showing up with a giant novelty cheque (though we’ve seen a lot fewer of those under this government than the previous one) – and he thinks it’s about time. Law professor Errol Mendes details how Dion has made a serious misinterpretation of his enabling legislation and jurisdiction in the creation of this report, which should be concerning (and We The Media need to be far less deferential to Officers of Parliament because they are not always right).
Good reads:
- Chrystia Freeland says that she has complete confidence in the prime minister (and also talks New NAFTA).
- Freeland was also advised of a serious and credible allegation of a Canadian arrested abroad and subjected to torture, according to ATIP documents.
- The government announced that they have now implemented Bill S-3, which they say will eliminate the sex-based inequities of the Indian Act.
- The Canadian military cargo plane that the government promised the UN for peacekeeping operations is finally ready for use, two years later.
- More allegations of racism and harassment in the Canadian Forces, this time from a civilian Indigenous employee.
- CSE plans to work with an Ottawa escape room as a recruitment tool.
- Here’s a good longread about how Sudbury found it profitable to tackle its emissions, first with sulphur and is now moving onto carbon.
- Here’s a look at the dynamics at play in Vancouver Granville, where Jody Wilson-Raybould is looking to keep her seat.
- Saskatchewan thinks that the federal government should split the bill to clean up the province’s abandoned uranium mines. The federal government says no.
- Kevin Carmichael warns of the looming possibility of a new currency war thanks to Trump, and how the New NAFTA agreement could shackle us to it.
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Harper appointed Dion as public integrity commissioner. SNC former CEO Gwyn Morgan was another Harper friend. For Scheer et. al. to describe SNC as a Liberal-friendly company is the height of projection. Harper’s stench reeks in every booby trap ever set for this government, including Indiagate. Says all you need to know about where Dion’s allegiances LIE. James Comey is a Republican, can you see the parallels here? It says a lot too about the media’s allegiances that they took “her truth” and now “his truth” as unequivocal gospel while discarding any possibility of mitigating circumstances or nuance coming from the defense.
This “scandal” amounts to Trump envy by America’s little brother (Kinsella, another rabid JT-hater, jumped the shark on Twitter and actually said Dion’s report was more damning than Mueller’s) and turning the court of public opinion into a star chamber. They had no Trump to score ratings and make their names on so they manufactured a caricature from whole cloth. Trudeau is smart and an avid reader. I wonder if he took time to pore into Kafka during all this?
The man has been crucified and burned at the stake by a Lord of the Flies outrage mob calling for his head on a pike. He has nothing to apologize for. P*sspot and the spoiled princess needs to go away and STFU. If anything, the media and the mean girls should be apologizing to Trudeau and to the entire country for the ordeal they have put Canadians and a genuinely decent man through. This whole thing was a setup and a coup. I really, really hope he is able to focus voters’ attention on things that actually matter (like the Scheer-Ford alliance and the existential threat facing the planet), and comes out of this with at least a minority government, because the prospect of Baby Trump in Ottawa gaining power through the same formula is too horrible to even contemplate. If he does, he may end up getting the Paul Martin treatment in two years, but at least he’d be able to buy a little time to rehabilitate his public image and hopefully, his future legacy.
What a mess. The planet burns and Canada’s parliamentary navel-gazers and M$M opinion peddlers fiddle with themselves.
It seems to me the media is mostly deferential to officers of Parliament when their opinions are “scathing”, to quote the reviews of Dion’s report. If they don’t see a problem, they’re “lapdogs” and “weak” and compromised by the government in power. The media likes “bombshells”.
I wonder how Dion’s language would have come across 40 or 50 years ago. Would a report in that era be written so dramatically it could be called “scathing”? I don’t know that these kinds of reports should lend themselves to generating such pithy summing-up.
Maybe Dion isn’t partisan, but he sure seems to have an axe to grind. The whole passage about being denied “unfettered” access to Cabinet documents — the Privy Council was within the law but he thinks the law should be changed. So he gets the publicity that he was denied access, and manages to colour the fact that the office was following the law as somehow suspect, since he doesn’t like the law. That he thinks his access is “implicitly” contained in the legislation is kind of funny, really. He’s no Robert Mueller.
The media needs to remember that not every investigator will turn out to be Mueller; sometimes they might be Kenneth Starr. I don’t know if Dion can be compared to the latter. But I think when adjectives like “scathing” are coming up, that might be a red flag to be more curious, and not — so deferential.
Funny that all the people you mentioned were from the US. Canadian media needs to stop jeopardizing the populace and insulting their intelligence with American scandal envy. This is not Watergate and you’re right, Dion is no Mueller. He’s actually a leftover Keystone Cop from the Harper regime and another ego-driven absolutist like JWR convinced that their opinion should be deferred to as holy writ. The Eric Cartman of public servants. Respect mah authoritah. But Harper was Canada’s first and hopefully last American PM. He played the long game by selling the media to US conservative hedge funds and stacking the national broadcaster with partisan hacks and it’s paying in dividends. It’s turned into Maple Pravda. Ratings above all. 24/7 clickbait. No nuance, just “bombshells” and an IOKIYAR “narrative” to be pushed at all costs.
I note how timely it was that JWR’s testimony happened the same day as Michael Cohen. Almost like it’s coordinated…? Everything Trump touches dies. Canadian media has no Trump, not even a Clinton to report on, so they manufactured one out of whole cloth. BUT HIS EMAILS. Trughazi. “I did not have socks with that woman!”
National Enquirer-owned Postmafia cabal and its ideological fellow travelers at the Probe and Wail, Goebbels News, Maclame’s and the Conservative Brainwashing Corporation want to engineer a 2016 repeat by obsessing over manufactured nontroversies to smear the star liberal candidate, while softpedaling or outright ignoring the other guy’s bigotry and Cambridge Analytics disinfo campaign being run by some hermetic incel who founded an alt-right hate website. Hamish Marshall is the Ben Shapiro of Steve Bannons. But Trudeau and everyone in his orbit is somehow a zillion times worse?
I therefore concur with what Trudeau told the NYT in May. This is the media getting distracted with noise. Why the hell is this gospel? Would it have really been such a problem for Dion to seek a second opinion from the multitudes of competent and credible lawyers who’ve weighed in on this on social media and found it unnecessarily harsh — David Hamer, Thomas Hall, Stephen Lautens, Mark Bourrie, Ishat Reza, Kenneth Jull, among others — or would that constitute “undue pressure”?