Roundup: Vandenbeld’s side—and a warning

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Liberal MP Anita Vandenbeld penned an op-ed over on National Newswatch to explain her side of what happened at the Status of Women committee last week, which has led to her and her staff being targeted and harassed off-line (because this is one of the tactics that Conservatives also employ and pretend they don’t, even though they know full well that they send their flying monkeys at the people they single out over social media). It’s an illuminating read that has a lot more of the backstory about how this committee was operating under its previous chair, some of the procedural elements of what happened that got lost in the noise around the witnesses walking out (never mind that they were set up from the start), and some of the rationale behind why this is happening. Don’t get me wrong—I think she still made a mistake in trying to make the public pivot to the abortion study motion, but the rest of the piece is a good insight into the problems at hand.

“Following Trumps playbook, since becoming Conservative Party Leader, Pierre Poilievre has put out a narrative that Parliament is broken, and the institutions are rigged. The Status of Women committee was living proof that this narrative was not true. And so Poilievre had to destroy it.”

This is one of the most important points as to why things are happening the way they are, beyond the clip-harvesting exercises. It’s one of the primary reasons why the Conservatives have been going hard after Speaker Fergus, why they are abusing privilege in demanding reams of unredacted documents and demanding that the Law Clerk do necessary redactions and not trained civil servants, why they try to tie arm’s-length agencies to the government or prime minister personally. It’s all out of the same authoritarian populism playbook.

But while she pointed out, I feel the need to call out Power & Politics’ abysmal coverage of this issue yesterday, with the guest host (reading from a script on a teleprompter) saying that Vandenbeld’s “behaviour” led to her being harassed, and in the discussion with the Power Panel that followed, was dismissive of the “minutiae of parliamentary procedure” when that was one of the key cruxes of what happened. Procedure was quite deliberately abused, and it led to this confrontation. And the panellists themselves being dismissive of the overall problem, and giving the tired lines of “only five people in the country care about this,” or “I’m shocked that there’s politics in politics!” as though what has been happening is normal. It’s not. Institutions are being deliberately undermined and that is a very serious problem, and it would be great if the gods damned pundit class in this country could actually arse itself to care about that fact rather than just fixating on the horse race numbers for once.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine says that it downed two Russian missiles and four drones overnight, but that shelling killed four people in the Donetsk region, and that homes in the Kyiv region were damaged by a drone attack the night before. There are unconfirmed reports of a Ukrainian force in the Kursk region of Russia, but Ukraine won’t confirm or deny.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau was in St. John’s for Regatta Day (local political reaction here).
  • Dominic LeBlanc says an internal investigation is being conducted on how an alleged terror suspect was able to enter the country and gain citizenship.
  • Bill Blair announced new military housing projects for CFB Esquimalt, and that Boeing will spend $61 million in the province as part of the deal on the Poseidons.
  • Mark Holland praised the large jump in the number of dentists who are accepting the new federal dental care insurance programme.
  • Arif Virani says that after an external review the incoming head of the Canadian Human Rights Commission is going on leave, and that he’ll have more to say soon.
  • Canadian Forces assets are being pre-positioned near Lebanon in the event that an evacuation of Canadian citizens is necessary.
  • The children and guardians of Canadian diplomats in Israel are being sent back to Canada amidst fears of escalating conflict in the region.
  • The Commissioner of Elections is being asked to look into the bot farm supporting Poilievre (that the party denies any involvement with).
  • A civil servant seconded to CBSA says she didn’t have the authority to make decisions regarding ArriveCan, and says she fears retribution for speaking out.
  • The federal government is funding a study on the health of Indigenous communities downstream from oilsands projects.
  • Kevin Carmichael considers whether the “vibe-cession” has given way to a “me-cession,” where it’s immigration that has kept us out of a recession.
  • Mike Moffatt points to things that provinces (especially Ontario) need to start doing if we want housing starts to catch up to that population growth.
  • David Moscrop pokes into the NDP’s slide into irrelevance under Jagmeet Singh’s leadership (but misses a few key areas from 2011-2015 that got them to here).

Odds and ends:

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3 thoughts on “Roundup: Vandenbeld’s side—and a warning”

  1. Dale, while I wish she hadn’t done it, I’m not sure what other choice she had to bring the issue to the forefront. The indigenous MP on the committee was positively indignant about what happened and held up committee as a result. She could have also been attacked. I am not surprised at power and politics, who play politics rather than responsible journalism.

  2. “(because this is one of the tactics that Conservatives also employ and pretend they don’t, even though they know full well that they send their flying monkeys at the people they single out over social media)”

  3. Okay, I take your point about security not being the issue with Trudeau’s events, or I take your word for it, which might not be the same thing. But I was stirred much more by Anita Vandenbeld’s piece, than Paul Wells’, which was at least as long and probably would have liked to evoke similar intensity. Thank you for your reading recommendations.

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