National
It’s Been One Week
Imagine the relief they’re feeling. Photo from the voluminous PW files
Paul Wells
Hold it now and watch the hoodwink/ As I make you stop, think
Maybe the Americans assume we’re already part of their country because our leaders won’t get off their TV shows. Politico reports that Justin Trudeau’s office called Jen Psaki on Thursday morning and asked whether she’d interview Canada’s prime minister pro tem for her Sunday MSNBC political show. The PMO’s timing was excellent: Psaki was dropping a kid off at school, so she had excess childcare capacity at precisely the moment she was being offered quality time with somebody high-maintenance.
Trudeau had a message to deliver about Canada-US relations, and he was eager to deliver it to the seventh highest-rated show on MSNBC. He also paid his regards to Jake Tapper, who gets fully one-fifth the viewers of his Fox competitors.
Trudeau’s message to his tiny bespoke audiences was straightforward: that Donald Trump wants to talk about annexing Canada because he doesn’t want to talk about the economic costs of his own tariff policy. Trump’s advisors were said to be working this week on ways to limit those costs. Talk of costs isn’t guaranteed to change Trump’s mind, but nothing is. I don’t have a secret smarter policy I’m keeping in my back pocket; the situation is what it is. Danielle Smith went to Mar-a-Lago — a gambit as legitimate as Trudeau’s visit or anybody else’s — but didn’t come away sounding confident that she’d had better results than anyone else.
Even Stephen Harper — also appearing on a U.S. podcast — sounded worried and perplexed by Trump’s thinking. Still, Canada’s last Conservative prime minister delivered a rebuttal of Trump that was orders of magnitude more on-topic and specific than anything we’ve yet heard from the next Conservative prime minister. There’s playing tough, and then there’s being tough.
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Trudeau will do what he does until the Liberals select his successor. His itinerary for Tuesday says “No public events scheduled,” yet again. If he has any particular message for Canadians at T2 Minus Six Days, he is in no hurry to deliver it. I think something in him broke after the Toronto—St. Paul’s by-election defeat at the end of June. Sure, he’s talked to Mark Critch and the hot-sauce guy in Quebec. But the fight was out of him long before he made it official. The impulse in almost any politician to tell you exactly what they’re up to — the yearning François-Philippe Champagne has at triple strength — it’s all but vanished from Trudeau for months now. I don’t think it’s because he’s decided to resign. I think if he had managed to stare down his Liberal critics over the holidays, if he still had one more campaign ahead of him, he’d still basically be waiting. In that alternate universe, waiting for the voters to deliver their verdict.
Instead Trudeau let his party’s late-blooming internal opposition win, and now the Liberals are having a bad time of it. I have to assume that in some corner of his psyche, he enjoys seeing them squirm. All he wanted to do was receive the voters’ judgment. There would have been grim realism in letting him. But the Liberal caucus, docile in October, panicked and bolted in December after Chrystia Freeland quit. So now they get to come up with a better idea.
By 2021 or so, the people who’d left the Trudeau government started to look like a better cabinet than the ones who’d stayed. Similarly, a lot of the talent in the emerging Liberal leadership race is in the people who are sitting it out: Dominic LeBlanc, Anita Anand, Champagne, Mélanie Joly if you like. Steve MacKinnon would have been interesting to watch as an underdog. He speaks both official languages better than most MPs speak either, and after an early defeat in 2011, he reacted in the old-fashioned way: by figuring out how to get better at politics. Oh well.
Does anybody doubt the crew who aren’t running for the leadership will have a more pleasant 2025 than Mark Carney, Chrystia Freeland, Christy Clark, Karina Gould, Chandra Arya and That Other Guy? Frenzied parallel campaigns to raise money and recruit supporters. Gigantic questions they’d rather avoid. Party horse-race polls that have exited the realm of arithmetic and turned into Escher drawings. And waiting just over the horizon, cracking their knuckles: the voters of Canada.
