LILLEY: Carney puts together new team of Trudeau has-beens
Mark Carney is showing that he is the agent of change by appointing two former Trudeau cabinet ministers as his top advisers. Marco Mendicino is Carney's chief of staff, David Lametti is part of Carney's transition team.
Mendicino and Lametti were famous while in cabinet for joking about how many tanks were needed for quelling the Freedom Convoy in 2022.
'You need to get the police to move. And the CAF if necessary. Too many people are being seriously adversely impacted by what is an occupation,' Lametti, then the justice minister, texted Mendicino, then the public safety minister.
That was in early February 2022, just days after the convoy arrived in Ottawa.
'How many tanks are you asking for?' Mendicino asked.
'I reckon one will do!!' was Lametti's reply.
That's not a good look for Carney and his incoming team. Even people who had no time for the Freedom Convoy recoiled at two senior cabinet ministers in the Trudeau government talking about using tanks to quell a domestic political protest.
Now, these two men are top advisers to Prime Minister-designate Mark Carney.
Mendicino was dropped from cabinet in July 2023 after a series of missteps. He lied about police asking for the Emergencies Act to be invoked to end the convoy, he introduced gun legislation that would ban common hunting rifles and shotguns and was denounced by Indigenous leaders, and he seemed incompetent when he couldn't provide answers on serial killer Paul Bernardo being transferred to a medium security prison.
Lametti was a law professor at McGill University espousing bizarre left-wing theories before seeking office in the 2015 election. In 2019, Lametti was made justice minister after Justin Trudeau moved Jody Wilson-Raybould out of the portfolio because she refused to give SNC-Lavalin a sweetheart deal in their prosecution over fraud and corruption allegations.
Trudeau was found to have violated the ethics rules by trying to improperly influence Wilson-Raybould in the SNC-Lavalin affair. Lametti defended the government's actions throughout the scandal.
People at the centre of some of Trudeau's worst political moments are now the top advisers to Carney, the agent of change.
Carney himself has been the chief economic adviser to the Trudeau government since the summer of 2020. That's almost five years. His campaign team was made of Gerry Butts, he received support from people like Katie Telford, most of the PMO and the majority of Trudeau's cabinet.
There is no way that Carney can claim to be the agent of change that he wants to be. Just look at some of the bills that Lametti promoted as justice minister.
LILLEY: Call an election now so Canada has a government with a mandate
LILLEY: Carney's Liberal coronation is just what Trudeau ordered
With Bill C-5, introduced by Lametti, the Liberals scrapped mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders for crimes such as gun smuggling and gun trafficking. With Bill C-75, championed by Lametti but introduced by Wilson-Raybould, bail became the default position that all judges and justices of the peace were instructed to take.
Carney has just hired one of the architects of the Trudeau government's soft-on-crime approach to help him bring change. Do you trust him or his team to actually deliver change?
The Carney team who takes issue with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre saying that Canada is broken wants you to forget about the broken justice system, the broken jail system, the broken immigration system, our that housing prices having doubled.
All the people responsible for those files under Trudeau now support or are working for Carney, the man promising change from the Trudeau government. They've changed the guy out front. The rest of the team, the rest of the policies, are the same as the failed policies that have brought Canada to this point.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Yahoo
EDITORIAL: Jobless numbers spell trouble
The need to grow the Canadian economy in the face of tough economic times was underscored by the release of the latest unemployment numbers by Statistics Canada on Friday. The unemployment rate in May rose to 7.0%. That's the highest it has been since September 2016, excluding the 2020 and 2021 pandemic years, and a 12.9% increase from 6.2% a year ago in May. The Canadian economy generated a net increase of just 8,800 jobs in May, far short of the roughly 30,000 per month needed to keep pace with population growth. A total of 1.6 million Canadians were unemployed in May, an increase of 191,000, or 13.8%, compared to May 2024. A smaller share of people who were unemployed in April found jobs in May (22.6%), compared to a year ago (24.0%), and spent an average of 21.8 weeks searching for work, compared to 18.4 weeks in May 2024. Unemployment in Ontario (7.9%); Alberta (7.4%); Newfoundland and Labrador (9.7%); Prince Edward Island (8.2%); and Nunavut (9.0%) were all above the national average, as was the case in a number of cities, including Windsor (10.8%); Oshawa (9.1%); Toronto (8.8%); Calgary (7.8%); and Edmonton (7.3%). Canada recorded its largest merchandise trade deficit of $7.1 billion in April, the first full month of the tariff war with U.S. President Donald Trump, compared to $2.3 billion in March. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development last week projected meagre 1% economic growth for Canada this year and 1.1% in 2026, noting Trump's global tariff war is expected to hit the economies of Canada, Mexico, China and the U.S. hardest. Prime Minister Mark Carney proposed measures to bolster the economy on Friday, including eliminating federal barriers to interprovincial trade, increasing labour mobility and shortening the process for approving major infrastructure projects. Those are worthy long-term goals, since internal impediments to trade cost our economy $200 billion annually, raise consumer prices up to 14.5% and reduce economic growth as measured by gross domestic product up to 8% annually. But they are also long-term solutions, underscoring the importance of Carney's government producing a budget as soon as possible to reveal the Liberals' specific plans to boost the economy. For better or worse, Carney decided to delay releasing the budget until fall.
