Brian Mulroney was the prime minister the first time Michael Wernick sat at the back of a cabinet committee room, taking notes. One time the young civil servant found himself transcribing John Crosbie’s remarks as the powerful fisheries minister recited arguments Wernick himself had put into Crosbie’s briefing notes. That particular ouroboros of influence was “quite exciting for a young desk officer,” Wernick said in an interview shortly before the recent federal election.

The venue was my back yard. The occasion was the release of Wernick’s new book, Governing Canada: A Guide to the Tradecraft of Politics (UBC Press). Wernick was a senior official for decades in Ottawa, a deputy minister under Paul Martin and Stephen Harper. Justin Trudeau made him Clerk of the Privy Council, a position from which Wernick retired amid the SNC-Lavalin controversy in 2019, after Jody Wilson-Raybould released a surreptitious recording of a conversation with Wernick.

Wilson-Raybould, clandestine recordings, and the doctrines of independence for attorneys general are not topics of Wernick’s book, and he made it clear he preferred that they not figure in our interview. I relented, mostly. I’ve known Wernick for 26 years. He’s been learning how Ottawa works for longer than that. The lore he’s accumulated, poured between the covers of a slim volume aimed at students of political science, is a valuable contribution to Canadians’ understanding of how they’re governed.

“I didn’t want to write a memoir,” Wernick said. What came out instead is “a kind of an amalgam of many experiences with different ministers and three prime ministers that I got to work with reasonably closely. I was trying to capture those conversations—what it’s like to sit across from the new minister after swearing in, or some of the conversations that go on. Particularly in the early days of a government as they’re finding their feet or learning their skills.”

For the longest time he couldn’t settle on a format. He finally found a model in Renaissance Florence.

“I have a daughter who’s studying political science at U of T. She was doing a political theory course. And she was home for Christmas, but still working on a paper. And one of the things on that second-year political science course, that I took umpteen years ago, is [Niccolo Machiavelli’s] The Prince. It’s second-person advice on statecraft. It’s held up for a long time. And that gave me that sort of lightbulb moment. ‘Oh, I can do something that way. I could do it direct and second-person advice to somebody who’s coming into that position.’ That unlocked the whole thing for me.”

The resulting book is nearly devoid of juicy insider gossip—never Wernick’s style—but full of pithy advice to political leaders in general. “If you can end a meeting early and gain a sliver of time,” he tells prospective prime ministers, “get up and leave.” And, elsewhere, “It is rarely to your advantage to meet the premiers as a group.” And, ahem, “The longer you are in office, the more courtiers you will attract.”

From various perches in the senior ranks of the public service, Wernick watched three prime ministers land in the top job and try to figure out how to govern. “There is a skill set involved in governing,” he said. “We seem to expect people to learn that skill set on the job quickly, without a lot of help.”

And yet the days after a gruelling election campaign are nearly the worst time to be starting a new job. “One of the things I try to emphasize is the human element of it. People come in off an election campaign, exhausted. Physically exhausted. And in a state of considerable disruption. Often they’re new to being a minister. They’re also new to being an MP. They have to make decisions about their family, relocate or not to Ottawa. They’re changing locations. They’re changing careers, fundamentally. And I was always warning public service colleagues, ‘You have to allow for that. Allow for some of that exhaustion and shock.’”

New governments have only a few weeks to get up to speed. And habits that are formed early are not likely to be substantially revised later, with the benefit of hindsight. By then it’s too late. “The Prime Ministers I saw settled into the job very quickly. But then it’s hard to change. They get into a comfort zone or routines and patterns. It’s a very human thing to do. So part of my purpose in the book is just to say, ‘Pause and be a little bit mindful of the how of governing before it all gets locked in.’”

One of the recurring themes in Wernick’s book is how little time everyone has. A federal cabinet will have 100 hours in a year for all of its plenary discussions. Maybe 120. It’s never enough. “It’s overbooked from day one until the day they leave. And you’re always making choices: to do one thing means not doing something else. And mindful management of the allocation of time is really important. It can get away on you.”

