The News Rundown
- It is now almost a certainty that political parties will be coming to municipal ballots in Alberta.
- Municipal Affairs Minister Rick MicIver who himself is a former Calgary city councillor described the situation as the wild west and said, “Since it’s happening, it’s good to have some rules around it. If we add rules, that actually adds complications and more conditions around having a political party.”
- Political parties maneuvering around the edges in Alberta municipal elections was an issue in the 2021 municipal elections but no one in the media talked about it.
- In Calgary numerous candidates were backed by union groups and won and sought to influence policy in broad strokes of these candidates.
- In Edmonton the situation was more dire.
- To start with in 2021 the Alberta NDP inserted themselves into the Edmonton races. A group called thE Election Readiness Coalition sought to recruit and support progressive candidates.
- We discussed this on Western Context episode 235. The group despite not running with anything close to NDP or social-democratic in their name had huge NDP backers like MLA and now leadership contestant Sarah Hoffman and outgoing leader Rachel Notley’s husband, Lou Arab.
- The group also discouraged some candidates to not run in an attempt to ensure only one progressive candidate was on the ballot in certain areas.
- Other wards saw something akin to a nomination process taking place.
- Lou Arab, Rachel Notley’s husband, also managed the campaign of now councillor Michael Janz.
- And of course to show that it doesn’t just happen on the left, current city councillor Erin Rutherford in the past ran for the UCP and was involved with that party for the 2019 election.
- And when she ran for city council, described it as a focus of her platform.
- So to say that there aren’t political parties right now is a technicality but people have been organizing behind the scenes for at least the last one or two elections.
- Hence McIver’s idea of at least formalizing the process if it is happening.
- Polling cited in the Edmonton Journal says that this shouldn’t happen, largely because people do not want to see an increase in polarization.
- Now of course most people will think that this is an American action, bringing political parties to the municipal sphere but Vancouver has been doing it for ages as has Montreal.
- Bringing such an idea to Alberta would not be a foreign idea and the story as it stands today lacks context of what has been going on in the past elections here in Alberta.
- The official stance is that the last political party to run in an Edmonton municipal election was in 1983 and the last partisan mayor was 1961.
- But with a former Trudeau cabinet minister as mayor and people who were managed by the NDP last election, are our elections without partisan politics?
- Parties would also pave the way for independents and people who are truly not connected to a party to stake their line in the sand and make a case as they do now.
- For everyone else it provides an idea of where someone lands and prevents surprise moments where one person may run on a platform of spending constraint but later choose to raise taxes.
- McIver also said that no UCP government would take over a city council and that no one will be allowed to be affiliated with a provincial or federal party if they decide to run in the municipal election as a party.
- And that’s the clincher. It brings transparency to advocacy and shows where people truly stand and in some cases forces the indecisive to make a choice.
- The office of the Auditor General of Canada, Karen Hogan, has been in the news a lot recently. This is because the Auditor General provides Parliament with advice and information about the costs of programs, departments and crown corporations, so that Parliament can then oversee government activities and hold the federal government to account for its use, or misuse as it were, of public funds.
- This is especially crucial right now, as the full report on the audit of the controversial and unnecessary ArriveCan app has uncovered millions of dollars of unaccounted spending going to small companies that clearly did very little work on the app.
- Besides ArriveCan, it's important that the reports of the Auditor General are accurate, because it shows where taxpayer money is going, and if we are getting value for our money. Increasingly under the Trudeau administration, it's become more and more clear that no, we really aren't getting value for the over a trillion in debt we've incurred.
- Unfortunately, it was found that several employees of the Auditor General were privately earning money from government contracts they had not declared.
- In a statement, the Office of the Auditor General said it recently fired and called in police to investigate two employees and is still investigating a third employee that it also discovered had contracts with another arm of the federal government the employee had not disclosed to their employer.
- The firings, which occurred between September and December last year, come to light as questions swirl about how a federal public servant’s company was able to obtain a nearly $8-million contract to work on the ArriveCan app.
- It also indicates that no federal organization — including the biggest watchdog of government contracting who recently published a scathing report on ArriveCan — is immune from employees breaking the code of conduct, and potentially the law, by failing to report all secondary employment, particularly government contracts.
- Testifying as part of the House Public Accounts committee’s study on the ArriveCan controversy, Hogan said last week her office had not detected that David Yeo, the CEO of a consulting firm that received $7.9 million in contracts for ArriveCan, now worked for the Department of National Defence, because the latter was not part of the audit.
