I put the entire weight of blame on this fiasco on the PM and his advisors. Did it never cross their minds that just because Johnston was named GG by SH that this version of the Conservative Party of Canada would not find a way to make this appointment about the inside circle of the Laurentian Elite? Could the PMO not have reached out to the other parties to ensure full house support of the appointee?
Good god quit smelling your own farts PMO. You are not the smartest kids in the lunchroom, lately you are just a bunch of nerds getting daily wedgies from the goths.
This is about the security of the nation, stop the games and do something right for once!
Yeah, I basically agree with your first paragraph here (though as I've said downthread, I don't think "full" house support is going to happen). The PMO's political instincts were badly off on this one. They thought that the Andrew Coynes of the world would see Johnston as Our Kind Of Fellow and that many people would see him as a Conservative. They were wrong.
It's tough because, by definition, anyone a prime minister might appoint to a job is an "elite", and Poilievre is very effective at pitching "elite" = "Liberal". This job is simply not going to a welder from Red Deer; it's going to the kind of person prime ministers give jobs to.
How about this; a 5 eye chair (New Zealand perhaps) with extensive knowledge of intelligence assessment and handling with a 4 person panel that consists of a governance academic, retired Military, a senior Court of Kings Bench judge, and a retired Senior Canadian Intelligence Director. The judge and academic can be cleared to Top Secret fairly quickly and to be honest, Canada way over classifies it’s documentations to the point of farce. The way we classify has more to do with not embarrassing politicians vice keeping our intel secure.
This panel reports to Parliament, not the PM. This and previous governments have done serious damage to Canadians trust in our institutions. It’s time to air the laundry and if a large amount of important people are embarrassed as a result so be it. It’s long past time for a deep dive into our institutions.
This is the most workable way forward. A disinterested “eminent” (barf) person from a Five Eyes partner is most likely to be palatable to the opposition parties and also most likely to do a serious job without caring about whose reputation in Ottawa takes a hit from whatever grubby incompetence is uncovered in the course of an inquiry.
I'm not sure about either the politics or the logistics of bringing in someone from outside Canada to run this process, as several people here have suggested. I simply don't know enough - I'm no expert in this kind of thing.
I do know that there's a significant element ascendant in our politics that's resentful of any institution. Academics, the military, the judiciary, and the intelligence apparatus are all institutions. I believe that if you ran your idea by Pierre Poilievre, he'd decry it as one globalist and four gatekeepers.
That said, I think the PM ought to do what's right regardless of Pierre Poilievre's opinions.
I think there are two serious problems to solve, and perhaps they require two solutions. I dunno.
One is the general malaise of the government and bureaucracy. It is leaking mediocrity from every direction and there is no indication that are adequate measures of accountability built into the system. Things can’t improve if the buck never stops anywhere.
If we look past the CSIS leaks and concentrate on the CSIS briefings to O’Toole and other MPs or testimony from the National Security Advisor, the dysfunction revealed requires someone to intervene who understands intelligence gathering and works or has worked in an intelligence organization where things actually work.
There is no usefulness in picking another Eminent Canadian back slapper who ticks off all the boxes of Laurentian connectivity. Let’s search far and wide and find one or more people who can assess the breakdowns in the system and fix them.
The second issue is the covert and overt attacks on our electoral system. My baseline view is that the electoral process in a democracy belongs to the people. When we send a collective of MPs to Ottawa, we expect them to be the guardians of our democratic process and to ensure that attempts to subvert the integrity of elections are taken seriously in a nonpartisan manner. The Liberal default position on everything is secrecy, stonewalling and dithering. It’s time to cut the razor wire of obfuscation and look at how our intelligence information is being collected and analyzed and what happens to it at the political level.
Secrecy, Stonewalling, and Dithering. Yep, that Canada in a nutshell. I’ve said before, our penchant for keep secrets has nothing to do with National Security, it’s to make sure nobody is held accountable for their lack of common sense.