The cabinet is going to need a lot of help. That was Wernick’s job, and that of all his bureaucratic colleagues, as well as countless political staff, operating with different aims and methods. “When it works well, you have a certain balance in what I call a triangle between the decision-maker—could be the PM, could be a minister—the support network they get from the public service, and the support network that they get from the political side.”

Sometimes the triangle gets out of balance. “The system gets into trouble when the public service tries to anticipate politics too much. And it clearly gets into trouble when the political side starts trying to run departments administratively. If people keep in their swim lanes and understand each other’s roles, each can add something. I always found it irritating when people chided ministers for being political. They’re supposed to be political in a democracy.”

I asked Wernick about a favourite Ottawa worry, that the public service is losing its ability to generate new ideas and policies. He didn’t bite. “I think there’s a little bit of a mythology that there was some other time when the great and good mandarins of the town—all white males, by the way—generated the ideas and pushed them towards the political system,” he said.

“I think there’s a competing narrative that the policy space is much more open and inclusive than it ever was. The costs of entry are much lower. Anybody with a laptop and a Google account can be a policy analyst. When I joined government, we had a quasi-monopoly on the ability to run big simulation models on income-security programs. Now many university professors can do it better.”

Besides, “I don’t think it’s really the role of the public service to be the originator of new ideas. Those usually come from democratic politics: ‘We wish to decriminalize cannabis.’ And then you work through the problem of how to do it competently.”

Governing Canada includes some pointed advice to cabinet ministers about the fact that they’re probably not going to get a chance to choose the date of their departure from politics. Prime ministers and voters have a way of making those decisions quickly and at inconvenient moments. Did I detect an autobiographical element to these passages?

“That’s largely true of clerks and public servants as well,” Wernick said. “Or hockey coaches. Like, there’s a lot of job jobs where you can’t arrange a perfectly-timed departure. I’m not the only person who’s been backed into a corner where it was impossible to continue to do the job. It’s unfortunate, but it happened.”

“But it’s happened to other people. Circumstances get away on people. People fall into all sorts of things that make it untenable for them to continue in the job.”

When things got weird for Wernick, did he draw any comfort from those earlier examples?

“No. I mean, that’s not the way I’d put it. I was conscious, during those last few months, that I was drifting towards a zone where I couldn’t do the job anymore. I was becoming part of the story. You have to enjoy at least some basic level of trust from the opposition leaders. I didn’t have that. And that just made it impossible to carry on.”

If he had a do-over, would he handle SNC-Lavalin differently? “That’s probably for another day, in another interview. I did not pick up on some of the warning signs about the trouble that was coming…. But I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that. You work and live in the moment and you do the best you can at the time.”

I tried one more question that was a little closer to the concrete example of the current government than to the trends and aphorisms Wernick’s book prefers. In the book, he writes to a hypothetical prime minister: “You will not be successful if you hang on to the same closed circle of close advisors and confidants for your whole time in office. There is an inevitable drift into a comfort zone and a form of groupthink that can create blind spots and put you at risk.”

Gee, did he have anyone in mind?

Butter would not melt in Wernick’s mouth as he told me he had no examples from current events. “The example I was actually drawing on was Stephen Harper in 2011. You know, the opposition leaders [Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh, in the election that had not yet happened when Wernick and I spoke] probably have a transition team, who will give them some advice on how to set things up. And I worked with Derek Burney from the Harper team, and Mike Robinson from the Martin team, and Peter Harder from the Trudeau team.” Those new governments are always “very conscious and mindful about how they want to set things up.” But re-elected prime ministers “tend to just start up again, with the same people in the same processes. People have argued, and I think I agree, that Stephen Harper missed an opportunity in 2011, to pause and think.

