On Thursday, after much hinting in the budget, defence minister Harjit Sajjan announced that the government would be hiring yet another former Supreme Court justice to help them deal with the issue of sexual misconduct within the military because they totally listened to the last one they hired and implemented all of her recommendations.  Or not.  In six years, the bulk of the recommendations from the Deschamps Report have gone unfulfilled in any substantive way, and in particular the need for an independent reporting mechanism for survivors of sexual misconduct, and for Sajjan to launch another process with another former Supreme Court justice is a signal that there is a problem with his leadership.  Sajjan has lost the moral authority to lead the Canadian Forces through its transformation, and it's time he resigns.

For a government that has pledged to change the toxic culture within the military and end the scourge of sexual misconduct in its ranks, they need a minister with credibility to do it.  Sajjan does not have that credibility.  Part of this is in how he handled the allegations regarding former Chief of Defence Staff, General Jonathan Vance or rather, didn't handle.  While one can appreciate that Sajjan did not want to politically insert themselves into an investigation, the fact that he didn't even want to see what the allegations were when the military ombudsman brought them to his attention raises doubts, as does the fact that he remained mightily incurious about the investigation as it was proceeding or not proceeding.  When it didn't go anywhere, did he follow up at any point?  Apparently not, which is a problem when he is the person who is responsible to Parliament for the conduct of the Canadian Forces and its CDS.

This fact cannot be understated there is nobody above the CDS.  This is where civilian control begins, and Sajjan had an obligation to ensure that civilian control was being exercised.  He did not.  Likewise, Sajjan's deep incuriosity extended to doing the homework in choosing Vance's successor, who immediately had to step aside to deal with allegations of misconduct in his past.  The fact that the chief of military personnel was also someone who had a reputation for misconduct was allowed to hold the position, without Sajjan properly exercising civilian oversight, is a glaring problem.  It also created a double standard that high-ranking officials like Vance or his successor would not be touched by Operation Honour while junior officers were and Sajjan not taking responsibility for the oversight that was his job just makes that double standard all the more glaring.

The refusal to take responsibility is another reason that Sajjan must go.  The government has (rightfully) been preaching ministerial responsibility as they push back against having staffers testify at committee, but ministerial responsibility means the minister has to actually take responsibility, and Sajjan has not.  In fact, he's been caught in lies at the committee, and had to go back to correct the record, and hasn't salvaged his own reputation, nor that of the PM.  He's lost any credibility as the person responsible to Parliament for the department, and it's simply untenable that he remains in that position.

The fact that Sajjan did not push to fully implement the Deschamps Report in six years is another indictment against him.  There is no good explanation for why he did not make more progress, most especially around the creation of an independent body where survivors could come forward, and where reports could be tracked and problem personnel identified, rather than the scattered systems that exist now that don't interact.  Now, perhaps some of this can be attributed to the Liberals' usual problems of implementing half-measures to make it look like they're acting on a problem while they move onto something else.  Perhaps some of this is about a lack of bureaucratic capacity to do the work (which again, as minister he must take responsibility for).  If he could not push to get the Deschamps recommendations implemented, how can there be any confidence that he can implement the recommendations that come out of Louise Arbour's review in a year's time?

Even with the announcement of Arbour's appointment, it was another show of weakness on Sajjan's part.  There is a demonstrable problem in Canadian politics, where politicians of all stripes refuse to act on tough issues until they are seen to be made to, kicking and screaming, by the Supreme Court of Canada, and putting this kind of work on retired justices is one more iteration of that.  He needs to be able to make decisions rather than punt them to someone who has more public credibility than he has, and that's a problem.  He failed.  He has demonstrated that he won't be held to account for his failures, and that goes against the message that needs to be sent to everyone in the military that everyone can be held to account, from top to bottom.  If he can't be held to account, how can they expect anyone else in the Forces can?

Which leads us to our next obvious question who should replace Sajjan?  Aside from the obvious joke of this being one more job for Chrystia Freeland, who has quite enough on her plate, we must resist the temptation of putting anyone else with a military background in the position.  As someone who was still active in the military at the time, Sajjan should never have been appointed to the position, because it undermines the crucial need for civilian control.  And as much as I would balk at the usual trope of putting a woman in charge to clean up sexual misconduct, and being set up to fail for it, there is someone in Cabinet already who has the necessary gravitas and intellectual heft to get a tough job done, and that is Catherine McKenna, who is currently being underutilized in her current job as infrastructure minister.  Will Trudeau agree?  That remains to be seen, but what is clear is that Sajjan can no longer remain in his position.  The sooner he falls on his sword, the sooner the work of cleaning up the Forces can begin in earnest.