I’m still hoping that the conservative brain trust sees that they’ve milked the cow dry and will gain more by surprising the Liberals vice just hating every appointee. I’m also hoping the Liberals realize that this issue need Parliament’s approval not the PMO’s.
As for a foreigner chairing a panel?Grown up Canadians can realize the advantages. Partisans? Not so much.
I agree, Sharon. I'm just saying, realistically, that prime ministers tend to give appointments to the kinds of people who run in the same social circles as prime ministers.
Damn that Harper! Its all his fault. Conservatives are making the government look incompetent even though they do everything well, for the right reasons, in the most cost effective way to the benefit of almost all Canadians that matter.
Back in 2019, when Mr. Trudeau had won a minority government and was naming his cabinet, he stressed gender and racial balance. I remember a conversation of a couple of us with a Liberal MP, and someone asked whether competence shouldn't be the main criterion to qualify as a Minister. The MP answered that competence had never been a criterion for being a Minister. In the old days, the main criterion was regional representation. Now, the criterion had been updated.
The main qualification for being a Deputy Minister was competence in the subject matter of his or her ministry. By the 1980s, that had changed. The main criterion had become to be well-connected with Treasury Board, PCO or PMO. By the early 1990s that change had spread down to ADMs and Directors General. Now you have to go to the level of Director (or below) to find subject matter knowledge.
When Rogers' network went down last winter, Rogers' CTO lost his job. Before that, when Bell Mobility seitched to a new billing system that didn't work in 2003 and customers didn't get their bills for six months only to get a whopping big bill in the seventh month, the President of Bell Mobility lost his job, along with the responsible Vice President. Now look at the federal public service. Who lost their job over Phoenix? Who lost their job at PHAC when it turned out that they had dismantled their early warning system for pandemics in 2019? (The President did resign, but popped up as Senior Associate Deputy Minister a few months later.)
Lack of competence is not punished. Rather, it is rewarded.
No doubt people fall up in government (bureaucrats and politicians).
As someone who lived in South Korea for 15 years I distinctly remember one incident involving former President Lee Myung Bak. A police station near Seoul failed at their job of catching a serial killer despite the opportunity to do so. As the public got angry the President showed up at the police station with media in tow and proceeded to berate all the staff including the top officials for their incompetence.
I dislike being dressed down by a superior at work, but a few times I have deserved it. Reprimands and firings are sometimes needed.
As the mushroom cloud of incompetence blasts out of Parliament Hill, it is pretty depressing to read banter about who can produce the most eminent of the eminences to carry on this farce. And worse: if only the opposition parties would stop being obstructionist and prop up the farce to “save democracy”.
Let’s cut the BS.
What is desirable right now isn’t another lapdog eminence from the Toronto-Montreal-Ottawa corridor to cover everyones tracks. It’s time to cast farther afield into the intelligence network and find someone who KNOWS WHAT THEY ARE DOING.
This person may be American or British or Australian. This person doesn’t need a U of T or McGill education to qualify but sure needs some rough around the edges qualities to call BS when they see it and make some comfortable people squirm.
I’m sick and tired of the deviousness of this crap. When MPs are receiving intelligence reports about their personal safety two years too late, it’s time to import some muscle and clean house.
I have followed this debacle since the beginning. I have watched Mr Johnston age in the last few weeks. He is 81 years old and Mr Trudeau abdicated his responsibility regarding the decision regarding an inquiry to Mr Johnston. Mr Johnston’s mistake was thinking that the honourable before a members name meant something. No party has coming out of this looking good and I for one am tired of this prime minister turning everything he does into a s**t show! He left the country and has now tasked Mr Leblanc with trying to get the other parties to cooperate. Shame on all of them! Also as for some of the comments above until the people stop trying to vilify other people’s choices when voting nothing is going to change.
I’m going to throw this out there. I don’t think Poiliviere gives a rat’s ass about foreign interference into Canadian government. It’s just one more manipulated scandal to take attention away from the absolute dire lack of Conservative policies that could help the Canadians. Yet, politicians and the media take him sooo seriously. He is a clown, a fraud, a con man. Treat him as such. This episode has *nothing* to do with Johnston and Liberal conflict of interest. Canadian media is so gullible.
