Dispatch from the Front Lines: Well that was a weird week
Alberta. Johnston. Voting. Quebec goes full Pastagate.
Howdy, readers. This is a weird dispatch, because it’s not really about anything in particular. We’re just trying to tidy up all the loose ends of a very busy week in the news. This is the time of the year when things would normally start to slow down a bit. We don’t take for granted that it will slow down that much this summer.
And you know what we hope you guys don’t take for granted? Our weekly videos!
Podcast is here, if you prefer it.
The top story of the week was, arguably, the Alberta election. But that was like days and days ago, man. We'll talk a bit about it in a minute, but what really held our interest as the week slowly melted into the weekend was the latest on the electoral interference story. We had major developments on two fronts, and neither buoyed our spirits.
The first front is what we'd call the main attraction: the details about the interference and Canada's response to it. Across hours of parliamentary testimony, senior officials generally confirmed the findings of the first Johnston report — the ones that left Line editor Gurney so bummed out last week. It's a shitshow in Ottawa, is about the kindest thing we can say about it. National Security and Intelligence Advisor Jody Thomas told members of Parliament that there wasn't a "single point of failure" that was responsible for Canada's botched response — and remember, describing the response as botched isn’t just our characterization. It’s the government’s own accepted position.
And we are forced to agree with Thomas: there wasn't a single point of failure, because everyone and everything seems to be failing at once. The processes and protocols are broken. The appointed staff are trapped by them, at best. The elected officials that are in theory our layer of democratic accountability seem disinterested or clueless, only ever really getting engaged as much as necessary to cover their own butts when something else leaks. Our particular favourite moment of that was Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair cheerfully tossing CSIS director David Vigneault under a bus, blaming Vigneault for choosing to keep some information from Blair back when Blair was public safety minister.
We could spend some time here drawing our readers' attention to the fact that neither Blair nor his successor at Public Safety, Marco Mendicino, are coming across looking great lately, and asking if we should just maybe ponder whether the ministries whose literal responsibilities are preparing for disasters and preventing mass death might benefit from a superior class of adult supervision. (Any randomly selected adult would likely be an improvement at this point.) But we've made that point before, we have no doubt we'll be given cause to make it again, and would actually like to make a different point today. Namely: how the hell does Vigneault go to work the day after his boss just deep sixes him like that?
Seriously. Blair wasn't subtle. Check out the video we posted above. It's all very pleasant and chipper but that pair of closely timed thuds you just heard were the front and back wheels of the Blair Bus going over the CSIS director. (This is a metaphor. Spare us.) We just don't know how one of two things doesn't happen here: Vigneault gets fired, or Vigneault, whom we presume has a spine, quits.
This is how it would go in almost any other scenario at any other institution. It might all be hidden under some soothing euphemistic talk of retirements or new opportunities or being the PM's preferred candidate to take over the OECD. The details would vary, but the end result wouldn't. Vigneault would either be fired for incompetence, or would resign for having been publicly called out for incompetence.
Only in the accountability void that is Ottawa — or almost any Canadian government HQ, really — would we end up with the absurd situation we find ourselves in now: everyone in Ottawa blaming each other for a problem that everyone agrees is serious and unacceptable, and absolutely no one facing any consequences for it ever getting that way or being allowed to remain that way. They all just keep showing up at work. Accountability? Honour? Self-respect? We don't do that stuff here.