Photo Credit: Ottawa Citizen

As Ontario continues to remain on fire with COVID, you would think that a reasonable government would do something to address the situation they find themselves in ­ but you'd be mistaken.  Are they doing something about implementing paid sick leave?  Of course not.  Are they prioritizing vaccinations for hot spots and industrial workplaces where we know that spread is happening?  Not really, because they prioritized a number of postal codes that aren't hotspots but which coincidentally happen to be Conservative-held ridings.  So just what has Doug Ford and his band of incompetent murderclowns been doing to control the pandemic?  Well, they'd be busy trying to win the communications game, deflecting attention to variant cases coming across the border, and insisting that the federal government do something about it.

There is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to the border, and no, this is not solely the federal government's fault.  Yes, they should have implemented hotel quarantines sooner, and they should probably have insisted on quarantining for the full two weeks in those hotels rather than letting people go home once they have a negative test more akin to how this was managed in Australia.  There are added complications around this, however, considering space limitations (Australia basically has a waiting list to enter the country), and there were instances of private security hired to enforce it running amok, but they were effective in enforcing quarantine.  There are very real questions about what is happening at the land borders and the lack of requiring hotel quarantine for those travellers except that with many of our land crossings, there aren't many nearby hotels (unlike at airports), so it makes it harder to implement consistently.

The federal government, while not blameless, has been trying to weasel out of their own culpability for the entry of variants into the country, citing that less than two percent of cases are related to travel.  Well, yes, but in most parts of the country, contact tracing has mostly collapsed, and that more than half the cases are untraced, and community spread started from a travel case at some point.  What also has not helped are the constant demands for exemptions from quarantine rules particularly hotel quarantine and many critics are unable to pick a lane demanding tougher quarantine rules, while also demanding the hotel quarantine be ended after some of its early problems (while admittedly serious).  Quarantine only seems to mean quarantine when it's convenient, apparently.  It's also difficult to think of an appropriate mechanism that can be better used to police what is and what is not "essential" travel.  Closing the borders to "non-essential" travel seems incredibly difficult considering that there is such a lengthy list of exemptions that it seems futile much of the time.

This having been said, fault cannot solely be laid at the feet of the federal government because when it comes to enforcing the Quarantine Act once the federal government has invoked it, that falls to the provinces and municipalities.  There is no federal force that swoops in to enforce these orders the RCMP is short-staffed as it is, and you do not task the military with acting like a police force.  You.  Do.  Not.  That is how police states happen.  That means that when provinces start complaining that these variant cases are getting in because people are breaking quarantine and we do know that there are cases of travellers who simply pay the fine at the airport and avoid hotel quarantine (meaning that the fine obviously is not high enough) the responsibility actually belongs local police and public health officers, who are empowered to do the enforcement work.

Of course, a big part of the problem here is that provinces consistently refuse to accept responsibility for what is clearly under their area of jurisdiction (see: paid sick leave), and they have been grasping at straws to blame the federal government for everything.  This includes vaccine procurement (apparently scarcity doesn't exist, nor do supply chain issues, and vaccines don't take any time at all to manufacture), and what has been happening with the borders, where provinces haven't taken up their responsibilities for enforcing quarantine.  And even more to the point, they are now treating this like a communications game, where they have decided that they don't need to actually do better they just need to ensure that blame gets shifted entirely to the federal government, much like the joke about needing to only outrun the other person when you're both being chased by a bear.

There is a lack of shame going around on all sides.  The federal government, while weaselling about how much culpability they really hold, will offer the platitude that they are always looking to do more, but never do, and even then, measures tend to be either too late, or mostly theatre (and yes, closing the border to direct flights from certain countries is theatre because as public health data has consistently shown since long before this current pandemic that people will find ways to circumvent those border closures and then lie about it when they import a virus, thwarting contact tracing).  For the provinces, and in particular those west of New Brunswick, they refused to implement proper lockdowns, didn't invest in expanding testing and tracing capabilities, re-opened too early, wouldn't enact measures to increase ventilation in schools, wouldn't deal with industrial workplace spread, and once again, did not enforce the quarantine measures that were their responsibility but hey, it's all the federal government's fault.

Absolutely nobody is blameless here, but simply trying to divert attention and shift blame to the federal government is not only dishonest, but it's blatantly immoral, because it's being used as cover for provincial inaction.  Provinces trying to cast this blame should get their own houses in order, and actually enforce the Quarantine Act as they are responsible for doing, rather than simply trying to point fingers.  We need all levels of government to pull their weight, and we need actual lockdowns that are properly enforced if we are to end this pandemic once and for all.

