Roundup: End of the parliamentary year 2023

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With a flurry of more nonsense motions, another apology from Speaker Greg Fergus, and a few more hours of sterile speechifying, followed by a royal assent ceremony, Parliament—both chambers—has gone home for the holidays.

This has been one of the most toxic, rancorous sittings I’ve lived through in my fifteen years on the Hill full-time, and I’ve watched it devolve in realtime to something where the clip-gathering was more selective to it being every single interaction on camera, and because they want to boost the engagement on those clips, they torque things and are now outright lying about absolutely everything, and now the place is a toxic swamp. The incident with Anthony Rota’s ouster just made everything worse, because the partisan rancour around that dialled up to eleven, and there was an actual attempt by the Conservatives to let Rota to escape responsibility by trying to falsely pin the blame on Trudeau and making false insinuations about the PMO essentially running the Speaker’s office, which is both wrong and dangerous. And it just gets progressively worse, the more that Greg Fergus keeps doing things that get pounced upon (no matter that provincial parties are not federal ones, particularly in Quebec).

And because the Andrew Scheer vs Greg Fergus fight keeps getting dumber, the NDP want to summon Scheer to the ethics committee over the use of his office for a partisan video. Meanwhile, people keep digging up more instances of Scheer going to fundraisers when he was Speaker, and lo, they were fundraisers for his own party, not events for provincial parties, which are the accusations being levelled against Fergus. Which do we think is the actual partisan activity here?

Ukraine Dispatch:

There is a strange story out of Keretsky in western Ukraine, where a village council member showed up at a meeting and detonated three grenades, injuring 26 including the person responsible, whose motive is unclear. Ukraine has signed “dozens” of contracts for joint production or technology exchanges with Western defence firms. As the EU struggles to get aid to Ukraine in spite of Hungary blocking it, here’s a look at what Ukraine needs to do in order to continue on its course for membership.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau’s Vancouver fundraiser was stormed by pro-Palestinian protesters, who staged a “die-in.”
  • Chrystia Freeland met with her provincial counterparts, and implored upon them to be patient so that the chief Actuarial Offer can finish his work on pensios.
  • Bill Blair says that while he doesn’t want to ban alcohol on military basis, he does want to change the drinking culture of the Canadian Forces.
  • Arif Virani says the government is “weighing options” around the extending the pause on medical assistance in dying for those suffering only from mental disorders.
  • Final Online News Act regulations were published, and divvy up the Google money so that CBC is capped at 7%, broadcast at one third, and the rest to print/digital.
  • The military’s top operations commander says that the military can’t keep delivering for domestic climate-related disasters. (Premiers need to step up!)
  • The CBSA has cancelled the deportation order for a gay Ugandan in Edmonton.
  • The Canadian Forces is not going to court martial an army officer who recorded a video in uniform calling for a national uprising over vaccine mandates. (Seriously?!)
  • The Supreme Court of Canada gave a 4-1 ruling from the bench to order a new trial for a murder suspect with regards to mental health concerns. (Video here).
  • Of course, provinces are going to try to push people on their own dental care plans onto the federal one. It’s like night following day.
  • Emmett Macfarlane points to the problems of a former Supreme Court justice lending his legitimacy to the Manning report in Alberta.
  • Chris Selley offers qualified praise for the Liberals for allowing internal dissent on the Gaza issue, rather than other parties enforcing monolithic positions.
  • Kevin Carmichael delves into Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem’s final speech of the year.

Odds and ends:

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3 thoughts on “Roundup: End of the parliamentary year 2023”

  1. Dale, Fergus didn’t attend the provincial event in Toronto. He sent a video for the farewell to Fraser segment of the event. John is a long time personal family friend. Nothing advantageous to him by doing this. Should he have donned his robes, no, but most likely it was an ask at an opportune time.

  2. Poilievre and Scheer would celebrate shite and call it a diamond.
    Canadians are finally starting to tire of the Cons.
    The question I hear is…when will Polly thank the government for all the decent things it is doing and has done for Canadians during the Covid and post Covid years?

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