In the latest episode of The Line Podcast, recorded a day earlier than normal on August 22nd, 2024, after Jen Gerson offers up some shockingly TMI stuff, your hosts start by noting, with amusement, that Jagmeet Singh, leader of the federal NDP, tried once again to tweet about how mad he was at Justin Trudeau and got zapped by Twitter's crowd-sourced fact-checking service. The Twitter hivemind, in its wisdom, noted that as Trudeau's confidence-and-supply agreement partner, Singh could hold Trudeau to account basically whenever he wanted. How strange that Singh seems to keep forgetting that. Nothing lasts long on Twitter, Matt Gurney notes. But it was glorious.
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After that, your Line editors move on to another big chat involving federal politics this week. Charles Adler, long-time broadcaster, has been appointed to the Senate. After Gurney makes a personal disclosure, Gerson takes the lead on a discussion about accountability, bias and the currying of favour, and why all members of the press wince a little bit when one of them makes the jump to political life. She also lays out what Gurney has dubbed the Gerson Scale for political ickiness.
From there, they move onto the rail lockout (for the record, this was recorded before the federal government announced that it would use its powers to end the disruption; as we prep this podcast for publication on Friday, it's not yet clear if the trains will actually start running — everything is moving fast on this one, folks, so bear with us). They don't talk about the disruption itself so much as how vulnerable (or not?) our supply chains are, and how strange it is to live in a time where the average Canadian has to spend so much time thinking about supply chains! It didn't used to be this way.
They end with what Gurney dubs a "vibe check." Ontario premier Doug Ford has taken a step that will close down a series of controversial safe injection sites in Toronto, and Gurney believes that this speaks to a bigger, broader cultural shift that's underway. That big ole pendulum is just swinging hard back to the right, ain't it?
All that, and much more, in the latest episode of The Line Podcast.
TECHNICAL NOTE: Substack normally generates a transcript of the podcast, but that functionality seems to be borked today. We’ve tried several times with no success. For any of our listeners who rely on the transcript, for this week, we would steer you to the YouTube version, below, which also has auto-generated captions. We apologize for any inconvenience. Beyond our control!
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The Line Podcast: Trudeau's buddy Singh gets owned on Twitter