Roundup: No sympathy over late night sittings

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In today’s edition of my ongoing exasperation with MPs, I present to you NDP mental health critic Gord Johns, who wants changes made to the parliamentary calendar in order to ensure that there aren’t midnight sittings toward the end of the fall and spring sittings, and he cited Elizabeth May’s hospitalisation as proof about how these twelve-hour days are bad. But there are a few things the matter with his concerns, not the least of which was that May wasn’t hospitalised for exhaustion but rather that she had a stroke, which was caught in time.

First of all, no MP is sitting in the Chamber for twelve hours a day. Even with committee commitments, MPs are only “on duty” for a few of those hours, and they have plenty of opportunity to take shifts during these late-night sittings. And thanks to remote voting (which is an abomination in our system), they don’t have to rush to the Chamber if there are late-night votes for whatever reason, so that’s not even an excuse. Elizabeth May does like to spend as much time in the Chamber as she can, but that is also a choice.

The bigger issue here, however, is that the biggest reason there are late nights late in each sitting is because there is work to get done, and it didn’t get done earlier because of procedural games or dilatory motions, or bullshit filibusters, or what have you. The parliamentary calendar is pretty finite, and there isn’t much wiggle room in there, so if you start playing games (and over the past few years now, this kind of procedural warfare has been fairly constant because they simply oppose the government as opposed to pulling out the big guns for major points of principle), then you have to make up that time somewhere, and that tends to mean late nights late in each sitting. I would have to say that there were actually fewer of them this spring than usual, possibly because the NDP agreed to play ball with more instances of time allocation to head off the procedural games, but it wasn’t that long ago that they were gleeful participants in said procedural warfare, and this is the result. Nevertheless, I’m not terribly sympathetic here, and this is firmly within the fuck around/find out principle, where the fucking around is the procedural warfare, and the finding out is the late nights in June and December.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Another overnight Russian air attack, this time hitting the port city of Mykolaiv, while defences around Odessa have been engaged. Russia has pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal, which could impact world grain prices and cause more problems for the food insecure regions that rely on Ukrainian grain, though Ukraine and Turkey say they will try to keep shipments flowing in spite of Russia. There are more details about the blast on the bridge linking Russia to occupied Crimea, where two people were killed, while damage to the bridge could cut off supply lines to Russian troops in occupied regions.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1680983350692007937

Good reads:

  • Prime minister Justin Trudeau had a one-on-one with CTV Atlantic about carbon pricing, interprovincial infrastructure, and the future of RCMP contract policing.
  • Dominic LeBlanc says there is progress but they are “not there yet” when it comes to any agreement regarding a possible public inquiry on foreign interference.
  • The Canadian Press got more emails, this time between Mendicino’s office and that of the Privacy Commissioner around public disclosures of offender transfers.
  • There are leaks around discussions about the future of the RCMP, and there is serious talk about ending contract policing and professionalizing national policing.
  • The co-chair of Health Canada’s scientific advisory panel on pest control products resigned citing a lack of confidence in the department’s processes.
  • Here is a deeper dive into the promise to eliminate “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies.
  • Google is blocking Canadian access to their AI chatbot as part of their retaliation for Bill C-18, while Facebook has started an ad campaign to denounce the government.
  • A Desjardins report makes the case for higher immigration but warns of housing challenges and the potential disincentive to improving labour productivity.
  • Academic journalism publication The Conversation is going to Federal Court over CRA’s determination that they don’t produce “original news content.”
  • Indigenous leaders in Winnipeg are not taking no for an answer when it comes to searching the landfill for remains of (at least) two Indigenous women.
  • Western premiers are (predictably) freaking out about Steven Guilbeault calling for the phase-out of “unabated fossil fuels.”

Odds and ends:

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