I regret to inform you that Pierre Poilieve is back on his MAGA-lite™ bullshit, and he’s going after DEI in order to “bring back merit.” It’s Dollarama Trumpism where they think that they can harness the “good parts only” energy of authoritarian populism without the overt racism—but they’re still going to wink to that racism. And it’s been pretty relentless, whether it’s deciding to target “DEI” or “wokeness,” the recent decision to go hard after immigration—sorry, “Liberal immigration policy” *wink*— or birthright citizenship. I’m not sure who they think they’re fooling, other than maybe that segment of the party’s base that Poilievre wants to keep on-side ahead of his leadership review.

https://bsky.app/profile/emmettmacfarlane.com/post/3m3bgx3sgek2d

The thing with insisting you want to focus on “merit” is that we have empirical proof that “merit” is only ever applied to straight white men who don’t have to fairly compete with women or minorities. They can’t get a fair shake because of ingrained prejudices, but if they get their positions entirely based on merit, they are dismissed as “DEI hires.” (It’s even more hilarious when women in the Conservative caucus insist that they got their positions due to merit, but any women in the Liberal Cabinet are just “DEI hires.”) All of this is entirely well-founded, but they have decided that they’d rather wink to racists and claim that they’re doing it to avoid “bloated bureaucracies” and “checkboxes” when it really just boils down to racism/misogyny/homophobia, every single time, but they insist on lying to themselves about it.

Hits harder than any legacy media outlet.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-10-15T14:37:40.489Z

Meanwhile, Poilievre is ramping up his “get out of the way” bullshit, and has his caucus not only repeat it to absurd lengths, but also try to force it into situations that don’t make any sense. For example, one Conservative MP was on Power & Politics and trying to insist that if government “got out of the way” that we would have spent the past decade building critical mineral mines and pipelines to tidewater and that would have given us leverage over Trump. And while David Cochrane pushed back on this, none of it makes any sense because you would think that American dependence on our oil/aluminium/steel/softwood lumber/electricity would already give us leverage, but that doesn’t actually matter with Trump. Nobody was in a rush to build pipelines to tidewater because the Americans were a captive market. We weren’t in a rush to build critical mineral mines because the market was being well-supplied by China, and nobody builds mines overnight. And frankly, putting aside the fact that these projects were in fact advancing, this notion that governments should just abandon all environmental regulation, property rights, or Indigenous rights and title for the sake of letting industry loose, so that they could line their own pockets while forcing the environmental and social devastation in their wake onto governments to take care of—at a time when CO2emissions are spiking because of wildfires—is frankly just incompetence and lunacy.

I mean, who cares about things like the environment, or property rights, or the rights of Indigenous people whose land these projects are on? We should just let it all burn and watch the dollars flow in (to the pockets of a few select rich people).

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-10-16T02:31:38.710Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian attacks hit power infrastructure in seven regions across Ukraine. Russian drones are getting more precise, and are increasingly targeting Ukraine’s rail infrastructure.

Good reads:

• François-Philippe Champagne says the global economy shows resilience from the trade war…but that trade war is still dragging it down.
• In case you were wondering, Dominic LeBlanc and Michael Sabia are back in Washington for more negotiations (not that there is a deal to be had).
• Mélanie Joly says that a relief package for the softwood lumber sector is on the way.
• Joly is also threatening Stellantis with legal action if they don’t fulfil their obligations regarding incentives after they decided to shift some production to the US.
• Government documents show that there was a high uptake initially for flights out of Lebanon as conflict escalated there, but that interest dropped off quickly.
• CSIS totally swears that they are committed to ongoing reviews and improvements of their intrusive new technologies. You can totally believe them! Really!
• CBSA’s online customs collection system continues to be plagued by outages and other problems that lead to delays.
• There are questions about what became of the promise to send our old armoured vehicles to Ukraine.
• Cabinet documents from the lead-up to the 1995 Quebec Referendum are being made public, and they show Chrétien advising his ministers to keep their cool.
• Garnett Genuis proposed a plan to deal with youth unemployment that starts with curtailing immigration, because of course it does.
• The Progressive Conservatives won a majority in Newfoundland and Labrador.
• In need of a fresh distraction before the first report on the Alberta Health Services scandal is released, Danielle Smith wants to change the province’s licence plates.
• Michael Kovrig warns that the Chinese ambassador’s assurances around tariffs and trade are not to be trusted.
• Philippe Lagassé wonders about the number of ministers who have all taken a stake in the defence portfolio, and what that means for accountability.
• Andrew Coyne calls out Conservative fear-mongering over so-called “birth tourism” as they whip up hysteria to end birthright citizenship.
• Susan Delacourt finds it strange that Poilievre keeps insisting on standing up to Trump, while simultaneously aping all of his policies.

Odds and ends:

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