Dispatch From the Front Line: The Toronto Maple Leafs Award for Excellence in Governing
A refreshingly open confession from a predictably anonymous Liberal. Ford's in trouble. Smith is screwing up. A plea from Ontario. And a great night in sports.
Hello, Line readers!
We were pretty hard on the federal Liberals last week and it felt a little much, even for us! It was a coincidence, nothing more. We'd all been jotting down notes over the week about stuff to write in the dispatch and by the time we were done, they were all federal topics. So we wanted to make a point this week of taking the focus off Ottawa and talking about some other stories.
We, uh, failed.
Not entirely! We've got some other stuff to talk about. But a bunch of federal stories did catch our attention this week, and we'd have felt weird not discussing them. So stick around, folks. There's provincial stuff, and even some local stuff, below.
But before we get to that, check out our latest video!
And the podcast version, if you prefer that.
On the federal front, we read an interesting piece this week in the CBC, by Aaron Wherry, taking stock of where Justin Trudeau and his party are, in their now eighth year in office. "Interesting" is used by us very literally when we describe Wherry's piece. It's long — many thousands of words — so you'll want to set aside some time to read it, and maybe make a cup of tea. We really do recommend it, though, because it's, again, interesting. We don't really know how else to sum it up, since it covers so much ground. We'd make two comments in reaction to the piece.
The first is that, a bit more than halfway through, Wherry cites "a senior Liberal (who also spoke to CBC News on the condition they not be named)." The unnamed senior Liberal tells Wherry that "there was a sense internally that the government was not focusing on the right things last spring — in part because of unforeseen events like the convoy protests and war in Europe — and that it needed to get back to basics."
Oh jeez.