Roundup: No undoing these elections

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In Alberta, the province’s municipal affairs minister has declared that he can’t vacate a seat on Calgary’s city council given the revelations that surfaced against one councillor from a time before his election, when he was a police officer. And this is actually a good thing – you do not want to give provincial governments the power to suddenly start vacating seats on municipal councils in their province, because that can very, very easily be weaponised to settle scores, particularly when there is friction between the municipal and provincial governments. (Seriously, given the rank incompetence of several provincial governments, you do not want them to have this power, no matter that it may sound nice for this particular circumstance).

There is a certain amount of resonance in this with the situation around ousted Liberal candidate and now independent MP Kevin Vuong, While there is some social media backlash over his visit to a local business that needed their MP’s help on a CRA issue, there are plenty of people who are demanding that something be done about his election, be it having the Speaker declare his seat vacant or the like, but I worry about that because of the implications for what it means as a precedent (especially given the fact that charges were not pursued in the allegations against him, which a gulf from the kind of conviction that would ordinarily be used as an excuse to declare such a vacancy). There needs to be a very high bar because this is democracy, and one of the things that happens in a democracy is that sometimes the people get it wrong for whatever the reason, and in this case, there is the added issue that the party did a closed-door acclamation process rather than an open nomination, so they have to wear this as well.

In both of these cases, there is something of an object lesson about why it’s important to get things right when you’re considering who you’re voting for (and why local journalism matters). There is nobody who can swoop down and save you from your bad choices, so it’s very, very important that you choose wisely.

Good reads:

  • Mélanie Joly visited her counterpart in Washington, and delivered (yet another) message disapproving of the latest protectionist measures in the US budget.
  • At COP26, Steven Guilbeault says Canada supports international deadlines to eliminate coal power generation and fossil fuel subsidies.
  • Mary Ng is in Geneva for meetings to help reform the WTO and finding a long-term solution to the problem of its appellate body.
  • Canadian officials are urging Canadian citizens to leave Haiti as the situation in the country worsens with fuel shortages and gangs controlling resources.
  • The government has authorised travel documents for a Canadian who has been in detention in Syria for suspicion of being an ISIS recruit.
  • Pfizer doses for children aged five to eleven could be approved within two weeks.
  • The Canadian Forces Provost Marshal estimates that 145 investigations involving sexual misconduct could be transferred to civilian police.
  • CSIS has grown concerned about the “unprecedented” rise in violent online rhetoric over the course of the pandemic, with calls for executions of certain individuals.
  • FINTRAC reports that organized crime likely used CERB fraud as part of money laundering operations.
  • The Supreme Court of Canada upheld the “starting point” sentencing regime for fentanyl traffickers, saying that those starting points are guidelines for judges.
  • An education “guidance document” in Alberta tried to both-sides Nazi Germany’s “economic strength” (which has been debunked) and are you kidding me?
  • Robert Hiltz reviews the history of Canada missing its climate targets.
  • Colby Cosh offers a deserved mocking of the federal government and the University of Saskatchewan’s problem of Carrie Bourassa’s faked Indigenous history.
  • My weekend column reads through Jagmeet Singh’s interview in Maclean’s and finds the places where he lacks any real introspection as to why he lost the election.

Odds and ends:

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