Roundup: Botching the Asia-Pacific Strategy Rollout

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The federal government launched their long-awaited Indo-Pacific Strategy yesterday, which was, well, a choice. They launched it on a Sunday morning at the same time as Canada was playing in a World Cup match, and didn’t provide journalists with a technical briefing beforehand as the usually do (the technical briefing will be today, which is after the ministers have all made themselves available to the media), so they were basically flying blind about trying to figure out what’s in it as the media availability was happening. This should not have happened, and I suspect this was the old trick of trying to make announcements on a Sunday in order to try and set the agenda and tone for the week (the Conservatives used to be big fans of this, but the Liberals rarely did).

https://twitter.com/ChrisGNardi/status/1596943087930335233

What we know about it so far is that it’s two years after it was initially promised to be delivered, there’s a lot of back-patting about how this is a major foreign policy shift, and that they are going to re-engage through the region with some added spending, slightly more military engagement in the region (eventually), and maybe some intelligence operations in the area as well. I’m sure we’ll learn more later today, but yeah, the government made a lot of choices today in their communications strategy, and what do we say about this government’s communications strategies? That they can’t communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, and well, they proved that once again yesterday. Slow clap, guys.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1596925774044405760

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1596927851130851329

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 278:

There is a renewed evacuation of Kherson now that it has been liberated (though they are fleeing to Ukrainian-held regions and not Russian-held areas) as Russia has stepped up its attacks on the liberated city, while they deal with a loss of critical infrastructure. Power and water have been restored in Kyiv, but the mood is sombre as blackouts still continue because of the damage to infrastructure as winter is setting in.

Good reads:

  • Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada says they didn’t see any problems with visa handling for the AIDS Conference, in spite of delays with African visitors.
  • The Chief of Defence Staff admits that the Canadian Forces would be hard-pressed to engage in a large-scale operation at this point given the personnel shortage.
  • Here is a list of the top five contaminated sites that the federal government is going to have to spend billions of dollars remediating.
  • Here is a look at the problem of anti-LGBTQ+ hate coming up from the United States over things like social media and spreading in Canada.
  • The Star has an interesting three-part series on the dispute with Italy over use of glyphosate in the Canadian wheat-growing industry. (Parts one, two, and three).
  • With the public inquiry, Emmett Macfarlane reminds us of what the Emergencies Act actually says, why he thinks the threshold was met, and ways to amend it.
  • Susan Delacourt ponders the level of access afforded to us with the public inquiry and how it’ll be hard to go back to the usual message discipline from ministers.
  • Chantal Hébert draws some parallels to the Gomery Inquiry, and suggests that even if Justice Rouleau finds against Trudeau, the outcome is more survivable.
  • Althia Raj notes Trudeau’s display of empathy toward the unvaccinated in his testimony, but also his lack of an apology for vaccine mandates.

Odds and ends:

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