Realistically it’ll come down to Freeland and Carney, if they both run. A study in contrasts: she’s from Alberta but couldn’t save her former chief of staff who ran in the riding next to Freeland’s last June. He’s from Alberta but has been flirting with electoral politics since the Obama presidency. “I’ve just started thinking about it,” Carney told Jon Stewart, whose return has driven The Daily Show to fully 40% of Colbert’s ratings. Just started thinking about it? Where’s he been all his life?
I wasn’t kidding, not one tiny bit, when I wrote last week that the least Carney can do is cough up the task force report on the economy that his party’s current leader commissioned from him four months ago. This should not seem like a clever gotcha from one of our nation’s premier snarky pundits. It should be obvious that serious people finish a job, and that the best measure of Carney’s insight and instincts is the work he was theoretically already doing when things got weird.
An obvious question for Freeland is why the Nanos polling spread between Liberals and Conservatives is seven points wider than it was the day before she left the cabinet. Another is whether the “costly political gimmicks” in the Fall Economic Statement she declined to deliver were the first she’d seen.
They’ve both done great things. Carney was appointed to run two central banks by two Conservative prime ministers, neither of whom ever had a word of criticism for his work. He delivered the smoothest possible Brexit even though he hated the idea. Freeland basically picked the Trudeau government up from the wrong side of relations with Russia and dropped it on the right side. Neither needs my permission to march into the history books. But if you think either is a natural political talent, you’ll find the next couple of months hard to watch.
Maybe one of the Liberal candidates will develop the habit of answering questions when asked. It would have the virtue of novelty. It worked well for Harper on that American podcast. Pierre Poilievre is still pivoting to message. Last week he was asked why Elon Musk seems to like him. “If I ever get a chance to meet Musk, I would say, how do we make this an economy where we bring home hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to Canada?” Smooth. Except Musk makes no secret of his answer: ban union labour. Which fits poorly with some of Poilievre’s pro-union marketing.
Two years ago three of Poilievre’s MPs met with Christine Anderson, a German eurodeputy from the AfD party. Poilievre called her views “vile” and said they “have no place in Canada.” Musk has been campaigning nearly full-time for Anderson’s party in German legislative elections.
I’m not trying to pin AfD’s politics on Poilievre. I’m just pointing out that once he no longer has Trudeau to kick around, the internal contradictions in Poilievre’s positions will become harder to ignore.
This week Jenni Byrne, Poilievre’s lead gatekeeper, came in for criticism when she criticized Erin O’Toole for saying nice things about Anita Anand. “For anyone unsure why Erin is no longer leader of the Conservative Party…. [Anand] supported DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] policies like name, rank and pronouns. Tampons in men’s rooms, etc.” Much of the criticism amounts to dismay that Byrne could be so mean. I could hardly care less. But I do wonder where Byrne expects Canadian soldiers to fight, and alongside whom. Here’s a story on pronoun use in the U.S. Navy and Marines. Here’s one on the UK’s Ministry of Defence offering pronoun guidance while Boris Johnson was prime minister. Here’s NATO’s gender-inclusive language manual. When congratulating oneself on preferring a warrior culture to woke culture, it’s handy to have the first clue what’s going on in other warrior cultures.
Mostly I wonder how anyone could look at a Navy [UPDATE: That should read “Air Force” — pw] veteran congratulating a former Minister of Defence and think, before anything else, “But the tampons!” Poland, and Elon Musk’s friend Donald Trump, want member states in the woke NATO alliance to spend five percent of GDP on national defence. All of the Liberals and all of the Conservatives in all of Canada’s little schoolyard arguments have never come up with a plan to get to two. I know we all get excited about our little feuds, but after an election comes, whoever wins will have to provide real government for a real country in a real world. That’s harder than tweeting.
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Indigenous
Trudeau gov’t to halt funds for ‘unmarked graves’ search after millions spent, no bodies found
From LifeSiteNews
According to the committee tasked with searching for ‘unmarked burials’ at residential schools, the Government of Canada has denied its request for further funding.