“I would say to any Prime Minister, when they’re going into a second or third mandate: ‘You should pause. It’s going to be different. Think about the processes and the people.’”

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The Globe has an eye-opening story about Chrystia Freeland’s youth, how she flummoxed the KGB while she was a student in Ukraine in the 1980s. Drawing on documents from the Soviet archives, Simon Miles shows that Soviet spies were impressed by Freeland — codename Frida — even as they tried to prevent her from linking Ukrainian activists with foreign journalists.

Ms. Freeland, and her ilk, were a threat to the Soviet Union – but one which had to be handled delicately: treating her too harshly could give credence to the “libellous” stories told in Ukrainian émigré communities about how the KGB treated national minorities in the Soviet Union. According to the KGB, Ms. Freeland was more than just an agitator for, as Col. Stroi derisively put it, “the liberation of Ukraine” who coerced Soviet citizens into staging marches and rallies to attract Western support. She delivered cash, video- and audio-recording equipment, and even a personal computer to her contacts in Ukraine. All of this took place under the watchful eye of the KGB, which surveilled Ms. Freeland. Its officers tailed her wherever she went, tapped her phone calls to Ukrainians abroad, bugged her accommodation, read her mail, and had an informer, codenamed Slav, insert himself into Ms. Freeland’s circle and gain the young Canadian’s trust.

New faces needed: Speaking of Freeland, Trudeau said after the election that she will continue as deputy PM and finance minister in his next cabinet, which seems, to the Globe’s Campbell Clark, a “signal that the rest of the team doesn’t matter as much.” Clark thinks some changes are in order.

First and foremost, he needs a defence minister who actually thinks they are responsible for the conduct of the military, unlike Mr. Sajjan, who repeatedly sloughed off responsibility for the military’s repeated mishandling of sexual harassment. Ms. Freeland said last week that the brass still don’t get it, so Mr. Trudeau needs an experienced minister, preferably a woman, who will make them get it. Perhaps Ms. Anand. He also needs a pandemic health minister who can be the clear spokesperson and forceful negotiator with provinces that Ms. Hajdu hasn’t been.

Going negative: The Star’s Althia Raj has a revealing long read with insight into some of the behind-the-scenes calculations that took place during the recent election. For instance, in late August, rattled Liberals decided they had to go negative because they were on track to lose to Erin O’Toole.

Dan Arnold, the Liberals’ director of research, was concerned by the way support for O’Toole was trending. “If you looked at his momentum and (Trudeau’s) momentum … it certainly was not looking like it was heading into a good outcome,” he told the Star. “I was pretty candid to people … that the way the trajectory was going, we were going to lose the campaign.” Arnold started the meeting with that overview. But he wasn’t the only voice to raise concerns. The campaign team was getting missives — some solicited advice, others panicked and unsolicited — urging it to go negative to change the tide.

Tofino fallout: Trudeau’s decision to travel to makes him look “disconnected” and “tone deaf,” political analysts tell the Hill Times, but most of them think he will outlast this controversy like others before it because of his durable brand, reports Abbas Ranna in the Hill Times.

Needs advice: Speaking of Tofino, in the Hill Times Rose LeMay has a thoughtful column suggesting that the prime minister should get advice from an Indigenous Elders’ Circle.

Enough Huawei: More than 75 per cent of Canadians think Ottawa should ban Huawei Technologies from this country’s 5G telecommunications, the Globe reports.

Opposition to Huawei’s presence in 5G has increased to 76 per cent of respondents from 53 per cent in a 2019 poll. Huawei’s 5G technology has been banned in other countries over fears that the Chinese Communist Party could use it for spying purposes. In the latest results, only 10 per cent of respondents say Huawei should be allowed to supply gear for 5G, down from 22 per cent in the 2019 poll.

Somewhat tougher: The Trudeau government appears to be subtly changing its tone on China, Mike Blanchfield writes for the Canadian Press.

