Roundup: Clown show at the bar

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The move to call the Iain Stewart, president of the Public Health Agency of Canada, to the bar of the House of Commons yesterday, was a complete clown show. After the Speaker read his admonishment, the Chamber descended to a back-and-forth of points of order, points of privilege, and a discussion of moving a motion on sending the Sergeant-at-Arms to the PHAC offices to search them and seize the unredacted documents (and good luck with that, given that secret documents are meant to be kept in secure cabinets).

I found it exceedingly curious that none of the opposition leaders were present for this spectacle, given that they would doubtlessly like to use it for their own partisan purposes. I am also deeply unimpressed that the government only presented other possible options for the disclosure of those documents, such as only turning them over after more security measures were in place and the Commons Law Clerk had assistance from national security officials to ensure redactions could be done properly and in context, after the admonishment happened, which they should have done beforehand to prevent this incident from ever having taken place.

I’m not sure that a security-cleared Commons committee could have prevented this whole incident, because the committee that started this whole state of affairs is not the Defence committee (which is the natural place for such as security-cleared body) but the Canada-China committee, which was a make-work project of this current parliament set up in large part because Conservatives are trying to use China as their wedge issue, and the government went along with it. The whole demand for these documents is overblown partisan theatre, considering that the firing of the two scientists was almost certainly a paperwork issue (based on the reporting by those who have been on this story for two years), but the fact that the Lab is a secure facility simply complicated matters. This whole incident is one trumped-up incident after another, until it all combusted, and it’s no way to run a grown-up democracy, and yet here we are. Nobody comes out of this looking good.

Good reads:

  • The government announced that some travel restrictions can be relaxed for citizens and permanent residents, but it’s slow out of an abundance of caution.
  • This is your reminder that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are interchangeable, so other than brand awareness, there is no reason to prefer one over the other.
  • The Privacy Commissioner says he has not yet been consulted on any form of vaccine passport, including the app the government plans to use.
  • Here is an example of how the RCMP needs better training to deal with sexual assaults, particularly when it comes to “stealthing” and how that vitiates consent.
  • Outgoing AFN national chief Perry Bellegarde reflects on what progress has been made during his time in office, and how much more there is to do.
  • The government has yet to say how many shipments of goods made with forced labour it has intercepted, and workers-rights groups can point to cleared shipments.
  • The defence committee did not complete their study on the Vance allegations after more procedural warfare, and the Liberals put out their own recommendations.
  • The Commons natural resources committee issued a report calling for secure supply chains of rare earth elements and other strategic minerals.
  • Justin Ling details the slow progress by governments on getting vaccine passports into place in order to allow international travel.
  • Heather Scoffield tries to explain some of the concerns about inflation – but doesn’t debunk the political arguments around it along the way.

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