I found myself bemused at the CBC story yesterday about Carolyn Bennett’s office allegedly being some kind of “toxic work environment,” according to a number of former staffers. Reading the piece, however, says little about Bennett herself – other than hammering on the point that she didn’t get along with Jody Wilson-Raybould, as though that were somehow relevant to her office – but rather that the toxicity was related to other staffers in the office who were clannish and played favourites with other staffers. The story made great pains to say that Indigenous staff felt their voices weren’t being heard on policy files, but again, this is about the behaviors of other staffers and not the minister herself.

This all having been said, I am forced to wonder whether anyone could reasonably expect a minister’s office to be some kind of normal office environment, because I can’t really see it. These places are pressure cookers of constant deadlines and stress, and there’s a reason why they tend to be populated by fairly young staffers, many of them recent graduates, which is because they are willing to put up with the long hours, constant travel, and the obliteration of their personal lives where older staffers with families and obligations largely wouldn’t. And while we can say we’d prefer that these offices are healthy work environments and safe spaces, but this is politics at the highest levels in this country. It’s not going to be pretty, as much as we may like it to be.

https://twitter.com/jec79/status/1417870826934730753

https://twitter.com/jec79/status/1417948347009101827

I also think it bears noting that Bennett has been the subject of a lot of criticism that is never given to male ministers, and in particular with the dust-up over her snarky text message with Wilson-Raybould a few weeks ago, seems subject to a double standard that women in ministerial roles are not allowed to have personality conflicts where this, again, is not even blinked at among men. Under this context, the CBC piece looks to be both catering to these double-standards, and looking like they have an axe to grind with Bennett, for whatever the reason.

Good reads:

• The government’s forum on combatting antisemitism went ahead yesterday, but was nearly sidelined by opposition leaders grousing they weren’t invited to speak.
• Jonathan Wilkinson says the extreme weather we’re seeing should be a wake-up call for those who continue to resist taking action to combat climate change.
• Carla Qualtrough says that a possible election would not stall a planned review of the EI system, as it will be conducted by department officials.
• David Lametti announced funds for an Indigenous law centre at Lakehead University’s law school to help revitalise Indigenous legal traditions and systems.
• Statistics Canada is updating the “basket” of goods and services they use to measure inflation on a monthly basis.
• The Bank of Canada has appointed Sharon Kozicki to its Governing Council, which means temporarily expanding it in order to ensure it’s not all white men.
• President Joe Biden has chosen David Cohen, the senior advisor to Comcast’s CEO, to be the next ambassador to Canada (after being vacant nearly two years).
• Former Conservative MP Brad Trost has decided he wants to run again, and has been green-lit to participate in a nomination race for his old seat.
• It has been revealed that the non-confidence vote against Annamie Paul was halted by arbitration, and now the party is going to court to overturn that decision.
• A Liberal candidate in the Nova Scotia election says she was told to drop her candidacy because of “boudoir photos” and lie about her mental health.
• Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column looks at how other parties adjudicate membership disputes, given the attention on the Greens’ process right now.
• Kevin Carmichael analyses the signals being sent by the appointment of Sharon Kozicki to the Bank of Canada and how they went about it.
• Heather Scoffield looks at the economic issues created by the housing crunch, but only reluctantly acknowledges that this is largely a provincial/municipal issue.
• Chris Selley castigates the Official Languages Commissioner for not understanding his own file when it comes to understanding the availability of French instruction.

Odds and ends:

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