Roundup: Doug Ford broke the fact-checker

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It’s now approximately day ninety-eight of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russian forces have captured half of the city of Severodonetsk in a “hail of grenades,” while fierce street fighting continues. A rocket strike also hit Sloviansk, also in the Donbas region, which killed three and wounded six. As previously mentioned, the Russian strategy seems to be to try and take the Donbas region as fast as possible, before more heavy western weapons arrive, and lo, it looks like the US will be sending medium-range rockets to Ukraine after a promise that they wouldn’t fire them over the Russian border. Meanwhile, here is a look at Médecins Sans Frontières treating civilians wounded in the fighting near Ukraine’s front lines, and how it’s at a scale they have never faced before.

Closer to home, the Toronto Star’s attempt to fact-check Doug Ford for a week wound up being an exercise in misery, as he “broke” said fact-check system. Now, to be clear, the Star’s whole fact-check exercise between the federal and provincial elections has been fairly risible. It’s not a good system where you take everything the leaders say for a week each, and then evaluate them based on number of falsehoods per time spoken. And because it’s done by someone for whom politics is not their regular beat, they don’t have enough context to know whether what is being said is true or not, and a lot of stuff is being given a pass that shouldn’t be precisely because they don’t know enough of what is going on to have a reasonable bullshit detector throughout. This having been established, Ford still broke their system by barely speaking at all, and when he does, it’s largely in generalities that can’t be easily checked, and it makes it easy for him to get caught up in exaggerations that also wind up getting a pass. Still, he did still lie a lot, particularly about the situation he inherited, but the fact-check system is pretty useless, so why bother?

Nevertheless, this is now the second election where Ford has largely been a blank slate, with little in the way of policy other than his previous move of rebating licence plate stickers, and his promise to expand a highway as though it will do anything about congestion (which it won’t because induced demand). There is no contest of ideas because it’s content-free, and nobody wants to call this fact out even though it is utterly corroding our democracy. But it seems to be a strategy that works for him, and which the media in this province seems to be fine with, because they have given him the easiest ride humanly possible, and it’s just so dispiriting. How are we a serious province?

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau attended the National Prayer Breakfast to offer a prayer for reconciliation and peace.
  • Carolyn Bennett announced a three-year decriminalisation for small amounts of hard drugs in British Columbia as a way to combat the opioid epidemic.
  • The Public Health Agency is extending border measures by at least another month.
  • The Auditor General released reports on veterans disability benefits, systemic racism in prisons, gender-based analyses, and hard-to-reach groups getting benefits.
  • Military police botched an investigation into the harassment of a female cadet at the Royal Military College, due to complete incompetence.
  • A group critical of the broadcasting bill is being funded by YouTube and TikTok, which certainly looks like it’s an astroturfing platform.
  • Some advocates welcome some of the provisions in the new gun control bill, around stalkers, and “red flag” and “yellow flag” systems.
  • Canadian armoured personnel carriers have arrived in Ukraine, but there are questions about how much use they’ll actually be on the front lines.
  • The Procedure and House Affairs committee heard testimony about expanding the parliamentary precinct to include Wellington Street, and the tramway to Gatineau.
  • Conservative leadership candidates are trying to stake territory on gun control.
  • Conservative MP Garnett Genuis is calling on his fellow social conservatives to mark Poilievre as their second choice, even though anti-abortion groups disagree.
  • Alberta’s “red tape reduction” legislation will just centralise more authority in ministers’ offices, particularly with the environment. Such a good outcome!
  • Matt Gurney points out the Goldilocks logic of the Liberal gun control plan being that there are just enough handguns in the country.
  • Similarly, Susan Delacourt also notes how most of Trudeau’s talk about handguns has been just talk, and sees some rhetorical echoes in with handling the occupation.
  • My column lists just some of Doug Ford’s encyclopaedia of failures as premier, and wonders why nobody can hold him to account for any of it.

Odds and ends:

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