The Canadian federal government will be halting funding to a committee tasked with searching for “unmarked burials” near former residential schools after zero graves were discovered and millions of taxpayer dollars spent.
In a statement released last week, the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials said it was “extremely disappointed to learn that the Government of Canada has decided to discontinue funding to support their work to help Indigenous communities in their efforts to identify, locate and commemorate missing children.”
NAC urged “the federal government to reconsider” its funding cuts to the committee, which is co-administered by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and the federal Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs, that was struck in 2021.
The reality of the situation is that since the NAC was struck not one body has been located on lands associated with former government-funded and mandated residential schools, many of which were run by Catholic and Anglican churches in Canada.
In fact, Canada’s Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations had already confirmed it spent millions searching for “unmarked graves” at a now-closed residential school, but that the search has turned up no human remains.
The initial funds budgeted in 2022 to aid in “locating burial sites linked to former Residential Schools” were already set to expire in 2025, with some $216.5 million having been spent.
A total of $7.9 million granted for fieldwork has resulted in no human remains having been found to date.
In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the schools.
As a result of the claims, since the spring of 2021, 112 churches, most of them Catholic, many of them on indigenous lands that serve the local population, have been burned to the ground, vandalized, or defiled in Canada.
The cut in funding comes after Trudeau’s cabinet said last year it would expand a multimillion-dollar fund geared toward the project.
The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation was more or less the reason there was a large international outcry in 2021 when it claimed it had found 215 “unmarked graves” of kids at the Kamloops Residential School. The claims of remains, however, were not backed by physical evidence but were rather disturbances in the soil picked up by ground-penetrating radar.
The First Nation now has changed its claim of 215 graves to 200 “potential burials.”
As reported by LifeSiteNews, Prime Minster Justin Trudeau as recently as June again falsely stated that “unmarked graves” were discovered at former residential schools.
Canadian indigenous residential schools, while run by both the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, were mandated and set up by the federal government and ran from the late 19th century until the last school closed in 1996.
While there were indeed some Catholics who committed serious abuses against native children, the unproved “mass graves” narrative has led to widespread anti-Catholic sentiment since 2021.
While some children did die at the once-mandatory boarding schools, evidence has revealed that many of the children tragically passed away because of unsanitary conditions due to the federal government, not the Catholic Church, failing to properly fund the system.
In October of 2024, retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht said Canadians are being “deliberately deceived by their own government” after blasting the Trudeau government for “actively pursuing” a policy that blames the Catholic Church for the unfounded “deaths and secret burials” of Indigenous children.
A B.C. pharmacy scam investigation has led the provincial government to return to a witnessed consumption model for safer supply
More than 60 pharmacies across B.C. are alleged to have participated in a kickback scheme linked to safer supply drugs, according to a provincial report released Feb. 19.
On Feb. 5, the BC Conservatives leaked a report that showed the findings of an internal investigation by the B.C. Ministry of Health. That investigation showed dozens of pharmacies were filling prescriptions patients did not require in order to overbill the government. These safer supply drugs were then diverted onto the black market.
After the report was leaked, the province committed to ending take-home safer supply models, which allow users to take hydromorphone pills home in bottles. Instead, it will require drug users to consume prescribed opioids in a witnessed program, under the oversight of a medical professional.
Gregory Sword, whose 14-year-old daughter Kamilah died in August 2022 after taking a hydromorphone pill that had been diverted from B.C.’s safer supply program, expressed outrage over the report’s findings.
“This is so frustrating to hear that [pharmacies] were making money off this program and causing more drugs [to flood] the street,” Sword told Canadian Affairs on Feb. 20.
The investigation found that pharmacies exploited B.C.’s Frequency of Dispensing policy to maximize billings. To take advantage of dispensing fees, pharmacies incentivized clients to fill prescriptions they did not require by offering them cash or rewards. Some of those clients then sold the drugs on the black market. Pharmacies earned up to $11,000 per patient a year.