Analysts saw hints of a potentially tougher approach in what appeared to be a throwaway line in a congratulatory note that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent to his new Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishida, this past week. Trudeau twice used the label “Indo-Pacific” to stress the importance of co-operating with Japan on shared regional interests. For some observers, that was a signal that Canada was moving toward a tougher posture toward future relations with China.

Canadian Nobel: Canadian economist David Card won the Nobel prize for economics Monday for pioneering research that showed increasing the minimum wage does not kill jobs and immigrants do not lower pay for native-born workers, CBC reports.

We’re Number 1! A new report by a Finnish telecom analyst shows that Canadians pay more for cellphone service than anyone else on the planet, the Post reports.

— Stephen Maher

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We are less than a year away from the next Quebec general election and, according to recent polling data, never in the past 30 years has a re-election seemed so likely in the province. Barring a historic turn of events or a major scandal, it appears no other political party is positioned to unseat François Legault’s CAQ.

Indeed, the latest Quebec poll conducted by Leger for Le Journal de Montréal measures the CAQ at 47 per cent of  voting intentions in Quebec, a monstrous 27-point lead over its closest rival, the Quebec Liberal Party (QLP). In distant third place are Québec solidaire (QS) and the Parti québécois (PQ) with 11 per cent support apiece, while a new fifth player, Éric Duhaime’s Conservative Party (akin to Maxime Bernier’s PPC at the provincial level), climbs to 8 per cent in the province, with support mostly concentrated in the Quebec City region.

Among francophone voters (which makes up about 80 per cent of Quebec voters), the CAQ’s lead is even greater: François Legault’s party obtains 54 per cent of voting intentions. The opposition parties share only paltry crumbs: 13 per cent for the Parti québécois, 12 per cent for Québec solidaire and 10 per cent for the Liberal Party.

The CAQ dominates virtually all demographic segments of the Quebec electorate. The CAQ leads by 29 points among men and 24 points among women. And while there is a statistical tie between the CAQ (28 per cent) and QS (26 per cent) among young voters aged 18-34, the CAQ crushes its rivals among older voters, with leads of 30 points among those aged 35-54 and 35 points (!) among those aged 55 and over.

In the Montreal metropolitan area (Island of Montreal, Laval and “the 450”), the CAQ stands 41 per cent support, compared with 28 per cent for the QLP. In the Quebec City region, the CAQ dominates with 53 per cent support, 35 points ahead of Éric Duhaime’s Conservatives, which stands in second place with 18 per cent in the region. In the rest of Quebec, the CAQ obtains 52 per cent, nearly 40 points ahead of its rivals.

What explains the CAQ’s current dominance? One of the questions frequently asked in such surveys measures satisfaction with the government. Such data can tell us something about the potential for growth (or decline!) of the competing parties. With 65 per cent of respondents saying they are satisfied with the CAQ government, François Legault enjoys a degree of consensus that goes well beyond partisan lines. Consider the following figure:

Not only does the CAQ enjoy near-unanimity among its own voters (97 per cent satisfaction), but seven in 10 PQ voters (69 per cent) say they are satisfied with the CAQ government. Even among voters of the other opposition parties, the CAQ scores exceptionally well: 44 per cent of Liberal voters and 41 per cent of QS voters say they are satisfied with the government’s performance.

Moreover, François Legault is seen as the best candidate for the position of Premier of Quebec among all party leaders, and by far. Consider the following table (taken directly from the Léger report):

Bad news for the Liberal Party: when asked which party leader would make the best premier, only 45 per cent of Liberal voters pick QLP leader Dominique Anglade. Even worse news for PQ leader Paul St-Pierre-Plamondon: only 25 per cent of PQ voters believe that he is the best candidate for premier. In fact, PQ voters even prefer François Legault (38 per cent) to the current PQ leader (25 per cent). I am scouring my memory and cannot recall a recent occasion when voters of a major party in Quebec preferred the leader of another party to their own. In fact, Paul St-Pierre-Plamondon (3 per cent) is even behind neophyte Éric Duhaime (6 per cent) in this survey.

