It was two Regina MPs who helped Vassy Kapelos to wrap up her West Block show on Global TV for the summer. As she had Prime Minister Justin Trudeau the week before, she brought on the new Leader of the Opposition Andrew Scheer this week. She also took another shot at asking Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale questions he might answer.
These two men are very different in some ways and very much the same in others. ‘Chuckles’ Scheer is a social conservative and a Catholic and he votes against abortions and against the right to physician-assisted death. He was a lacklustre Speaker of the House of Commons under Prime Minister Harper and was the final choice of a convoluted preferential vote for Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. He will be a lacklustre party leader until he is likely to be ousted after the next election.
Vassy Kapelos had Chuckles on first and threw him a few lobs as to why he disagrees with what Trudeau and his Liberals are doing. The opposition leader stuck gamely to his talking points and tried very hard to look serious. It was over quickly but it was still boring.
Ralph Goodale is a long-time Liberal survivor from western Canada. He has never found an interviewer that he could not talk over. Vassy had done some serious study obviously of the new security act and wanted her audience to learn what was different between this new act (if any) and the previous Conservative act.
Ralph was ready for her. “It is all in the oversight,” we learned. By the time Goodale was through, we knew more about the Liberal Party’s oversight, than we wanted. It all seemed to come down to having the right, elitist, Liberal overseers for our myriad security agencies. Even Canada’s ancient communications security agency people are being turned into attack dogs instead of just listeners—but even there, Ralph Goodale assures us there will lots of elite oversight.
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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry
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