L'Etat, C'est Moi!

It's what Justin believes.

Prove me wrong:

It was only 20 years ago that a Liberal government was brought to the edge of collapse by revelations that they sole-sourced $4 million in ad contracts to Liberal-friendly marketing firms. And it was 10 years ago that headlines were dominated for months by a scandal in which Senator Mike Duffy accepted a $90,000 cheque from the prime minister’s chief of staff in order to pay back invalid expense claims. 

All Canadian governments amass scandals, but the government of Justin Trudeau nevertheless stands out for the sheer tonnage of official misconduct. Trudeau remains the only prime minister found to have violated the Conflict of Interest Act, and he’s attained the rare distinction of having scandals that have attained widespread mention in the foreign press. When Canada’s Ethics Commissioner stepped down earlier this year, he noted with exasperation that he had been forced to investigate Liberal ministers more than two dozen times since 2018.

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It would be too difficult to list all of them, so here’s our best effort at listing the ones that have happened since the last federal election in September, 2021.

(As for the main pre-2021 scandals, here’s a quick summary: SNC-Lavalin, Aga Khan, We Charity, alleged Kokanee groping and blackface.)

The Chinese interference scandal

This one has several parts and technically stretches all the way back to 2016, when one of the first scandals of the newly elected Trudeau government surrounded the prime minister’s attendance at “pay for play” fundraisers featuring Chinese billionaires.

But the core of the scandal is a series of CSIS leaks, primarily released through the Globe and Mail, holding that the Trudeau government had openly ignored warnings about Chinese attempts to swing the results of the last two federal elections. The alleged Chinese efforts weren’t massive – a laundered donation here, a disinformation post there – but it was apparently being conducted so brazenly from Chinese consulates that it would have been relatively easy for Ottawa to shut it down. As to why they didn’t, it’s not helping the optics of the scandal that the Chinese interference was all directed towards getting Liberals elected.

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Meanwhile, another CSIS leak hinted that the Chinese government has been openly trying to influence-peddle Trudeau almost since he first entered politics in 2008. And just this month came allegations that CSIS also passed on a 2020 warning that Chinese agents were attempting to target the Hong Kong family of Conservative MP Michael Chong – only for the Prime Minister’s Office to ignore it just like everything else.  Trudeau has maintained through everything he was not made aware of China being up to anything unseemly.

The Lucki Affair

One of the most notable results of the Mass Casualty Commission – the probe into Canada’s worst-ever mass shooting – was how it revealed that RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki had tried to interfere in the early stages of the massacre’s investigation for the explicit purpose of obtaining cover for a planned Liberal gun ban.

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As revealed in the Commission-tabled notes of Nova Scotia RCMP Superintendent Darren Campbell, Lucki had demanded that investigators make public the types of firearms used in the massacre. The local RCMP refused, arguing that withholding the information could help them track the weapons’ origins in the United States. To this, Lucki berated the Nova Scotia Mounties so hard that Campbell would describe some attendees being brought to tears (they were all in the first hours of piecing together a mass-shooting, after all).

And according to Campbell’s note – as well as the testimony of a civilian employee in the room that day – Lucki had been acting on the direct orders of the federal cabinet, who wanted the information to justify a planned gun ban. As Campbell wrote, “the Commissioner then said … this was tied to pending gun control legislation that would make officers and the public safer.”

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Cabinet ministers keep handing sole-sourced contracts to friends

International Trade Minister Mary Ng said she became so overwhelmed by media requests during the COVID-19 pandemic that she had to commission $20,000 in media training from a close friend. Even after the Ethics Commissioner informed Ng that her actions were pretty clearly a violation of the Conflict of Interest Act, Ng would tell a House of Commons committee that she had no idea you weren’t supposed to sole-source contracts to friends.

“Media training” was also the culprit when it emerged in January that a staffer inside the office of Housing Minister Ahmed Hussen had paid $93,050 in constituency funds to her sister, who ran a food marketing company called Munch More Media. The Ministry of Housing did not need food marketing help, but the idea was that Munch More Media could branch out into political PR.

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Hiring a cabinet minister’s sister-in-law as Ethics Commissioner

That exasperated Ethics Commissioner mentioned in the introduction? When the Trudeau government named his interim successor, they went with Martine Richard. She was a veteran lawyer in the commissioner’s office, but she also happened to be the sister-in-law of Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc. Richard would step down after a House of Commons committee decided to probe her appointment for anything hinky.

ArriveCan overspending

This is another one that didn’t inherently break any laws (so much as we’re aware). It’s just another case of the government spending way more money on something than would make reasonable sense. ArriveCan – a glitchy and oft-criticized mobile app that was mandatory for travellers entering Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic – somehow managed to cost $54 million. 

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Software development is expensive, but $54 million was so beyond the pale that in October a team of coders decided to stage a “hackathon” to see how quickly they could rebuild ArriveCan from scratch. It took them two days. Estimates at the time from smartphone app insiders estimated that ArriveCan should conceivably have cost no more than $2 million.