Obviously, such a dominance in voting intentions also translates into a strong lead in the seat projections. According to the 338Canada Quebec model, the CAQ would win an average of 100 seats in the National Assembly if an election were held this week, or 24 more seats than it currently holds.

The QLP would be reduced to an average of only 18 seats in the ridings where many anglophone and allophone voters reside in Montreal, Laval, Montérégie, and the Outaouais regions. Moreover, the CAQ’s lead among francophones is such that some traditional Liberal ridings in Montreal could potentially flip, including Anjou-Louis-Riel, Verdun, Maurice-Richard, and Marquette.

Québec solidaire would probably manage to keep its core of Montreal seats, but ridings such as Sherbrooke, Jean-Lesage and Rouyn-Noranda-Témiscamingue, all won by QS in the 2018 election, could be at risk. In addition, the CAQ’s growing support in Montreal’s French-speaking boroughs, combined with the PQ’s fall from grace on the island, could mean that even Rosemont may be in play next year.

As for the Parti Québécois, it would be left with Pascal Bérubé’s (former PQ interim leader) riding of Matane-Matapédia in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region (Lower Saint-Lawrence). However, the PQ remains competitive in other ridings which the party already holds, including Joliette, Gaspé and Îles-de-la-Madeleine.

In fact, the 338Canada model has the CAQ projected with no fewer than 74 “safe” ridings (ridings with a 99.5 per cent or greater odds of winning). The CAQ thus has a pool of safe ridings higher than the threshold for a majority in the National Assembly, i.e. 63 seats.

So who could stop the CAQ in 2022? Could the numbers we are seeing now be tipped in favour of one of the opposition parties in less than a calendar year? One should never say never in Quebec politics, but the CAQ’s current dominance has no recent precedent in Quebec. One has to go back to Robert Bourassa’s Liberals in the mid-1980s to find similar numbers. After winning 99 seats in 1985, the QLP was easily re-elected with 92 seats in 1989. Moreover, the QLP had only one serious opponent in that election (Jacques Parizeau’s Parti Québécois), whereas today the CAQ faces a highly divided opposition, giving the CAQ a clear advantage in terms of seats.

At the risk of having to swallowing these words in a few months, it seems that the worst of the pandemic is behind us and that Quebec has withstood the worst of the fourth wave that hit the Canadian Prairies hard. Economic recovery will likely dominate the government’s agenda in 2022, which, in theory, should play right into François Legault’s hands. So what could stop the CAQ? Considering that complacency and arrogance can arise when a government feels a little too comfortable, perhaps the CAQ will be its own worst enemy in this upcoming election year.

* * *

Details of this projection are available on the 338Canada Quebec page. You will find all 125 electoral district projections here, or use the regional links below:

• Island of Montreal
• Montreal Suburbs (450)
• Quebec City region
• Regions of Quebec

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Justin Trudeau, back from Tofino, held a newser in Ottawa Wednesday to announced a vaccine policy that will require public servants to get jabbed or go on an unpaid leave of absence, CBC reports. The mandate applies to the RCMP and federal contractors, an estimated 267,000 employees. Travellers will also need to fully vaccinated by Oct. 30. The unvaccinated will face “disciplinary action that could ultimately cost them their job,” an official said at a technical briefing.

Crown corporations — including Canada Post and CBC/Radio Canada — and  the House of Commons and the Senate — will be asked to establish similar policies.

The whole thing will depend on attestations, which could open loopholes.

The employees who fall under this mandate will not have to produce their proof of vaccination documents. Instead, it essentially relies on an honour system: employees will have to sign an attestation form certifying that they’ve had the necessary shots. These attestation forms will be audited and managers can ask for proof of vaccination at any time. “Lying would mean disciplinary measures would be taken. It’s consequential for an employee to lie,” a senior government official said, adding that a false statement would breach the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector and could result in termination.

