The ongoing protests in support of those First Nations hereditary chiefs protesting the Coastal GasLink pipeline have not yet resulted in arrests, raids, or other police action to enforce the court injunctions just yet, and VIA Rail has shut down passenger rail service throughout the country, while CN Rail has shut down their eastern Canadian operations for the time being, and that means temporary layoffs. There has been more government responses now – BC premier John Horgan is setting up new meetings, while Carolyn Bennett is heading to BC to meet with those hereditary chiefs, while Marc Miller will be meeting with the Mohawk leaders setting up the blockades in Central Canada (while Justin Trudeau says he remains apprised of the situation while abroad, and will be returning to Ottawa tonight following the conclusion of the security conference in Munich). Trudeau reached out to one of the First Nations leaders leading a solidarity protest blockading the port in Prince Rupert, and that seems to have worked, as they agreed to dismantle that particular blockade.

Part of what is underlying the response to these protests seems to be an aversion to another Oka crisis – so we’ll see whether there have really been any lessons learned, thirty years later. And police action would inflame the situation, and they seem to be alive to that situation, which is probably a good thing. I have to wonder if part of the response to this isn’t also a bit of a mirror of what we saw recently with the CN Rail strike, where certain voices started immediately howling that Parliament needed to be summoned in order to ram through back-to-work legislation or there would be dire consequences, and the government held off and lo, a resolution came within about eight days. Was there some disruption? Yes. Was the outcome better than if they had taken out the sledgehammer? Undoubtedly. And it would seem to me that similar thinking is underway here. Despite a few middle aged, white male columnists are melting down over, things are not at a crisis level – they are largely inconveniences, which is the point of protest. And by not making things worse, there remains a chance to resolve this in a peaceable manner.

This having been said, the cries that Trudeau is off trying to secure a UN Security Council seat instead of dealing with this “crisis” are myopic and don’t grasp what the seat would do for Canada (articulated in this thread), though I will lay that on this government’s chronic inability to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag. I also suspect that the hereditary chiefs’ attempt to launch a constitutional challenge against the pipeline on an environmental basis is going to blow up in their faces, so I’m not sure either side is doing themselves any particular favours in all of this.

This is doomed to fail. https://t.co/YwzBqcN9CE

— Emmett Macfarlane 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 (@EmmMacfarlane) February 13, 2020

Good reads:

• Justin Trudeau met with women peacekeepers in Senegal before wrapping up his visit there and heading to Munich.
• Harjit Sajjan has hailed Iraq’s decision to allow NATO to expand its operations in that country.
• The federal government has developed a framework for dealing with occupational PTSD.
• The Parliamentary Budget Officer has cut his fiscal projections due to temporary factors such as the impact of COVID-19 on the global economy.
• The Supreme Court of Canada has agreed to hear a pair of cases challenging the solitary confinement regime in federal penitentiaries.
• American prosecutors are making new allegations about intellectual property theft against Huawei (which puts yet more pressure on Canada).
• Telus says they’re going to use some Huawei components in “non-sensitive” portions of their 5G network rollout.
• Bombardier is getting out of the commercial aviation business – and one hopes that means they repay their loans to the federal government.
• An international panel suggests using Magnitsky-like sanctions – which Canada has – against regimes that target journalists.
• The head of NORAD says that Canada and the US have lost their edge over the Arctic and that we urgently need to upgrade our technology there.
• Unsurprisingly, John Baird isn’t running for the Conservative leadership.
• Andrew Leach and Olszynski have an expanded version of their piece looking at the impacts and trade-offs associated with the Teck Frontier mine.
• Jen Gerson boggles at the utter incompetence of Jason Kenney’s $30 million “war room,” and their inability to grasp their basic purpose.
• Matt Gurney posits that we haven’t learned our lessons after Omar Khadr, and we will likely need future compensation cheques for the ISIS fighters detained in Syria.

Odds and ends:

For the CBA’s National Magazine, I look into how the December changes to the New NAFTA agreement might actually give the environment chapter some teeth.

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