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TOP STORY
This week, the office of Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly said Joly was not aware that her department had controversially purchased a $9-million condo in the New York City neighbourhood known as Billionaires’ Row. As her office confirmed to National Post, Joly found out like everyone else when the news first appeared in the New York Post.
Opposition MPs alleged this is a pattern with the Trudeau government: A federal agency screws up or does something controversial, and the minister in charge declares that they’re as shocked as everyone else. In the words of Conservative foreign affairs critic Melissa Lantsman, “the foreign affairs minister seems very surprised at all the things happening to her.”
Below, a cursory review of recent incidents in which a Trudeau official expressed shock at something their government had done.
Immigration minister alarmed by his department’s lax student visa policy
Last month, Immigration Minister Marc Miller spoke of an “alarming trend” of thousands of foreigners entering Canada on student visas, only to immediately claim refugee status. Miller said they were abusing the refugee system as a “backdoor entry into Canada,” rather than being authentic asylum claimants.
Miller’s alarm comes just after his government finished overseeing the largest expansion in foreign-student admissions in the country’s history. At the beginning of 2024, one in every 40 people in Canada was here on a foreign study visa. One of the reasons that prior governments kept a tighter lid on student visas is precisely because of the risk of abuse.
In this latest influx, screening has been so lax that the program has attracted more than a few suspected terrorists looking for an easy route into North America.
Joly condemns one of her own diplomats partying with Russia
Russia is as close as Canada comes to a sworn enemy. Trade relations between the two countries are in a deep freeze, and Canada routinely sends lethal weapons to Ukraine intended for use against Russians. So it was definitely a black eye when Yasemin Heinbecker, the deputy chief of protocol in Global Affairs Canada, accepted an invitation attend Russia Day festivities at Ottawa’s Russian Embassy in 2022.
Joly reacted by condemning Heinbecker’s actions on social media, before it emerged that Joly’s office had actually been given plenty of advance notice of the diplomat’s scheduled attendance at the event.
Public safety minister outraged that his department moved a serial killer to medium security
It was a national scandal when Paul Bernardo — one of the most notorious serial killers in Canadian history — was relocated from a maximum-security prison into a medium-security “campus” in rural Quebec.
Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino was as outraged as everyone else, although it quickly emerged that his staff had been given two months’ notice of the transfer and had failed to intervene. “It is very clear that I should have been briefed at the time and that is something that I made abundantly clear to my staff,” Mendicino would explain in June 2023.
Minister unaware his staff were handing out unauthorized travel documents
Among the myriad Canadian screw-ups that defined its emergency airlift from Taliban-controlled Kabul in 2021 was that hundreds of Afghans had been given unauthorized Canadian travel documents. The tragic result was Afghans making the perilous journey to the Kabul airport in hopes of evacuation, only to have their documents rejected.
The “visa facilitation letters” had been handed out by Sen. Marilou McPhedran, following a template given to her by George Young, chief of staff to International Development Minister Harjit Sajjan. When the fiasco became the subject of a House of Commons investigation, Sajjan reported that he didn’t know anything about the documents because he hadn’t been checking his email.
“During the time of the evacuation, I really didn’t have the time to be able to check my emails,” Sajjan would tell reporters in April 2023.
PMO invites Nazi to gala, expresses surprise at Nazi invite
After the September 2023 incident in which the Canadian House of Commons delivered a standing ovation to a former member of the Waffen-SS, Trudeau was quick to blame the entire affair on Speaker of the House Anthony Rota.
Rota had invited the ex-Nazi, 99-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, and the gaffe was framed as Rota’s alone.
However, it soon emerged that the prime minister’s office was given advance notice of Hunka’s attendance, and even drafted a letter inviting the Nazi veteran to a VIP event. If anybody in the PMO had so much as Googled Hunka’s name, his Second World War loyalties would have been quickly revealed.
Heritage minister surprised when web giants shut down news like they said they would
Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez was the point man on the Trudeau government’s Online News Act, a bill that required web giants to compensate Canadian news agencies (such as Postmedia) whenever links to their content were shared online. In the lead-up to the act’s passage, both Google and Facebook repeatedly warned that, rather than comply with its terms, they would simply shut down the sharing of Canadian news links.
Rodriguez ignored them. As such, when the Online News Act received Royal Assent in June 2023, Google and Facebook immediately banned Canadian news from their platforms. “I’m a bit surprised by Google’s reaction,” was Rodriguez’s response at the time. (Google has since restored Canadian news after negotiating a scaled-down version of the act, while news links on Facebook and other Meta platforms remain banned).
IN OTHER NEWS
Chemtrails – the conspiracy theory that the government is using commercial airliners to rain chemicals on the landscape – is in the news again. During a recent public forum, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith was asked about chemtrails. Her response wasn’t “chemtrails aren’t a thing.” Rather, Smith replied that “no one is allowed to go up and spread anything in the air … if anyone is doing it, it’s the U.S. Department of Defense.” The premier’s office would later issue a statement saying they’d “found no evidence of chemtrails occurring in Alberta.” Regardless, this marks the second time that a Prairie premier has received a public question about chemtrails, and gave a non-committal response. In April, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe was asked about chemtrails at a town hall and responded, “I am starting to hear about this through emails into our office the last number of months and, honestly, I have to do some more work looking into it.”
The phrase of the week in the House of Commons is arguably “flaming pinecones.” On Wednesday, amid questions over whether the wildfire that flattened Jasper, Alta., over the summer could have been prevented with better forest management, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded that Jasper was burned by climate change. “This fire was a treetop fire. It jumped from treetop to treetop and threw flaming pinecones kilometres ahead of it, which is what set the burn,” he said.
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