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Roundup: No resignation from Rota, chaos ensues

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The fallout from Friday’s incident in the House of Commons where Speaker Anthony Rota recognised a Ukrainian veteran who had served with a Nazi-affiliated unit was a complete and utter gong show yesterday, as Rota did not offer his resignation as he should have, and the day simply spiralled out of control. Both the NDP and the Bloc have called for Rota to resign, and the Liberals have been doing this weird hinting that he needs to “really think about” whether he can maintain confidence, without just coming right out and saying he can’t, while only the Conservatives have been de facto rushing to his defence by trying to blame Justin Trudeau and the PMO for what happened, in a stunning display of bad faith and mendacity, while also apparently trying to shield an incompetent Speaker whom they want on the job because he’s so lenient with them. The prime minister did make a brief statement about how this was an “embarrassment,” but didn’t call on Rota to resign either.

Much of the bad faith arguing was a deliberate conflation from every single Conservative between security screening and political vetting. The 98-year-old veteran was not a security threat. All security screening was followed. What he was not subject to was political vetting, as the Speaker is not subject to the PMO, and his office submitted their guest list to the Parliamentary Protocol Office who doesn’t share the list with PMO, and which doesn’t to background checks or vetting for political embarrassment, because that’s frankly not their job. The fact that there is a reporting relationship between the Parliamentary Protective Service and the Minister of Public Safety also has nothing to do with political vetting, as it’s not their job, and they don’t (and couldn’t) do background checks on everyone who visits the Hill, because that would be insane. Nor should PMO be doing this, as has been the assertion from a great many people who should know better, which is again utterly ludicrous.

Compounding the mystifying behaviour yesterday was Government House Leader Karina Gould trying to move a motion to strike the mention of said individual from the record, but also to have the audio-visuals scrubbed as well, which is weirdly Stalinist behaviour. While I get the impulse to try and remove the taint of his visit from the record, and that Parliament has done this in committee when Conservative MP read the manifesto of a mass shooter into the record, this was nevertheless fairly gross and disturbing, and the Conservatives objected (which also turned into an absolute gong show as this went down, and Rota was, yet again, out of his depth in the Chair).

So while we await Rota’s resignation, which cannot happen soon enough, we’re seeing Russian propagandists having a field day with this. But should Rota finally do the right thing and resign, the session will need to suspend, possibly for a day or two, so that the election of a new Speaker can take place. The likely two candidates are Conservative Chris D’Entremont and Liberal Alexandra Mendès, currently the deputy and assistant deputy Speakers, and we’ll see how this ends up. But Rota has to resign, immediately.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russia’s early-morning attack on Odessa Monday has killed four people and caused significant damage to infrastructure at their grain storage facilities. There were early morning attacks today against the grain port at Izmail. Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials say that their attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters in occupied Crimea last week killed 34 officers including the fleet commander.

https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1706193779940581503

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