Intrigue in the Canadian Parliament

[WOM]

By end of day, telecom provider Telus and The Globe and Mail had ended their sponsorship arrangements with WE, and both Royal Bank and Virgin Air are reevaluating theirs. Dominoes falling...

[WOM]

Of course, this thing keeps growing. RBC and virtually every one of their other sponsors has dropped them, including their accounting and consulting firm, KPMG.

And now it's come out that they've paid over $600,000 to Republican lobbyists in the US last year, who've been writing hit pieces on Jesse Brown's Canadaland podcast because he's been digging into the Kielburgers' affairs for the past two years.

They testified in front of a Parliamentary committee yesterday and didn't have the best time of it. How do you convincingly 'we wouldn't have benefited financially from the whole deal' when you'd have made $40+ million dollars from it?

[Hot Pepsi]

Who is “they” in that last paragraph?

[Amor de Cosmos]

The Kielburger brothers

[Hot Pepsi]

Thanks

[Amor de Cosmos]

Bill Morneau resigns as finance minister, Krystia Freeland takes over, and Justin's gonna prorogue parliament. That'll fix things eh?

[WOM]

Unless he miraculously finds he has a fourth foot and then manages to shoot it, too.

[WOM]

Meanwhile WE is laying off staff like a summer resort the day after Labour Day, and are putting some of their real estate on the market.

Please someone audit them. Please please please please.

[WOM]

The federal Conservatives have elected a new leader; Erin O'Toole. No, of course it's not a she Erin, but a puffy white male who's six years younger than me but looks six years older. Plus ca change. He may be facing off against Trudeau in a federal election as early as October.

[Amor de Cosmos]

I don't think there's much of a chance of an Autumn election. In the teeth of the virus it wouldn't be welcomed by anyone, including Tory voters.

[Diable Rouge]

https://twitter.com/CBCAlerts/status/1299784501812498432

[Diable Rouge]

Dimitri Lascaris sounds like an intriguing candidate for the leadership of the Canadian Greens, but presumably unlikely to win?

https://twitter.com/dimitrilascaris/status/1300132425914343424

[Nocturnal Submission]

Who's going to ask Dimitri what he thinks of the new Wolves change strip?

[WOM]

Seeing the writing on the wall, the WE charity is closing up shop, selling its hard assets (real estate) and the sainted Kielburgers are leaving. For where? Who knows. This is all they do and all they've ever done. Please, somebody audit everything. All the charity's books...all the for-profit books....their personal incomes going back 7 years, etc. It'll never happen, but a guy can dream.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/poli...rgers-leaving/

[Amor de Cosmos]

We getting a provincial election next month, a year ahead of schedule. I kinda understand why Horgan's called it but given the circumstances it could backfire spectacularly.

[WOM]

I saw that. What's the impetus to call one now?

[Amor de Cosmos]

The first is that new(ish) Green party leader chose to sit as an independent, making the NDP government even more vulnerable than it was. If he and the Liberals vote together the government will fall. This has been true since the beginning of the year and an election was mooted then, but Covid happened. So not the time to go go to the polls unless you want your ass handed to you. Horgan's government has since, rightly, received plaudits for the way they've handled the crisis, but now cases are rising again and who knows what next year's going to look like for a minority government. By then the Liberals, who've been practically invisible for the past couple of years, might have regained their moxie. So this seems like the best time under the circumstances, though no one is in the mood for it.

[Diable Rouge]

Looks like your 45 years with a Tory-free parliament are coming to an end, if the polls are to be believed?

[Amor de Cosmos]

In BC the Liberals are the Tories in all but name.

[Diable Rouge]

Was wondering why the NDP were polling so well ...

[Amor de Cosmos]

There's been a 100-fold increase in requests for mail-in ballots for BC's election in two weeks. In the 2017 election there were 6,500 requests. So far there have been 646,000 this time, with the deadline for requests this coming Friday. Fortunately Elections BC anticipated 665,000 requests, so they appear to have nailed it.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Election day tomorrow. Pretty everyone expects a big NDP victory, based mainly on how well they've handled the pandemic. Plus the previous dodgy Liberal government left the province in a massive financial hole, which torpedoed their reflexive claim to be reliable money managers. The Greens have a rather impressive new leader so they might steal a couple more seats, probably from the NDP.

Tune in Sunday morning to find out how wildly wrong my prediction has turned out to be.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Has there been any discussion on here of the racist attacks on First Nations fishing communities?

[WOM]

None.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Ok. Shame. Anything you'd recommend reading on it?