Roundup: Stampede politicking in full swing

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We’re now on or about day one-hundred-and-thirty-eight of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and there are reports that Russian reservists are starting to assemble near the border for a future offensive. There have been rocket attacks against the eastern city of Chasiv Yar, in the Donetsk region. Civilian evacuatiosn are underway in parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, as the shelling continues in the eastern part of the country. Meanwhile, a cohort of Ukrainians has arrived in the UK for combat training in an attempt to more rapidly turn civilians into soldiers.

Canada has been in the middle of a dispute over a gas turbine undergoing repairs here, for the Nord Stream One pipeline from Russia to Germany. Germany has been trying to urge our government to return the turbine, while Ukraine wanted us to withhold it as a part of Russian sanctions. In the end, the Canadian government opted to return the turbine, but put more sanctions on Russia, though the decision came with much criticism from Ukrainian officials.

Closer to home, it’s Stampede time in Calgary, which has become a major political event over the years. Justin Trudeau attended the Stampede yesterday, and was mobbed by supporters, while a single person yelling “traitor” was escorted out. For Conservatives, this has been one of the hallmarks events for their leadership contest, and of course, Pierre Poilievre has been the darling of the event, touted as “more Albertan than Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney,” seeing as he was actually raised there unlike the other two. Others were not so lucky—Jean Charest was booed at the event, which is not a surprising in the “Conservative heartland” given that he’s from Quebec. Just more of Alberta’s childish politics of resentment that Poilievre is playing into.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau and Anita Anand were in Truro, Nova Scotia, on Saturday for an official apology to the families of the Black Brigade in WWI.
  • François-Philippe Champagne will be meeting with the CEO of Rogers after last week’s nation-wide outage.
  • The government is restarting their consultations around online harms after their expert panel could not come to a consensus on how to define it.
  • Provinces don’t want to assume military sexual assault cases in their justice systems without more money and resources from the federal government. Of course.
  • Premiers are meeting this week and will—surprise!—demand yet more health transfers from the federal government (with no strings, of course).
  • The chair of the Conservative leadership organising committee said Patrick Brown was ousted to ensure the party was “beyond reproach” in the long term.
  • Brown’s disqualification doesn’t relieve him of his obligations to Elections Canada, nor his outstanding debts as part of the contest.
  • Heather Scoffield tries to weave a grand narrative around why there is a sense of pessimism in the wake of an economy that is firing on all cylinders.
  • My weekend column sees commonalities in the demise of Boris Johnson, Jason Kenney, and Patrick Brown, all of them related to the way we choose leaders.

Odds and ends:

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