I disagree. It think Poilievre and most of our MPs care deeply about foreign interference. Certainly those whose families are endangered do. And I guess those who were aided by the CCP do too, albeit for different reasons. Certainly, according the the polls the majority of Canadians care. So if for no other reason, parliament should care.
A humble suggestion: Amb David Mulroney. Former Defence and Security at PCO, former Ambassador to China, speaks Mandarin, Entirely skeptical of the CCP, very involved in Manley commission on Afghanistan. Speaks and writes clearly and forcefully.
Great title. Competence not eminence don't hold your breath! Why aren't Canadians appalled by the political power wielded by the large number of non-elected PMO staff who use it as a training ground to get on the even more lucrative political gravy train.
My question from your last post on this remains - is there anyone to whom the prime minister could give a job without engendering a temper tantrum from the Conservatives about how the appointee is a Liberal stooge? If these people can pretend Stephen Harper's governor-general is a Liberal partisan, of whom can't they pretend that?
What on earth does it matter if the Conservatives don't like the person? The Liberals' problem with Johnston -- the tactical problem, at least; to me there were blindingly obvious substantive problems from the outset -- was that *all three* opposition parties opposed his appointment, including the one with whom the Liberals have an agreement. If a new name draws the support of even one opposition party, it won't matter what the others say. It's incredibly tiresome to hear partisans say, "The government can't do anything because the opposition won't like it." Incredibly tiresome. I'm given to understand Liberal oppositions opposed stuff too. Am I to understand that kept Mulroney and Harper from making decisions?
I think where I was getting tripped up was in assuming that by "the opposition", you meant the Official Opposition. Sorry about that. To be clear, I think the prime minister should make sure he's got the majority of the House on board, do his job, and then let the other guys howl if they want to. He needs to do the job, and then voters can decide if he did it well.
"The government can't do anything because the opposition won't like it" is absolutely no excuse for any inaction. I think it's absolutely correct that, with the tenor of modern politics, the government can't do things with the kind of broad-based societal consensus governments used to---but that's never a reason not to do things.
If Leblanc really wants an "eminent" Canadian then he should simply ask Paul Wells to handle this mess.
If Paul Wells is so approached, I do dearly hope that he has the presence of mind to a) say, "Hell, no!" and b) run for the hills and leave no forwarding address that the government can find.
[But please ensure that said hills have an internet connection so you can continue to file your wonderful dispatches.]
Ultimately, while Leblanc has this problem presently, I think that he should simply dump it back in the lap of his boss and should, recuse himself from any further discussions. As should any other cabinet minister that JT assigns to take this on. Yeah, I know, far more likely that the ostriches will indeed fly.
Good luck finding Johnston’s perfect replacement that the political partisans will all endorse…rather, use whatever goodwill they have for Canada and focus on FIXING the communication weaknesses that his report identifies…quit pissing away critical time…our enemies are no doubt amused at our destructive preoccupations. Read Wesley Wark for advice moving forward.
Again Paul, you are spot on, which is a tad discouraging. Our country's leaders should be making the hard decisions, getting the job done for the people!
The Canadian people deserve better than their current leadership, or do we? Maybe we are not very discerning voters. Maybe we are naïve. We elected these folks to represent us, but instead they are representing and protecting themselves. Talking in self-promoting obscurities. Their first goal is obtaining power and then the focus is maintaining that power.
Trudeau who cannot have a week pass without boarding a jet, has passed the foreign interference baton to his friend Dominic Leblanc, who in turn is suggesting that the opposition party members who have been screaming that foreign interference in Canada's election process is a serious matter, should start taking the issue seriously! Do they really think we are so unawares? If we are, then we deserve them.
Our leader of the Conservatives, whom I favour, is too often in debating mode to remember people want to feel he is talking to and for them. He is starting to warm a bit to the news media, but he needs to remember they are his link to the people.
Our leader of the New Democrats wants to keep supporting a government he is constantly criticizing. Does that make sense?
