Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne seems to have figured it out. The more incompetent her cabinet, the better she looks. Take Madeleine Meilleur, Ontario’s new attorney general. She was a disaster as minister of community safety and correctional services and was recently promoted to attorney general. She must have fit right in with the premier’s plan: incompetence works!
But what everyone has now noticed is that Meilleur has been playing coy with the media because they think she should release the report from the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) into the police killing of Andrew Loku last July. She finally admitted to the media that her office has had the report for a month and she had not yet read it. And despite not having bothered to read it, she will not be releasing it.
The biggest question of all is: who told her not to release the report?
While SIU reports are always confidential, Ontario has changed since the Sammy Yatim incident. When the constable in that case repeatedly shot that troubled teenager, there were too many citizens recording the event on their cell phones. We are spoiled by the truth.
Meilleur told us by her admission that she had not read the report on the Loku shooting but that someone else had. It would seem logical that whomever read the report told her not to release it. This is a critical admission of dereliction of duty.
You can be as sympathetic with her as you wish about her workload but the job of the attorney general is to read such reports and make the critical decisions required. She cannot delegate that responsibility. She can have staff discuss it with her but she should chair that discussion. You can hardly chair the discussion without reading the report.
It reminds us of the awful job Deb Matthews did in the health ministry. We often thought of putting a wig on a Rob Ford bobble-head and naming it after her. While Eric Hoskins might be doing just as bad a job in the portfolio, at least you get the feeling that he cares.
What Meilleur is doing is playing directly into the hands of the Black Lives Matter bunch. While it is hard to read their long-term objective, this pressure group is disciplined and smart. They know where the pressure points are and they know when to pull back. They could teach all those young, supposed media experts at Queen’s Park a lot about getting the media onside.
But there is little hope for Premier Kathleen Wynne. She reminds us more and more all the time of Baroness Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It was never her mind that was sharp; it was her teeth.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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