Roundup: Elizabeth May to the rescue (again)

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The House of Commons has once again embarrassed itself in voting to send the NSICOP report to Justice Hogue for her to review, and its documents, to see if she can do or say something about the potentially “disloyal” parliamentarians therein. She can’t, and won’t, because this is a political problem and MPs have just voted to kick this down the road until October because certain of the leaders can’t arse themselves to be adults and take their responsibilities seriously, preferring instead to remain ignorant so that they can shout increasingly lurid and baseless accusations from the rooftops, because that gets them clicks and engagement on social media, and that is the cart that is driving politics in these debased times. Hopefully Justice Hogue will get this request and tell MPs to go drop on their heads because she has enough work to do and not enough time to do it in, thank you very much, and this is their political problem to solve, not hers. But we’ll see.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth May was the adult in the room, who took the opportunity to avail herself of the security clearance she acquired over the course of these months of foreign interference handwringing, and did read the full, classified report, and then took to a microphone in the press theatre in the West Block to discuss what she could about the report, and then went on Power & Politics later and refined those remarks even further. And what did she find? No list of treasonous or disloyal MPs, a handful of cases of MPs who are no longer serving who may have been compromised in some manner, and the one incident of a former MP who should be investigated and charged. And even more to the point, she just proved that reading the report wouldn’t tie Pierre Poilievre’s hands, that he could still talk about the conclusions of the report without any specifics, and that Michael Chong has indeed spouting bullshit when he claimed that he knew more than a former CSIS director about this.

Hopefully this means that the hot air has been drained from this, particularly since Jagmeet Singh will read the classified version today, and Yves-François Blanchet seems to have finally been convinced to get the proper clearance so that he too can read it for himself. That leaves Poilievre as the odd man out, insisting on remaining ignorant, but hopefully with the other leaders offering similar reassurances as May, this could deflate the issue and turn to the real issues about how to better combat this sort of interference, letting parties put in necessary internal reforms to prevent nomination races from being coopted, and so on. That relies on them being grown-ups, and if one party decides to remain off-side and not among the adults in the room, that will be pretty telling. There should also be questions asked of the members of NSICOP for not providing reassurance from the start, and for letting this issue blow up unnecessarily, because that should have an impact on their credibility, or would if the Elder Pundits of this country hadn’t decided on a particular narrative that they are going to relentlessly pursue, regardless of what has transpired.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Kharkiv’s mayor says that the ability to strike missile launch sites across the border in Russia has helped calm the number of attacks his city has been facing. At the recovery conference in Berlin, Ukraine has been attracting pledges to help modernise its air defences to help prevent the need for even further rebuilding.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1800249418949841359

Good reads:

  • Chrystia Freeland is signalling to oil and gas companies that the tax credit for carbon capture projects is nearly in place, so she expects quick progress from them.
  • The government’s Ways and Means motion on the capital gains changes passed after the Conservatives decided to make up a bunch of nonsense to oppose it.
  • Mélanie Joly points to the value of “strategic ambiguity” in order to not tell Putin where NATO’s red lines are going to be with Ukraine.
  • Marc Miller says that BC needs to take on more asylum seekers if they want more money for them, like Quebec got this week.
  • Arif Virani says it will take time to get the new Digital Safety Commissioner up and running once the Online Harms bill passes.
  • The government is proposing changes to regulations under the Cannabis Act, but retailers are largely grousing about the excise tax.
  • CSIS director David Vigneault says the Service took it for granted that the House of Commons would alert MPs being targeted in a 2021 cyber-attack, but it didn’t.
  • The RCMP claim they don’t have enough legislative tools to combat hate speech after prosecutors declined to lay charges in several cases.
  • A tentative agreement has been reached with the CBSA union, averting a strike and job action for those who couldn’t strike.
  • A lack of military personnel means an increasing reliance on contractors to do jobs that uniformed personnel used to do.
  • The Federal Court ruled that the federal government took too long to recommend emergency protection orders for BC’s spotted owls, calling out the delay.
  • Quebec is estimating that three times as many houses than at present could be in flood zones once the updated flood maps are released.
  • Aaron Wherry posts some thoughts on the state of political journalism in Canada, but misses the points about both-sidesing and a refusal to deal with jurisdiction.
  • Susan Delacourt gives her take on Elizabeth May being the grown-up in the room in availing herself of the classified NSICOP report.
  • My column takes a deeper dive into the “acoustic incident” that happened in QP on Monday, and why it’s a sign that MPs’ disregard for interpreters has consequences.

Odds and ends:

For National Magazine, I hear from those concerned about the immigration detention provisions in the budget bill and the use of federal penitentiaries for it.

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