Then there is the leader of the Bloc Quebecois who is very clear, they are in Canada's parliament to represent the French people of Quebec.
Democracies deserve better.
BTW -- Oxford Dictionary definitions:
Eminent - distinguished, notable, outstanding.
Competent - adequately qualified or capable. effective.
Protection of essential secrets is not the only concern about a public inquiry. Canadians of Chinese ancestry might well feel themselves being put on the spot. Then there is the reaction to a political free-for-alll of a major trade partner who buys $100 billion a year largely for coal and canola oil from western Canada. Do any of our politicians really know how to thread these needles.
So do we hand over our government to the highest bidder? (ok I guess we already do to some extent). China doesn't buy canola and coal from us because the like us. Both are commodities and fungible. Losing their custom is less harmful to Western Canada than what the government has done with pipeline cancellations, no tanker laws, carbon taxes et.
Totally irrelevant, but the title caught my eye. I was in Botswana last month and there were in fact ostriches on our runway... it's not just a literary expression in case you were wondering...
Bob Fife’s reporting is dubious. He admits to torquing headlines. His scandalous reportage during the Maher Arar debacle should have cost him his job. He interviews an anonymous CSIS leaker and we’re supposed to *trust* him. Wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. I read the Globe and Mail daily, but Bob Fife, Steven Chase and Andrew Coyne are out.
Oh man, yes, Robert Fife's media colleagues have either forgotten or ignore how badly he got rolled by his anonymous sources on Arar, with real world consequences
I put the entire weight of blame on this fiasco on the PM and his advisors. Did it never cross their minds that just because Johnston was named GG by SH that this version of the Conservative Party of Canada would not find a way to make this appointment about the inside circle of the Laurentian Elite? Could the PMO not have reached out to the other parties to ensure full house support of the appointee?
Good god quit smelling your own farts PMO. You are not the smartest kids in the lunchroom, lately you are just a bunch of nerds getting daily wedgies from the goths.
This is about the security of the nation, stop the games and do something right for once!
Yeah, I basically agree with your first paragraph here (though as I've said downthread, I don't think "full" house support is going to happen). The PMO's political instincts were badly off on this one. They thought that the Andrew Coynes of the world would see Johnston as Our Kind Of Fellow and that many people would see him as a Conservative. They were wrong.
It's tough because, by definition, anyone a prime minister might appoint to a job is an "elite", and Poilievre is very effective at pitching "elite" = "Liberal". This job is simply not going to a welder from Red Deer; it's going to the kind of person prime ministers give jobs to.
How about this; a 5 eye chair (New Zealand perhaps) with extensive knowledge of intelligence assessment and handling with a 4 person panel that consists of a governance academic, retired Military, a senior Court of Kings Bench judge, and a retired Senior Canadian Intelligence Director. The judge and academic can be cleared to Top Secret fairly quickly and to be honest, Canada way over classifies it’s documentations to the point of farce. The way we classify has more to do with not embarrassing politicians vice keeping our intel secure.
This panel reports to Parliament, not the PM. This and previous governments have done serious damage to Canadians trust in our institutions. It’s time to air the laundry and if a large amount of important people are embarrassed as a result so be it. It’s long past time for a deep dive into our institutions.
This is the most workable way forward. A disinterested “eminent” (barf) person from a Five Eyes partner is most likely to be palatable to the opposition parties and also most likely to do a serious job without caring about whose reputation in Ottawa takes a hit from whatever grubby incompetence is uncovered in the course of an inquiry.
I'm not sure about either the politics or the logistics of bringing in someone from outside Canada to run this process, as several people here have suggested. I simply don't know enough - I'm no expert in this kind of thing.
I do know that there's a significant element ascendant in our politics that's resentful of any institution. Academics, the military, the judiciary, and the intelligence apparatus are all institutions. I believe that if you ran your idea by Pierre Poilievre, he'd decry it as one globalist and four gatekeepers.
That said, I think the PM ought to do what's right regardless of Pierre Poilievre's opinions.
