Roundup: From one rebel to another

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With all of the tongue-wagging in Parliament over Joël Lightbound going rogue in his dissent on vaccine mandates, there have been a lot of questions about his place in caucus, and what the other caucus “rebels” think of the situation. So, the most famous of said rebels, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, tweeted a thoughtful thread on the subject.

Meanwhile, a third Liberal was thought to be joining Lightbound and Yves Robillard in their dissent, but it turns out that no, that they merely misrepresented Anthony Housefather’s position. So there’s that.

Grifter Occupation: Day 15

There was minor progress yesterday, as one intersection outside of the official occupation zone was cleared, and police are apparently handing out more tickets, but the occupation nevertheless grinds on, while some of its denizens tried to escalate matters by circling the airport with their trucks, or jamming 911 lines, and threats of “protesting” outside of schools.

The prime minister bowed to pressure from the opposition leaders and gave them a briefing, after he had a meeting of the Federal Incident Response Group and calls with premiers (many of whom are not doing their jobs). It was noted that the Conservatives changed their tune inside of the House of Commons by saying it was time for the occupiers to go home—but at the very same time, they spent the day debating a Supply Day motion that essentially called on the government to capitulate to their demands by ending all federal vaccine mandates. Because what we really want is to teach an angry mob that all you need to do to force a government’s hand is to start blockading ports of entry and Ottawa’s downtown. Such strategic genius!

After ignoring another meeting at the ministerial level, Doug Ford did announce that they would invoke a section of the Criminal Code to prevent the occupiers at either Ontario site from accessing the crowd-sourced funds they have raised, which I suspect will just push more donors to the organiser’s personal email transfer (because that’s not a red flag for grift), while other organisers are trying to push donations into crypto (again, grift). But there is a lot of active misinformation circulating among the occupied zone (aided by a former Trump official) and the reliance on conspiracy theories and outright delusion is merely emboldening them, which likely means that this is likely to carry on for a while longer still. Oh boy.

https://twitter.com/DavidWCochrane/status/1491799241559216144

Good reads:

  • National Defence underspent by $1.2 billion last year, largely in delayed capital projects like ships.
  • Unsurprisingly, the Correctional Investigator found that Black and Indigenous inmates faced disproportionate uses of force against them in prisons.
  • FINTRAC told the Commons public safety committee that they don’t track crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe.
  • A group of former federal and provincial conservatives have launched a group called Conservatives for Clean Growth. (We’ll see how much uptake they get).
  • New Brunswick is trying to use their provincial emergency powers to head off any attempted convoy protests in that province.
  • Matt Gurney wants to see leadership on the occupations and blockades, and is particularly outraged that Ontario isn’t even bothering to show up to meetings.
  • Robert Hiltz points out the absurdity that the most sustained anger we’re seeing with the grifter occupation is that governments did too much in the pandemic.

Odds and ends:

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2 thoughts on “Roundup: From one rebel to another”

  1. Clearly, Lightbound got under Erskine-Smith’s skin to the point that E-S thought the only effective counter was to misrepresent his colleague’s remarks.

    Lightbound came nowhere close to implying that the Prime Minister was “the greatest threat to freedom in this country.” What he actually said was: “I can’t help but notice, with regret, that both the tone and the policies of my government changed drastically on the eve and during the last election campaign. From a positive and unifying approach, a decision was made to wedge, to divide, and to stigmatize. I fear that this politicization of the pandemic risks undermining the public’s trust in our public health institutions. This is not a risk we ought to be taking lightly.”

    If E-S can provide a truthful counter to Lightbound’s message, he should do so. If he can’t, then he shouldn’t invent words that Lightbound never used in a juvenile effort to discredit the messenger.

    • No, that was a quote from Andrew Scheer. E-S was using it as an example of divisive language being deployed around vaccines.

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