Roundup: Summoning Sunwing and VIA to committee

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The chair of the Commons transport committee says he is looking to call a meeting shortly in order to summon the heads of airlines like Sunwing and of VIA Rail to get them to explain how they handled the travel chaos over the holidays. Which is all well and good, even if it’s more about a public expression of anger and accountability. The wrinkle here is that the Conservatives also want the minister to be summoned to explain why he didn’t “fix the system.”

Sigh.

Aside from the risible press release that the Conservative transport critic, Mark Strahl, put out over the holidays that essentially blamed Justin Trudeau for the weather, we have to remember that the government has very few levers at their disposal here. They don’t run the airlines, and while VIA Rail is a Crown Corporation, it is operated at arm’s length from the government specifically so that they can’t tell them what to do. (The minister can select the board of directors and give general policy directives, like they are doing with the pursuit of high-frequency rail, but he cannot direct operations). We all watched over the summer as airport operators conveniently blamed the ArriveCan app for their failures to do things like hire enough ground crews, or airlines blaming the app for their decisions to schedule flights that didn’t have flight crews, and that credulous media organisations lapped it up without calling them on their bullshit, and lo, nothing actually got fixed (which, again, the minister cannot direct because those are private companies), so when these problems persisted and were amplified by the inclement weather over the holidays, they can no longer blame ArriveCan or anything the federal government has or has not done. They should face some actual accountability for their failures, rather than just have the opposition parties repeat their bullshit to try and pin the problems on the government.

Of course, the government could and should do something about the Canadian Transportation Agency, like shaking up its membership so that it’s no longer subject to capture by the industry, or giving it additional resources to deal with the backlog of complaints, or strengthening its governing structure, or any number of other things that could hold industry to account. That would be a better use of their time than having Strahl give a performance for the cameras at committee, where he can invent new constituents like “Briane” to give fictitious sob stories about, but this government has shown little interest in doing that work. Perhaps the committee could expend some of their time and resources to provide that pressure?

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 315:

Russia says that 89 service members were killed in the Ukrainian attack on a position in occupied Donetsk region, and cited the unauthorised use of mobile phones from their soldiers that allowed their location to be determined. (They also claim they retaliated and killed 200 Ukrainian soldiers and four HIMARS launchers, to which Ukraine says two people were injured in an attack on a hockey arena in the area attacked). There is also talk that the increasing use of drones in this conflict could bring about the dawn of the “killer robot” as they become more autonomous.

Good reads:

  • Sean Fraser says that 431,645 new permanent residents settled in Canada last year, blowing past the previous record set the year before.
  • Jonathan Wilkinson says the “just transition” legislation is coming this year, as will a finalised agreement on the Atlantic Loop hydroelectric project.
  • The government has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit around the operation of boarding homes for Indigenous students attending public schools.
  • Canadian Heritage has been working on the Diversity of Content Online initiative to feed into a UNESCO project to promote discoverability rules on the internet.
  • There is a debate among parties around the process for selecting the next Commons Clerk.
  • Jim Carr’s son, Ben, is considering running to replace his late father in Parliament.
  • Here is an interesting longread that debunks a lot of the moral panic that has infected the discourse around the expansion of MAiD in Canada.
  • A Russian professor who spent years in Canada looks at how we are engaging in Indigenous reconciliation versus how Russia is assimilating their Indigenous people.
  • Professor Vass Bednar gives a scathing indictment of the Competition Tribunal’s decision regarding the Rogers-Shaw merger, and our system in general.
  • My column on the RCMP’s 150th anniversary, their “Vision 150 and Beyond” strategic plan, and how the Force is too broken to be fixed.

Odds and ends:

For National Magazine, I look at the upcoming Parliamentary sitting, and all of the bills still on the Order Paper.

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