On a slow news weekend, about the only thing of interest was an interview that Jody Wilson-Raybould did with the Globe and Mail about her upcoming book, which everyone seems to be hoping will have some kind of explosive revelations that will reverberate on the campaign trail (and rest assured, the publisher is timing the release to coincide with the election because they want the sales).

I’m not sure that there was anything too new in this interview, but I would make a couple of observations. One of them is that she never got Trudeau’s cell phone number, but had to deal with either Gerry Butts or the PMO switchboard to reach him, which is interesting from a way of how Trudeau views his Cabinet. Another is that she notes that in the beginning, there did seem to be a true attempt at “Cabinet government,” where ministers were given their files and left alone to deal with them, and only later did PMO start interfering, leaving Wilson-Raybould to believe it was all a sham. I’m less convinced it was a sham – my own conversations with various and sundry people have tended to indicate that PMO only started to handle those ministers who were less than competent at their jobs, but this being a Canadian Cabinet, stay in for various reasons (largely around representation) – certainly not every minister is being handled by PMO. It also fits with what I heard about Wilson-Raybould’s performance as minister, which was largely that it wasn’t terribly competent (and the fact that there were bills that were continually abandoned and absorbed into larger omnibus bills is certainly one indication of this). As well, she seems particularly sore that her ideas for advancing Indigenous self-governance weren’t necessarily being followed, and there seems to be a bit of ego in that she feels hers was the way to go, though given the particularly fractious nature of Indigenous politics, one can bet that her ideas weren’t necessarily being universally agreed to by other Indigenous leaders.

This being said, I don’t doubt that she feels she as being tokenized by this government, and she’s not the only one. That’s a problem, but I’m not sure it would be any better in any other party, and it may require another generational change within all of the parties to start improving. I do think there is plenty of blame to go around for her experiences in federal politics (and she is neither blameless nor a victim), and it’s too bad that we are losing her perspective from Parliament.

Good reads:

• The border is now open once again to fully vaccinated American travellers.
• The RCMP say they need to hire 5,100 more women and 1,140 visible minorities to meet their recruitment targets. (Better get to work fixing your broken culture then).
• Gun control group PolySeSouvient says the proposed regulations to enact the most recent gun control bill won’t stop people without proper licences from purchasing.
• Erin O’Toole was in Quebec to promise more food self-sufficiency if he forms government (but good luck with bananas, pineapples, coffee and chocolate).
• Liberal MP Adam Vaughan has announced that he’s not running again, as have Karen McCrimmon (citing unspecified “health challenges”) and Will Amos.
• Former Ontario premier Bill Davis died at age 92.

Odds and ends:

https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1424059224343076868

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1424060628373811203

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