Roundup: A Canada Day fail in Ottawa

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It’s Canada Day, and we are having festivities again this year, and included in them will be astronaut Jeremy Hansen, whom The Canadian Press has interviewed here. There will be an Indigenous ceremony ahead of the main show at noon, so the attempt to balance things carries on.

Meanwhile, the City of Ottawa continues to embarrass itself by deciding that the brand new LRT station they built near LeBreton Flats, where the festivities are being held (because there is no room on Parliament Hill with the construction), is suddenly deemed to be too small to handle the crowd, so they’re telling people to get off at the station before and walk a kilometre to the site. Absolutely ridiculous, but that’s been the story of everything with this LRT.

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1674860701804814346

Programming note: I’m going to try to make this a quasi-long weekend, so no roundup post on Monday. See you Tuesday and enjoy Canada Day!

Ukraine Dispatch:

A Russian missile struck a school in a village near the front lines in Donetsk region, killing two and injuring six, and only because students were not in school at the time. Defence officials say they continue to advance in all directions along the front lines both in the east and the south, including around the flanks of Bakhmut. Here is another look at how the Ukrainian army is trying to wear down and outsmart Russian occupiers. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has ordered the northern border to be strengthened given that Wagner Group forces are moving into Belarus, while it sounds like Russia is reducing the number of their personnel at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which increases fears that they could be attempting sabotage of the plant.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1674798244579221504

Good reads:

  • Mélanie Joly joined with allies in calling on Israel to rescind its approval of 5700 settlement units in the occupied West Bank.
  • The CRA has fired 20 employees and is investigating 580 more for claiming CERB benefits while they worked at the CRA! Unbelievable!
  • The CRA’s request for client data from Shopify is part of an international tax avoidance investigation that includes Australia and France.
  • In light of the stabbing attack at Waterloo targeting a gender studies class, there are calls that we need to preserve free discussion on campuses.
  • The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that someone’s license suspension pre-trial should count toward her impaired driving conviction, essentially nullifying it.
  • Dan Levy of Schitt’s Creek has been named to the Order of Canada.
  • Riding associations in New Brunswick are starting the process to oust Blaine Higgs as the Progressive Conservative party leader (and by extension premier).
  • Senator Paula Simons reflects on today being the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the warning of that history on what we’re seeing currently.
  • Aaron Wherry takes stock of this government’s promises of more transparent government nearly eight years ago, and we’re still waiting.
  • Sandy Garossino calls out the mobster behaviour of Google and Facebook over their reaction to Bill C-18 versus the amount of money they extract from Canada in a year.
  • My weekend column points out that the government keeps letting the opposition rebrand policies like the Clean Fuel Standard, because they refuse to push back.

Odds and ends:

 

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