Roundup: Not a corporate workplace

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Parliament is back today, and while I would normally be fairly excited, it’s feeling less and less so these days, because this current parliament is a fairly terrible one overall, that feels increasingly toxic to be around. But hey, maybe we’ll actually talk about housing and food price inflation, and some things that matter! But who am I kidding—it’ll be a bunch of complete bullshit coming from Pierre Poilievre, some non sequiturs from Jagmeet Singh about “greedflation” and the like, while Justin Trudeua and his front bench will repetitively deliver some canned pabulum that is supposed to make you feel vaguely reassured and like they’re patting you on the head. Because that’s the state of the political discourse these days, and I hate it.

As with anything this time of year, we’re also getting the usual calls about ways to “reform the workplace” of Parliament, as though this were a corporate office and that MPs are all just middle managers. They’re not, and that’s the problem with framing discussions like this. They’re all elected. They are all equal under the constitution, and in the framework of power dynamics. You can’t impose HR standards because you can’t involve an HR structure like this because power is entirely horizontal.

The other thing that we need remember here, however, is that MPs need to divorce Question Period—which is theatre—from the every day, and I see a lot of that in these complaints, and it goes around and around. Why do people do it and get away with it? Because it’s performance, and it’s confrontational for a reason. Heckling has a place, and some of that is to knock MPs and ministers off of their talking points. And that’s why I have a hard time qualifying all of it as “bullying” or “intimidation” because while that does happen, QP is a different beast and we all need to remember that. We also need the Speaker to do his gods damned job, but that’s also the fault of MPs for consistently choosing weak Speakers and ensuring that he has weak Standing Orders to enforce, because they like it that way.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russian missiles have again hit the grain port at Odessa, while another strike at Kharkiv was allegedly targeting a plant where armoured vehicles undergo repairs. Ukrainian forces have apparently carried out a “special operation” in Sevastopol in occupied Crimea, and reclaimed another village near Bakhmut. Meanwhile, a Ukrainian farmer was killed when his plough hit a landmine, while Norway is reporting that the number of Russian forces staged along their borders are now just twenty percent or less than what they were before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau was at the Global Progress Summit on the weekend, meeting with current and former leaders and talking about the need for better messaging.
  • The list of new parliamentary secretaries was finally released over the weekend.
  • Chrystia Freeland has made the relevant (if obvious) point that even with action from all levels of government, it is going to take years to solve the housing crisis.
  • There has apparently been very little follow-up to claims from a former Polish consul-general about being asked to keep tabs on a former Alberta cabinet minister.
  • The RCMP and other federal employers tend to exhaust harassment complainants by exploiting the rule that they need to exhaust all internal mechanisms first.
  • Housing researcher Paul Kershaw notes that until politicians start talking about housing prices stalling or coming down, we can’t actually address the issue.
  • The Star has tracked how the three main party leaders spent their summer.
  • Doug Ford’s mandate letter to his infrastructure minister included previously unrevealed plans to sell off “inefficiently used” government properties.
  • All of Ford’s 2018 mandate letters can now be found here.
  • Emma Teitel points out the realities of just whom is doing the indoctrinating about gender, and that this isn’t just an American import.
  • Shannon Proudfoot has a longread about Trudeau’s Chief of Staff, Katie Telford, and how inscrutable she is for how indispensable she is to the PM.
  • Susan Delacourt takes a bigger-picture look at the Liberal caucus retreat, and what she heard from Trudeau about the state of play within the party.

Odds and ends:

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