Roundup: Responding to events isn’t a desperation move

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If you’ve been paying attention to Question Period over the past several days, you may have noticed that the Liberals haven’t been asking endless questions about abortion, or rather, asking the government to comment on the Conservatives’ stance about abortion. Throughout this, you had a bunch of pundits, almost all of them located outside of Ottawa, going “The Liberals are desperate! They’re using the abortion move 18 months too early!” The problem with that particular analysis is that it ignores the events going on around them.

What the Liberals were really doing, if someone bad bothered to pay attention, was responding to things the Conservatives have been doing around them. It started with Pierre Poilievre’s speech where he promised to use the Notwithstanding Clause to “make” tough-on-crime policies and laws “constitutional” (never mind that invoking the Notwithstanding Clause is a flashing red light that what you’re doing isn’t constitutional, and you’re doing to do it anyway—at least for the next five years, anyway. The Liberals were not going to pass up an opportunity to ask Poilievre just what else he planned to use those powers for, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask.

From there, Arnold Viersen tabled his petition calling for abortion restrictions, and the March for Life happened on the same week, which the Liberals (and usually the NDP) always put on a big production in Question Period about how important a woman’s right to choose is. This all happened within a few days, so of course they were going to respond to it. And once those events happened, they moved onto other things (like lambasting Poilievre’s “housing” bill). Not everything is a desperation move. They talked about abortion back in December when the Conservatives swapped a bill so that Cathay Wagantall’s backdoor abortion-banning bill could be voted on before they rose for the winter break (so it wouldn’t act as a millstone around their necks, even though the entire caucus voted for it), and everyone wasn’t insisting this was some kind of desperation move then. The moral here is that sometimes you need to pay attention to what is going on around Question Period, because it’s not the only thing going on.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukraine shot down 13 out of 14 drones launched by Russia on Monday night, with most of the debris falling on the Rivne region. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Belgium to sign another security agreement.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau reiterated that doesn’t support Israel’s actions in Rafah, and continues to call for a ceasefire, more humanitarian aid, and hostage release.
  • Sean Fraser announced a redrafted housing agreement with Ontario that supposedly better reflects the Ontario governance structure.
  • The NSIRA report on foreign interference shows that there were times when CSIS and the National Security Advisor disagreed on some of the intelligence.
  • It turns out that a lot of soldiers are leaving the Canadian Forces because of its toxic leadership. (What abuse of power crisis? Certainly not here!)
  • Unsurprisingly, Speaker Greg Fergus survived the latest attempt to oust him.
  • The Sergeant-at-Arms told a committee that the number of threats made against MPs has increased by some 800 percent over five years.
  • The attempts by Conservatives to water down the pharmacare bill at committee were for naught.
  • At the heritage committee, privacy experts denounced the Senate public bill that would impose age verification requirements for internet service providers.
  • Liberal MP Ryan Turnbull wants a more public admission by the PBO that they screwed up their analysis on the carbon price, and to consider climate effects.
  • Michael Chong says that the Conservatives are willing to fast-track the bill on combatting foreign interference.
  • Wab Kinew wants increased federal transfers regardless of who is in government federally, because he got the hang of being a premier really quickly.
  • The Alberta government is imposing time allocation on four contentious bills, only allowing for an hour debate at each stage (which is ridiculous).
  • Colby Cosh bemusedly notes that UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s proposal for mandatory national service is a return to communitarian conservatism.
  • My column looks at the latest attempt to oust Speaker Fergus, as each attempt gets more transparently in bad faith than the last in a bid to undermine the office.

Odds and ends:

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