It was not really a surprise to see the news that misconduct investigations of CBSA officers has increased over the past year – even in spite of travel volumes being down precipitously over the last year – and cases included things like interfering in an immigration process, belittling clients, abusing authority and sharing private information. Partly why this isn’t a surprise for me is because I’ve been tracking some of this for a while – I’ve heard horrific stories from lawyers, and from the Senators who have been pushing for independent oversight for CBSA for years.
That independent oversight still hasn’t happened. There have been numerous bills introduced in Parliament to provide it, and the most successful to date was a Senate initiative to create an Inspector General for CBSA. This was something the Liberals used to be in support of. Ralph Goodale was set to sponsor the bill in the Commons, until he became minister for public safety, then suddenly wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. When the bill passed the Senate unanimously, no one in the House of Commons dared to sponsor it there, MPs on the Liberal side having been warned away, and Conservatives were certainly not going to sponsor a Senate Liberal bill (and the Bloc and NDP most certainly were not either). The Liberals did introduce a weak sauce version of an oversight bill at the end of the previous parliament, with no time for it to go through, then again early in the current one, which died on prorogation and hasn’t been introduced since. That version would put CBSA under the RCMP’s Civilian Complaints and Review Commission, but for all intents and purposes, CBSA would still be investigating itself, meaning that the oversight is certainly not independent (and the CCRC is having a hard enough time getting the RCMP to sign off on its own complaints, which can’t be formalized until such sign-off).
The political will for this seems to be non-existent, which is strange, considering that the Liberals did reimplement plenty of other oversight for national security institutions like CSIS and CSA, and while some of CBSA’s activities call under the ambit of the new national security oversight bodies, it doesn’t capture the oversight of all of their activities. There are known problems with CBSA, and it’s unthinkable that a law enforcement body like it doesn’t have proper civilian oversight. The disconnect is unfathomable, but puts another mark in the column of Liberals being weasels about their promises once again.
Good reads:
- At a Democracy Forum event on Friday, Trudeau threw a bit of shade at Doug Ford for trying to make an issue of the border and not following up on it when pressed.
- Chrystia Freeland says that the agreement at the G7 finance ministers’ meeting about taxing multinationals and setting a global minimum rate is just the first step.
- The National Post attempts to tally progress made on the TRC’s calls to action.
- Here is a look at how Justin Trudeau accepting a finding of genocide by the MMIW inquiry and others can have future legal consequences for the government.
- The Pope expressed sorrow over residential schools, but no apology, Toronto’s Archbishop whined Trudeau wasn’t being fair, and Indigenous leaders were angry.
- Here is a look at what is taught around the country with regard to the history of residential schools (province-by-province breakdown here).
- Library and Archives continues to debate next steps on their biographies of Sir John A Macdonald and others at Confederation, while the web pages remain in place.
- Military police are investigating claims that Canadian soldiers were asked to train Iraqis who boasted about committing war crimes, including showing videos of them.
- There are seven candidates in the race to become the next national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, and the Kamloops discovery is affecting that race.
- One of Jason Kenney’s ministers – who isn’t in his boys’ club – is speaking out and wants an apology for the Sky Palace dinner. (Can she last long?)
- Susan Delacourt notes Trudeau’s change of tone from being “cool,” to dealing with the complexities of the job and not being detached as “cool” might indicate.
- Chantal Hébert weighs in on the debate on the statues of Sir John A Macdonald.
Odds and ends:
https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1401248009317326851
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I just can’t see the history of the treatment of native children being a subject taught in our schools. The subject will be a study in revisionism and candy coated to not corrupt or disturb innocent minds. Rather like there will never be a fulsome course on the wickedness of the all powerful church which is still driven by its need to coerce people into its “faith”, particularly the young in all places in the world, to accept it’s teachings which include the stripping of freedom of thought from every young person who is unfortunate enough to fall within the orbit of religion. No societal pressure will overcome any attempt to really educate Canadians about the pogroms of our colonial past. Perhaps as our world sees the inevitable browning of its population and the now entitled whites are faced with being in a minority position, will there be some like discussions by the whites who find the tables turned, but not today.
I watched the town hall interview with Martin Regg Cohn and noted the shade Trudeau gave the NDP towards the end (“politics is more than just ‘hey, look at me, I’m on my bicycle on Instagram’, it’s hard work” or words to that effect). Singh has got to be the sleaziest, most deceitful, most exploitative partisan hack I’ve seen in a long time. Today’s bad-faith motion attempting to “corner” the Liberals on the court case is yet another example. And his outright refusal to say boo about Horgan and old-growth logging just so he can pin “environmental catastrophe” on the Liberals, and conflate them with B.C.’s corrupt provincial cons by any other name.
He knows damn well the jurisdictional issues surrounding the Indigenous compensation case, but he chooses instead to rile up emotions and fault Trudeau as some kind of unfeeling, cold monster. The very word “jurisdiction” causes Dipper diehards to arch their backs, and I truly believe it’s because they’re tankies at the core who want central planning and an upheaval of government institutions they feel are “invalid.” They’re as populist and irrational as the Wexit loons or the U.S. Bernie bros they like to copycat, who themselves are a horseshoe-politics mirror of the MAGA cult of insurrectionists. “Bern it all down”! Fight the establishment! Down with the fuzz, man! Because it’s 1968!
Revolutions rarely if ever end well. Governing is hard, but Singh is abusing naive and desperate people to think that all of Canada’s problems can be solved overnight — and that if they can’t, it’s Justin Trudeau’s fault for not trying hard enough. “Do or do not, there is no try” doesn’t apply to real-world governance. The reason young people are apathetic isn’t per se because “voting isn’t cool.” It’s because they’ve been lied to by charlatans like Singh who’ve convinced his teenage Tik Tok followers that the hard slog of governing is as simple as clicking OK to send a tweet. Governance by tweet, hm, seems the NDP’s shade of orange is rubbing off from a certain someone else.