The Globe has a story focused on the implications for travellers.

What about MPs? Star columnist Althia Raj has an astute column on how the Conservatives could get wedged on the vax status of their caucus, even though the election is over, because there will be pressure to impose a vaccination mandate in the House of Commons.

Last year, when the government — with the consent of the Conservative leadership — tried to pass emergency pandemic legislation sight unseen, Conservative MP Scott Reid defied orders and showed up on the Hill to make some valid points about this dangerous precedent. It is not inconceivable that several unvaccinated Tories would — if the Bloc, NDP and Liberals adopt mandatory vaccination — stand up to argue their “privileges” as members are being breached. These are essentially rights in Parliament that allow MPs to fulfil their duties unimpeded, with “freedom from obstruction, interference and intimidation.” Some Liberals relish the thought of seeing Conservative MPs stand up and plead for permission to remain unvaccinated against COVID-19.

Sorry for Tofino: Trudeau also took the occasion to apologize for skipping events on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation to hit the beach with his family, the Globe reports. “Travelling on September 30th was a mistake, and I regret it. I’m focused on making this right.”

Often sorry: In the Post, John Ivison disapprovingly enumerates some of Trudeau’s apologies.

Not getting it: Chrystia Freeland says the leadership of the Canadian Forces just don’t get it, Global reports, when it comes to the handling of sexual misconduct within the Canadian Armed Forces. She was commenting on the removal of an officer from his role reviewing sexual misconduct files after it was revealed that he wrote a positive reference letter for a sex offender.

Headed for exits: Alice Chen, in the Hill Times, has a poignant story based on interviews with MPs who lost their seats in the recent election, including Lenore Zann, who said the experience “feels like another death.”

Liberals get Quebec seat: The Liberals won the riding of Châteauguay-Lacolle by 12 seats after a recount, CTV reports

Greens said to exist: Elizabeth May shares her thoughts about the state of the Green Party with CBC: “I know this puts me in a bad situation but it’s important for Canadians to know that there is a Green Party. It’s important for people to know the Green Party exists. We’re not going away. We will rebuild.”

ICYMI: William Shatner is going to space.

— Stephen Maher

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O’Toole faces his MPs: Conservative MPs will gather today for their first caucus meeting since the recent election, which ought to give everyone a better sense of Erin O’Toole’s immediate future. One big item on their agenda — and what a pity it will happen behind closed doors — is the vote over the Reform Act, which the caucus could use, theoretically, to defenestrate their leader. CTV has the story.

Whining and dining: The Star‘s Stephanie Levitz surveys opinion in the caucus and finds no incipient revolt, but some grumbling.

Meanwhile, as caucus gets briefed Tuesday, O’Toole’s campaign team will be doing a post-election briefing for members of the Albany Club, where the perceived power brokers of the Conservative movement like to wine, whine and dine. A fear that the party is becoming more beholden to the members of that club than its own grassroots is an issue that’s rankled for months, and some say reflects the fact O’Toole never spent much time on the party’s backbench.

So sorry: There is a some interesting commentary on the prime minister’s whereabouts on the weekend, beginning with a funny column from Maclean’s own Marie Danielle Smith imagining Trudeau’s ultimate apology.

I’m sorry I created a federal holiday for reconciliation then went and spent part of it vacationing. I’m sorry I didn’t go to Kelowna instead. I’m sorry my itinerary said I would be in “private meetings” in Ottawa and didn’t mention my flight to Tofino. I’m especially sorry this sojourn attracted national attention. Because—cough-fishwrap-cough—we should all have been focusing on reconciliation. So what I’m sorry about, most of all, is that you seized on my trip rather than spending the day in quiet reflection. The thing is, I keep saying “sorry” over and over and over. But what makes me feel the sorriest is how my apologies never seem to satisfy you. Even when I use all the right words.

