BLACK MIRRORS — Funny how many times you can experience déjà vu during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. Conservative Leader ERIN O’TOOLE must be feeling that way these days. Global News reports an Alberta riding association has put forward a formal petition for a leadership review. A petition led by Sen. DENISE BATTERS, who O’Toole removed from the party’s national caucus after challenging his leadership, continues to collect signatures with 7,700 names racked up as of Tuesday evening. Questions about O’Toole’s leadership will dominate in the coming days as the findings of former Tory MP JAMES CUMMING’s Conservatives election post-mort are expected to be presented to caucus tomorrow. It’s hard to envisage a win for O’Toole in a week that will end with the Saturday arrival of a “freedom convoy” on Parliament Hill to protest the federal government’s vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers. The date will mark a week since the U.S. Department of Homeland Security implemented its own mandate requiring all truck drivers entering the country to be vaccinated for Covid-19. — Keep on trucking: While an overwhelming majority of truckers are vaccinated in Canada (90 percent, says the Canadian Trucking Alliance), the issue being presented to Canadians is that the vaccine mandate is irritating Canada’s supply chain in a high-inflation era. As the convoy rolls closer to the capital, the scenario is playing out again like when the United We Roll protest came to town in February 2019 to advocate for the oil and gas sector and call on the government to scrap Bill C-69 and the carbon tax. The event attracted industry and pro-pipeline supporters — and also white nationalists. People’s Party Leader MAXIME BERNIER applauded a “handful of Conservative MPs” on Tuesday for their positions on the vaccine mandate. Yesterday, Transport Minister OMAR ALGHABRA was on the receiving end of a racist tweet from a high-profile convoy supporter, prompting Public Safety Minister MARCO MENDICINO to flag the comment to Twitter as “ flagrantly abusive, offensive and Islamophobic” hate speech. — Unlike the last time: CTV’s GLEN MCGREGOR reports a video of convoy supporters calling for Jan. 6 Capitol Hill-style protest was yanked from YouTube for violating its hate speech policy. BANK ON THIS — Governor TIFF MACKLEM will make his first public appearance of the year today. Markets are expecting the Bank of Canada to launch the country into its first rate-hiking cycle since the heady economic days of 2017-2018. But not all forecasters think there will be a rate increase this morning. At the very least, however, the meeting is widely expected to tee up a hike for March. Here’s POLITICO’s ANDY BLATCHFORD on the anticipation — and what comes next: Households are already carrying high levels of debt. All eyes will be on any fallout for the fire-hot real estate markets all across the country. Macklem is widely expected to increase the rate several times in 2022 — perhaps as many as a half-dozen times. — For s, Andy explains how the monetary policy moves will influence politics. ANOTHER REAWAKENING — Williams Lake First Nation announced Tuesday that ground-penetrating radar has revealed 93 sites of “potential human burials” near the St. Joseph’s Mission, a former B.C. residential school. There’s much more work to do and the community has “every intention” of continuing its investigation, said Williams Lake First Nation Chief WILLIE SELLERS. “For now, it’s important that everyone focus on their own wellness, and the wellness of those around them. I’m encouraging everyone to reach out to others, to engage in ceremony or to access the various supports available.” BILL’S BACK — Former finance minister BILL MORNEAU says carbon pricing is the single biggest policy challenge facing Canada, one that will determine the fate of its energy transition. Morneau has kept a relatively low profile since resigning from public office in August 2020. He showed up on a virtual panel Tuesday hosted by Toronto-based climate policy think tank Clean Prosperity. The big question at hand: Can Canada reach its climate goals? Not without long-term certainty around the pricing of carbon in this country, Morneau said. “There's just no way for industry to play the role that it needs to play, for all of us to be engaged and doing the things that we need to do, if we don't have an understanding of what that pricing looks like over time.” Ottawa has signaled that the national carbon price will increase to C$170 per tonne by 2030, but the rates beyond then are unclear. The finance department is under pressure to eliminate the uncertainty. Morneau suggested the fate of Canada’s energy transition demands federal and provincial governments “work intensively” in a “respectful way to ensure that carbon pricing is increasingly consistent across the country. “From my perspective, it's pretty close to all being about carbon pricing,” he said. — Three ingredients for policy wins: Another former top insider, former deputy Cabinet secretary MATTHEW MENDELSOHN, joined the panel discussion with first-hand experience about tackling the Trudeau government’s ambitious agendas. “Success on any big complex issue is always about getting three things right: It's about getting the politics right. It's about getting the policy right. But it's also about getting the implementation right.” No shortcuts: Mendelsohn led Trudeau's “results and delivery” unit until his departure in spring 2020. He pointed to the Liberal government’s success with legalizing cannabis in 2018 as an example of how ambitious policies can be pulled off. — Case study: “We developed the new focus structures to focus on cannabis implementation, where you had political staff and bureaucrats from 12 different departments meeting every week over the course of a year. … Climate change is going to require decades of work to continue to focus … it means setting up new routines, setting up new accountabilities, meeting regularly in a horizontal way … this is something that requires urgency for decades. And that's a huge challenge.” |