“I’m positive that [the B.C. government has] known this for a long time and only made this decision when the public became aware and the scrutiny was high,” said Elenore Sturko, Conservative MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale, who released the leaked report in a statement on Feb. 5.
“As much as I am really disappointed in how long it’s taken for this decision to be made, I am also happy that this has happened,” she said.
The health ministry said it is investigating the implicated pharmacies. Those that are confirmed to have been involved could have their licenses suspended, be referred to law enforcement or become ineligible to participate in PharmaCare, the provincial program that helps residents cover the costs of prescription drugs.
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Witnessed dosing
The leaked report says that “a significant portion of the opioids being freely prescribed by doctors and pharmacists are not being consumed by their intended recipients.” It also says “prescribed alternatives are trafficked provincially, nationally and internationally.”
Critics of the safer supply program say it enables addiction, while supporters say it reduces overdoses.
Sword, Kamilah’s father, is suing the provincial and federal governments, arguing B.C.’s safer supply program made it possible for youth such as his daughter to access drugs.
Madison, Kamilah’s best friend, also became addicted to opioids dispensed through safer supply programs. Madison was just 15 when she first encountered “dillies” — hydromorphone pills dispensed through safer supply, but widely available on the streets. She developed a tolerance that led her to fentanyl.
“I do know for sure that some pharmacies and doctors were aware of the diversion,” Madison’s mother Beth told Canadian Affairs on Feb. 20.
“When I first realized what my daughter was taking and how she was getting it, I phoned the pharmacy and the doctor on the label of the pill bottle to inform them that the patient was selling their hydromorphone,” Beth said.
Masha Krupp, an Ottawa mother who has a son enrolled in a safer supply program, has said the safer supply program in her city is similarly flawed. Canadian Affairs previously reported on this program, which is run by Recovery Care’s Ottawa-based harm reduction clinics.
“I read about the B.C. pharmacy scheme and wasn’t surprised,” Krupp told Canadian Affairs on Feb. 20. Krupp lost a daughter to methadone toxicity while she was in an addiction treatment program at Recovery Care.
“Three years [after starting safer supply], my son is still using fentanyl, crack cocaine and methadone, despite being with Dr. [Charles] Breau and with Recovery Care for over three years,” Krupp testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health on Oct. 22, 2024.
Krupp has been vocal about the dangers of dispensing large quantities of opioids without proper oversight, arguing many patients sell their prescriptions to buy stronger street drugs.
“You can’t give addicts 28 pills and say, ‘Oh here you go,’” she said in her testimony. “They sell for three dollars a pop on the street.”
Krupp has also advocated for witnessed consumption of safer supply medications, arguing supervised dosing would prevent diversion and ensure proper oversight of pharmacies.
“I had talked about witnessed dosing for safe supply when I appeared before the parliamentary health committee last October,” she told Canadian Affairs this week.
“I’m grateful that finally … this decision has been made to return to a witness program,” said Sturko, the B.C. MLA.
In 2020, B.C. implemented a witnessed consumption model to ensure safer supply opioids were consumed as prescribed and to reduce diversion. In 2021, the province switched to take-home models. Its stated aim was to expand access, save lives and ease pressure on health-care facilities during the pandemic.
“You’re really fighting against a group of people … working within the bureaucracy of [the B.C. NDP] government … who have been making efforts to work towards the legalization of drugs and, in doing that, have looked only for opportunities to bolster their arguments for their position, instead of examining their approach in a balanced way,” said Sturko.
“These are foreseeable outcomes when you do not put proper safeguards in place and when you completely ignore all indications of negative impacts.”
Sword also believes some drug policies fail to prioritize the safety of vulnerable individuals.
“Greed is the ultimate evil in society and this just proves it,” he said. “We don’t care about these drugs getting into the wrong hands as long as I get my money.”
This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.
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