Non-negotiable: In the Post, Colby Cosh has an interesting rumination on how we think about politicians and elections. He, too, imagines what Trudeau might say to voters, if he were to be honest.

“I was in an awkward position because I promised my unfortunate wife and my blameless children that we would have a getaway as soon as the very rigorous and exhausting election campaign was over. We didn’t see the problem with the timing soon enough, and, as you can imagine, I have long since depleted the store of excuses that even a prime minister can offer to his family. This one was non-negotiable, and I’m confident that every husband will understand my situation.”

Jaw-dropping vacuum: At CTV, Don Martin writes that the prime minister’s absence from reconciliation ceremonies suggests not all is well in his operation.

Such a jaw-dropping vacuum of common political sense at the top of this government’s sprawling-staff pyramid can only be caused by one of three things. Either his advisers have all come down with a third-term case of scheduling blindness and communications incompetence. Or the prime minister was warned about the brutal optics of flying directly over residential school burial sites to reach some prime surfing beaches – and opted to ignore them anyway. Or his staff are too scared to red flag even the most jarring oversight on a super-sensitive file that already requires every word in every statement to be vetted by a dozen bureaucrats.

What happened? In Maclean’s, Justin Ling has a revealing piece looking at an election study based on focus groups, which show that the Liberals’ election promises struck voters as insufficiently concrete, which suggests they were in trouble in the campaign.

One of the most insightful takeaways from the consultants’ study was around affordability—particularly a hot, increasingly inaccessible, housing market and spiking gas prices. “The major party platforms nibbled around the edges of the basket, but with no leader successfully addressing this issue head-on, the electorate chose to reward none of them,” they warned. Affordability and inequality have crashed together in a particularly poignant way during the pandemic. As one small-business-owner voter explained: “We’re the hardest hit. And when you look at how ridiculous a lot of the restrictions were, like your basic mom and pop shops closed down and Walmart, or Costco or stayed open.”

Close to majority: In the Hill Times, Abbas Ranna crunches the numbers and looks at how the Liberals could have won a majority:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals could have won a majority government in the Sept. 20 election if they had received 16,870 more votes spread across 11 ridings, according to an analysis by The Hill Times.

In-between person: In the Star, Jacques Gallant has an interesting profile of the first first openly Two-Spirit member of Parliament, the new NDP MP for for Edmonton Griesbach.

There’s a word in Cree — tastawiyiniwak — that Blake Desjarlais says best describes him. It means “the in-between people.” “I love that word because it helps to demonstrate how I operate and see myself,” said Desjarlais, 27. “I see myself between this terrible binary that’s been created — the Western world imposed this male/female binary, ‘this way or that way’ kind of mentality.”

Back on the job: Global has a disturbing story from Mercedes Stephenson and Rachel Gilmore revealing that a general who wrote a reference letter for a sex offender has been tasked with working on a number of reviews related to sexual misconduct within the Canadian Armed Forces.

Pallister out: Brian Pallister has resigned from the legislature five weeks after stepping down as premier, CP reports. Manitoba Tories choose a new leader Oct. 30.

No fines: It seems international travellers who wanted to avoid quarantining needed only to fly to Calgary, CBC reports, presumably since the government was so badly organized it couldn’t hand out fines.

Feds could mandate vaccination: Federal officials were told in the spring that the government could make it mandatory for all workers to receive the vaccine, CP’s Jordan Press reports. Although public health is under provincial jurisdiction, documents say the federal government could consider making vaccines “a national interest item.”

Jab them: In the Globe, Andre Picard makes a compelling argument that health care workers should be compelled to get jabbed.

MPs also: And the Hill Times argues that MPs need to be vaccinated.

22 per cent: A new poll shows Jason Kenney is so unpopular that he could be doomed, veteran Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid writes.

— Stephen Maher

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