Roundup: Auditor General day passes with little notice

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The Auditor General released a series of reports yesterday, but you almost wouldn’t know it from the dearth of coverage. Yes, The Canadian Press did cover them, and CBC did somewhat, but most of those stories were not headline news, and barely made a splash. The reports didn’t come up in QP save for two NDP questions near the back third of the exercise, and Power & Politics gave it seconds worth of mention in their “five things” segment (while they also spent three blocks on their Power Panel, a block on their ridiculous “Quote of the Day,” and ran the segment on Donald Trump’s pending announcement twice). Power Play did slightly better by actually having the Auditor General on to discuss the reports, but gave her a mere 3 minutes and 42 seconds of airtime, and only a couple of the items actually got mention.

The reports:

  • We don’t know if the federal government’s plan to reduce chronic homeless by 50 percent by 2028 is working because they don’t have enough actual data.
  • Indigenous Services’ handling disasters like fires and floods remains reactive rather than proactive, even though this has been highlighted for a decade now.
  • Federal departments need to do more to ensure secure storage on cloud servers given the rising threat of cyberattacks (which is pretty alarming, really).
  • Our aging aircraft and icebreakers mean we can’t effectively monitor Arctic waters, and there are no plans to replace RADARSAT capabilities by 2026.

Is any of this earth-shattering? Maybe not, but it’s still important and a big part of the way we’re supposed to be holding the government to account, which should be important. There was once upon a time, not that long ago, when Auditor General Day was a big deal in the spring and the fall, and it was a media circus. And now? It barely makes a dent in the news cycle. It’s a pretty sad indictment of where we’re at in terms of our national political media, and how little we’re paying attention to the things that are supposed to matter.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 266:

Russia fired a large number of cruise missiles at civilian infrastructure throughout Ukraine, and throughout this, a pair of missiles appear to have crossed into Poland and struck a farm near the border, killing two people. While everything is being verified that these were in fact Russian missiles (and not, for example, Ukrainian missiles that missed intercepting the Russian missiles), NATO leaders are thus far keeping cool and trying to keep the situation cool, but this is almost entirely unlikely to trigger Article 5. Instead, it’s likely to trigger Article 4, and ramping up their investment into giving more equipment to Ukraine faster, including the plan from Poland to deliver its old MiG fighters to Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1592647150504407042

Good reads:

  • While at the G20 summit, Justin Trudeau attended an emergency meeting of G7 and NATO leaders around the incident at the Polish border.
  • Trudeau also briefly met with Xi Jinping face-to-face, announced vaccines, and deleted a tweet about Iran allegedly planning to execute 15,000 arrested protesters.
  • Sean Fraser says that immigration can help solve our housing crisis by bringing in needed builders and tradespeople, rather than worsening the crunch.
  • It was RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki’s turn to testify at the public inquiry, and there remains confusion about whether the Emergencies Act was needed after all.
  • Health Canada officials were grilled at committee about the shortages in children’s medication, and it’s a situation they have been trying to manage since April.
  • The former CEO of Hockey Canada was before the Heritage committee to express his regrets that he didn’t do more about the abuse situation in the organisation.
  • Ontario is facing a shortfall of 220,000 new childcare spaces, in part because they have no strategy to staff them that should include a wage grid.
  • Leonid Sirota pushes back against the notion that the Supreme Court has been inventing laws that the Notwithstanding Clause is needed to counter.
  • Stephen Saideman calls out certain media outlets raising the hysteria about NATO’s Article 5 and what it means with the incident in Poland.
  • Heather Scoffield notes the competing demands for COVID reviews, and highlights the Royal Society report on the effect that it had on women in particular.
  • Paul Wells reviews the past few days of testimony at the public inquiry, and finds a pattern of selective engagement from the federal government.
  • My column points out that the current procedural fight over midnight sittings to allow more canned speeches is suffocating our Parliamentary democracy.

Odds and ends:

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One thought on “Roundup: Auditor General day passes with little notice”

  1. A recent report has it that Canadians are concerned over the Liberal plan to increase immigration because they feel that there will be no way to house them. Again short term thinking. Without immigration there will be much less money for the governments at the two main levels to spend on health care for our rapidly growing senior population. Canada needs this additional tax base. It is evident now with a shortage of workers in health care at all levels with the exception of bedpan carriers. Many professional are content to live on their albeit reduced pensions or on home equity than return to work. Alas, our society has turned from long term planning and solutions to short term thinking.

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