As a general rule, I hate opinion pieces as I feel that they are a major contributor to our slide towards ‘facts don’t matter’ US style political rhetoric. That said, I thought this was an interesting and fact driven piece that if anything was too easy on the RCMP. Sharing a journalist’s request for information with the union, without permission, definitely struck me as a serious lapse in judgment.
Someone needs to fix the dysfunctional relationship between the RCMP and the government. Trudeau may not be the man to do it, writes Justin Ling.
I feel like the issue with this is the immediate follow up of ‘Then who is?’
It’s sure not Poilievre, so it’s Jagmeet Singh? I don’t entirely disagree, it just feels weird to put this entirely on ‘the Trudeau government’ and not the last you know, 200 years of RCMP acting with little oversight.
I think the answer is like housing in which case no party really has any desire to even attempt fix it so people should be voting for something they’d plausibly even attempt do.
I don’t even know what that is anymore as far as any of them “attempting” to do anything. The House of Commons is just one massive dog and pony show where they chew out each other for issues none of them will make an effort to actually address and solve. None of the parties, like you said, want to actually even make the slightest attempt to fix the housing problem in this country. None really want to fix the cost of living either.
I mean I can’t stand all three parties. I look at the leadership of all three and I just sigh cause I don’t want to vote for any of them. I can’t do more years of Trudeau. I can’t stand Poilievre and his stumbling of words and snake oil tactics. and Singh I just have zero confidence in to come up with original thought.
even make the slightest attempt to fix the housing problem in this country. None really want to fix the cost of living either.
There won’t be much affordability with housing prices the way they are.
I also rank voting reform over housing. Without voting reform the only plausible flip on housing policies won’t come for decades until things get way worse for more Canadians.
The problem is partly that the entire-framing of what a working government requires is wrong…
A political-party with a leader…
that isn’t working, never has worked for the best of any first-past-the-post country, & never will.
Just as the Indigenous peoples often had different kinds of Chiefs for different dimensions of their lives…
- Peace Chief for maintaining proactive/strategic harmony
- War Chief for dealing with existential threats from others
- Shaman for dealing with the deep end of reality
- Grandmothers for dealing with the questions that neither males nor young-people were competent at understanding … etc …
What the world actually requires is a system whereby the different kinds of leaders required to competently lead a country ALL get put in place.
Jugmeet Singh’s a people-person, and he could be there both for, & with, people better than anybody else I know-of in Canadian federal politics…
but he isn’t the guy who I’d put in charge of Strategy, or the person whom I’d put in charge of Implimentation, or the person I’d put in charge of Emergency Services & Military…
the right-framing would require a team, not an individual.
There’s a book “Rocket Fuel” which is on how nearly-all businesses get 1 thing wrong:
most businesses mistakenly ignore that a visioneer usually isn’t an implimenter.
Implimenter’s closer to bean-counter.
Visioneer’s closer to … lunatic.
The book Change Intelligence identifies that people-people are 1 of 3 major kinds of leaders required…
the other 2 being thinkers/visioneers, & the implimenters…
You REQUIRE all-3, or you’re not having enough traction to accomplish what you’re supposed to be doing!
The business-culture’s incompetence, however, is that it presumes that the COO of a company ( who is an implimenter ) ought be the next CEO ( which is kinda what happened to Beoing: they ended up with no engineer-visioneer, only bean-counters, & the whole religion of the company became poison… NASA did the same thing when it compromised engineering for “business” culture, with the Challenger shuttle )
The problem is that you can’t put a person whose nature fits only 1 of the required-roles, into a different required-role.
NONE of our countries bothers differentiating between the required-roles & then works to get the right person into each of those roles, none!
That is, at global scale, Darwin Award territory.
We KNOW the more complex the leadership, or management, problem, the better-quality the team required, we KNOW the structural-diversity of the team is key to having it be more-capable in different ways…
we won’t do what’s required??
( PS: never expect any political-system to tolerate required-evolution.
World-death would be preferable to political-motivation, compared with actual transformation to a different apolitical kind of system,.
Sad but true. )
Absolutely too easy on the RCMP as it mainly came down to “We don’t want to.”
One could also parse the longer answer as “We don’t do that at all. Well, not very much. And it’s better when we do. But we can’t prove that.”
Yea, but that’s the slippery line between factual reporting and rhetoric laced opinion. I agree 100% that the RCMP basically saying ‘no’ to direction from their minister is absurd - but that’s my opinion.
I thought the article did a good job of laying out the points but then letting the reader draw their own conclusions.
You are absolutely correct, and my snarky reply leads toward this tendency to call an organization as a monolithic entity that has agendas when the actual issue could be any number of other things, probably all of them, in a quagmire together:
Resistance to change and outside pressure, factionialization within the group that leads to the request being impeded, corruption, organized crime, institutional failure, racism, nationalism, cronyism, outdated training, lack of training in general…
There could be a good number of people trying to comply with the policy and simply failing. We just don’t know the full truth.
But it’s probably all of the above.