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Daniel Blaikie, an NDP MP from Manitoba, got a chance to debate his proposal in the House on Friday afternoon. His proposal would change the House of Commons standing orders around confidence votes and penalize prime ministers for declaring some motions a test of confidence in the government.

Some votes in the House of Commons have always been confidence measures, like budgets and throne speeches, and they would remain so under Blaikie’s bill. But, currently, a prime minister can deem any motion a confidence vote, which, if the government loses, triggers an election, a tactic sometimes used by prime ministers to pressure the House into supporting controversial bills.

During debate on the government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act last year, for example, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said a vote on that motion would be treated as a confidence measure. More recently, the Liberals threatened to make a vote on calling an inquiry into foreign electoral interference into a confidence vote, although they eventually relented.

Blaikie said he doesn’t like to see Parliament pushed around.

“The fact of the matter is that one of the biggest powers that the prime minister in Canada has is this ability to just dissolve Parliament or prorogue Parliament at his or her pleasure, and we’ve certainly seen that power be abused,” he said.

Blaikie’s proposal can’t prevent Trudeau, or any future prime minister, from declaring something to be a confidence measure, but if it passes, the prime minister would be sanctioned by the House for doing so.

“Short of a constitutional amendment, you can’t stop the prime minister from doing so; all you can do is make it harder.”

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau slipped up in the House of Commons earlier this week when he accidentally referred to House Speaker Anthony Rota as “Mr. Trudeau” rather than “Mr. Speaker” during question period.

Though he quickly corrected himself, the gaffe led to jeers from the opposition while Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre quipped, “The only thing the prime minister wants to know about is himself.”

Trudeau’s mistake actually went against the rules of the House in two ways. Beyond identifying the wrong person, Trudeau also broke a long-standing rule that guards against debates becoming too personal. Members do not refer to one another by their names but rather by title, position or constituency name, while cabinet ministers are referred to by the portfolio they hold.

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The Canada Revenue Agency yesterday hinted it may “take a look” at the federally-subsidized Trudeau Foundation. “Could be,” Revenue Commissioner Bob Hamilton testified at the Commons public accounts committee as MPs from all opposition parties sought an audit of the charity’s books: “The potential for us to take a look? Could be.”

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Conservative and Bloc Québécois members of the Commons public accounts committee yesterday served notice they seek to review 10 years’ worth of Trudeau Foundation tax returns. It follows evidence the Foundation misrepresented a $140,000 gift from a Chinese donor affiliated with China Central Television: “Canadians are owed a proper explanation.”

 I'll believe it when I see it.

Alas:

The Office of the Ethics Commissioner confirms it is unable to investigate any misconduct until a new appointee is named by Parliament, a process that could take months. The post has been vacant since April 19: “Take notes, keep receipts.”

Now to the matter of that dreadful new passport.

Some believe that this is a trivial distraction from more important matters, and perhaps they are right.

However, the passport is an official document, not a scribbled list of stereotypes and carictatures.

If anything, this is yet another example of an unserious leader taking Canada's credibility with him into the sewer.

But don't take my word for it:

Trudeau is trying to erase Canadian identity. Removing religious & royal symbols, purging our national identity from passports, replacing Vimy Ridge & Terry Fox, with a man raking leaves & a squirrel with a nut, shows disrespect for our history & those who sacrificed to build it. pic.twitter.com/oRqkXBzinN

— Dr. Leslyn Lewis (@LeslynLewis) May 12, 2023

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Ottawa has managed to produce something so ugly, juvenile, and banal that I’m actually personally offended. The new documents are so ugly that they feel like an insult to Canadian identity and people. They reveal the inner psychology of a government that is so pathologically self-hating, it may risk dooming the very concept of nation itself.

“Oh, come now, it could not be that bad!” I hear you objecting.

Couldn’t it?

Let’s divide our critique into two categories: the first, an examination of the internal visa pages, and the second of the cover itself. I take it for granted that a redesign is necessary, and that the passport’s new security features are all very fine and well and cool.

So let’s look at the internal pages, in which all traces of history, all heroes, and all national monuments have been replaced with a bland cartoon of Canadiana that looks better suited to my toddler’s placemat.

This style of graphic design resembles a school known as Corporate Memphis, which Wikipedia reliably tells me is “a flat, geometric art style, widely associated with Big Tech illustrations in the late 2010s.” For most of us, it looks like the inoffensive yet dystopian clip art that adorns uninspired PowerPoint presentations.

By removing the gritty images of Vimy Ridge and Terry Fox, this government has managed, incredibly, to piss off both the Royal Canadian Legion and the mayor of Terry Fox’s hometown in the same day. They should have strangled a beaver in maple syrup and gone for the trifecta.

Anyway, like a lot of people, I’m tempted to read too much into this. We are told that there is no political motivation behind erasing images of Canadian history from the passport: that this isn’t reflective of a government that sees itself leading a corporatist, post-national state; nor one that regards all expressions of nationalism as an embarrassing anachronism.

There’s no deeper symbolic meaning to the fact that they have chosen to remove the rough edges, blood, sacrifice, and failure of the past and replace it with a two-dimensional cartoon version of the country.