This is an interesting thread.
I think there are two serious problems to solve, and perhaps they require two solutions. I dunno.
One is the general malaise of the government and bureaucracy. It is leaking mediocrity from every direction and there is no indication that are adequate measures of accountability built into the system. Things can’t improve if the buck never stops anywhere.
If we look past the CSIS leaks and concentrate on the CSIS briefings to O’Toole and other MPs or testimony from the National Security Advisor, the dysfunction revealed requires someone to intervene who understands intelligence gathering and works or has worked in an intelligence organization where things actually work.
There is no usefulness in picking another Eminent Canadian back slapper who ticks off all the boxes of Laurentian connectivity. Let’s search far and wide and find one or more people who can assess the breakdowns in the system and fix them.
The second issue is the covert and overt attacks on our electoral system. My baseline view is that the electoral process in a democracy belongs to the people. When we send a collective of MPs to Ottawa, we expect them to be the guardians of our democratic process and to ensure that attempts to subvert the integrity of elections are taken seriously in a nonpartisan manner. The Liberal default position on everything is secrecy, stonewalling and dithering. It’s time to cut the razor wire of obfuscation and look at how our intelligence information is being collected and analyzed and what happens to it at the political level.
Secrecy, Stonewalling, and Dithering. Yep, that Canada in a nutshell. I’ve said before, our penchant for keep secrets has nothing to do with National Security, it’s to make sure nobody is held accountable for their lack of common sense.
I’m still hoping that the conservative brain trust sees that they’ve milked the cow dry and will gain more by surprising the Liberals vice just hating every appointee. I’m also hoping the Liberals realize that this issue need Parliament’s approval not the PMO’s.
As for a foreigner chairing a panel?Grown up Canadians can realize the advantages. Partisans? Not so much.
There are many smart and competent people who are blue collar workers. Too bad so many white collars look down on
them.
I agree, Sharon. I'm just saying, realistically, that prime ministers tend to give appointments to the kinds of people who run in the same social circles as prime ministers.
"You can tell the Trudeau government is really badly rattled when it starts doing what it should have done in the first place."
Dope.
Damn that Harper! Its all his fault. Conservatives are making the government look incompetent even though they do everything well, for the right reasons, in the most cost effective way to the benefit of almost all Canadians that matter.
Which Canadians don't matter?
Prairie Canadians (they don't vote LPC), people who don't get Covid vaccines, legal gun owners ...
Back in 2019, when Mr. Trudeau had won a minority government and was naming his cabinet, he stressed gender and racial balance. I remember a conversation of a couple of us with a Liberal MP, and someone asked whether competence shouldn't be the main criterion to qualify as a Minister. The MP answered that competence had never been a criterion for being a Minister. In the old days, the main criterion was regional representation. Now, the criterion had been updated.
The main qualification for being a Deputy Minister was competence in the subject matter of his or her ministry. By the 1980s, that had changed. The main criterion had become to be well-connected with Treasury Board, PCO or PMO. By the early 1990s that change had spread down to ADMs and Directors General. Now you have to go to the level of Director (or below) to find subject matter knowledge.
When Rogers' network went down last winter, Rogers' CTO lost his job. Before that, when Bell Mobility seitched to a new billing system that didn't work in 2003 and customers didn't get their bills for six months only to get a whopping big bill in the seventh month, the President of Bell Mobility lost his job, along with the responsible Vice President. Now look at the federal public service. Who lost their job over Phoenix? Who lost their job at PHAC when it turned out that they had dismantled their early warning system for pandemics in 2019? (The President did resign, but popped up as Senior Associate Deputy Minister a few months later.)
Lack of competence is not punished. Rather, it is rewarded.
No doubt people fall up in government (bureaucrats and politicians).
As someone who lived in South Korea for 15 years I distinctly remember one incident involving former President Lee Myung Bak. A police station near Seoul failed at their job of catching a serial killer despite the opportunity to do so. As the public got angry the President showed up at the police station with media in tow and proceeded to berate all the staff including the top officials for their incompetence.
