Dispatch from the Front Lines: Goin' nuclear
Would if we could! Also. Raise a glass to Gerard Comeau.
Hello, Line readers. It’s an unusual weekend — we know that we’re getting breaking news on Sunday, when the Liberal leadership race wraps up. But we don’t know when that’s going to happen. So your friends at The Line have decided to put together our usual weekend dispatch, but with a caveat — we are excluding all federal/Liberal leadership news. We’re going to do a special day-after dispatch on Monday to cover everything that develops on Sunday.
Before we get into this modified weekend dispatch, though, as always, please enjoy the latest episode of The Line Podcast.
Also enjoy last week’s episode of On The Line, where Matt Gurney and Richard Shimooka talk about Canadian military preparedness, and what we can do to improve it.
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Because there’s been some confusion about this: we are distributing The Line Podcast and On The Line through the same channel. We just have the one main The Line account across all the platforms. Follow the links above and you’ll get access to both podcasts when they come out. Easy peasy!
And now, on with our weekend dispatch, free of any federal politics/Liberal leadership stuff.
We start with a brief update on the Ice Bucket Challenge for National Survival. Regular readers know what we mean. We had planned to stop tracking responses after the 30-day reprieve ended, as it did this week. But we’ve decided to keep accepting suggestions from readers — email us or drop them into the comments. We won’t be updating weekly, though. We’re going monthly from here on out.
If we had still been going this week, we should have noted, without lauding, the announcement that the federal government and the provinces and territories have agreed to continue streamlining regulations to promote internal trade. The Globe had the story, and we’ll just borrow a few paragraphs from it:
Federal, provincial and territorial governments have agreed to move quickly to take down internal trade barriers, and to soon allow Canadians in most regions to buy alcohol from other jurisdictions. …
The Committee on Internal Trade, which is made up of federal, provincial and territorial officials who oversee the Canadian Free Trade Agreement, has been given the task of coming up with a process to recognize labour credentials by June 1. The CFTA was signed in 2017 and aims to reduce internal trade barriers.
Governments will also be launching negotiations to recognize each other’s regulatory standards for all consumer goods, with the exception of food.
Don’t get us wrong. Sounds good! We will have a lot more to say about a specific element of this later on in this dispatch. But as we noted a few times during our weekly updates, announcements are easy. We would give the above a half-mark, at best.
But! We do like this announcement, and not just because it’s a good idea. It also provides us a deadline! And we can use those for accountability. Your Line editors have set up a scheduled email to themselves for June 1. And we’ll report back in our first dispatch after that date with an update on whether the Committee on Internal Trade did indeed come up with a process that allows labour credentials to be recognized.