- OAG spokesperson Natasha Leduc said the OAG first discovered the two fired employees had government contracts in June 2023 from Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC). In one case, it was when PSPC asked the OAG if the employee of a company it was investigating still worked for the auditor general. She said the OAG became suspicious of a second, newly hired employee when PSPC did not transfer the individual’s security clearance because it had been suspended.
- The problem is clearly not just in the Auditor General's office, as PSPC deputy minister Arianne Reza said five department employees who did not disclose conflicts of interest were fired or resigned in the past year.
- She noted that the current system is based on attestations. That means vendors must sign an attestation when bidding on a contract that they are not in any way putting themselves in conflict of interest with the public service.
- She also pointed out that public servants are obligated to declare any potential conflict of interest, including secondary sources of income, to their manager for vetting.
- There is a growing phenomenon of workers launching side businesses that is fuelled by the pandemic, affordability concerns and the rise of the gig economy. That means it’s time for the public service to rethink how it trains bureaucrats on public service values.
- Ian Stedman, a York University assistant professor specializing in ethics in government, said it’s time for the government to start being more proactive in checking if public servants are respecting their employment codes, instead of relying on attestations signed by each bureaucrat.
- For example, he said each department and agency could have a team whose job is to randomly pick certain public servants to be “audited,” which could include a review of their expense reports and verifying that they don’t have undeclared secondary sources of income.
- He said: “Because our work dynamics and our work cultures have shifted so much (since the pandemic), we probably have to have a layer of oversight and auditing enforcement to continue to reinforce that the rules matter, and that they have consequences. I think this is a smoke signal that the system might need to adjust how it works in order to better detect [conflicts of interest].”
- Stedman doesn't think this means the system is failed or broken, but that it shows the processes of the government need to be more proactive when dealing with ethics concerns rather than just believing someone when they say everything is alright.
- The problem with this is that the Liberal government under Trudeau has been investigated for ethics and conflict of interest breaches multiple times and faced no real consequences each time. Leadership comes from the top, and if we expect our government employees to have to be truthful and disclose potential conflicts of interests, then we should expect the same of our government too. And if not, then maybe it's time to fire them.
- Supplementals:
- In our continuing coverage of the war in Israel we have new information this week about the Trudeau government putting a pause on non-lethal military exports to Israel over human rights concerns. These include items such as night vision goggles.
- The pause was put in place because of the Canadian government’s perceived difficulty in establishing whether or not the items could be used in human rights violations.
- The government says no particular report or particular incident led to the change.
- The report that the pause is in effect was released as an exclusive to the Toronto Star.
- The government of Canada was already facing a lawsuit from human rights lawyers and Palestinian Canadians who want a full stop of exploring military goods and technology to Israel.
- The lawsuit was filed on March 5th by the Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights.
- The Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights acknowledge that the Hamas attacks were a serious violation of international humanitarian law but take issue with Israel’s conduct following the attack.
- The federal government and Melanie Joly haven’t spoken about this particular order but it has also been stated that Israel has not requested and no permits have been set up allowing for Canada to export lethal arms to Israel.
- Joly defended the move by saying that Canada decided to pause exports nearly two months ago and had nothing to do with the lawsuit.
- So while the lawsuit provides a consistent shield for the Canadian government, they were never going to export anything to begin with.
- This is of course in huge contrast to last week's story where we talked about Canada “resuming” funding to UNRWA despite never suspending funding in the first place.
- It creates a horrid double standard for our country, one that is enabling the antisemitism of Hamas abroad and sending the wrong signals about antisemitism at home.
- Now while we’re talking specifically about non-lethal hardware, one might wonder where Canada exports military goods and technology?
- Well according to the government itself, Saudi Arabia is first on the list with a value of over $1.1b but also on that list is Qatar with just over $49m in exported value in 2022.
- Why Qatar, you might ask?
- Qatar is a small oil producing country in the middle east that has the dubious distinction of allowing Hamas operatives to live there and has outright hosted Hamas’ senior leaders.
- The cases brought about the Palestinian Canadians requesting the government to stop sending “non-lethal” military gear to Israel are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of Canada’s silent enablement of Hamas in Gaza.
- Now granted these values for exports to Qatar are from 2022 and not even 2023 but given where we are at now, the government should be proactive and end funding to all organizations and countries that enable terrorism and antisemitism.
- That of course includes Qatar and UNRWA as we talked about last week.
- It seems as though the Canadian media has not been focused on this nor has anyone in the political sphere this week because it’s not until you dig into the issue that you see where Canada’s present government truly stands in relation to the war in Gaza.
