In spite of instructions not to travel outside of the country, Liberal MP Yves Robillard did anyway, and now is facing censure for it. Liberal Whip Steve MacKinnon issued a statement saying that as a result of this non-essential travel, Robillard is being removed from his committee duty (he was a backbencher on the national defence committee, meaning there is no financial penalty for this loss), and that MacKinnon will give him a talking-to later.

This having been said, I find the removal from committees to be an odd sort of punishment, because you’re assigning them less work to do. Maybe the assumption is that they are somehow vain enough to want face time in committees, but that seems like a perverse incentive. You could reassign them to the less glamorous committees, like Scrutiny of Regulations, I suppose, where they are unlikely to get media attention or to any travel, or the like. If I had my druthers, I would not only keep them on their assigned committee, but ensure that every hour not on committee was spent being assigned to House duty in perpetuity (with some additional prohibitions against device use so that they can’t be spending the time playing solitaire on their tablets, or the like), but that may cross the threshold into cruel and unusual punishment.

I will also note that taking away someone’s committee duties is counterproductive because there aren’t enough bodies to go around on committees as it is, so removing someone just means more work for everyone else. It’s especially perverse that this has also been handed down on Senator Denise Batters, who was kicked out of the Conservatives’ national caucus, but she still sits with their senate caucus, but has been denied committee work—which, again, makes more work for everyone because the diminished Conservative ranks in the Senate means not enough of them to go around to fill committee seats (and this gets to be a big problem, much as it was pre-2008 when Stephen Harper was refusing to fill Senate seats and his senators were doing double and triple duty on committees to just try and have enough bodies on them). More to the point, this just gives Batters more time to be on Twitter, picking away at O’Toole. Taking away someone’s committee duties as punishment simply makes no sense at all.

Good reads:

• Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland announced that they were temporarily expanding lockdown benefits to include businesses suffering from capacity limits.
• Freeland and Trudeau also pushed back at Joe Biden’s message saying that fully vaccinated Americans can gather on the holidays in spite of omicron.
• Three members of Trudeau’s staff and three members of his security detail have tested positive for COVID, so he’s monitoring symptoms and limiting contacts.
• Marie-Claude Bibeau announced another $30 million for the Emergency Food Security Fund to help the charitable sector help more people access food aid.
• CFIA has identified and quarantined a highly pathogenic avian influenza at an exhibition farm in Newfoundland and Labrador, and can we not right now?
• The Conservative Party has turned 18, and is still trying to figure out what kind of party that it wants to be (which is kind of a problem).
• Althia Raj takes a look at gifts that Trudeau has been given by the public and foreign dignitaries, and which of those he has opted to keep.
• My column notes the positive signs that Senator Tannas pushed back against the demands to rush through bills—only to be mired down in modernization debates.

Odds and ends:

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