The Commons industry committee has voted unanimously to open hearings by month’s end on Rogers Communications’ $26 billion purchase of its Calgary-based rival Shaw Communications Inc. A final report would go to the House by July before regulatory reviews are complete: “Are we going to bring a few witnesses in to wag our fingers at them? Fine, I enjoy that.”
The Supreme Court will rule Thursday at 9:45 am Eastern whether the federal carbon tax is lawful. Seven of fifteen lower court judges said the law granted cabinet powers so sweeping it was unconstitutional: “What’s your Plan B if the Supreme Court rules against the government?”
Climate change is here
and
Canada rolls up its sleeves.
Lawyers present their case.
Judges listen.
From the thawing permafrost
in the Northwest Territories
to the diminishing herds
of the Eastern Migratory Caribou,
the fate of our planet
rests in the question:
Is managing carbon
a federal jurisdiction
or a provincial one?
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)
Stéphane Dion was so disorganized he literally could not run his own household. An Ottawa grocer suspended deliveries to Stornoway, official residence of the Leader of the Opposition, after Dion forgot to pay his account. Professor Brooke Jeffrey of Concordia University writes a certain unnamed hotel chain refused to take Liberal Party bookings for non-payment.
Jeffrey’s Road To Redemption documents the Liberals’ fall and rise from 2006 when the Party stumbled to third-party status in the Commons. It dramatized “a steady decline in voter support across the country over several decades,” writes Jeffrey.
Road To Redemption is not a dispassionate account. Professor Jeffrey is a longtime Liberal insider, former director of the caucus research bureau, and feeds the mythology of Liberal insiders as a kind of master race of wily political operatives. Federal Liberals are “often described as the most successful political party in the Western world,” claims Road To Redemption.
Incorrect. Mexico’s PRI party ruled for 71 consecutive years. Japan’s Liberal Democrats elected sixteen prime ministers in a row from 1948 to 1993. Ireland’s Fianna Fáil monopolized politics of the republic for three-quarters of a century. The U.S. Democratic Party’s Cook County Machine has run Chicagoland since 1932, marking 89 years of corruption and malfeasance.
Yet Professor Jeffrey knows where all the bodies are buried, and is an enthusiastic gravedigger. Take the hapless Dion, an incompetent manager who could barely string together a sentence in English. At one point the Party hired a speech coach who complained Dion had “a problem with intonation and pitch” with “his sentences often rising at the end conveying the impression of uncertainty.”
“Stéphane Dion was not a party man,” writes Jeffrey. He lacked “emotion intelligence” in either official language: “Dion had few personal relationships or meaningful interactions with individual caucus members. One critic pointed out there was never a line-up to see the leader outside of his Centre Block office in 409-S. ‘This was unheard of. Usually there would be a long line of supplicants waiting to get a leader’s ear.’”
Then there was Michael Ignatieff, “the next Messiah.” In the 2011 campaign Ignatieff boasted to advisors he was “a champion debater at university and had spent his life as a TV journalist,” then went to pieces in a televised debate when New Democrat Jack Layton took a shot: “If you want the job you have to show up for the work.”
“As Liberal MP Mark Holland later recalled, when he was canvassing door to door during the election more than one constituent told him, ‘If he can’t stand up for himself, how can he stand up for me?’” writes Jeffrey.
Road To Redemption is uneven in documenting more recent events. The author claims Canadians have a “love affair” and “ongoing fascination with Trudeau” – actually the Party was reduced to 33 percent of the popular vote – and dispenses with the SNC-Lavalin scandal without serious examination of raw corporate influence in the Prime Minister’s Office.
Analyzing the 2019 campaign, Professor Jeffrey dismisses the jarring blackface incident in two cursory paragraphs on page 262, yet claims: “In August 2019 the Liberals received an invaluable pre-election boost when two dozen academics released a book titled Assessing Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Government” (!)
For all its partisanship and revisionism Road To Redemption is a rollicking account of a crowded era.
By Holly Doan
Road to Redemption: The Liberal Party of Canada 2006-2019, by Brooke Jeffrey; University of Toronto Press; 336 pages; ISBN 9781-4875-00566; $25.97
A Victoria newsroom whose editor campaigned against the Conservative Party has been designated a “qualified journalism organization” by the Canada Revenue Agency. The Narwhal News Society has also received more than $354,000 in taxpayer grants: “No, honestly, those federal programs do not affect our coverage.”
Ongoing deficits ensure future tax increases are certain, the Commons finance committee was told yesterday. The finance department projects deficits will total two-thirds of a trillion by 2025: “Those numbers are astonishing.”
Payment of billions in federal pandemic relief saw an increase in “government-related scams,” says a Canada Revenue Agency report. The Agency counted millions “lost to Covid-19 fraud” but did not elaborate: “Where we are focused is organized crime.”
Then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1981 drafted a bill to legalize marijuana but dropped it over cabinet squabbling, according to declassified records. The initiative came 37 years before Parliament repealed a criminal ban on recreational cannabis: “The government should not be seen to be liberalizing laws on cannabis.”
The labour department yesterday said it will consider first-ever Canada Labour Code amendments to cover electronic overtime by employees who take Zoom calls, texts and company emails after hours. A public consultation is open until April 30: “Risks include anxiety, depression and burnout.”
A majority of Canadians, nearly sixty percent, oppose federal regulation of internet speech, says in-house government research. The Privy Council study contradicted claims by Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault that “a very high proportion of Canadians” want regulation: “This is an issue of concern for more and more Canadians.”
The Department of Foreign Affairs yesterday said it knew of at least 119 Canadians detained in Chinese prisons and hospitals. The actual figure may be much higher, staff noted: “This figure represents the number of Canadians detained in a prison, in a detention centre or in a medical facility.”
MPs should veto a 56 percent increase in the federal debt ceiling unless cabinet first writes a budget, the Commons finance committee was told yesterday. No date has been set for a budget, the first in two years: “That is a recipe for trouble.”
Then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1984 said he privately sympathized with Cold War protesters and “was concerned about losing public opinion” over cruise missile testing, according to declassified records. Cabinet Minutes disclosed senior Liberals were sharply divided over “Reaganite militarism.”
Climate change amendments to the National Building Code will be introduced by year’s end, the National Research Council said yesterday. The Council has promised the nation’s 14 million homeowners will not be forced to renovate existing properties: “It is not mandated that everyone refit their homes.”
Barely two percent of Canadians infected with Covid reported the fact using a costly federal tracing app, says the Public Health Agency. Only a fifth of mobile subscribers downloaded the app in the first place despite repeated appeals by the Prime Minister: “This is an approach we are confident is going to make a big difference.”
