Roundup: Premiers playing the deflection game

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We’re in day one-hundred-and-forty-five of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russian forces have been intensifying their shelling of cities in Ukraine, and not just in the Donetsk region (and here is a look at what life is like in that region currently). Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired the head of the country’s security services and the prosecutor general, citing Russian collaborators within their departments.

Closer to home, there was some more discussion/whinging over the weekend about last week’s Council of the Federation meeting, and how it was mostly a gripe-fest directed at Ottawa. CBC’s Janyce McGregor wrote an excellent piece summarising the event and the arguments on both sides, but made a very salient observation in that the premiers were conspicuously silent on agenda items that were solely in their own wheelhouse, over things like harmonising regulations, or regulatory bodies, or interprovincial trade barriers. All of those require zero input from the federal government, and yet the premiers were silent on any progress made on these (intractable) issues in favour of simply a chorus of blame Ottawa. And it’s a very good point, because it points to the absolute deflection of the performance art that John Horgan and the others were engaged in. They’re not doing their own jobs. It was their lack of action during the pandemic that cratered the healthcare systems that they starved beforehand (particularly when they were getting higher federal transfers that they then spent on other things). Now they’re trying to deflect from their culpability by trying to rope in Ottawa, who has been sending them a lot of money, which many of those premiers have either not spent and just applied to their bottom line to pad their surpluses, or if they did spend it, didn’t track it so we know how it was actually spent. That’s on them. Trying to blame Ottawa is their way of avoiding culpability, and the media shouldn’t be simply acting as stenographers for them along the way.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau had a call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and it sounds still positive and lots of thanks for help with defences, but the turbines were obliquely mentioned.
  • Chrystia Freeland defended the decision to return the gas turbines to Germany (in spite of Conservatives insisting that she was really opposed to it).
  • The government will be proposing either an industry-specific cap-and-trade system or modified carbon pricing system for the oil and gas sector to cut emissions.
  • The Star interviews Roman Baber, and yup, he’s still a moron. Cripes.
  • Nova Scotia has proclaimed Mi’kmaq as the province’s first language.
  • In advance of the planned Pickering nuclear plant phase-out, Ontario needs more electricity generation—after Doug Ford cancelled 750 green energy projects.
  • Susan Delacourt gets a behind-the-scenes look at the role that Canada played in getting Finland and Sweden fast-tracked into NATO membership.
  • My weekend column delves into the timelines involved in energy projects, and why Canada won’t be delivering LNG to Europe anytime soon, if at all.

Odds and ends:

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