Hi, I'm here to not offer political direction

It's so hard to be subtle sometimes

“So how, in the most general terms, are things going?”

My favourite part of the week was when the Deputy Prime Minister said politicians have no role in operational decisions about law enforcement, the day after the Prime Minister showed up in the office of Toronto’s police chief.

This is how two stories converge unexpectedly. One was the longstanding reluctance of the Toronto Police Service to clear overpasses of protesters. I guessed in some detail about the logic of this decision last week.

The second was the latest case in which a politician came into near-contact with Rebel News “Mission Specialist” David “The Menzoid” Menzies. He was “brutally arrested” on Monday for scrumming Chrystia Freeland. This follows his arrest in 2019 for asking questions to Andrew Scheer and his arrest in 2021 for asking questions to Melissa Lantsman, who left an event because she “felt unsafe.” Menzies’ employer called his arrest “the worst thing that ever happened” to Rebel News, and good luck guessing which time he said that. The worst thing happens to Menzies every couple of years like clockwork. He’s like Kenny from South Park.

One presumes Lantsman had a moment’s quiet sympathy for one of the protagonists in this week’s drama. I honestly wish I could guess which one. Of course many people spent the week pointing out the continuity of Menzies’ misadventures across time and space. None of them are current members of the Conservative Party of Canada’s parliamentary caucus.

I have never been arrested, although during the Oka crisis at the dawn of my career I was stopped in a Montreal Gazette company car a couple of times for leisurely police searches because our cartoonist Terry Mosher took great pleasure in making fun of the Sûreté du Québec. Menzies gets arrested more often these days because Menzies is a careful student of outrage and its uses. One thing he’s learned is that police are often too eager to ensure the comfort, not just the safety, of the politicians they protect. The RCMP officer who body-checked an oblivious Menzies was overstepping. But I’m here to tell you Chrystia Freeland, like Stephen Harper before her and the Poilievre family today, routinely receives credible threats from fools and worse, and with Menzies sorted her police escort was free to scan the streetscape for real threats. He was back on the fundraising beat within hours. The whole thing seems to me a bit of a moral soup. If you prefer your news analysis to be less equivocal, I’ve already linked three times to a place where you can get that.

While I think of it….

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Anyway, reporters — sorry, the bought-and-paid for corporate media — caught up with Freeland on Thursday in Toronto and asked her about Menzies’ arrest. His brief arrest. His latest brief arrest. “Operational decisions about law enforcement are taken by the police of jurisdiction,” she said. “Quite appropriately, political elected officials have no role in the taking of those decisions and that's why I don't have any further comment.”

This was an excellent answer, and also hard to square with Justin Trudeau’s visit to Toronto police chief Myron Demkiw’s office a day earlier, where they discussed “what more we can do to keep Jewish Canadians safe.” I’m sure a Canadian prime minister has visited a Toronto police chief, in the police chief’s office, before in the history of Confederation, but a quick search could turn up no such case. The prime minister rarely pops by people’s offices. I’ve had an office in downtown Ottawa for two years and I haven’t seen him there yet. And in this case his timing was uncanny: the day after Trudeau’s visit, Chief Demkiw reversed a month-long practice of treating the Avenue Road protests with kid gloves.

So now it was Trudeau’s turn to field questions from reporters about the link between government wishes and police behaviour. His answer was a bit of a word salad, but he insisted that “the federal government doesn’t have any direct line of command” over police forces.

I’m willing to believe both are true. I’m willing to believe Trudeau didn’t say, “Demkiw, start making arrests!” I’m also willing to believe Demkiw is able to take a hint when it is shaped like the Prime Minister of Canada and it lands across from his desk. Which helps explain why Demkiw’s thinking on the general question of the appropriate balance between freedom and order was so obviously different on Thursday than on Tuesday.

Honestly the whole thing makes me nostalgic, because the spectacle of a person from the PMO dropping by the office of a person in the criminal-justice system just to… you know… chat about stuff is something I hadn’t seen since the person was Canada’s attorney general. At least these days the PM seems willing to go take the meeting himself instead of sending a staffer.

I don’t really know why everyone is so circumspect about these things. “I told him he can make his own decisions but from where I’m standing, the law could use some enforcing” is something even a prime minister should be able to say.

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Back to the Rebel News thing. Conservatives have long had a hard time figuring out their stance in regard to Ezra Levant’s operation. Scheer stopped giving interviews to The Rebel soon after he became Conservative leader. Erin O’Toole took a brief break from that policy before returning to it. To complicate matters, Rachel Notley’s Alberta NDP government banned The Rebel from its news conferences before un-banning it. Poilievre is less equivocal, for obvious reasons: people who donate to Rebel News have a demonstrated history of using their credit cards to back their beliefs, and they know which federal party they don’t like. Their energy could come in handy. As a bonus, in a media landscape that’s even more fragmented today than it was a year or two ago, people who don’t follow The Rebel are far less aware of it than they might have been when Scheer was the leader. So it’s easier to narrowcast without mainstream voters noticing.

Still, I suspect these questions are easier for the party to handle when the Menzoid is scrumming Freeland than Scheer. Certainly the party under Poilievre seems to have gone full Rebel in the wake of last week’s incident. The party circulated a statement from Sarnia MP Marilyn Gladu, the party’s “shadow minister for civil liberties,” who wants to recall the Canadian Heritage Committee immediately “to demand transparency and accountability.” Great: will the committee call Scheer, Lantsman and Freeland to testify, or only one?

I’m struck by this sentence in Gladu’s statement: “Trudeau’s policies have divided the media into two groups: those he’s bought off with bailouts and those he censors and has arrested.” Gladu subscribes to this newsletter, so perhaps she won’t mind my asking: to which group would she assign me?