Roundup: The frustrated Commissioner was part of the problem

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The outgoing Ethics Commissioner is starting to do exit interviews, and he’s expressing frustration that these kinds of ethics violations keep happening, despite the law being in place for 17 years now. To that I say two things:

1) No matter how many rules you put in place, it won’t matter because the Liberals under Trudeau fundamentally believe that so long as they mean well, the ends will justify the means, and that it’s better to simply apologise after having broken rules than it is to scrupulously and slavishly adhere to them in the first place. You can’t just put new rules to stop them from that particular belief, and no amount of training from the Commissioner’s office is likely to shake them from such beliefs.

2) Our ethics regime sucks, in large part because so much of it is predicated on the whims of the Commissioner, and this Commissioner had a lot of whims. His predecessor had a habit of reading her mandate so narrowly that nothing ever applied, except for a small handful of cases, one of which was Trudeau’s vacation with the Aga Khan, in which she made up rules around what a family friendship entails. The current Commissioner has been the opposite, reading his mandate very, very expansively so that things it should not encompass, it does (like the SNC-Lavalin issue). He has made up statutory interpretation from whole cloth, such as the definition of what constitutes “family” under the Act, and capturing relatives through marriage that no other statute in the country captures in its definitions (the issue with Dominic LeBlanc). There is no consistency, and even when they believe they are within the law, he will make up a rule that says they’re not.

I’m not suggesting the Liberals are blameless, because they’re not (see the part about them not caring about rules), but the statue itself is a problem, as are the perceptions around it, and the apocalyptic language being used to describe minor transgressions. They keep talking about the transgressions making it hard to have trust in politicians, but when the system itself fails them because it’s poorly designed and poorly administered, it’s just one vicious circle that nobody wants to show a way out of.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 359:

Russia launched 36 missiles early in the day and struck the country’s oil refinery, while also shelling two dozen settlements in the east and south of the country.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1626479351045804032

Good reads:

  • The Emergencies Act public inquiry report is being released at noon today.
  • From the CARICOM meeting in the Bahamas, Justin Trudeau announced new measures to help Haiti, but didn’t promise any military intervention.
  • David Lametti (finally) tabled his bill to create an independent commission to review and investigate potential wrongful convictions.
  • Jean-Yves Duclos has agreed to the provinces’ request for a five-year review of health transfers and funding.
  • Back from Ukraine, Mélanie Joly has praised Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s crackdown on corruption, and is promising more funds for a variety of projects.
  • Some of the asylum seekers who crossed at Roxham Road have been shipped off to Windsor, in order to ease pressure on the Quebec system.
  • The RCMP Civilian Review and Complaints Commission issued a scathing report on the failure to search for a Saskatchewan woman who disappeared.
  • There are questions as to whether an Air Canada flight spotted the suspected Chinese spy balloon first, but the Canadian government isn’t talking.
  • MPs on the procedure and House affairs committee have asked CSIS to help train them to spot foreign interference, which can be something of a black box.
  • The Senate has agreed to move expeditiously on the bill to delay MAiD for mental disorders when Parliament resumes sitting in March.
  • The special joint parliamentary committee on reviewing MAiD recommending moving ahead with allowing access to mature minors, with restrictions.
  • Here is a look at provinces running growing surpluses while they cry poor to the federal government and continue to under-invest in healthcare.
  • Newfoundland and Labrador’s energy minister is unhappy that oil companies are looking to abandon holdings in the province while making record profits.
  • New Brunswick is scrapping their provincial carbon price and signing onto the federal programme for the summer.
  • For The Line, Scott Van Wynsberghe goes through the entire history of spy balloons, and it’s way more extensive than you might think.

Odds and ends:

David Cochrane has been made the permanent host of CBC’s Power & Politics, and it’s about gods damned time.

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One thought on “Roundup: The frustrated Commissioner was part of the problem”

  1. Can the guy paying his ex-girlfriend as his campaign manager really say he’ll run a government against “benefiting friends”?

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