Roundup: A possible reluctant partial briefing

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Because we’re stuck on this story, the Globe and Mail has heard that Pierre Poilievre has now said that he will accept a briefing if CSIS has any particular concerns about his caucus or party—but that’s it! Nothing more, because he keeps falsely insisting that his hands would be tied, when they actually wouldn’t be. Nevertheless, there is more to intelligence than just CSIS, and the NSICOP report is drawn from various sources, who sometimes disagreed with one another, and that matters in this kind of thing too, so it is baffling why Poilievre keeps insisting on tying his own hands.

Meanwhile, Jagmeet Singh was on Power & Politics to discuss his reading of the classified version of the report, and it was just more evasion and going around in circles rather than answering anything, and some of this was the continued attempt to take shots at the Liberals and Conservatives without actually spelling out what he thought should have done differently. He did say that the Liberals should keep Han Dong out of caucus, but that was as much as he would say, but kept insisting that the government has done nothing, but couldn’t say what they should do, or even acknowledged that there wasn’t really actionable intelligence that they could have acted upon, so again, what has really been the point? Incidentally, Elizabeth May does say that she is just as concerned about what is in the report as Singh, but her relief was that there were not current MPs implicated, which Singh won’t even say.

The only smart thing that Singh has said to date is that he isn’t going to pull the plug on the government over this because it would make no sense to go to an election if there are still questions about how it might be interfered with. To that end, they are in the process of passing the Elections Act updates, and the foreign interference bill, which should hopefully provide new tools to combat any attempted interference. Once those are passed and implemented it’ll probably get us closer to the fixed election date, so that may be the one thing that keeps the Supply and Confidence Agreement going until then.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Ukraine shot down seven of eleven Russian drones targeting critical infrastructure on Friday. Ukraine has been adopting an “elastic” defensive posture while they wait for the arrival of more western weapons to shrink the munitions gap between Russia and them. Vladimir Putin said he would call a ceasefire if Ukraine turned over the four regions his forces partly occupy plus forswear any NATO membership in the future, which Ukraine flatly rejected. The International Criminal Court is investigating Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure as potential war crimes.

Good reads:

  • At the G7 meeting, Justin Trudeau signed onto a statement about combatting foreign interference, and was seen shaking hands with Narendra Modi.
  • Trudeau also announced that the G7 summit next year will be held at Kananaskis, Alberta, just as it was in 2002.
  • At a NATO meeting in Brussels, Bill Blair says that more help is coming for Ukraine and Latvia.
  • Indigenous Services is facing a nursing shortage, while they work on building capacity for First Nations to hire nurses from their own communities.
  • The Canadian Forces updated their dress code rules to mandate trimmer beards and long hair being tied back after a certain length. (Can they also ban mullets?)
  • The Competition Bureau is investigating Amazon around whether it is turning a blind eye to fake reviews that amount to deceptive marketing.
  • There are 84 names on the ballot for the Toronto—St. Paul’s by-election because some moronic electoral reform group thought this would be an effective protest.
  • The NDP are “considering their options” about whether to support or oppose the privacy nightmare age verification bill (which the government rightfully opposes).
  • A Nova Scotia judge rejected an argument that local First Nations have a treaty right to sell cannabis in their own dispensaries.
  • My Xtra column looks at instances of conservative politicians in Canada employing LGBTQ+ scapegoating and other pages from the authoritarian playbook.

Odds and ends:

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One thought on “Roundup: A possible reluctant partial briefing”

  1. The only “foreign interference” going on here is being carried out by CSIS and the “five eyes” intelligence agencies who are throwing a monkey wrench into domestic politics in their efforts to ramp up a Cold War with China.

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