The situation in Kabul seems to have had a secondary effect during the campaign, which have been repeated calls for the prime minister and/or affected ministers to suspend their campaigns in order to deal with the crisis. While it sounds like a good idea, I can’t help but feeling that this is strictly performative, especially given the situation on the ground.

For starters, having them in Ottawa at this point wouldn’t make that much of a difference, as the vast majority of civil servants are still working from home, and these ministers have just been through a year of remote or hybrid Parliament, and managed to do their duties from home for much of that, so why they couldn’t just keep doing it during this situation – and by all accounts that’s what they are doing – just strikes me as odd, but again, this instinct of performativity – being seen to be looking like they’re doing the job, as opposed to just doing it. And it’s not like they would be micro-managing the civil servants processing these approvals either, so again, I’m not sure why the need to suspend their campaigns is really there. The prime minister attended a G7 teleconference while on the road, other ministers have been providing daily briefings to the press from their homes over the past week or so, so again, there doesn’t seem to be a genuine need to suspend.

Meanwhile, Jagmeet Singh is declaring the airlift mission to be a “failure” without necessarily understanding the situation on the ground, while Erin O’Toole, with his military experience, is simply proclaiming that he would have had “a plan,” as though any plan survives the first engagement. It was a fast-moving situation where we didn’t have assets of our own on the ground and were reliant on our allies, who weren’t necessarily dependable in their own right – made all the opaquer by the need for operational security. Of course, their real goal is to make the current government look like they’ve been incompetent on the file, and while I will agree that some of what happened can be attributed to our culture of risk-aversion, I think we need to try and keep some of the context of the situation in mind, rather than jumping to knee-jerk conclusions.

O’Toole is pressed four times to explain what he would have done on Afghanistan if he had been Prime Minister.
He says he would have a plan but does not explain what it is, and gives no specifics. He says he would act and lead but doesn’t say what he would do or how #cdnpoli

— Marieke Walsh (@MariekeWalsh) August 26, 2021

On the campaign trail:

• Justin Trudeau was in Quebec City to promise enriched benefits for seniors.
• Apparently the Liberal brass is trying to assure nervous candidates that there is a plan and that they should stick to it rather than get spooked.
• The Liberals’ plan to tax banks and insurers who make over $1 billion in profits could net $2.5 billion per year over four years.
• Erin O’Toole was in Ottawa to lay out his plan to support gig economy workers.
• O’Toole also says that flags on federal buildings which have been at half-mast since the discovery of the Kamloops residential school graves should go back to full-mast.
• Jagmeet Singh was in Winnipeg, where he repeated his housing promises.
• Singh is also politicising Elections Canada’s decision not to continue campus voting in the current election.
• Some real estate associations are freaking out about the Liberal promise to end blind bidding – even though it won’t do much to bring prices down.
• There are questions as to why nobody is addressing the “hate crimes crisis” on the campaign.
• The Liberals are hoping that Jean-Yves Duclos can maintain their toe-hold in the Quebec City area.
• Michael Chong thinks Canada needs to step up its foreign policy.
• Here is a look at Alexandre Boulerice trying to hold onto the NDP’s only Quebec seat, and the party’s hopes to regain a few more.
• Susan Delacourt recounts the history of the Liberals hitting the panic button on the campaign trail, sometimes to their benefits, sometimes to their detriment.
• Robert Hiltz gives some serious side-eye to the incoherence of the Liberals’ campaign, making their reasons for calling the election even more dubious.
• Hiltz also calls out Jagmeet Singh’s inability to stand up to NDP premiers who aren’t living up to their rhetoric, as what’s happening with the arrests of protesters in BC.

Good reads:

• The military airlift in Kandahar has ended, and the focus now shifts to resettling those who make it out of Afghanistan to a third country.
• Several members of the Afghan air force made it to Tajikistan, and are hoping for Canada to come to their aid.
• The RCMP is investigating a data breach including the theft of files from the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency.
• Kevin Newman updates what he’s hearing from the ground in Kabul, and how one of the bombs that went off was near where people were crossing to the airport.

Odds and ends:

Has that ever actually worked? History suggests that the first year of a hung parliament, nobody actually challenges the government because they’re too afraid of another election. https://t.co/yYm6gSH2jI

— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) August 26, 2021

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