I dislike being dressed down by a superior at work, but a few times I have deserved it. Reprimands and firings are sometimes needed.
As the mushroom cloud of incompetence blasts out of Parliament Hill, it is pretty depressing to read banter about who can produce the most eminent of the eminences to carry on this farce. And worse: if only the opposition parties would stop being obstructionist and prop up the farce to “save democracy”.
Let’s cut the BS.
What is desirable right now isn’t another lapdog eminence from the Toronto-Montreal-Ottawa corridor to cover everyones tracks. It’s time to cast farther afield into the intelligence network and find someone who KNOWS WHAT THEY ARE DOING.
This person may be American or British or Australian. This person doesn’t need a U of T or McGill education to qualify but sure needs some rough around the edges qualities to call BS when they see it and make some comfortable people squirm.
I’m sick and tired of the deviousness of this crap. When MPs are receiving intelligence reports about their personal safety two years too late, it’s time to import some muscle and clean house.
Amen.
How about Bev Oda? She lost her job ovet a $16 glass of orange juice, I'm sure she could take names and kick ass.
I have followed this debacle since the beginning. I have watched Mr Johnston age in the last few weeks. He is 81 years old and Mr Trudeau abdicated his responsibility regarding the decision regarding an inquiry to Mr Johnston. Mr Johnston’s mistake was thinking that the honourable before a members name meant something. No party has coming out of this looking good and I for one am tired of this prime minister turning everything he does into a s**t show! He left the country and has now tasked Mr Leblanc with trying to get the other parties to cooperate. Shame on all of them! Also as for some of the comments above until the people stop trying to vilify other people’s choices when voting nothing is going to change.
I’m going to throw this out there. I don’t think Poiliviere gives a rat’s ass about foreign interference into Canadian government. It’s just one more manipulated scandal to take attention away from the absolute dire lack of Conservative policies that could help the Canadians. Yet, politicians and the media take him sooo seriously. He is a clown, a fraud, a con man. Treat him as such. This episode has *nothing* to do with Johnston and Liberal conflict of interest. Canadian media is so gullible.
I disagree. It think Poilievre and most of our MPs care deeply about foreign interference. Certainly those whose families are endangered do. And I guess those who were aided by the CCP do too, albeit for different reasons. Certainly, according the the polls the majority of Canadians care. So if for no other reason, parliament should care.
A humble suggestion: Amb David Mulroney. Former Defence and Security at PCO, former Ambassador to China, speaks Mandarin, Entirely skeptical of the CCP, very involved in Manley commission on Afghanistan. Speaks and writes clearly and forcefully.
Great suggestion
Maybe too skeptical of China to be acceptable?
Is there such a thing as too skeptical of China?
Not in my books.
Great title. Competence not eminence don't hold your breath! Why aren't Canadians appalled by the political power wielded by the large number of non-elected PMO staff who use it as a training ground to get on the even more lucrative political gravy train.
My question from your last post on this remains - is there anyone to whom the prime minister could give a job without engendering a temper tantrum from the Conservatives about how the appointee is a Liberal stooge? If these people can pretend Stephen Harper's governor-general is a Liberal partisan, of whom can't they pretend that?
What on earth does it matter if the Conservatives don't like the person? The Liberals' problem with Johnston -- the tactical problem, at least; to me there were blindingly obvious substantive problems from the outset -- was that *all three* opposition parties opposed his appointment, including the one with whom the Liberals have an agreement. If a new name draws the support of even one opposition party, it won't matter what the others say. It's incredibly tiresome to hear partisans say, "The government can't do anything because the opposition won't like it." Incredibly tiresome. I'm given to understand Liberal oppositions opposed stuff too. Am I to understand that kept Mulroney and Harper from making decisions?
I think where I was getting tripped up was in assuming that by "the opposition", you meant the Official Opposition. Sorry about that. To be clear, I think the prime minister should make sure he's got the majority of the House on board, do his job, and then let the other guys howl if they want to. He needs to do the job, and then voters can decide if he did it well.