Yahoo
15 hours ago
- Yahoo
LEDREW: Tyranny over, Liberals once again free to disagree with prime minister
Debate and differences of opinion are permitted once again in the Liberal Party – the children are no longer in charge. Canada is no longer run by a cockwomble. What a difference a mature prime minister makes! A prime minister who does not pick the weakest for cabinet so that his PMO will be totally in charge. A prime minister who can obviously change his mind, all the way from 'net-zero' to thinking of utilizing resources. A prime minister who will not impoverish Canadians and embarrass Canada by telling other heads of state that there is 'no business case' for exporting LNG to needy nations with lots of cash to pay us. Refreshingly, we now have a natural resources minister – Tim Hodgson – who has travelled to the once-separating Alberta to support new oil and gas infrastructure to trade in overseas markets and supply energy to Eastern Canada! How novel – jobs and riches for Canadians. LILLEY: Mark Carney offers words – Pierre Poilievre's words – but we need action GOLDSTEIN: Carney can't fix Canada's underperforming economy on his own LILLEY: Trudeau lowered bar so much, Carney gets credit for being an adult Under the regime of the last ten years, ideas that may be contrary to the dogma of the PMO could not even be broached. The late Bill Graham, an experienced and tested and worldly intellect, and former Liberal leader, was once told in no uncertain terms by some kid in the PMO that his advice on a complex issue was not necessary because 'we have this, thank you very much.' This closure of the mind was aided and abetted by appointees in the PMO who did not have the wherewithal to think through even the simplest situations. Remember the SNC-Lavalin scandal? I seriously doubt that any lawyers in the new PMO will be contacting prosecutors in any Crown office in Canada in an attempt to change a decision on criminal charges. Senior and thoughtful Liberal senators were removed from the Liberal caucus – their views not needed. Only members of parliament were allowed in caucus – people who either had their positions because of the PM or wanted a promotion that only the PM could offer, gutless supplicants who would never offer up an opinion differing from the official PMO stand. The Liberal Party itself was reduced to an insignificant triviality, its supporters cowed into silence, because if you dared offer a differing viewpoint then you were considered disloyal, and banished – or at least branded as no longer a Liberal. I had turned down government appointments, and was not seeking invitations to state dinners in Ottawa, so over the last decade I could be critical of many Trudeau positions that now, after he has been dumped, many others suddenly seem to understand were idiotic. And for that difference of opinion with the Trudeau government, lifelong friends, many of whom had partaken of my hospitality over the years, who had enjoyed the perks of power from being in favour in Ottawa (gotta love those government jets), would actually turn their heads at the sight of me – or not invite me to events that I had helped create decades ago. Several dowagers of the party tried to rip strips off me. Friends tell me that the big shots of Ottawa and Montreal hate me with a passion for daring to challenge the Trudeau government. I was 'no longer a Liberal.' The truth is that I am a Liberal – I believe in well-managed government, fiscally prudent, socially progressive, encouraging of debate, with an eye on providing the freedom and impetus to build a better Canada. I believe in the rule of law – not the fiat of unnamed, well-paid, political helpers. Much to the detriment of my finances, I have volunteered tens and tens of thousands of hours of tough slugging in the service of the Liberal Party. Now that things are returning to some degree of normalcy, I would gladly do so again, and encourage others to do so – politics is a noble calling. Canada, and the debate, needs you.