Photo Credit: CTV News

There are a little over seven sitting weeks left before the House of Commons is due to rise for the summer, and there are a lot of bills left on the Order Paper because so few of them have been able to make it through the legislative process.  Partisan gamesmanship and procedural shenanigans have meant that the implementation bill for the fall economic statement which was introduced in December didn't even make it to the Senate until April 15^th, just before the 2021 budget was tabled.  This is not a normal state of affairs, even in a hung parliament, and it raises questions as to how much of their agenda the government will be able to pass before they rise for the summer, bearing in mind the threat of an election in the fall.

Currently, there are about fourteen bills on the Order Paper under active consideration, some of whom have yet to see any debate.  There will still be a budget implementation bill to come in the next couple of weeks, along with supply bills which will also need to be passed, and add to that another ten or so Supply Days, wherein the opposition parties get to choose the agenda for the day, and suddenly those seven sitting weeks start looking very, very short when it comes to getting through those bills.  Time is a very underappreciated commodity in any parliamentary session.

There are a number of reasons why things have been as bad as they've become and some of them are structural.  When compared to the mother parliament in Westminster, our House of Commons has grown to be really, really bad when it comes to how we treat second reading debate.  Procedurally, this is the stage of debate where MPs are concerned with the general principles of the bill, but not the specifics, and it should be fairly quick, so that it can go to committee and the technical aspects can be delved into.  In Westminster, this takes place over the course of an afternoon the Speaker sees how many MPs want to speak to the bill, divides the time up accordingly, and they each get their say extemporaneously with the ability for others to interject and ask questions throughout and then it heads to committee.  Not so in Canada.

Here, we have come to set aside days for second reading debate, and because we have enforced speaking times in the Standing Orders, we are bound to listen to twenty-minute recitations of scripted material into the record and they must be twenty minutes or the House Leader's office gives the MP trouble and parties will put as many speakers up as they possibly can so that this drags out for days, for no reason.  There isn't even any debate it's just reading speeches into a void.

When it comes to this particular parliament and the slow progress of bills, this is largely because we are in a hung parliament, and the government largely doesn't have the tools available to speed things along, such as time allocation, because they don't have the votes to do so, nor do they have willing allies in the Chamber under most circumstances.  We did have a single incidence of closure a few weeks ago when the Bloc had agreed to vote with the government to get the assisted dying bill passed, as there was a court-imposed deadline that had already been extended several times, and they were eager to see it passed, while Conservatives in particular were dragging out final debate on that bill.

More to the point, there has been a propensity by the Conservatives over the past few months to use procedural tactics to forestall debate on bills. Instead of allowing debate to happen, they would force debate on committee reports some of them a mere three lines in length and because the NDP and Bloc would side with them (any chance to embarrass the Liberals), we went for weeks where we saw almost no actual legislative debate.  Well, except for private members' business, because that has an allocated hour every day, and nothing can forestall it.  That's why the government can't get progress on bills containing aid measures for businesses in the pandemic passed, but a bill on single sports betting has made it through the Commons.

When pressed, the Conservatives insisted that they weren't cooperating because the government didn't have a "coherent legislative agenda," which is nonsense.  Several bills were priorities in there for very well-known reasons (such as the assisted dying bill), but that wasn't really the reason.  A lot of these procedural shenanigans have been a sort of filibuster to punish the Liberals for what has been happening at committee, whether it's resisting allowing staffers to testify (which is an issue with constitutional implications), or because the Liberals had the temerity to oppose unreasonable witch-hunts or demands to produce unmanageable document production such as the absolute farce that has taken place at the health committee.  They won't openly cop to doing it, but the motivation has been apparent if you've been paying attention.

So how can the government make any progress on the many, many bills on the Order Paper before they rise for the summer?  It essentially boils down to how many deals they can make with opposition parties to make it happen. The NDP, for example, are very keen to make progress on the UNDRIP bill, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation bill, and the conversion therapy ban bill, and could strike a deal for time allocation on those bills to get them passed.  The NDP or the Bloc might be persuaded to move along the environmental bills possibly in exchange for some tweaks.  But some of the other bills, including the justice reform bills, may be tougher sells.  The government also likely sees some tactical value in making those budget votes this week confidence votes when they normally aren't, so that they can say that the Commons obviously has confidence so it's time to move things along.  Will it work?  Probably not, but stranger things have happened.