"The government can't do anything because the opposition won't like it" is absolutely no excuse for any inaction. I think it's absolutely correct that, with the tenor of modern politics, the government can't do things with the kind of broad-based societal consensus governments used to---but that's never a reason not to do things.
He has the majority of the house on board for a public inquiry. Has had for months. What did he do instead?
Stunningly astute, Sir.
If Leblanc really wants an "eminent" Canadian then he should simply ask Paul Wells to handle this mess.
If Paul Wells is so approached, I do dearly hope that he has the presence of mind to a) say, "Hell, no!" and b) run for the hills and leave no forwarding address that the government can find.
[But please ensure that said hills have an internet connection so you can continue to file your wonderful dispatches.]
Ultimately, while Leblanc has this problem presently, I think that he should simply dump it back in the lap of his boss and should, recuse himself from any further discussions. As should any other cabinet minister that JT assigns to take this on. Yeah, I know, far more likely that the ostriches will indeed fly.
Good luck finding Johnston’s perfect replacement that the political partisans will all endorse…rather, use whatever goodwill they have for Canada and focus on FIXING the communication weaknesses that his report identifies…quit pissing away critical time…our enemies are no doubt amused at our destructive preoccupations. Read Wesley Wark for advice moving forward.
As a measure of self preservation, Dominic LeBlanc needs to watch out.
Justin Trudeau off loaded his decision making responsibilities to David Johnstone but didn’t provide the bullet proof vest. Careful out there...
Again Paul, you are spot on, which is a tad discouraging. Our country's leaders should be making the hard decisions, getting the job done for the people!
The Canadian people deserve better than their current leadership, or do we? Maybe we are not very discerning voters. Maybe we are naïve. We elected these folks to represent us, but instead they are representing and protecting themselves. Talking in self-promoting obscurities. Their first goal is obtaining power and then the focus is maintaining that power.
Trudeau who cannot have a week pass without boarding a jet, has passed the foreign interference baton to his friend Dominic Leblanc, who in turn is suggesting that the opposition party members who have been screaming that foreign interference in Canada's election process is a serious matter, should start taking the issue seriously! Do they really think we are so unawares? If we are, then we deserve them.
Our leader of the Conservatives, whom I favour, is too often in debating mode to remember people want to feel he is talking to and for them. He is starting to warm a bit to the news media, but he needs to remember they are his link to the people.
Our leader of the New Democrats wants to keep supporting a government he is constantly criticizing. Does that make sense?
Then there is the leader of the Bloc Quebecois who is very clear, they are in Canada's parliament to represent the French people of Quebec.
Democracies deserve better.
BTW -- Oxford Dictionary definitions:
Eminent - distinguished, notable, outstanding.
Competent - adequately qualified or capable. effective.
You are right, competent over eminent.
Protection of essential secrets is not the only concern about a public inquiry. Canadians of Chinese ancestry might well feel themselves being put on the spot. Then there is the reaction to a political free-for-alll of a major trade partner who buys $100 billion a year largely for coal and canola oil from western Canada. Do any of our politicians really know how to thread these needles.
So do we hand over our government to the highest bidder? (ok I guess we already do to some extent). China doesn't buy canola and coal from us because the like us. Both are commodities and fungible. Losing their custom is less harmful to Western Canada than what the government has done with pipeline cancellations, no tanker laws, carbon taxes et.
Totally irrelevant, but the title caught my eye. I was in Botswana last month and there were in fact ostriches on our runway... it's not just a literary expression in case you were wondering...
So a runway was all they needed to fly?
Bob Fife’s reporting is dubious. He admits to torquing headlines. His scandalous reportage during the Maher Arar debacle should have cost him his job. He interviews an anonymous CSIS leaker and we’re supposed to *trust* him. Wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. I read the Globe and Mail daily, but Bob Fife, Steven Chase and Andrew Coyne are out.
Oh man, yes, Robert Fife's media colleagues have either forgotten or ignore how badly he got rolled by his anonymous sources on Arar, with real world consequences