My patience for the current round of blame-shifting in the handling of this pandemic has pretty much reached its breaking point, and Alberta’s justice minister has crossed a line. Recall that a week ago, NDP MP Heather McPherson accused the prime minister of rather watching Alberta burn than help Jason Kenney – a statement that borders on psychotic and ignores the billions of dollars in federal aid that has been extended that Kenney has either sat on or declined. Of course, McPherson, like her leader Jagmeet Singh, seems to think that the federal government should be invoking the Emergencies Act and swooping in to take over the province, which is nothing more than a recipe for a constitutional crisis the likes we have never seen in this country. (Can you imagine the reaction in the province if Trudeau did this?)

Well, yesterday Alberta’s justice minister declared that the provincial NDP opposition, the federal government, and the media, were all cheering on a COVID disaster in the province, which is absolutely boggling. To think that your opponents literally wish death upon Albertans is some brain worm-level thinking, and yet here we are – and no, the minister would not apologise, citing that his opponents were trying to exploit the pandemic for political purposes. This is nothing short of insane, and yet this kind of thinking is clearly rearing its head as the provincial government flails, under attack by all sides, and frankly, reaping the unhinged anger that it has been sowing for years and thinking they were too clever to get caught by.

But in the midst of this, there was a column in Maclean’s yesterday which declared that it was “partisans” that were the cause of this blame-shifting, and then proceeded to pathologically both-sides the issues until my head very nearly exploded. It’s not “partisans” – it’s political actors who are to blame, and trying to pin this solely on people who vote for them is ridiculous. I will say that a chunk of the blame does rest on media, for whom they downplay actual questions of jurisdiction as “squabbling” and “finger-pointing,” thus allowing premiers in particular to get away with the blame-shifting and hand-waving away their responsibilities, and it’s allowed this obsessive fantasy about invoking the Emergencies Act to keep playing itself out – especially because most of these media outlets have been cheerleading such a declaration (so that they can fulfil the goal of comparing this to Trudeau’s father invoking the War Measures Act during the October Crisis). If media did a better job of actually holding the premiers to account rather than encouraging their narratives that everything can be pinned on the federal government (for whom they have some of their own issues they should be better held to account for), there may have been actual pressure on some of them to shape up long before now, and yet that doesn’t happen. Absolutely nobody has covered themselves in glory here, and it’s just making this intolerable situation all that much worse.

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1391949740896657410

Good reads:

• Work on Bill C-10 is going to be put on hold while the amendments are sent to the Justice Department for a new Charter evaluation.
• Here is a look at some of the justice measures the government is looking at, both in legislation and the budget, to keep more Black and Indigenous people out of jail.
• The government is some four years behind in its promise to revamp the citizenship guide.
• Some former top military members are expressing regrets that they didn’t do more to combat the culture of sexual misconduct when they were in charge.
• Canadian soldiers in Iraq are complaining that they are being asked to train war criminals (who keep showing videos of themselves committing war crimes).
• The Privacy Commissioner plans to investigate PornHub over allegations of non-consensual use of images.
• There are questions as to whatever happened to the report the Senate was working on about the state of Canada’s prisons. (Context not in the piece here).
• Liberal MP Rob Oliphant, parliamentary secretary for the minister foreign affairs, is publicly questioning the value of the Justice’s Department’s legal advice. Holy…
• Some Conservatives are worried that Doug Ford will be a liability to the party in the next election – more than Erin O’Toole’s apparent unpopularity.
• The NDP decided to back the government on time allocation and in passing Bill C-19 at Second Reading, which allows for safer elections to happen in a pandemic.
• The NDP are also hoping that they have messaging that well help them break through in Toronto again in the next election, but the odds are against them.
• We have more details about what was in some of the military reports for long-term care residences that they were called into in the Toronto area.
• Stephen Saideman argues that the government needs to appoint a new permanent Chief of Defence Staff immediately (and that Sajjan needs to fall on his sword).
• Kevin Carmichael calls out the government’s timidity in dealing with the overheated housing market in the budget, when stronger measures are required.

Odds and ends:

“To suggest we should shut down our economy when we have 100 cases is to suggest that the only way to avoid a lockdown is to have a lockdown.”
Erm, EXPONENTIAL GROWTH DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS, BRIAN PALLISTER!
FFS. #PnPCBC

— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) May 10, 2021

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