- Supplementals:
Firing Line
- We've covered the extent of the car theft problem in Canada, specifically in Toronto, and how the thieves are working as part of a sophisticated organized crime ring that gets stolen cars shipped out of the Port of Montreal to Europe, onto Dubai, and then sold from there to wherever it needs to go.
- It's been about a month since that episode, and we would hope that the government and the police are cracking down on that issue harshly, right? Well no. In fact, the problem is only getting worse, and is now being coupled with astoundingly bad advice from the Toronto Police for people trying to protect their property. It seems as though the police have no idea how to solve the crime problem, and in a recent safety meeting, one officer even gave advice that basically boiled down to: If thieves come knocking to steal your car, just let 'em have it.
- Toronto Police Service Constable Marco Ricciardi said, "To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your [key] fobs at your front door because they're breaking into your home to steal your car. They don't want anything else."
- This is the kind of advice you might expect from a well-meaning but misguided family member, not a person who's literal taxpayer-funded job is to stop this kind of thing from happening.
- Still, some Torontonians have evidently taken the advice to heart like one person who—after having their vehicle broken into three times—opted to leave their car unlocked (along with a big, handwritten note indicating it was unlocked) so that would-be thieves wouldn't break the window again.
- Others, however, have gone to opposite extremes to try and deter thieves. Profiled in a New York Times story on Toronto's car theft epidemic (the existence of which illustrates just how bad things have gotten), one Honda CR-V owner has installed two alarm systems, a tracking device, four (4) Apple AirTags, keeps the key fob in a signal-jamming Faraday bag, and has two motion-sensitive flood lights pointed at his modest suburban driveway. When parked, there are also parking boot-style wheel locks on every wheel, a steering wheel club, and even a bollard in the driveway to keep it from being driven away. All this just to park your own car in front of your own house.
- Ricciardi told residents to leave their keys by the door, especially if they’re in a Faraday bag that prevents would-be thieves from stealing the signal needed to unlock the car and start it. He added: “A lot of them that we’re arresting have guns on them. And they’re not toy guns; they’re real guns. They’re loaded.”
- So yes, while it isn't worth dying over an insured inanimate object, it's insane that the police's best advice boiled down to "just let it happen and make it easier so you don't get hurt".
- Asked about the comments at a photo opportunity in Barrie, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he had to be “picked (up) off the floor” when he heard them. He then defended the officer who made them, who he said was a friend, calling him “one of the finest police officers in the country.”
- Ford said he couldn’t get his head around the advice and seemed to draw a parallel with leaving treats out on Christmas Eve: “We might as well leave cookies and milk at the front door along with a note. ‘Dear Mr. Criminal, the keys are in the mailbox, don’t kick my door in.'”
- The Toronto Police have since backed down from those comments, but it doesn't change that the problem is still getting worse with no resolution in sight.
- From a post on X, the Toronto Police said: "An officer at a recent community meeting suggested that people leave the keys to their vehicle in a faraday bag by the front door. While well meaning, there are better ways to prevent auto theft motivated home invasions."
- These tips include parking in a garage if possible, keeping the driveway well lit, and installing security measures in and around your home such as cameras, motion detectors, security film on glass windows, and multipoint door locks.
- Thieves stole more than 12,000 vehicles in Toronto in 2023, according to police, an increase of 250 per cent from eight years prior. Home invasions and break-and-enters for auto theft rose 400 per cent in Toronto just last year alone.
- It comes down to the fact that thieves have no real deterrence stopping them, cases aren't being solved, criminals aren't being caught, and those that are caught are being let back out on the street by a weak justice system.
- We need real crime reform in Canada, and it's clear that the lackadaisical approach undertaken so far has not worked.
- Supplementals:
Quote of the Week
“We might as well leave cookies and milk at the front door along with a note. ‘Dear Mr. Criminal, the keys are in the mailbox, don’t kick my door in.'” - Ontario Premier Doug Ford on the Toronto Police’s advice to keep car keys by the front door to prevent injury during home invasions
Word of the Week
Faraday - used for describing containers or screens that stop any electronic signals from getting through
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Show Data
Episode Title: Double Dipping
Teaser: Alberta moves to allow municipal political parties, the auditor general fires government employees getting money on the side, and Canada pauses non-lethal exports to Israel. Also, Toronto Police give bad advice to deter car thieves.
Recorded Date: March 16, 2024
Release Date: March 17, 2024
Duration: 56:22
Edit Notes: None
Podcast Summary Notes
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Duration: XX:XX