Roundup: May sees some, but not all, of the documents

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Green Party leader Elizabeth May held a press conference yesterday to talk about the unredacted documents she saw related to foreign interference, and in particular what David Johnston had written during his brief tenure as Special Rapporteur. It wasn’t, however, quite what she had hoped and stated that she was disappointed that she could only read David Johnston’s unredacted report, rather than the documents that supported his conclusions, which were all footnoted, but not actually there to read.

It is worth noting that May was quite generous and believes this to be something of a mistake on PCO’s part, and if not a mistake, it’s part of their usual pattern of being overly secretive and disclosing the bare minimum, even if May had been properly vetted and given clearance to read the documents. And she makes an extremely valid point that if the point is to be reassured in the quality of Johnston’s work, then you also need to see the documents that he was seeing in order to determine if he had arrived at the right conclusion or not. And I suspect that she will be able to see those documents before too long, because someone at PCO must know just how bad it will look if she can’t see the supporting evidence, and that it will look like they have something to hide, which is counter to the entire point of this whole exercise.

With this in mind, it bears mentioning that Jagmeet Singh is planning on seeing the documents as well as soon as he can schedule the time in Ottawa (as he’s busy on the summer barbecue circuit), while both Pierre Poilievre and Yves-François Blanchet have refused, insisting that this is some kind of “trap” where they wouldn’t be able to talk about what they’ve seen and be unable to criticise the government. That’s not true, and there is plenty they could say about the documents without revealing specifics, but they would rather play the game of insisting the government is hiding something nefarious when the truth is so much more mundane than that.

Ukraine Dispatch:

American sources are saying that the number of casualties in the war are reaching nearly 500,000, but that number needs to be taken with a shaker’s worth of salt because Russia routinely undercounts its killed and wounded, while Ukraine doesn’t publicly disclose their official casualty figures (though I do note that they do very much use tributes to dead soldiers for propagandistic purposes). Russians are claiming that a Ukrainian drone smashed into a downtown Moscow office building, while Ukraine denies it targeted a civilians or civilian infrastructure.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1692492507878224375

Good reads:

  • Prime minister Justin Trudeau met with evacuees from Yellowknife in Edmonton, as the government prepares to airlift those still in need of evacuation from the city.
  • Mark Holland is making a big show of playing nice with the provinces over ongoing negotiations of the health transfers (as though they won’t walk all over him).
  • Here is a discussion about tax incentives for building rental housing.
  • The owners of a Russian cargo plane being seized in Toronto are trying to contest it with a Soviet-era investment treaty.
  • Poor polling numbers appears to have spooked some backbench Liberals as they are grousing about the government’s performance on a number of files.
  • Pierre Poilievre claims that immigrants are telling others to stay away from Canada. Immigrant bloggers say they’re only offering a reality check on expectations.
  • Yves-François Blanchet made an official visit to New Brunswick, more as a show for Quebec voters as the party won’t expand outside of the province.
  • Records show that Doug Ford didn’t use his government-issued phone for at least three months in the pandemic, as requests for his personal phone records grow.
  • The search of a church basement at a former Manitoba residential school found no bodies, and the local chief worries this will feed the denialist narrative.
  • The “free enterprise!” UCP government in Alberta has nationalised their lab services, just a few years after privatising all of them.
  • David Eby has declared a province-wide state of emergency in BC regarding the province’s wildfire situation.
  • Here’s an interview with the mayor of Yellowknife about the current situation there.
  • Shannon Proudfoot looks at the Conservatives falsely claiming media collusion as an act of worldbuilding for credulous followers in order to reshape objective reality.
  • My Xtra column goes through the New Brunswick Child and Family Advocate’s review of the policy changes to the safe schools policy for LGBTQ+ students.

Odds and ends:

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