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Yahoo
Christine Van Geyn: Do police have the right to peer at you in your car with a drone?
Can police use a drone with a zoom lens to peer into the interior of vehicles stopped at red lights? Can police enter a home's private driveway and look in the windows of vehicles? Can the government track the cellphone location data of millions of Canadians to track their movements? And can a private foreign company scour the internet collecting photos of Canadians for use in facial recognition technology that is sold to police? These questions are not hypotheticals; they are real live issues in Canadian law. We are living in the mass surveillance era. But many Canadians do not have a thorough understanding of how far surveillance goes, or what the limits on it are, or whether our legal protections are adequate. The police in Kingston, Ont., are ticketing drivers at red lights for merely touching or holding their cellphones based on evidence collected by a drone. The Supreme Court recently heard a case about police entering a private driveway and not just looking in a truck window, but opening the door and collecting evidence — all without a warrant. The Alberta Court of Kings Bench just considered a case involving the facial recognition technology of Clearview AI. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian government was tracking the cellphone location data of 33 million Canadians. After the Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act, the government ordered the freezing of bank accounts of a police-compiled 'blacklist' of demonstrators, which was distributed by the government to a variety of financial institutions and even lobby groups. What these cases are demonstrating is that we have entered the era of mass surveillance, and Canada's legal protections are inadequate. First, Canada's privacy legislation is outdated. Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne has said we are at a 'pivotal time' for privacy rights in Canada. Former Ontario Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian has also called for updates to Canadian privacy laws, 'so they apply to all data, including anonymized data.' Much has changed since the current federal privacy legislation was drafted in the early 2000s, but efforts to modernize this law died when Parliament was prorogued. Second, when it comes to state intrusions, the concept of privacy may be inadequate. Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Supreme Court has interpreted this right to mean the protection of a person's 'reasonable expectations of privacy' against state intrusions. The notion of 'reasonable expectations of privacy' has become a mantra in Section 8 jurisprudence. But some academics have said that in the era of mass surveillance, this guiding principle is an inadequate gatekeeper. In a lecture for the Canadian Constitution Foundation's new free course on privacy rights, Osgoode Hall Law professor François Tanguay-Renaud proposes a thought experiment that reveals the inadequacy of 'privacy' as an organizing principle. What if the police were recording people on the street, with drones following people and recording their movements as they went about their day, zooming in on their cellphones and recording their conversations? In such a scenario, where people are in plain view, privacy is an inadequate concept to limit what we all see intuitively as oppressive state conduct. At one time, this hypothetical might have been considered far-fetched. Today it is eerily similar to the Kingston police drone scenario. In Kingston, police are using a drone to take aerial images peering into cars and zooming in on cellphones. Those drivers do have reasonable expectations of privacy inside their cars, but what would limit this police conduct if they surveilled citizens on sidewalks or parks, where they were in plain view without those privacy expectations? A principled line must be drawn between things done in plain sight that police can view and constant surveillance using enhanced technology. It may not be possible to draw that line on the basis of the existence or not of 'reasonable expectations of privacy.' There are other values that could serve as guiding or informing principles for Section 8. There is nothing in the text of Section 8 that mandates the gatekeeper of the right be 'reasonable expectations of privacy' rather than another interest, like dignity, liberty, security, anonymity, public confidence in the administration of justice, and many more. Indeed, American jurisprudence has been moving away from the concept of 'reasonable expectations of privacy' as the sole guiding principle for their 4th Amendment. To meet the challenges of the surveillance era, it is well past time for Parliament and the provincial legislatures to update privacy laws. But as recent police conduct shows, it's time for our Section 8 jurisprudence to be revisited as well, to meet the emerging challenges of the surveillance state. National Post Christine Van Geyn is the litigation director for the Canadian Constitutional Foundation. Canadians who want to learn more about their privacy rights in Canada can sign up for the Canadian Constitution Foundation's free course at Opinion: In 2020 the world shut down, and Canadians lost their privacy rights Facial recognition tool used by RCMP deemed illegal mass surveillance of unwitting Canadians
